Adversaries of the Air Terror

Richard Westwood’s article “Vera Brittain versus George Orwell” was written in the light of A C Grayling’s book Among the Dead Cities (2006). It is worth adding some more material about wartime events which have since come to light.

Westwood said:

In April of 1944 Orwell had reviewed in his ‘As I Please’ column in Tribune, Brittain’s anti-bombing pamphlet Seed of Chaos in which she argued for restrictions on the extent and intended targets of allied bombing, whilst agreeing that the war against Hitler had to be won.

Orwell in describing Brittain’s pamphlet was remarkably non-confrontational, at least in failing to point out the nature of her evidence.

Various well-known opponents of bombing, such as General Franco and Major-General Fuller, are brought out in support of this. Miss Brittain is not, however, taking the pacifist standpoint. She is willing and anxious to win the war, apparently. She merely wishes us to stick to “legitimate” methods of war and abandon civilian bombing, which she fears will blacken our reputation in the eyes of posterity.

That is to say, the opponents of bombing she quotes are Franco, the Spanish Falangist (i.e. fascist) leader whose Italian allies had bombed Guenica and would bomb Barcelona, and General Fuller, in Britain a member of the Right Club, who had earlier attended Hitler’s birthday party by invitation. How could she think these were credible witnesses?

Meanwhile, the Nazi leadership pressed ahead with the development of the V-weapons, moving their proving grounds, and their factories, and re-developing the weapons so that they could be fired from articulated launchers, to avoid the effects of Allied bombing. How this progressed on the Axis side and what the Allies learned of the potential disastrous flying bomb and rocket attacks is the subject of Christy Campbell’s Target London: Under Attack from the V-Weapons (2012: that is, it was published after Richard Westwood’s article).

George Orwell is only quoted once in Target London, although his journalism does contain more references to firstly, the effects of the V1 (the doodlebug, or flying bomb: the British government abandoned the phrase “pilotless aircraft”), and, secondly, briefer references to the V2 (due, he explains, to wartime censorship about these rockets). Clearly he thought in the subsequent years about the consequences of using pilotless weapons as they form part of the background to Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), where London still experiences occasional rocket (“screamers”) attacks.

For those interested in Orwell and Brittain’s debate, though, the most interesting item that Christy Campbell prints is this introductory sentence and quotation from a letter sent within Germany in June 1943:

Dr Carl Krauch, Reich Minister for Chemical Production, wrote to Albert Speer outlining a fascinating prospectus for a German victory:

The air war against our population centres is at present the only effective war weapon of the enemy… Those adversaries in England of the air terror should be encouraged.

(Target London, page 99. Source in the Bundesarchiv given in end-notes)

Christy Cambell adds a footnote to his quotation: ‘Presumably those such as George Bell, Bishop of Chichester, who is the House of Lords in 1943-4, attacked the “obliteration” of German cities as “not justifiable acts of war”’. He could have added, of course, “or Vera Brittain”.

Carl Krauch, a director of I G Farben, one of the business leaders responsible for the building of the Auschwitz Monowitz plant, was convicted of war crimes after the Second World War for his activities; mainly for his Auschwitz activities but clearly he took a much wider view of propaganda and tools of psychological warfare when he was concerned with weakening the Allied will to fight the air-war over the continent. Did the Nazis have a line to reach the adversaries of the air terror, and did those “adversaries” not realise that they were playing into Nazi hands? Were they consciously doing so? Perhaps the evidence is somewhere to be found, in the British public records or the German Bundesarchiv.

For the time being all we can say is that Orwell’s doubts about the motives of his opponents in the argument over bombing restriction were well-justified. Can we have more research, please, to answer the question with certainty.

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Target London: Under attack from the V-weapons during WWII, by Christy Campbell (London: Little Brown, 2012)