The Myth That Bombers Will Always Get Through

Michael Peck

Security, Americas

Stealth aircraft seem as unstoppable today as the early bombers once did.

"The bomber will always get through," declared British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin in November 1932.

Baldwin did not make that statement because he loved bombers. He said it because he wanted to rid the world of them. Baldwin feared strategic bombing so much that he called for disarmament talks to rid the world of their menace.

As the United States prepares to spend more than $60 billion on the new B-21 (formerly known simply as the Long Range Strike Bomber), it is worth recalling that in the early 1930s, many people believed there was no defense against bombers. In the years since the Kaiser's Gotha aircraft struck London in 1917, bombers had steadily improved in speed, range and payload. Even as air forces deployed monoplane twin-engine bombers, they continued to fly biplane fighters not much different from the aircraft used by the Red Baron and Eddie Rickenbacker in World War I. Strange as it sounds, early 1930s monoplane bombers such as the U.S. B-10 were actually faster than the biplane fighters that would have tried to intercept them. Today, it would be like a propeller-driven Russian Yak-9 from 1944 trying to shoot down a B-2 stealth bomber.

And so European leaders were gripped by apocalyptic visions of fleets of bombers pulverizing cities with bombs, or asphyxiating populations with poison gas. These fears were given intellectual credence by Giulio Douhet, the Italian airpower theorist who predicted that future wars would be decided by strategic bombing of cities, that pounded civilian morale until a demoralized public compelled their leaders to make peace. This nightmare became visual in 1936 film Things to Come, written by H.G. Wells, in which the first fifteen minutes depict a city being devastated by a night bomber raid.