https://airminded.org/2024/04/03/first-blitz-i/ and https://airminded.org/2024/04/17/first-blitz-ii/ ( )

Though largely forgotten now, no doubt eclipsed in the collective memory by the more spectacular Blitz of World War Two, London was bombed by German aircraft during World War One. More than 100,000 kg of explosives and 6500 kg of incendiaries were dropped, and more than 800 people were killed.

First Blitz tells the story of that bombardment. It was small by the standards of modern warfare, but its very smallness provides an opportunity to tell the story in enormous detail, virtually raid by raid. On this small scale we can acquire an understanding impossible in modern war, can learn the names of the bomber crews, and of the people they killed.

First Blitz is especially strong on its portrayal of the German side of the conflict, drawing in particular on Walter Aschoff's _Londonfluge_, a 1940 memoir of his time flying a 'Gotha' bomber. I believe this book has never been published in English. Though a mediocre stylist (if the translation is faithful), Aschoff is an excellent recorder of his emotions as he flies over the British countryside and the London suburbs, savouring the fear and worry that he and his comrades must inspire in the population below, and enjoying the thrill of seeing far-off explosions and fires in his wake, indicating successful hits. He also provides gripping accounts of flying through dangerous weather in his fragile, open-cockpit 1917 aircraft, and of repeatedly facing anti-aircraft fire and attack by British aircraft.

The English side of the bombardment is represented by comparatively more secondary sources. Initially this reliance on secondary sources seemed a weakness: on reflection, the British side of the story has been so well researched and published, it would be a waste of effort for an author to reinvent that wheel. Among the more notable primary sources representing the English side is fighter pilot Cecil Lewis's memoir _Sagittarius Rising_, considerably better-written than Aschoff's. Then there are readers' memories published in England's Evening News newspaper in the early 1930s, which along with contemporary newspaper reports provide detailed first-hand accounts of the immediate aftermath of each raid.

The story culminates in the German race to deploy the 'fire plan', the complete destruction by fire of Paris and London, a plan which they were capable of executing by the end of the war, and which they came remarkably close to carrying out.

One striking observation that emerges is the lack of moral qualms on each side; neither the German bombers, nor the British pilots who fought them, believed the bombing was wrong. On the German side, morality was reserved for propaganda statements to the German press, which invariably claimed that the bombers targeted military targets, when in fact the inaccuracy of the bombing made it impossible to target anything in particular. The commanders who made the decisions to bomb were largely motivated by the belief that the killing of many women and children would weaken the British public's will to continue fighting the war; the killing of civilians was the intention of the bombing. Even British pilot Cecil Lewis felt that 'nobody in their right mind would deny that the Germans were perfectly right to bomb the capital of the British Empire'. After the war Britain's leaders vetoed efforts to bring the bombers and their commanders to justice, reasoning that to declare such actions war crimes would be to condemn their own pilots in the next war, as the bombing of enemy cities would clearly be an important part of any future conflict.

Despite its many merits, First Blitz is weakened by what seems to be an effort to appeal to a popular audience by making the footnotes as unobtrusive as possible. I'm a pedantic, sceptical reader, and I always want to know what the sources are. With this book, that meant maintaining two bookmarks, and effectively reading in turn the main section and the corresponding Notes section. It is difficult to imagine what readers who never look at the Notes would make of all those passages where quoted text appears without attribution in the main text; without knowing who said it, what country they were from, and when they said it, many of those quotations must lose most of their meaning. For example, on several occasions an account of the decision making of the German High Command is interrupted by a quotation, which the reader might reasonably infer is a statement by one of those commanders -- when in fact the quotation belongs to a British historian. And I think it is important to know that those stories from the Evening News were composed not immediately after the events they describe, but were stories the tellers had surely told and retold many times over the years, at the very least 'polishing' the details in the process. There is no doubt that they are largely true, but many have an 'enhanced' quality, with their narrow escapes and coincidences. All the information needed to understand the context of quoted text is there, but you have to work for it. ( )