Richard Rhodes - The Making of the Atomic Bomb

At Folkestone on a sunny, warm Friday afternoon, May 25, 1917, housewives came out in crowds to shop for the Whitsun weekend. A few miles away at Shorncliffe camp, Canadian troops mustered on the parade ground. There was bustle and enthusiasm in town and camp alike. It was payday.

Without warning the shops and streets exploded. A line of waiting housewives crumpled outside a greengrocer’s. A wine merchant returned to the front of his shop to find his only customer decapitated. Blast felled passersby in a narrow passage between two old buildings. Horses slumped dead between the shafts of carriages. Finely shattered glass suddenly iced a section of street, a conservatory shed its windows, a crater obliterated a tennis court. Fires bloomed from damaged stores.

Only after the first explosions did the people of Folkestone notice the sound of engines beating the air. They hardly understood what they heard. They screamed “Zepps! Zepps!” for until then Zeppelin dirigibles had been the only mechanism of air attack they knew. “I saw two aeroplanes,” a clergyman remembered who ran outside amid the clamor, “not Zeppelins, emerging from the disc of the sun almost overhead. Then four more, or five, in a line and others, all light bright silver insects hovering against the blue of the sky…. There was about a score in all, and we were charmed with the beauty of the sight.” 361Charmed because aircraft of any kind were new to the British sky and these were white and large. The results were less charming: 95 killed, 195 injured. The parade ground at Shorncliffe camp was damaged but no one was hurt.

Folkestone was the little Guernica of the Great War. German Gotha bombers—oversized biplanes—had attacked England for the first time, bringing with them the burgeoning concept of strategic bombing. The England Squadron had been headed for London but had met a solid wall of clouds inland from Gravesend. Twenty-one aircraft turned south then and searched for alternative targets. Folkestone and its nearby army camp answered the need.

A Zeppelin bombed Antwerp early in the war as the Germans pushed through Belgium. Churchill sent Navy fighters to bomb Zeppelin hangars at Düsseldorf. Gothas bombed Salonika and a British squadron bombed the fortress town of Maidos in the Dardanelles during the campaign for Gallipoli. But the Gothas that attacked Folkestone in 1917 began the first effective and sustained campaign of strategic civilian bombardment. It fitted Prussian military strategist Karl von Clausewitz’s doctrine of total war in much the same way that submarine attack did, carrying fear and horror directly to the enemy to weaken his will to resist. “You must not suppose that we set out to kill women and children,” a captured Zeppelin commander told the British authorities, another rationalization that would echo. 362“We have higher military aims. You would not find one officer in the German Army or Navy who would go to war to kill women and children. Such things happen accidentally in war.”

At first the Kaiser, thinking of royal relatives and historic buildings, kept London off the bombing list. His naval staff pressed him to relent, which he did by stages, first allowing the docks to be bombed from naval airships, then reluctantly enlarging permission westward across the city. But the hydrogen-filled airships of Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin were vulnerable to incendiary bullets; when British pilots learned to fire them the stage was set for the bombers.

They came on in irregular numbers, dependent in those later years of the war not only on the vagaries of weather but also on the vagaries, enforced by the British blockade, of substandard engine parts and inferior fuel. A squadron flew against London by daylight on June 13, nineteen days after Folkestone, dropped almost 10,000 pounds of bombs and caused the most numerous civilian bombing casualties of the war, 432 injured and 162 killed, including sixteen horribly mangled children in the basement of a nursery school. London was nearly defenseless and at first the military saw no reason to change that naked condition; the War Minister, the Earl of Derby, told the House of Lords that the bombing was without military significance because not a single soldier had been killed.

So the Gothas continued their attacks. They crossed the Channel from bases in Belgium three times in July, twice in August, and averaged two raids a month through the autumn and winter and spring for a total of twenty-seven in all, first by day and then increasingly, as the British improved their home defenses, by night. They dropped almost a quarter of a million pounds of bombs, killing 835 people, injuring 1,972 more.

Lloyd George, by then Prime Minister, appealed to the brilliant, reliable Smuts to develop an air program, including a system of home defense. Early-warning mechanisms were devised: oversized binaural gramophone horns connected by stethoscope to keen blind listeners; sound-focusing cavities carved into sea cliffs that could pick up the wong-wong of Gotha engines twenty miles out to sea. Barrage balloons raised aprons of steel cable that girdled London’s airspace; enormous white arrows mounted on the ground on pivots guided the radioless defenders in their Sopwith Camels and Pups toward the invading German bombers. The completed defense system around London was primitive but effective and it needed only technological improvement to ready it for the next war.

At the same time the Germans explored strategic offense. They extended the range of their Gothas with extra fuel tanks. When daylight bombing became too risky they learned to fly and bomb at night, navigating by the stars. They produced a behemoth new four-engine bomber, the Giant, a biplane with a wingspan of 138 feet, unmatched until the advent of the American B-29 Superfortress more than two decades later. Its effective range approached 300 miles. A Giant dropped the largest bomb of the war on London on February 16, 1918, a 2,000-pounder that was thirteen feet long; it exploded on the grounds of the Royal Hospital in Chelsea. As they came to understand strategic bombing, the Germans turned from high explosives to incendiaries, reasoning presciently that fires might cause more damage by spreading and coalescing than any amount of explosives alone. By 1918 they had developed a ten-pound incendiary bomb of almost pure magnesium, the Elektron, that burned at between 2000° and 3000° and that water could not dowse. Only hope of a negotiated peace restrained Germany from attempting major incendiary raids on London in the final months of the war.

The Germans bombed to establish “a basis for peace” by destroying “the morale of the English people” and paralyzing their “will to fight.” 363They succeeded in making the British mad enough to think strategic bombing through. “The day may not be far off,” Smuts wrote in his report to Lloyd George, “when aerial operations with their devastation of enemy lands and destruction of industrial and populous centres on a vast scale may become the principal operations of the war, to which the older forms of military and naval operations may become secondary and subordinate.” 364

The United States Army was slow to respond to gas warfare because it assumed that masks would adequately protect U.S. troops. The civilian Department of the Interior, which had experience dealing with poison gases in mines, therefore took the lead in chemical warfare studies. The Army quickly changed its mind when the Germans introduced mustard gas in July 1917. Research contracts for poison-gas development went out to Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Yale and other universities. 365With what a British observer could now call “the great importance attached in America to this branch of warfare,” Army Ordnance began construction in November 1917 of a vast war-gas arsenal at Edgewood, Maryland, on waste and marshy land. 366, 367