The Battle of Britain Five Months That Changed History, May—October 1940 by James Holland (z-lib.org).epub

side of the River Rhine, and within easy reach of the heavies. By hitting
these targets as well as oil installations, the RAF believed it could strike at
the very roots of the German war machine.
Throughout the winter and spring, the Air Staff had argued vociferously
that they should begin a heavy-bomber campaign against the Ruhr the
moment the Germans launched an offensive. The French, however, were
having none of it. Openly, they refused to believe such attacks would have
any substantial impact on the advancing Nazi hordes and insisted instead
that the heavies would be better employed over or near the battlefield.
Privately, as the British well knew, and in keeping with their intensely
defensive mindset, they feared provoking a retaliation on their own cities.
The French had finally given way at the end of April, agreeing to
British bombing of the Ruhr should Holland or Belgium be attacked, but
since then it was General William ‘Tiny’ Ironside, the Chief of the Imperial
General Staff, and Churchill and his War Cabinet, who had got cold feet.
Air warfare was still new in 1940 and modern planes remained largely
untested. When push came to shove, there was a horrible suspicion that
heavy bombers were like some kind of super-weapon, which once
unleashed would provoke large-scale tit-for-tat destruction and death.
Leaders were understandably wary of instigating such carnage.
Yet in the cases of Guernica, Warsaw and Rotterdam, the Luftwaffe had
always attacked in daylight, with good visibility, and with almost no enemy
air opposition. Flying in darkness, depending on old navigational tricks
such as dead reckoning, and over areas swarming with flak batteries, had no
guarantees of producing Guernica-esque levels of destruction at all. Such
considerations did not trouble the confidence of bombing’s advocates
within the RAF, however. And with the German bombing of Rotterdam the
War Cabinet gave Bomber Command the green light to attack the Ruhr.
This, it was recognized, might well provoke the Germans into retaliating
over London and elsewhere in Britain; yet such a diversion could not come
soon enough to help the French and Belgians. Through air power, if not on
the ground, Britain could still play a decisive role.
That night, 15/16 May, 111 RAF heavies bombed sixteen different
targets in the Ruhr. It was the first hundred-bomber raid of the war. Most of
those who flew returned confident they had hit their mark. Reports from
within Germany were less overwhelmed by Bomber Command’s effort,
however. A report from Cologne claimed that bombs directed at the IG