(RAF's) Independent Air Force, 1918, and the morality of "carpet" bombing.

Beevor’s new WW2 has this, P.440: “(IAF incurred) massive casualties to little avail” (no source quoted). Is that so?

My perception is that Paralysers were onway by 11/11/18, but that operations had been modest. From 9/18 the Hindenburg Line was overflown by upto 40 of 794 HP. 0/400 onway in UK, 1,500 onway at Standard,US. 3 of 1,130 Vickers Vimy on order, 3 of 210 HP V/1500, 8 of 1,295 D.H.10 Amiens III were with RAF 9/11/18. Paralysers were as yet a threat, not a fact, and I know of no basis for “massive casualties” (Beevor means: on our side, not collateral).

Beevor is here addressing “area” or “carpet” bombing, and his thrust is to criticise not its morality, but its cost-benefit: politicians should have learned from 1918, and not been seduced by Trenchard’s efforts to preserve the light blue career prospects of Officer Service on a promotion line distinct from Army/Navy.

Many others have written in the same vein. I believe it to misapprehend Air “Independence”. The intent was not to infer career/budget, free of khaki/navy diversion, but was to stress the new techno-force of bombardment deeper than possible by Monitors or Big Berthas.

As for the issue of strategic bombing’s morality (2 wrongs don’t make a right…but: ) from the first castle under siege, from the first cannonade from the sea onto a port, civilians have been a target. See Henry V, 3/4 to the Governor of besieged Harfleur:

Take pity of your town and of your people
Whiles yet my soldiers are in my command;
Whiles yet the cool and temperate wind of grace
O’erblows the filthy and contagious clouds
Of heady murder, spoil and villany.
If not, why, in a moment look to see
The blind and bloody soldier with foul hand
Defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters;
Your fathers taken by the silver beards,
And their most reverend heads dash’d to the walls,
Your naked infants spitted upon pikes,
Whiles the mad mothers with their howls confused
Do break the clouds, as did the wives of Jewry
At Herod’s bloody-hunting slaughtermen.
What say you? will you yield, and this avoid,
Or, guilty in defence, be thus destroy’d?

When Austria-Hungary’s Armistice opened Allied surge on Prague, to swarm Paralysers to Berlin, Ministers saw that as a factor in the Central Powers folding: Allies had crossed the Marne, but not yet the Rhine to flush the Hun, yard by painful yard.

Carpet bombing was, as Beevor says, all there is – Army had not, and after the fall of France, Navy could not blockade Central Europe. We should cease bewailing the fact. We might instead be grateful: Allied 1919 Offensive would include “Poison gases of incredible malignity (which) would have stifled all resistance and paralysed all life on the hostile front (No) doubt the Germans too had their plans” WSC, Great War,P1605. In his bunker, April,1945 Hitler (is reported to have) ordered CBW upon the Sovs. Who doubts his officers would have acquiesced…were it not for Allied hard rain?