In this skillful study, Brett Holman contributes to the already extensive literature on interwar ideas about bombing. In particular, he illuminates the manner in which visions of a devastating bomber offensive came to play a central part in British assumptions and debates about forthcoming war. Though he begins with pre-World War I fears, Holman focuses chiefly on the 1930s. He argues that airpower theorists of that moment sought to make sense of the experience of World War I and to find in that experience a war-winning formula. These theorists were influenced by a belief in the fragile nature of morale, both military and civilian, and accordingly they developed a theory of the knockout blow. Air power, they contended, would be able to overcome the stalemate and high casualties of conflict at the front. The quagmire of World War I would not be repeated. Thus, the conviction—prevalent in Britain in particular, but not only there—was that that aerial bombardment would be more highly devastating than it actually turned out to be for Britain from 1940 as the island was bombed.

Holman emphasizes the extent to which the civilians influenced the military in this assumption, rather than the other way round. Similarly, he presents civilian observers of the 1930s as anticipating a key shift in aerial strategy before their military counterparts, in that they sooner became less dogmatic about the knockout blow theory. However, Holman, argues that airpower skepticism at the end of the 1930s was only relative, partial, and temporary, being due more to an increase in confidence in Britain's own ability to withstand bombing rather than to any lack of belief in the potential of bombing as such.

En route, Holman surveys public responses to the threat of bombing. These responses were varied and included calls for more British bombers and even for the establishment of an international air force. Such appeals for a more aggressive strategy, however, enjoyed less traction than defense panics and immediate concerns about the German air menace, which Holman traces from the 1913 airship panic to the Sudeten crisis of 1938. Worries about enemy air superiority showed up in many corners of British discourse, even before the war. In John Galsworthy's novel A Modern Comedy (1929), Sir Lawrence Mont wondered how the English nation could exist with “all its ships and docks in danger of destruction by aeroplanes.” In practice, there was little genuine danger in the 1920s, as Britain's principal opponent then, the Soviet Union, was in no position to mount an attack. Indeed, the Soviet Union did not develop a long-range bomber capability until the 1930s, and, even then, aimed against Japan, its force was not suited for any attack on Britain. The point, though, was that militarized flying machines now had a major presence in the British public imagination—a presence that would of course become even more pronounced in the years to come.

This book makes its contribution by analyzing Britain's social and political atmosphere rather than military history per se. Holman repeatedly argues that it is necessary to consider the public space, as politicians were affected by the views of opinion formers and the broader populace. Indeed, his book offers an instructive guide to more general themes of political culture and practice. It also captures crucial aspects of wartime experience and psychology, exploring, for instance, the dynamics of fear in the changing shadows of the bombers, as well as the pressure of a drive for collective welfare in its most important form of defense. A first-rate work. Military specialists might like to consider the ease with which technological capability was misread and strategic consequences misleadingly assumed on the basis of doctrine and oversimplified models of operational effectiveness. Other readers will simply want to consider a moment of history as lived on the ground, with eyes on the sky.