The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else and nobody was going to bomb them.

At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation.

They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.

British Air Marshal Arthur Harris.

Welcome to the history of the 20th century.

Music The Episode 355, Reap the Whirlwind.

Back in the good old days before the war, I spoke about aerial bombing, which was at that time a new and untried form of warfare.

From the beginning, it was clear that bombers could potentially be used to attack innocent civilians far behind the front lines,

a thought that filled most people with horror.

Military analysts imagined dreadfully destructive bombing attacks

that would, in a matter of days or weeks, destroy an enemy nation's ability to fight,

perhaps even bomb it back to a pre-industrial economy. Only a ruthless barbaric nation would resort to such mass slaughter of civilians, went the

thinking. A civilized nation would restrict its bombing to military targets

in the same way that soldiers are only supposed to shoot at other soldiers in uniform

and not at civilian non-combatants.

In August 1939, the British Air Ministry set out the rules for air warfare.

Intentional targeting of civilians was banned.

Only identifiable military targets could be attacked.

The Air Ministry even declared that bombing through clouds or at night should be prohibited,

even if it were believed that a military target was down there somewhere, risking lives of civilians by bombing blind and hoping to hit it by sheer luck was unacceptable.

If the enemy did not reciprocate and went ahead and bombed without regard to civilian lives,

that might be different, but it was important that the RAF restrain itself until that happened.

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