April 17, 2015
With the U.S.-led campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and the Saudi-led operations against Houthi rebels in Yemen, bombing campaigns are on our minds these days. What better time to look at one of the most important and dramatic documents in the history of airpower: the inauspiciously named “Butt Report.” This document was declassified more than fifty years ago but has only recently become readily accessible (in transcribed form) through “Ether Wave Propaganda,” a blog site devoted to the “history and historiography of science.”
The Butt Report was undertaken in the summer of 1941 by David Bensusan Butt at the order of an aide to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Issued on 18 August 1941, it investigated the effectiveness of the British night time bombing campaign against German targets in France and Germany. Its conclusions were far from encouraging and helped lead to a major change in British bombing doctrine that had profound effects.
In the early months of World War II, the Royal Air Force’s (RAF) Bomber Command launched a number of daytime bombing raids against German targets but found that their own losses were alarming, as high as 50%. Air Marshal Edgar Ludlow-Hewitt, the head of Bomber Command, realized that the psychological effects of continuing such raids would be profound. Furthermore, he calculated that continuing such raids would lead to the deaths of skilled air crews who would otherwise be able to fly better bombers that would eventually be brought into the force.
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