The bomber will always get through

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The bomber will always get through was a phrase used by Stanley Baldwin in a speech to the British Parliament in 1932:

"I think that it is well for the man in the street to realize that there is no power on earth which can protect him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through... The only defence is in offence, which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves."^[1]

The argument was that, regardless of air defences, sufficient raiders will survive to rain destruction on cities.

This was not hyperbole; at the time bombers had a slight performance advantage over fighters due to having multiple engines, so a successful interception would require careful planning in order to get fighters into a suitable defensive position location in front of the bombers. Before World War II and the invention of radar, detection systems were visual or auditory, which gave only a few minutes' warning, not nearly enough to arrange such a mission. This balance of force meant that bombs would be falling and there was little that could be done about it. For Britain, the answer was to concentrate on bomber production, primarily as a deterrent force.

Some theorists, especially in Britain, imagined that a future war would be won entirely by the destruction of the enemy's military and industrial capability from the air. The Italian general Giulio Douhet, author of The Command of the Air, was a seminal theorist of this school of thought.^[2] H.G.Wells' pre-WW1 novel The War in the Air concluded that aerial warfare could never be 'won' in such a manner as bombing.

In recent years, the phrase has been resurrected to refer to suicide bombers and the inability of legislation or security to stop someone intent on blowing something up.^[3][4][5]

[edit] References

[edit] See also

• Carpet bombing
• Total war