Quick Take: Putin's Mini-Blitz
Looking at the Drudge Report over the past two or three days, you could be forgiven for assuming that V. Putin, incensed over the attack on his prized Russia-to-Crimea bridge, has been raining shock, awe, and wrath on a prostrate, cowering Ukraine. Missiles! rockets! Kamikaze drones imported from Iran! But if you took the trouble to read the news stories behind all that big red lettering on Drudge’s home page, you’d have found that on day one of Putin’s apocalyptic blitz…fourteen people were killed and about a hundred were injured.
Do not misconstrue my point. For every individual killed or wounded in a war, the casualty rate is one hundred percent. And it’s true that Putin’s onslaught has added to the already considerable damage that’s been inflicted on Ukraine’s physical fabric since this war began.
But in military terms—tactical, operation, strategic—these indiscriminate attacks have changed nothing. Once again, history is repeating itself.
“The Blitz” was what the people of Britain called Nazi Germany's air assault against their country in 1940-41. After the Battle of Britain, in which the Luftwaffe failed to achieve air superiority over the English Channel and southeast England—the essential prerequisite for an invasion—the Germans resorted to a sustained bombing campaign targeting British cities. The Blitz ran from November 1940 to the spring of 1941, when many Luftwaffe units were withdrawn from France to support the imminent invasion of the USSR. Bitter experience having revealed that its bombers, unescorted, were sitting ducks for RAF Fighter Command’s Hurricanes and Spitfires, the Luftwaffe switched from day to night operations. But though losses were reduced, bombing accuracy suffered. Thus, though the Blitz inflicted a great deal of damage and killed many British civilians, it too ended in failure.
The claim that strategic air attacks on a country’s urban centers would cause disorder, panic and a collapse of civilian morale was a staple of interwar debates over military strategy. It was preached by the so-called prophets of airpower: Billy Mitchel in America, Hugh Trenchard in Britain, and others. The myth of the “knockout blow,” which would end the next war in weeks if not days, soon caught the popular imagination. H.G. Wells promoted it in his novel of future history, The Shape of Things to Come (1933), which was successfully adapted for the screen in 1936 as Things to Come.
Apprehension over the impending aerial knockout blow rose as war loomed in 1938-39, but as things turned out, strategic bombing was not the game-changing, winning weapon that the prophets of airpower claimed it would be. On the day that Britain declared war against Germany, the air raid sirens sounded in London. But no German bombers appeared over the city that day.
Strategic airpower’s great test came later during World War Two. The US/UK Combined Bomber Offensive against Germany caused enormous damage and by 1945 had killed some 400,000 German civilians. But though it was a major factor in the Allied victory, it neither undermined German national morale nor destroyed German industry. Only in the last months of the war, with the armies of the Grand Alliance advancing over Germany’s borders and the war clearly lost, did civilian morale collapse.
It can at least be said of the Combined Bomber Offensive that it was based on a strategic conception, however flawed. War abounds in ironies, however, and the irony of strategic bombing was that its indirect effects may have contributed more toward Germany’s defeat than the physical destruction it wrought. For instance, it compelled the Germans to divert major resources from the fighting fronts to the home front: a large fraction of the Luftwaffe, thousands of antiaircraft guns, hundreds of thousands of men. Allied air supremacy over the Normandy battlefield in the summer of 1944 was largely due to the air battles fought and won over Germany in the months preceding D-Day.
V. Putin’s spasmodic blitz against Ukraine has no chance of achieving comparable results. A small number of missile strikes spread over a dozen or so urban centers can certainly cause damage and casualties. But killing civilians, destroying apartment and office buildings, flattening schools, will only intensify the hatred and enmity that the Ukrainian people feel toward Russia.
These missile and drone strikes are terror attacks, plain and simple, with no real military object, carried out in the hope that the Ukrainian government and people can finally be frightened into throwing up the sponge. But after all that has happened since February, with the tide of war now running in its favor, why should Ukraine surrender now? Terror, like all the other weapons in Putin’s arsenal, has proved far less potent than he and others expected.