One assumption that a lot of very smart people had in the decade before World War 2 was, “The bomber will always get through.” According to these military experts and newspaper pundits, the new multi-engine, long-range bomber aircraft just coming off assembly lines in the 1930s, were an irresistible super-weapon against which no defense was possible. All a belligerent power had to do, in their telling, was aim a fleet of loaded bombers at their opponents’ population centers and watch civil society crumble under the weight of mass hysteria.
And they were right about one thing: the new bombers were powerful, frightening, and more destructive than any weapon that had come before. The Luftwaffe, Hitler’s air force, certainly benefited from belief in their invincibility, and for a while it seemed to be so. In the early days of WW2, when German bombers hit poorly prepared cities like Warsaw and Rotterdam, and they met air forces whose fighter planes hadn’t improved much since 1918, their bombers did through. Soon, the threadbare armies arrayed against them collapsed, and their governments capitulated.
England seemed a good candidate for bomber-induced fatalism. It had brought forth politician Stanley Baldwin, who first coined the slogan and H.G. Wells, whose books (and the movies they inspired) prophesied future wars where aerial bombardment leading to civilizational collapse in short order. The interwar planners England’s Royal Air Force (RAF) thought otherwise. Instead of panicking about the very real destructive power of this scary new weapon, they saw that much of much of its psychological impact came from fear of the unknown. The bombers’ ability to rain destruction on urban civilians far from the battle front inspired terror, but for the British, it wasn’t terror of a totally unknown kind. They had been partially inoculated against it by the Zeppelin raids of the last war, when football-field-sized, hydrogen-filled air ships blacked out the stars over London and dropped bombs on the houses, shops and factories below.
The Brits who endured the Zeppelin raids of 1918 acquired a mental model for “bombers attack my city” that most other Europeans lacked. This allowed them to anticipate that the Nazi bomber raids of the coming war would likely be the same kind of thing, albeit on a much larger scale. It also gave them valuable information about the built-in vulnerabilities of any long range bomber weapon. The sheer amount of material, power and people needed to keep a fleet of huge, complex, and heavily laden pieces of machinery airborne and moving towards their far-off destination was so great that hitting even lightly defended targets carried an off-the-charts degree of difficulty. And while the enormous size, payload and lethality of bombers was impressive, it came at a cost in performance. Every centimeter of space in the bomb bay, each additional crew member, every gun, bomb sight, bolt, plate, and rivet made the planes that much heavier and less maneuverable, even without their multi-ton explosive payloads.
Each of a bomber’s two or four engines supplied more horsepower and lift than half-a-dozen WWI-era biplanes. But somehow the bomber inevitability theorists, awestruck by their power failed to notice that these bombers wouldn’t face the slow, underpowered, canvas and wood relics of the previous war. Instead, as they neared their drop zone, they would meet fighter planes with engines just as powerful as each of theirs, but smaller, more nimble and much, much faster.
Despite this, some bombers did get through, at great cost to their machines and crew. But as it turned out, thew3 were much better at leveling buildings than destroying civilian morale. In the days between 7 September 1940 and 11 May 1941, as Nazi Luftwaffe planes dropped thousands of tons of bombs on greater London every night. Thousands of Londoners died. Many more lost their homes, but the uncontrollable mass panic and breakdown of civil society that the very smart people had predicted? That didn’t happen.
British military and government leaders were quick to ascribe the resilience of Britons during what became known as “The Blitz” to some unique bulldog trait in the national character, and exploited the image of stoic Londoners carrying on amidst the rubble for all it was worth—quite a lot, as it happened. Still, when British bomber command Air Marshall, Harris sent his planes out to hit German cities with more bombs than the Brits got, he seemed oblivious to the fact that German civilians carried on just as well as their counterparts across the Channel.
The lesson was simple: people don’t like being bombed, so they resist the people doing it.
Now let’s jump-cut to this past week when Disney/ABC fired Jimmy Kimmel for displeasing Donald Trump. Within hours of the news, people on social media were ready to declare democracy over, and the First Amendment nullified. Yet by Monday, Disney/ABC had reversed its decision, and announced that Jimmy Kimmel will return to the air on Tuesday.
What happened in between those two milestones? Millions of patriotic Americans noticed—some for the first time, that the regime was targeting people like them, and they didn’t like it. They responded by cancelling their Disney Plus subscriptions. As MAGA snitches doxxed people for showing insufficient grief at a podcaster’s murder, other, angry, contemptuous anti-regime voices spoke, wrote and drew, and sang their outrage.
It turned out to be a good moment for free speech, though doomers didn’t see it coming. Whether the doomer is forecasting complete civic breakdown from aerial bombardment in 1935 or the death of democracy from a TV comedian’s cancellation 90 years later, they look at fluid, developing and uncertain circumstances and assume irredeemable and permanent defeat. Faced with a new and genuinely alarming thing, like long range bombers, or a Federal government dedicated to abusing anyone who disagrees with their anointed bully or his toadies, they draw a line from the threat its worst possible result, then announce that it’s already too late, so don’t bother trying.
But the biggest mistake both doomers and the corporate press made in this crisis was assuming that Trump wanting to strangle free speech, and corporate cowards going along with him, was enough to destroy America’s long tradition of free expression.
Fortunately, a whole lot of us didn’t buy that. Where some saw reason for despair, many others saw an opportunity to hit back, and acted on that conviction. Millions of us hit attacked Disney’s bottom line, and overnight turned the “The Mouse” and the brand he represents, from cheerful corporate avatar to emblem of repression. Not a bad day’s work.
More struggles await. We can’t expect the regime to abandon the ‘shock and aw shit’ campaign that’s been so successful freaking half the country out so far, but at least now, a lot of us know in our bones that We the People, have the power to will to resist and overcome whatever they throw at us next, and continue resisting all the outrages that follow until we finally win.
This bomber did not get through, but we will.