Policing Germany by Air

VOLUME 174

NUMBER 2

87th YEAR OF CONTINUOUS PUBLICATIO N

AUGUST, 1944

by ALLAN A. MICHIE

IN THE Treaty of Mutual Guarantee signed by Britain, Germany, Italy, France, and Belgium at Locarno in 1925, these states agreed to guarantee the status quo on the Franco-BelgoGerman frontiers, and to back that guarantee by military action when called upon. That agreement, known as the Locarno Pact, specifically provided that the signatory powers were to come to the assistance of the victims of aggression in case of a breach of the Franco-German or Belgo-German frontiers, or a breach of the provisions of the Versailles Treaty relating to the demilitarized zone.

In thus limiting the use of force to keep the peace in specific areas which, as the Pact states, have “so frequently been the scene of European conflicts,” the Locarno agreement marked a step forward from the vague obligations of the League of Nations. The self-interest of the signatory powers was behind the Locarno Pact, and its acceptance by the five powers indicated in 1925 a willingness to improvise a police force for peace.

As the Locarno Pact improved on the League of Nations idea, so the proposal outlined here would implement the Locarno idea by improvising an aerial police force out of the national air units of the United States, Britain, Russia, and China for the limited, mutual function of checking future aggression on the part of Germany or Japan.

Two “improvised” Allied air forces are in fact now functioning in the war zones. One is in the welding together in the RAF of its varied national components; in addition to the United Kingdom squadrons, most branches of the RAF — fighter, bomber, coastal command, army cooperation, photographic reconnaissance, and so on — at present include Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, Indian, Fighting French, Norwegian, Dutch, Belgian, Yugoslav, Greek, Polish, and British Colonial contingents, some of them organized and operated under their own air force direction, others commanded by British RAF officers, but all working under cent ral control for a common cause.

The other Allied air force is the combination of the RAF and United States Air Force in Britain, the Mediterranean, the Indian-Burma front, and the Pacific areas under one planning authority that directs their common, coordinated program of attacks against German and Japanese objectives.

It is the vision of both British and American air commanders, who have seen their partnership give birth to the greatest striking weapon the world has known, that that working wartime foundation is the beginnings of an aerial police force which, with the addition of the air force of Russia and, in time, of the growing air strength of China, will enable the free world at long last to secure the peace it has sought.

Copyright 1944, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston, Mass. All rights reserved.

2

OUR disarmament provisions for Germany and Japan, carried out under temporary armies of occupation, must include the scrapping of their military air forces, the prohibition of future construction of military airplanes, and the destruction or surrender of all anti-aircraft weapons (guns, predictors, radar installations). With all opposition from the air thus removed, the Allied aerial police force that will take over control on the withdrawal of the occupational armies need not be large. The main advantage of air control is that a comparatively small number of far-ranging airplanes can police a large geographical area.

A contribution of 100 mixed fighter and bomber squadrons by each of the Big Three powers would be more than adequate to keep down aggression by Germany in Europe and by Japan in the Far East in the immediate years after this war. As China’s contribution is added, the squadrons provided by Britain, Russia, and the United States could be correspondingly decreased. In other words, figuring twelve operational and four reserve machines to a squadron, the generally accepted standard, each of the Big Three would be called upon to provide some 1600 aircraft, making a total air police force of some 4800 machines — or about one half of one month’s current American wartime production.

Instead of immobilizing many millions of Allied soldiers for long years as armies of occupation, the total manpower needed for such an aerial police force would be no more than 200,000 men, provided equally by the three great powers. Broken down into functions, this force might include 2400 operational and reserve fighter pilots, 24,000 operational and reserve bomber crewmen, some 133,000 in the ground crew services, and some 40,000 administrative men (planning, intelligence, weather, repair and maintenance services).

The component national units of the air police force would remain within their national air forces, but earmarked for the duties of air control; and unless the peoples concerned willed otherwise, it would not be necessary for either the aircraft or the airmen to leave their own nations until called upon. In order to counter American isolationist objections, which will revive with a vengeance after the war, to the establishment of American armed force outside the American hemisphere, the United States squadrons could remain at convenient coastal air bases until their turn came for an air police assignment; or, if the American public after the war retains its wartime realization that it is more sensible to counter aggression far from home, the United States squadrons assigned to police duty might occupy airfields in Iceland, on a Lend-Lease basis,¹ or base in any one of the half-dozen smaller nations bordering Germany.

British squadrons assigned to air police duties over Germany could remain at their home bases, within reach of a large part of German territory, and the Russian air police units could be based at the airfields in Russia closest to the German border.

Although in the formative stages, at least, the components of the air police force would be furnished by the three great powers, participation in the air control of Germany might later be opened up to the smaller nations of Europe which desire to contribute in the keeping of the peace, once they have recovered from German occupation.

In the first years after the war, while their own air forces are being built up, these smaller nations might put airfields at the disposal of the air police forces of the Big Three. Poland and Czechoslovakia might allocate air bases to the Russian air police units, which could operate from them on a longterm basis or utilize them only when engaged in putting down German aggression. Similarly, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, and France might hold airfields ready for the use of the air police units of Britain and the United States. In the Pacific-Far East area, an independent Korea — and, of course, China — would put air bases within striking distance of Japan at the disposal of the peace-keeping air forces.

In actuality there would be two distinct air police forces: one designed for duty in the European theater, the other for the Far East. These units would remain under their own commanding officers, and on a rotating basis the two posts of Air Officer Commanding in these areas would be filled by these national commanders for a term of one year. By this means an American airman would command the Big Three air police force every third year in the European theater, and every third or fourth year in the Far Eastern theater.

These Air Officers Commanding would be bound to select their planning and administrative staffs from the qualified officers of the three or four air police units participating. We have seen during this war, in the effective mixing together of British and American air staff officers in one command in the Mediterranean and also in the Indian-Burma theater, that airmen of two prestige-minded, competitive nations can work and plan together.

Participation in the police force I have sketched here does not, as in so many of the earlier schemes for an international air police force, imply disarmament of any nation except the defeated enemy countries, although the continued successful functioning of air control would naturally produce the confidence that aggression is being checked — the very confidence needed to reduce for the peaceloving peoples of the world the crushing burden of armaments.

For the United States in particular the participation in such an air police force has one important aspect. After this war the United States will not dare to lag so far behind in the technological development of military aircraft as we so dangerously did in the years up to — and even for months after — Pearl Harbor. By an inability to assimilate or by deliberately closing our eyes to the performance of the military aircraft of both enemy and friendly nations from 1939 to December 7, 1941, we were caught tragically and criminally without a single combat aircraft of any military type that could match the performance of its equivalent in the German Luftwaffe or the RAF when we were forced into the war. The best way to keep abreast of technical improvements in post-war military aviation is to participate with at least part of our air force in friendly, competitive collaboration with our major allies, and, when necessary, to employ those machines in actual operations to keep aggression in check.

To sum up the advantages of keeping the peace through air power: an aerial police force would require comparatively few aircraft and airmen; it would release millions of Allied soldiers from the non-productive tasks of armies of occupation; by drawing on the existing national air forces, and enabling the allocated police units to remain at their home bases until needed, it would avoid the colossal cost of maintaining either huge armies of occupation or ground striking forces in overseas service; by allowing the air units to serve under their own commanders it would allow each participating nation to retain a great measure of control over its own force.

The most important advantage, however, is that the yearly cost of the aerial control duties which the police force would have to undertake would probably not be so great as the combined United Nations expenditure for but one day of this war.

An air police force contributed equally by the three or four major powders, such as I have outlined, is open to the same objection made against most of the earlier proposals for a real international air police force to be put at the disposal of the League of Nations: it is dependent upon the honor and good faith of the powers to respond with their air units when called upon. I accept that objection, but I am strongly convinced that after this Second German War it will no longer be a valid one. In the genuine determination of the Big Three or Big Four to preserve the peace that their bloody sacrifices in this war will win is our certainty that the contributory powers will respond in full faith when called upon.

3

EITHER the “inverted blockade” as used by the RAF in the Middle East, or the “pin-down blockade,” or both, might be adopted and elaborated to serve as the mechanism of air control which the aerial police force would apply to wipe out aggression. I will deal first with the “inverted blockade” technique as it might be applied to Germany.

After Germany’s disarmament has been completed under the supervision of Allied commissions, backed by our temporary armies of occupation, those commissions should be replaced by a permanent Allied investigating body. This organization, composed of several hundred plain-clothes investigators widely established all over Germany, would act as a body of armament detectives. (In addition to former military men as investigators, I suggest that it include a number of Allied industrial experts, shop foremen, and so on, who could see through camouflaged arms production in the guise of peacetime products.) Their job would be to make periodic — and surprise — visits to all German factories in their areas, and to keep watch on Germany’s police forces and on the semi-military organizations that will attempt to spring up under the disguise of veterans’ organizations. Basically, it would be their responsibility to see that the disarmament provisions of the new treaty are kept to the letter, and to gather evidence of the slightest breach of those provisions.

This time we must not make the mistake we made after the last war, of first asking permission from either the German government or the German military authorities before the Allied commission make their inspections. Too often, last time, the government and the military men quietly tipped off the factories to be visited, enabling them to conceal the weapons being manufactured or to camouflage preparations for arms production. After this war, the Allied investigators must be as much a part of German industrial life as are safety and fire prevention inspectors in British or American factories, able to move through the plants at will, without prior notification of their visits.

As a check to prevent the misuse of the air police force, and to make certain that a German breach of the disarmament provisions is clearly established, the evidence collected by the investigators might be put before an Allied European Council, composed of representatives of the Big Three powers, meeting in permanent session. On this Council might also sit representatives of the smaller European nations who wish to join in the responsibility for maintaining peace. This Council would have none of the international governmental responsibilities or powers of the League of Nations; it would be a purely deliberative body which would decide on a legal basis whether the evidence put before it established a deliberate breach of the disarmament clauses of the treaty.

Once German guilt was established, the responsibility would then be put into the hands of the officer commanding the air police units in the European theater. His first step would be to inform the management and the workpeople of the offending factory, and perhaps the people of the town in which the plant is located, that their factory has been caught breaking the treaty.

At the same time, the choice before the offenders should be clearly stated. Either the factory must hand over to Allied investigators all weapons already manufactured or under construction and the blueprints for them, or else, at a stated hour on a stated day, Allied air police units will begin the punitive bombardment of the factory. This “either-or” option should allow adequate time for the management, the workers, and, as a further precaution, all those who live in the immediate vicinity of the plant, to remove themselves and their belongings to a place of safety, in case the factory elects to take the aerial consequences.

If there has been no compliance up to the deadline allowed, then at the stated time a small force of Allied air police bombers would appear over the factory and drop their bombs. If German aerial opposition is suspected or anticipated, the bombers could be accompanied by protective fighter squadrons of the air police force. If no opposition is in fact encountered, the unharried air police bombers will be able to bomb with perfect precision and direct their bombs at the one section of the factory that has offended — not necessarily the entire industrial establishment.

The aim of this punitive bombing would not be to kill people. If Allied warnings are seriously heeded (as they undoubtedly will be after the first few demonstrations that the Allies are determined to use force to keep the peace), and proper precautions are taken in the actual bombing, not a German life need be lost, and there need be no operational casualties among the attacking police units. The aim of such an elaborated “inverted blockade” applied to Germany would be the same as it was in the Middle East — to produce a change of heart among the peace-breaking peoples.

As Sir Charles F. A. Portal has pointed out, that change of heart would not be produced merely by dropping bombs on the offending factory and warning the offenders that if they misbehaved again they would get another dose of bombs. It can be produced only if we can persuade the workers of the factory and the people of the town that it is in their own interest to take collective responsibility to see that the disarmament provisions are not breached.

The real aim of punitive, air police bombing as applied to Germany would be to keep the people and the workers away from their offending factories until the discomfort, the stoppage of work, and the inability to hit back produce in them the realization that only when they demonstrate a willingness to keep the peace will they be allowed to live peaceably. As long as they refuse to accept the terms imposed by the peace-keepers, bombers of the air police force would make periodic and surprise flights over the factory, occasionally dropping bombs to keep its workpeople away from it. Then, the minute submission is forthcoming, the air police mechanism can be switched off as quickly as it was put on.

In our local communities we long ago realized that if the rest of us wished to live in peace and security, we had to set up a code of conduct to which the irresponsible among us had to adhere, and we appoint police authorities to make certain that these less responsible elements are kept in check. The Germans must be brought to take the same collective responsibility toward the disarmament lawbreakers in their midst.

4

To TAKE a specific example, suppose that sometime in 1947 one of the Allied investigators comes upon concrete evidence that one German industrial organization — for example, Rheinmetall-Borsig, at Düsseldorf—is secretly engaged in the illegal manufacture of new, improved 88-millimeter antitank, anti-aircraft guns. That evidence would quickly be put before the Allied European Council, the members of which would decide whether it is sufficient to warrant punitive air action. If the evidence so warrants, the case would then be turned over to the officer commanding the air police units in the European theater, who would call for the required squadrons of the air police force from the contributing nations and place them at readiness on Allied airdromes within easy reach of Düsseldorf.

His next step would be to warn the workers of Rheinmetall-Borsig and the people of Düsseldorf, by means of radio broadcasts, leaflets dropped from the air, and warnings in the local newspapers, that the factory had been caught in a breach of the peace. The choice would then be clearly stated. Unless, by a stated time, the factory destroyed the manufactured weapons, diverted to other uses the jigs and tools for making them, and destroyed the blueprints, then at that stated time and at any time thereafter, Allied air police units would be at liberty to bombard the plant.

Plenty of time would be given for the workpeople to leave the factory and, for the sake of safety, for all those living in the neighborhood of RheinmetallBorsig to remove themselves and their belongings to another area. Then, at the given hour, unless compliance was forthcoming, a handful of Allied bombers would appear and drop their bombs, not on the entire industrial establishment, but only on the particular section that had broken the peace. On following days, and for as long as RheinmetallBorsig refused to submit to the terms, other bombers would appear and, to keep the workers from trickling back to the factory, widen the area of their bombing within the factory bounds.

The moment word came from Rheinmetall-Borsig that it was willing to discontinue the illegal manufacture of armaments and to scrap those weapons already produced, the Allied air police units would cease bombing.

Those of us who have watched at close hand the lesson that air bombardment has written across the face of Germany in this war are convinced that, for generations to come, no German in the industrial areas of his country will take lightly the threat of such aerial punishment; and that, first in the little units of their factories, then in the larger units of their towns, then finally in the nation as a whole, the German people will come to the realization that it is safer, more comfortable, and more honorable to take a collective responsibility for keeping the peace.

At least once during the short-lived reaction against militarism following 1918, the German workers demonstrated to themselves and to the world that they had both the will and the power to paralyze their militarists if they acted as a body. In 1920, some of the reactionaries of the Reichswehr, led by General von Lüttwitz, head of the Berlin Command, and the naval brigade of Captain Ehrhardt, sought to overthrow the government and establish a reactionary dictatorship.

In March of that year they marched on Berlin and installed Dr. Kapp, an official of the East Prussian government, as dictator. Kapp was nothing but a figurehead for the real leaders of the putsch, the most important of whom was old Ludendorff, who remained craftily in the background. This attempt by the militarists was answered by a general strike that paralyzed Germany in a few hours; and when the Reichswehr leaders saw that the whole German nation was in rebellion against them, they quickly retreated to await a better day, leaving Kapp to hold the bag.

With that potent weapon of a strike in their hands, the German workers have it in their power after this war to break the militarists of Germany.

5

BUT, say the skeptics, wouldn’t it be possible for the German industrialists to build their factories underground, and thus escape destruction from the air? There has been a great deal of ill-founded speculation during the war concerning the possibility that the Germans have built underground factories, safe from the danger of Allied air raids. The Germans have experimented with underground factories, as have the British, but such factories are only a fraction of Germany’s total industrial plant. There are limiting factors to the erection of underground factories, and for the most part the experiment so far has been confined to small firms making arms components and aircraft parts. It is a physical impossibility for the Germans, or anyone else, to attempt to move underground their heavy industries — the steel and chemical plants of the Ruhr and Rhineland, the coke ovens, and the great rolling milts of Germany’s western areas.

However, if an underground factory is discovered flouting the disarmament provisions of the treaty after this war, and it is impossible to compel it to desist by the mere threat of air bombardment, then the air police units can be applied against the aboveground factories that are supplying it with raw materials or component parts. At one stage or another in the manufacture of illegal weapons, the air police force can be applied to stop that manufacture.

Nor will it be possible for the Germans to move their arms-producing factories to remote areas out of range of Allied police bombers, for with the cooperation of the Big Three and the smaller neighbors of Germany, every square mile of the Reich will be within comfortable range of the air police units.

Still other skeptics may contend that while the air police force by the threat of air bombardment might prevail upon the Germans to destroy their weapons and the jigs and tools used in the making of them, it is impossible to be certain that, all the blueprints for the manufacture of those weapons will be destroyed. Blueprints, after all, exist first in the minds of the creators and only secondly on paper. That is true, but the mechanism of air control can be turned on and kept on for an indefinite period, and as long as German factories come forth with new blueprints the air police units will be on hand to strike.

Although the “inverted blockade” technique could successfully be used to keep people away from the arms-making factories until they agree to stop making arms, it may not be the most suitable technique for imposing control over other breaches of the disarmament provisions. For example, it might not be effective in preventing the re-establishment of German military organizations, such as the General Staff Corps, under new peacetime guises; or for rounding up freebooting private armies that may take to the countryside, as they did after 1918; or for unearthing concealed stores of arms on the Junker estates, if any such estates remain after this war. For these special cases, however, the air police units might apply a variation of the RAF’s “pindown blockade.”

Suppose, for instance, that Allied investigators discovered that huge stores of weapons were being concealed on a remote country estate. Instead of giving the offenders warning, and thus enabling them to spirit the weapons away to another hiding place, units of the air police force, both fighters and bombers, would suddenly appear in the air over the grounds. Warnings would be issued, by wireless and loud-speakers, that anyone attempting to leave the estate would be machine-gunned or bombed from the air. Then, while the air police aircraft held the area in quarantine, Allied investigators, aided if necessary by German police forces, would surround the estate and begin their search.

The same technique might be used to round up para-military formations operating in the countryside, or to raid suspected hideouts and headquarters of ihe underground Nazis or German Army plotters.

There are those in the democratic nations who still feel, despite two abortive German attempts to enslave the world, that we must avoid any post-war control over Germany that might arouse the resentment of the German people. In the minds of those who incline towards a “soft peace” for Germany, this application of air control without occupation may seem too harsh a technique.

To them I answer that there is no reason why the use of either the “inverted” or the “pin-down” blockade should create resentment among the German people. If, as these apologists for Germany assert, the bulk of the German people after this war will be ready to live at peace with the world, and will regard their militarists as their real enemies, then they should be ready to support a peacekeeping technique that is designed to impose control on those militarists and on no one else.

Twice in one generation the Germans have seen their militarists prepare for a war and then lose it. This time the German people must crush those elements which made war in 1914 and 1939. If they succeed by themselves in eliminating these warmaking groups from their midst, the air police force will not have to go into action. But if they fail once again to gain control over their and our warmaking enemies, the air police will be available as the free world’s weapon of self-protection.

In the application of air control, no lives need be lost, not a drop of German blood spilled — and as long as the German people eagerly assumed a collective responsibility for keeping their own militarists in check, there would be no need to apply air control at all. Under ideal conditions — undoubtedly more ideal than we can hope for — the air police units would exist only as a precautionary weapon in case Germany’s militarists again gained the upper hand.

But even if the continued threat of aerial punishment for misbehavior should bring some resentment in Germany — and, in my opinion, any form of control, however mild, will be resented for some time by many Germans who will remember in their defeat only how close they came to victory — the victorious Allied powers must keep uppermost in their minds that more than the fate and feelings ol sixty-eight million Germans is at stake. It is the future of the world’s two billion inhabitants, and the millions yet unborn, who will have to suffer what two generations have already suffered if we fail again in our responsibility to keep the peace.