The Spectre of the Bomber

An important element in 'appeasement' as its apogee in 1938 - along obscured by searches for more complicated and sinister motives - was simple fear.

One of the key influences in the British policy of 'appeasement' towards Germany in the 1930s was terror of the most brutal manifestation of air warfare: bombing. Correlli Barnett in The Collapse of British Power says that in the 1930s 'the British were obsessed by fear of the bomber'. It was a double-edged fright, he says, partly a matter of First World War memories, but 'they had worked themselves up no less over the novel horrors which, thanks to science, were to be expected in the next war'.