Abstract
From Guernica through to Dresden, the 1930s and the Second World War saw an evolution in airpower as a means of destruction. This chapter begins with the concepts of air theorist Giulio Douhet and the path to Dresden taken by the RAF and its believers in the right of strategic bombing. It then considers how novelists George Orwell and Rex Warner anticipated the rise of the bomber threat and examined the psychology of airmen, civilian responses to bombing and changes to England’s landscape in their novels Coming Up for Air (1938) and The Aerodrome (1941).
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Filmography
The Dawn Patrol. Dir. Howard Hawks. USA. 1938.
Hell’s Angels. Dir. Howard Hughes. USA. 1930.
Things to Come. Dir. William Cameron Menzies. UK. 1936.
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Goulding, S.W. (2020). ‘Watch the Skies!’: Guernica, Dresden and the Age of the Bomber in George Orwell and Rex Warner. In: McCluskey, M., Seaber, L. (eds) Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain. Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60555-1_15
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