The bomber will always get through

"The bomber will always get through" was a phrase used by Stanley Baldwin in a 1932 speech "A Fear for the Future" given to the British Parliament. His speech stated that contemporary bomber aircraft had the performance necessary to conduct a strategic bombing campaign that would destroy a country's cities and there was little that could be done in response. It concluded that the conduct of future wars would require one to "kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves."

At the time of the speech aircraft performance was rapidly improving and new techniques and construction methods were producing ever-larger aircraft. For a time, this resulted in a performance gap where multi-engine aircraft outperformed the single-engine fighter aircraft that would have to intercept them. This gap could be further widened through the use of night bombing, which made interception practically impossible.

This state of affairs was relatively short-lived. By the mid-1930s the same techniques were being applied to fighter design, once again handing them a significant performance advantage that allowed them to chase down even the fastest bomber aircraft. During the same period, the introduction of radar created an early warning system that gave interceptors sufficient time to climb to altitude before bombers arrived. The Battle of Britain suggested Baldwin was no longer entirely correct; many German bombers did get through, and did cause much destruction to British cities, but did not come close to destroying Britain's manufacturing or morale. Additionally, many bombers did not get through, being destroyed in the air. The rate of losses forced the Germans to abandon the campaign after a few months. Use of poison gas was not seriously considered by any nation, as immediate retaliation in kind would render this escalation pointless.

But later, Britain and the United States did produce enough bombers such that enough got through that a fair part of Germany's industrial production was hindered, albeit at high cost in bomber losses, and mostly only toward the end of the war, mainly because of the Allied development of long-range escort fighters capable of guarding bombers all the way to Germany.

Baldwin did not advocate total disarmament but believed that "great armaments lead inevitably to war". However he came to believe that, as he put it on 9 November 1932, "the time has now come to an end when Great Britain can proceed with unilateral disarmament". On 10 November 1932 Baldwin said:

I think it is well also for the man in the street to realise that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through. The only defence is in offence, which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves... If the conscience of the young men should ever come to feel, with regard to this one instrument [bombing] that it is evil and should go, the thing will be done; but if they do not feel like that – well, as I say, the future is in their hands. But when the next war comes, and European civilisation is wiped out, as it will be, and by no force more than that force, then do not let them lay blame on the old men. Let them remember that they, principally, or they alone, are responsible for the terrors that have fallen upon the earth.

This speech was often used against Baldwin as allegedly demonstrating the futility of rearmament or disarmament, depending on the critic.

Some theorists imagined that a future war would be won entirely by the destruction of the enemy's military and industrial capability from the air. The Italian general Giulio Douhet, author of The Command of the Air, was a seminal theorist of that school of thought. In contrast, H. G. Wells, in The War in the Air (1908), had predicted that aerial warfare would destroy cities, fleets, and armies, but such would not bring military victory, only the collapse of human civilization. Likewise, Olaf Stapledon, in his 1930 novel Last and First Men, depicts a very brief but devastating war in which fleets of bombers deliver huge payloads of poison gas to the cities of Europe, leaving most of the continent uninhabited.