The cries of ‘give it ’em back’ which greeted Churchill in London’s bombed East End in 1940 had already resounded with equal vehemence in 1917.

From Battle of Britain by Richard Hough and Denis Richards.  

It is a well observed, though infrequently developed, idea that World War I and World War II were in many respects a single conflict with a twenty-one year interlude.  In the scheme of Europe with its Thirty Years' War and Hundred Years' War, there is nothing unusual about a multi-decadal or multi-generational war.  

It is understandable why the idea of a single conflict is so little developed.  Both wars were in themselves sprawling dramas ranging across the entire globe and every aspect of life.  To treat the two as one implies a sustained writing capability and reader interest that is not always obviously achievable.  

Further, that span of time, 1914-1945 encompassed all the changes associated with the consequences of the Second Industrial Revolution such as mass production, mass logistics, the seeds of big data and the period when people began to move en masse from agrarian countryside to industrial cities.  It also was pinnacle Empire.  

It is very understandable why there are so few Meta-World War 1914-1945 histories.  Every now and then, though, you run across something which brings home just how much continuity there was.  There is an incident where the time, the place, and the characters repeat one another from WWI to WWII.  Some of the inexplicable decisions of WWII become more explicable in the context of the individuals' knowledge and learning from the same experiences across the two wars.

Specifically, an example relating to Churchill and the East Enders of London.  

On 28 November 1916, only a few hours after the destruction of two Zeppelins, some bombs fell on London in broad daylight from an unseen German aeroplane. It was the first episode of its kind, but a portent. The Zeppelins, for all their advantages in range, ceiling and bomb-load, had proved highly vulnerable to the defences and still more so to the weather. Aeroplanes were a different story.

For the next six months enemy air activity was slight and two of the Home Defence squadrons were sent over to France. Then, with the better weather, the Germans struck in force. On the afternoon of 25 May 1917 twenty-three Gothas, sturdy twin-engined bombers from what came to be unofficially known as the Englandgeschwader, set off from their bases in Belgium to attack London. Thwarted by cloud, most of them dropped bombs on Folkestone instead, killing ninety-five people. On 13 June - ‘the Wednesday’ of Londoners’ later memories - fourteen Gothas in clearer weather then penetrated to the heart of the capital. Flying high in formation like a flock of white birds, and watched in fascination by thousands of people below who at first mistook them for ‘friendlies’, they calmly unloaded their bombs on Liverpool Street Station and the neighbouring areas, killing 162 persons. Until heading home they met no challenge from the ninety-odd British fighters ordered into the air. Three weeks later the pattern was repeated when eighty-three fighters failed to intercept, or even see, Gothas bombing Harwich. Then on 7 July – ‘the Saturday’ – came the second big daylight raid on London. Again the Gothas rode the skies, undisturbed by ineffective gunfire. But this time, after dropping their bombs on the City, they paid a price – two shot or forced down on the flight back, three more wrecked in landing.

This second daylight raid on London had profound effects. The public outcry against the weakness of the defences led to the setting up of a Prime Minister’s Committee on Air Organisation and Home Defence against Air-Raids. It consisted only of Lloyd George and General Smuts, with the latter doing all the work. Criticising ‘the dispersal of Command’ in the Home Defence Force under Lord French as between the RFC, the artillery and the Observation Corps, Smuts recommended on 19 July that all such forces should be placed under the control of an airman, responsible to French but ‘charged with the duty of working out all plans for the London Air Defence’.

[snip]

For the Englandgeschwader, however, there was still the unexploited cover of night. Navigation in the dark would be difficult for the Gothas – unlike the Zeppelins they carried no wireless for direction-finding fixes – but at least they could hardly have an easier target to find than London. After an experimental raid on Chatham which took the defences completely by surprise, eleven Gothas set out the following night – 4 September 1917 – to attack the capital. Only five got through, but the damage they inflicted caused the British to estimate their numbers at twenty-six.

[snip]

The Gothas’ most sustained night assault came in late September 1917. Between 24 September and 1 October they attacked London on no fewer than six nights – ‘the week of the harvest moon’. They were joined by half-a-dozen Riesen (Giants), huge multi-engined aircraft nearly as big as a World War II B29 Superfortress. With a crew of eleven, a bomb-load of two tons and a range of nearly 600 miles, they carried every known refinement of the time from wireless, an intercom system and electrically heated clothing for the crew to a wide selection of instruments including an artificial horizon.

This series of raids caused little physical damage by World War II standards, but nevertheless had big effects. Each night, thousands of Londoners poured into the underground railway stations: as the song of the time had it:

When the moon shines bright

Ma red-faced Rube,

Put your little hand in mine

And hop it for the tube.

Others took to the western suburbs or the countryside. In the East End of London the psychological trauma was deep. Despite earlier experiences in the war civilians still did not expect to be bombed, and least of all in a proud island which had successfully resisted intrusion for centuries. On all sides arose the cry not only for further strengthening of the defences, but for retaliation.

[snip]

Once it was known that the Giants were operational and had been in action, Smuts’s recommendations were accepted and swiftly implemented. The Air Ministry came into being in January 1918, and the two air services became the Royal Air Force (RAF) on 1 April 1918. No great change in air defence arrangements immediately followed, but the other half of Smuts’s ‘independent’ air operations, the bombing of Germany, received a great impetus. RFC units in eastern France, which began bombing Germany regularly in October 1917, grew from a wing into a brigade into the RAF’s Independent Force, which in turn was meant to be the nucleus of the projected Inter-Allied Independent Air Force. When the Armistice came, the RAF was planning to bomb Germany the following year with a force of forty squadrons based in France and eight in England – four-engined Handley Page V1500S, capable of reaching Berlin. The cries of ‘give it ’em back’ which greeted Churchill in London’s bombed East End in 1940 had already resounded with equal vehemence in 1917.

Churchill, German bombing of London, sheltering in Tube stations, the anguish and anger of East Enders - all were there together under similar circumstances in both WWI and WWII.  The hunger for vengeful retaliation was a cumulative hunger.  

It provides additional context to one of the great moral dilemmas of WWII, Bomber Harris and area bombing.  There is an operational criticism of area bombing, does it work?  But there is a moral one as well.  Should civilians be on the front line of war?  Is terror an acceptable military strategy?  Is it morally acceptable to replicate one's enemy's immoral strategies?  What is the moral culpability when targeting legitimate war sites (an aircraft manufacturing plant for example) which is located within civilian areas making civilian casualties probable?

All legitimate questions and easily posed in hindsight and in peace.  

There is one set of answers when considering everything solely in the context of World War II.  

Is there a different set of answer when you consider that Harris and Churchill went through exactly the same experiences in World War I, that German civilian bombing occurred initially unilaterally in both wars and that Churchill, as a war time political leader, had to provide answers to the same bombed East Enders in both wars?

Maybe not, but it sort of seems like it might yield a different rumination.