by Dan Carlin
Tami Davis Biddle asks in her essay “Air Power and the Law of War,” “How does one weigh the lives of one’s own soldiers against the lives of enemy civilians?” And when Britain began bombing Germany, some pacifist clerics brought up the question of when it was better to lose a war than to cross a certain moral threshold to win it.
US Army Air Force leader Henry “Hap” Arnold said after hundreds of thousands of civilians had died, “When used with the proper degree of understanding, the bomber becomes, in effect, the most humane of all weapons.” The worst carnage occurred when the conditions were just right.* Under certain circumstances the bombing could create a phenomenon known as a firestorm, which can happen when there are many blazes in a given area—in this case, a city—and they merge into one huge inferno. When that happens, a giant updraft of heat pulls the air upward, and all the cooler air on the ground gets sucked into the vortex, creating hurricane-force, superheated winds.
In a situation like this, people can meet their end in any number of ways. A person could be killed by the blast itself—the lungs burst, the veins and nerves absorb the shock, and death follows. Victims could be burned to death from flames or crushed under giant pieces of concrete or buildings (unlike a bullet, which creates a personal wound that may prove fatal, bombs destroy the world around the victim, too). Many were asphyxiated by the carbon monoxide that blew into bomb shelters or were deprived of oxygen after the firestorm sucked the air from a room. (Photos of such scenes exist; beware, they are gruesome.)
The worst night of the London Blitz was so bad that a firestorm developed, creating perhaps the worst conflagration the city had seen since the Great Fire of 1666. Yet this paled in comparison with the payback delivered against German cities.* The first really terrible attack happened in Hamburg in 1943; an estimated forty to fifty thousand people were incinerated.
Kate Hoffmeister was nineteen years old in 1943, writes Gwynne Dyer in his book War, when she survived a bombing raid. Hers is among the most extreme human experiences imaginable. On leaving the shelter, Hoffmeister entered a world that had become a burning inferno. People’s gas masks had melted onto their faces. Dyer quotes Hoffmeister’s experience: “We couldn’t go on across the Eiffestrasse because the asphalt had melted. There were people on the roadway, some already dead, some still lying alive but stuck in the asphalt. They must have rushed on to the roadway without thinking. Their feet had got stuck, and then they put out their hands to try to get out again. They were on their hands and knees screaming.”
Once these firestorms started happening, a precedent had been established that could not be broken. Forty thousand people died in the London Blitz over a period of eight months (that’s more than most militaries in premodern times lost in a whole war); the Germans in Hamburg lost that many in one evening. If there was ever a time to look into the abyss and turn away, that would have been it.
Few were in a position to do so, but the prime minister of Great Britain might have been one of them. Winston Churchill is supposed to have reacted in horror when viewing film from the nose camera of a plane of the damage being done to these German cities. According to an Australian military attaché who was with him at the time, Churchill sat bolt upright in his chair and said loudly, “Are we beasts? Are we taking this too far?” This is the same Churchill who is quoted as saying in 1940, “A fire in his own backyard will force Hitler to retreat, and we will make Germany a desert, yes, a desert.”
Churchill was also concerned with the loss of European heritage that the bombing was causing. Even after the people being directly affected by the war were dead and gone, their great-great-great-grandchildren would still suffer the loss of their heritage going back to Roman times. Their cultural inheritance was being destroyed by this logical insanity. And it wasn’t just Europe. It was happening in Japan and China and lots of other countries.*
FDR held two different positions on bombing enemy cities: in public, he was against it; in private, he was for it. On August 4, 1941, he made a statement recorded by US treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau (as quoted by Conrad Crane): “Well, the way to lick Hitler is the way I’ve been telling the English but they won’t listen to me. I’ve suggested again and again that if they sent a hundred planes over Germany for military objectives that ten of them should bomb some of these smaller towns that haven’t been bombed before. There must be some kind of factory in every town. That’s the only way to break German morale.”
By 1943, the casualties were mounting at a horrifying pace, and the number continued to grow. The United States would lose more people in the final year of the hostilities than it lost in the entire rest of the war.
General Douglas MacArthur hated the firebombing. One of his aides, essentially writing on his behalf, called it “one of the most ruthless and barbaric killings of noncombatants in all history.” MacArthur actually put his troops in harm’s way and lost men in order to protect civilians and not bomb civilian targets, a decision even today some would argue was wrong.
Some of the most powerful people in the world seemed powerless to halt the momentum of these atrocities. George Marshall, the top US general conducting the war, and Henry Stimson, the US secretary of war, both didn’t like what was happening and yet couldn’t stop it. Stimson said that the Manhattan Project physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer thought it was appalling that there wasn’t more public outrage in the United States over the firebombings and attacks on civilians—he didn’t want the attacks to stop, necessarily, he was just disturbed that more people weren’t upset about it.
It is a sign of the insanity of the times that the very people who had designed a precision-oriented air force because public opinion before the war wouldn’t condone the targeting of women and children had by 1944 largely shed those concerns. But cities had lots of military targets, so if you wiped an entire city off the map, you were taking out lots of military targets.
Japan, in a move that unwittingly came at unfathomable cost, decided to spread its industry among civilian areas. The Japanese made every block have a small factory on it, so that production wasn’t concentrated where bombers could destroy it. This, naturally enough, turned out to provide a convenient justification for leveling everything.
Technology now provided physical distance from the damage being inflicted, too. Army lieutenant colonel Dave Grossman, an expert in military psychology, writes about how distance makes killing possible and how the farther away one is from the target, the easier it is to kill. None of what was done to Japan and to Germany, nor what the Germans did to Britain, would likely have happened had the soldiers been required to inflict it face-to-face by hand.
Grossman writes about one of the raids that killed seventy thousand people from the air in an evening: “If bomber crew members had to turn a flamethrower on each one of these seventy thousand women and children, or worse yet slit each of their throats, the awfulness and trauma inherent in the act would have been of such a magnitude that it simply would not have happened. But when it is done from thousands of feet in the air, where the screams cannot be heard and the burning bodies cannot be seen, it is easy.” American aircrews returned from one of the Tokyo fire raids smelling like burning people. The bottoms of their planes were scorched, and they supposedly handed in their after-action reports with shaking hands.
Conrad Crane quotes a US official on the use of the air force to target civilians: “Isn’t that the same as ordering ground forces to kill all the civilians and destroy all the buildings as they fight?”
Well, sort of, except that, as we’ve said, ground forces, like naval forces, have the benefit of thousands of years of codified behavior in war and an understanding of what’s permissible and what’s not.
By February 1945, there were complaints that there was nothing left to bomb in Germany, that all the Allies were doing was making the rubble bounce—and yet it didn’t stop them from continuing. After the war, at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, the defendants—most of whom would be hanged for crime
s against humanity—complained about the Allied bombings of German cities. One of the Allies’ chief counsels said the aerial bombardments had “become a recognized part of modern warfare as carried on by all nations.” So the horse was out of the barn on that ethical question.
If the Allies didn’t stop bombing the Germans when they were effectively defeated, how could anyone have stopped attacks in the Pacific theater, where the Japanese were, relatively speaking, stronger?* Indeed, the idea of a “death blow from the air,” once floated as a tool against Germany, would resurface in August 1945. The day-to-day casualties were horrific at that point, and every day the war was shortened, thousands and thousands of lives could be saved.
Days after the two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, and before the surrender was finalized, a thousand planes dropped firebombs on Tokyo. Again.
To focus on the Allied bombing attacks in a vacuum, however, is to forget the stakes, and the nature of the opponents. The air force historian Bruce Hopper, after visiting the Buchenwald death camp in April 1945, wrote: “Stench everywhere: piles of human bone remnants at the furnace. Here is the antidote to qualms about strategic bombing.” At the 1899 Hague Convention, it had been the American delegation who had said that bombers could someday be made precise enough that they wouldn’t hurt civilians, meaning that they would be a humanitarian weapon. It was the United States, too, that felt that its citizens wouldn’t stand for a military policy that indiscriminately killed so many noncombatants. How ironic that this was the same nation—the only nation—that used an atomic bomb, perhaps the most indiscriminate killer of civilians in world history.
The logic of Total War is brutal.
Fast forward fifteen years and, by codifying the rules after the war that using bombs and high-altitude explosives on inhabited areas was legal—after all, everyone was doing it—the United States had opened itself up to being targeted by nuclear weapons during the Cold War. The magnitude of the logical insanity would grow exponentially when world leaders started talking about whether it was morally acceptable or justifiable to exterminate 100 million human beings to save the lives of 300 million.
It is certainly logical to try to minimize death totals, especially if you save 300 million people in the process. But it would be difficult to put a spin on the violent deaths of 100 million human beings at the hands of your weaponry in any way that looks sane and beneficent.
If humankind ever spawns another dark age because we engage in a global thermonuclear war, perhaps we will all feel as Charlton Heston did when he screamed, “You maniacs! You blew it up!” But if that is the outcome we get, it won’t be because that’s what anybody wanted at the time.
Afterword
The Fermi Paradox is named after the famous physicist Enrico Fermi, who did the math and figured out that, statistically speaking, the universe should contain a ton of intelligent life. So, he asked, where were they? He and others then started speculating about all the reasons that might explain why extraterrestrial life might not be here, and one of them was that they didn’t survive long enough to migrate beyond their home world.* This idea is part of an aspect of the Fermi Paradox known as the Great Filter. It’s possible most life on other planets never made it through the great filter.
I was born in 1965. At that time the world lived in justifiable fear that a nuclear war might end modern civilization. It wasn’t long afterward that a mass understanding of the many threats facing the global environment began to take hold. This double sword of Damocles still hangs above us today. Perhaps they are both part of our great filter test.
Whether you are optimistic or pessimistic about our civilization’s long-term chances may depend on your view of how much we human beings can change. We laud ourselves for the adaptability of our species, but these are difficult challenges that may have sunk many other intelligent life forms before us. If we do what we have always done, we can depend on outcomes that are disastrous. If we engage in another total war between the great powers, we will do damage on a scale that has no comparable historical analogy. If we cannot change enough to deal with the modern global version of the environmental damage that human beings traditionally do to their immediate surroundings, we will cause ramifications that affect almost every aspect of life. Either one of these scenarios could cause the sort of downstream problems like starvation, disease, mass migration, geo-political upheaval, piracy, and systems collapse that we dealt with in some of the earlier chapters of this book.
If we wish to look on the bright side, we can hope for innovations and discoveries to create conditions in which we can continue to live as we do and not kill ourselves—the invent-our-way-out-of-it scenario. Then there’s also the possibility that Fermi’s paradox could get blown out of the water and beings from other solar systems could arrive and begin to use their advanced technology to solve our problems. Of course, that’s quite a bit to depend on.
But, should the worst happen, perhaps humans will adjust to the new conditions. Be it the post–World War III world or an apocalyptic overpopulation/environmental wasteland, maybe the idea that tough times make tough people will remind us that we as a species are survivors. Children will be raised differently, expectation levels will change, and we could easily see people adapt as much to fit into their less rosy world as we have seen humans adjust and evolve into the world created once the era of computers and cell phones began.
The possibility also exists that our ecological system will be the one to adjust, giving the people who rely on it no say in the matter. It’s certainly conceivable that nature has its own ways to rebalance itself. If there are far too many people for the ecosystem to support at modern consumption levels, maybe something like a modern plague “fixes” things by halving global population levels in a decade. Would that be a good thing?
Or maybe the next Dark(er) Age is one we trigger intentionally. It’s certainly possible that someday environmental problems could necessitate society forcibly cutting things like energy use (as one example) or any of the other elements of modern society that require the high voltage of the twenty-first-century lifestyle. What if there were far less power and energy available in the world a hundred years from now? Fewer electronics or devices or conveniences like refrigeration, sure, but what if it’s to combat a potentially existential threat? If our children do not have our level of capabilities because the power doesn’t exist, does that mean they live in a worse time? Or is it a better time because they are possibly making headway against extremely significant, potentially extinction-related problems we are currently far from solving? If their situation allows them to progress through the Great Filter successfully, but ours doesn’t, who is really ahead?
Yet even this characterization is simplistic. If the true threat to humanity turns out to be something more like a virus or an asteroid, it might be the very societies that most endanger us environmentally or militarily that have the advantage in dealing with the danger. It would be incredibly ironic if a civilization-killing asteroid that has been on target to hit Earth for perhaps millions of years was only thrown off course at the last minute by the timely use of a nuclear weapon. A bomb developed to kill millions, shot into space on a missile similar to the ones that would have devastated our cities in any Third World War, saves everyone and (historically speaking) was developed just in time to play that role.
That scenario sounds about as plausible to my ears as the likelihood of my alternative book title coming true. It was going be called And They All Lived Happily Ever After. How do I define “happily”? Humanity living in an age when, for once in our existence, it is not the case that the end is always near.
Acknowledgments
It would probably take up less page space to list those to whom I do not owe a debt of thanks for this book rather than the reverse. I hate to single people out, though, so I am ditching that idea. Also, since I’ve decided that I have too many friends, I will keep this brief. Instead, I will take the conventional route because in my case it
happens to be true. Without my family there is no book or anything else. My endlessly patient wife, Brittany; my daughters, Avery and Liv; my über-talented mom, my mother-in-law, my sister, my brothers, my sisters-in-law, and my brothers-in-law. It is no cliché to say they make my life worth living.
Being a history geek, how can I leave out those who are not here now but who are also in large part responsible for me.* I had both a father and a stepfather that any person would have been lucky to get in an either-or deal. They helped me so much and I miss them terribly. I never knew my dad’s dad, but my maternal grandfather was Batman.* Proof indeed that the apple can fall far from the tree. I miss him greatly, too. At his funeral the man who knew him giving the eulogy said of his wife, my grandmother, that had it not been for my grandfather she would have been president of the United States. So she was really something herself (and more proof about the apple tree thing). I miss her fiercely as well.
I’ve never officially confirmed the existence of my longtime podcasting partner Ben, nor am I doing so now, but even if he’s the equivalent of Elwood Dowd’s white rabbit, Harvey, there’s no book without all that he’s (seemingly) done. Thanks, buddy.
My co-writer, Elizabeth Stein, turned working with an impossible person and impossible material into something possible. I have always enjoyed watching gifted people plying their trade and she was so good at what she does. I appreciate the many things she did to make this book a reality. I owe my sanity to her on at least a few occasions.
My literary agent Andrew Stuart was the actual genesis of this work. Somebody has to eventually say, “Ever thought of writing a book?” for a project to get started, and that’s how this one began. Unfortunately for Andrew the work for him didn’t stop there, but he’s infinitely patient and like Liz Stein excellent at his craft.