The real issue is to understand how this process of escalating violence came to be justified at the time; in other words, how operations that were not easily defined as legal could nevertheless be regarded as ethically acceptable by those ordering the bombardment. This is a much more complex question and its answer rests on a number of moral assumptions that were relative to the wartime situation. The simplest answer is that both sides responded to what they saw as the violations carried out by the other. In Britain the bombing of Germany could always be given a wartime moral justification with the argument that the German Air Force began the campaign against civilian targets, if not at Guernica or Warsaw, then certainly with the bombing of British cities in the autumn of 1940. The idea that German forces had ‘sowed the wind’ and would as a result ‘reap the whirlwind’ of heavy retaliatory bombing ran through much of the public defence of bombing during the war, and since. The morality of a tooth for a tooth had a raw biblical sense to it which could be widely endorsed even by those who only a few years before had campaigned for the international abolition of bomber aircraft. Indeed, this preference was reflected in the biblical terms chosen for many of the major RAF campaigns – Operation Gomorrah, Operation Millennium, Operation Chastise. German bombing of British cities, on the other hand, was justified as retaliation or revenge for the bombing carried out by British aircraft since May 1940. Much of the justificatory language associated with German bombing in 1940, in 1942 and 1943, and with the V-weapon campaign in 1944, was founded on vengeance. Bombing encouraged a vicious circle in which being bombed could be used as the moral instrument to legitimize bombing the enemy. The United States public had to borrow this morality second-hand, since German aircraft never threatened American cities. One of the fruits of the British propaganda fed to America during the Blitz was the absence of any anguished debate there on the ethics or otherwise of bombing Axis cities.
Behind the justification for bombing as well-merited punishment lay deeper fears about national extinction and political subjection, which were taken to be the terms in which total war had to be waged. The insistent idea that the Second World War was fought for the highest of stakes was not only needed in order to justify national mobilization on a unique scale, but became accepted by a great many Europeans as a historical reality. The official voice on both sides made great play with the idea of ‘total war’ or ‘people’s war’, but the resonance those terms had among European populations reflected the popular perception of just how dangerous the enemy was and how urgent the need to take any measure, however legally or morally dubious, to defend the spirit of democracy, or the prospect of liberty, or the future of the German race and culture. The sense of an apocalyptic struggle, whether against fascism or communism or the alleged Jewish world conspiracy, was certainly not fully understood or accepted by the populations made to fight against them, but in every combatant power the idea that a war on such a scale must be about issues of life or death blunted many of the doubts about whether the way the war was conducted abided by liberal notions of jus in bello, justice in war. The escalating scale and destructiveness of bombing reflected the absolute nature of the way the contest was presented and the moral relativism that this prompted. The difficult thing to do would have been to halt the bombing on the ground that it damaged civilian lives too heavily. When the bombing offensive against Britain ended in summer 1941, there followed years in which those monitoring public opinion in Germany highlighted the frustrations felt by the German public that bombing on a large scale could not be renewed. When there was evidence that British or American bombing was too small-scale to be effective, the public demand for more and heavier bombardment was used to pressure the air forces to respond. From the perspective of the time the moral obligation to defeat the enemy at all costs overrode any moral or legal constraints intended to ensure that in doing so the laws of war were not compromised too far. The support of many in the Church of England for a bombing campaign, for example, rested on an ethical judgement that the higher moral obligation for Christians was to ensure national survival rather than worry about the means through which it was to be achieved. Moral expediency in war is no novelty, nor should it seem surprising that in the terms in which this particular war was fought, the higher morality was always the appeal to national survival.
Expectations about total war as an expression of national struggle in an acute form helped to underpin the decision to carry out bombing offensives, which of all the forms of military activity in the Second World War directly affected the non-combatant population violently and directly. The moral outrage that might be felt today by such deliberate violations was more limited in an age in which total war was, for better or worse, the language of the day. ‘Why should a factory in which lethal weapons are made,’ wrote the British legal expert John Spaight, ‘be immune from attack if it can be attacked?’53 The Dean of St Paul’s in London justified his refusal to sign a petition against bombing in autumn 1941 on the grounds that it promoted a more democratic wartime reality: ‘I do not think that the sufferings of civilians under night bombing are necessarily the worst thing in this war … and I don’t think that we civilians have any right to cry out or to try to evade our share in the general suffering’.54 The view that the front line was no longer the front line of conventional warfare was expressed everywhere, from British wartime propaganda on ‘taking it’ to Soviet mass mobilization of townspeople for digging anti-tank trenches to German recruitment of schoolchildren to man anti-aircraft emplacements. The view that total war meant war between societies had profound implications for how that war was waged. ‘A people is only defeated,’ announced the commander-in-chief of Bomber Command to an audience of businessmen in 1941, ‘when their Will-to-Win has been broken. How can this be done? Only by carrying the offensive into Germany. How else can the offensive be carried into Germany except by the Bombers?’55 On just such a syllogism was it possible to justify bombing as an instrument of the national effort against enemy civilian targets.
The balance sheet of bombing shows that whatever concerns may inform current judgements about its morality or effectiveness, there were a great many military and moral arguments used at the time to explain why so much commitment was given to it. These arguments need to be understood if sense is to be made of why the combatant powers fighting in Europe indulged in air campaigns over five years in which more than half a million civilians were killed and wide areas of Europe’s urban heritage destroyed by fire and explosive, and sense made of how these campaigns were ethically justified at the time. The historical narrative of the bombing war nevertheless confirms that there existed throughout the conflict a wide gap between what was claimed for bombing and what it actually achieved in material and military terms, just as there existed a wide gap between the legal and ethical claims made on its behalf and the deliberate pursuit of campaigns in which civilian deaths were anticipated and endorsed. The resources devoted to strategic bombing might more usefully have been used in other ways: providing large tactical air forces, strengthening air-sea collaboration, producing more and better tanks, or, above all, concentrating research and production on high-quality air technology (long-range fighters, for example, or guided weapons), which might have made bombing a more effective campaign for all three states that tried it. Strategic bombing proved in the end to be inadequate in its own terms for carrying out its principal assignments and was morally compromised by deliberate escalation against civilian populations. The unintended military impact was its most important consequence. Strategic bombing in its wartime form disappeared as a strategic option in Europe after 1945. Profound changes in available weapons, the transformation of geopolitical reality and post-war ethical sensibilities have all combined to make the bombing war between 1939 and 1945 a unique phenomenon in modern European history, not possible earlier and not reproducible since.
Epilogue
Lessons Learned and Not Learned: Bombing into the Post-War World
After 1945 the terms in
which a bombing war came to be understood were dominated by the reality of nuclear weapons, which were only used at the end of the conflict in the Pacific War. Until the missile age, the long-range intercontinental bomber was designed to deliver a first or second-strike nuclear attack of annihilating power against the enemy. This did not rule out the use of conventional bombing (as the wars in Korea and Vietnam made evident), but it forced the Allied air forces to think about the lessons of the Second World War, both in terms of what the campaigns had achieved and in terms of projected future war.
On one thing the two major air forces, the RAF and the USAAF, were agreed: a third world war if it came would be another total war of even greater proportions than the last. When the post-war RAF chief of staff – now Marshal of the Royal Air Force, Lord Tedder – was invited to give the Lees-Knowles lectures on military affairs in Cambridge in the spring of 1947, he assured his audience that in the future ‘war will inevitably be total war and world-wide’.1 In October 1946 Maj. General Lauris Norstad, head of the Plans and Operations Division in the War Department, and a wartime air commander, briefed President Truman on the shape of the post-war American military. He concluded his presentation by repeating what he had already claimed several times: ‘We must plan for the next war to be in fact a total war.’2 A lecture to the National Industrial Conference Board in spring 1947 by General Brehon Somervell, the officer responsible during the war for creating the Pentagon, began from the premise that the next war would be worse than the last: ‘Let no man question that World War III will be a total war of a destructiveness and intensity never yet seen.’3 It was also understood that this war of the future should not be fought as if it were the Second World War. Tedder told his listeners that the fighting services ‘must discard old shibboleths and outworn traditions’; for future security ‘we must look forward from the past and its lessons, not back to the past’. Norstad told the National War College in Washington, DC, shortly after his briefing of the president, that it was a mortal danger ‘to cling for security in a next war to those things which made for security in a last war’.4
There were nevertheless important lessons to be drawn. In August 1947 Tedder organized a major RAF exercise codenamed ‘Thunderbolt’ to study the lessons of the Combined Bomber Offensive for the future of war. Senior airmen, government scientists and politicians were invited, though Portal and Harris, architects of the offensive, chose not to attend. There were five senior American Air Force officers, including General Kepner, victor of the ‘Battle of Germany’. The conference opened at the School of Air Support at Old Sarum, near Salisbury, on 11 August and lasted five days.5 Although some defence was made of the bomber offensive, the general tone of the assembly was critical. The failure to destroy the enemy economy or seriously to dent enemy morale was admitted; so too the slowness of the build-up of Bomber Command during the war and the failure to exploit science fully enough.6 The exercise was an opportunity to think about the advent of entirely new weapons, including atomic bombs, and to decide how the air force should be organized to exploit them. The result was a vision of future air war not very different from the strategic fantasies of General Douhet, first elaborated in the wake of the Great War in his book Command of the Air, and finally translated into English in 1942.
Like Douhet, the key priorities identified were the need to be prepared fully for the moment when a war breaks out, to strike ruthlessly and swiftly using any weapon available, and to target the enemy civilian population as the key to destroying the will to resist in days rather than years. Tedder had identified in his Cambridge lectures the key importance of being ready to strike at once when hostilities began, not an ‘embryo Goliath’ like Bomber Command after 1939, which took years to develop after the outbreak of war, but ‘a fully grown David, ready to act swiftly and decisively’.7 This meant choosing weapons that could deliver a sudden annihilating blow. During Exercise Thunderbolt the possibility was proposed of using atomic weapons, which Britain did not yet possess; Henry Tizard, the government scientist, thought that 500 atomic bombs might bring about a swift end to any war. Norman Bottomley, Harris’s successor as commander-in-chief of Bomber Command, presented a paper on biological warfare as an even more effective instrument for total war since it killed only people rather than destroying cities, as incendiary or atomic bombings had done. Carried in cluster bombs or rocket warheads, biological agents used as a strategic weapon against the civilian population would be, ton for ton, more deadly than poison gas and likely to be available sooner than nuclear weapons.8 In either case, nuclear war or biological war, air power would deliver the rapid and decisive blow it had failed to deliver effectively enough before 1945.
Douhet was even more in evidence in the conclusions drawn by the American military leadership. In his speech to the National Industrial Conference Board, Somervell described the Third World War in terms every bit as lurid as the scaremongering visions of the 1930s:
What kind of war would the third world conflict be? Would it be a Buck Rogers affair with atomic bombs bursting everywhere, bacteria of all kinds falling on us from the sky like angry winter rain, rockets moving with uncanny precision thousands of miles to the most remote inland target hidden in a cave in the Rockies, with one-half or two-thirds of our population or that of the enemy wiped out or crawling about maimed by radioactive emanations or crippled by loathsome or incurable disease … Would it be over as quickly as that, with one or both combatants totally destroyed and their civilization wiped out? God only knows.9
Somervell reflected the prevailing post-war view that a future world war would be over quickly, despite all the lessons of the recent conflict, and that it would be even more destructive than the damage inflicted from the air in the wartime offensives. In a speech on ‘Strategy’ to the National War College in January 1947, General Albert Wedemeyer, architect of the American Victory Program in 1941, told his audience that the next war would swiftly assume ‘the characteristics of a war of extermination’ involving ultra-destructive atomic and bacteriological weapons. Since the United States had failed to rearm in the 1930s in the face of Axis aggression, Wedemeyer warned against the typical American attitudes of ‘indifference and apathy’ when confronted by the emergence of yet another totalitarian menace to Europe.10
The Soviet Union was regarded as the successor to Hitler’s Third Reich, but a state potentially capable of stockpiling weapons of mass destruction and inflicting them in a sudden preemptive strike against the American mainland, which Germany had not been able to do. Norstad told Truman that the Soviet Union was the only possible enemy and that war against Communism ‘is the basis of our planning’.11 Like the RAF, American thinking focused on the need to build up overwhelming striking power in peacetime to counter such a threat and to be prepared to use all and any weapons, including bacteriological, chemical and nuclear payloads, to be certain of victory against an apparently ruthless dictatorship. Arnold’s final report for the president in 1945 stressed the need in the future for an atomic capability that would allow ‘immediate offensive action with overwhelming force’, which the American Air Force had demonstrably lacked in 1941.12 For American planners this meant retaining a strategic air force capable of mounting an immediate air offensive and in 1948 the Strategic Air Command was activated for this purpose under the former Eighth Air Force wing commander, General Curtis LeMay. He welcomed the assignment and had no regrets about wartime bombing. ‘Enemy cities were pulverized or fried to a crisp,’ LeMay wrote in 1965. ‘It was something they asked for and something they deserved.’13 The RAF bomber force was less fortunate after 1945. Bomber Command was almost entirely demobilized, its Air Striking Force reduced to 10 squadrons by 1946.14 By the 1950s Britain could no longer afford to be a major player in the air war of the future. No effective heavy bomber was developed for the post-war force and in 1950 the RAF had to borrow 70 B-29s from the United States.
The possession of nuclear weapons now made the city-busting strategy of the Second World War a
possibility. Though the object of a nuclear arsenal was to deter an aggressor, both Britain and the United States prepared plans for the point where deterrence failed. By the early 1960s American air forces, using missiles or aircraft, possessed the means to obliterate most Soviet cities and to kill more than 80 million of their inhabitants in a first or second strike.15 British planners, working with a much more limited nuclear capability, identified 55 Soviet cities for destruction. A committee set up in 1960 to investigate the strategy was instructed to consider only the effects on the population, ‘the aim being to select target cities so as to pose the maximum threat to the greatest possible number of Russian people’. The Air Ministry was particularly interested in learning lessons from the bombing of Germany to decide what level of destruction was needed for ‘knocking out’ a city. It was calculated that Hamburg had received the equivalent of a 5-kiloton bomb during the war, which encouraged confidence that the large megaton bombs now available really would be able to paralyse a city at a stroke.16 The principal lesson learned from the bombing campaigns of the Second World War was the need for even greater and more indiscriminate destruction of the enemy if ever the Third World War materialized.
The experience of the bombing war helped to shape the Cold War confrontation of mutual destruction or mutual deterrence. It was under this shadow that European nations began the process of reconstructing the bombed cities and towns and counting the cost of the cultural damage they had sustained. The programmes were ambitious and optimistic despite the threat of nuclear obliteration hanging over them.17 Recovery was in this sense like recovery from a natural disaster – a volcanic eruption or a major earthquake – in the knowledge that another geological shift might undo the urban rebuilding at a stroke. The reconstruction began at first against a background of economic crisis and legal wrangling over ownership of the ruins, and in many cases the bolder plans were shelved in favour of cheaper or more feasible solutions.18 The most ambitious building took place in Germany where more than half the urban area in the major cities had been destroyed. Some 39 cities had at least 1 million cubic metres of rubble to clear, but in Berlin the figure was 55 million, in Hamburg 35 million and in Cologne 24 million.19 Coping with life among the ruins were millions of Germans who lived for years in cellars and shacks, short of food, supplies and schooling. A delegation of British peace workers visiting Lübeck in 1947 were shown weekly food rations consisting of just two pounds of bread, a half litre of skimmed milk, half a herring, one ounce of butter and four ounces of sugar. They found 4,000 people in the port still being fed a watery soup daily from a communal kitchen. Accommodation was rationed in Hamburg to 5.6 square metres per person; the water supply was poor, electricity irregular. The women they met expressed strong sentiments ‘against all forms of militarism or war’.20
The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945 Page 86