The idea that a country could be bombed into submission long predated the Second World War. H. G. Wells’s aliens were on the point of unleashing flying machines on London when they succumbed to earth’s fatal microbes. Shortly before the First World War, Kipling had imagined (in his short story ‘As Easy as ABC’) a world brought to heel by a single International Air Force. Air raids on civilian targets by the Germans between 1914 and 1918 had, admittedly, been of negligible military value. As for their impact on civilian morale, they almost certainly aroused more vengefulness than panic. The main role of air forces proved to be reconnaissance rather than bombing. Nevertheless, the idea of flattening cities from the air had captured the public imagination and it remained fashionable throughout the inter-war years. As Secretary of State for War and Air, Churchill used air power without compunction to help quell the Iraqi revolt of 1920. The world was more shocked when the Germans used bombers against Guernica; Mesopotamian villages were seen as fair game, European cities not so. Japanese air strikes against China after 1937 only seemed to confirm the adage that ‘the bomber would always get through’, and with devastating results.
As we have seen, British strategy in the 1930swas to invest not in defensive but in offensive air power, in the hope of deterring a German attack from the air rather than repulsing it. This was an irrational response to the threat posed by the Luftwaffe. But it did mean that by 1940 Britain had the beginnings of a strategic bombing capability. This early investment was important given the time it took – more than two years – to train pilots and navigators. On the other hand, the 488 bombers that Britain had ready in September 1939 were far from equal to the task of conducting air raids on Germany. Nevertheless, within less than a week of becoming Prime Minister, Churchill – true to form – ordered the RAF to do just that. Indeed, in this regard, Churchill may be said to have pre-empted Hitler, whose Blitz against London was seen in Germany as an act of retaliation following the British raids on Berlin. Hitler later declared: ‘It was the British who started air attacks’ – though it had scarcely been ‘moral scruples’ that had dictated German strategy. Yet Churchill could cite the German bombing of Rotterdam, to say nothing of the use of dive bombers against Polish civilians, as a perfectly good precedent.
But what exactly should the targets of British air raids be? Since German fighting forces were quite widely dispersed for much of the war, the obvious targets were economic – the factories that were supplying Hitler’s forces with weapons and the infrastructure that allowed these to be transported to the various fronts. However, most of these economic targets were, by their very nature, located in densely populated areas like the Ruhr. Moreover, British bombers were very far from accurate. In October 1940 the British ruled that, in conditions of poor visibility, their airmen could drop their bombs in the vicinity of targets, in so-called ‘free fire zones’. This made it more likely that German civilians would be hit – a necessity which Churchill sought to make into a virtue. Ashe put it on October 30, ‘The civilian population around the target areas must be made to feel the weight of war.’ Throughout 1941 Churchill repeatedly emphasized the need for Bomber Command to target the morale of ordinary Germans. The strategy of ‘area bombing’ – the aim of which was in fact to incinerate urban centres – was in place even before Air Marshal Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris took over Bomber Command. Nine days before Harris’s appointment, on St Valentine’s Day, 1942, Air Vice-Marshal N. H. Bottomley, Deputy of the Air Staff, wrote to Bomber Command to convey the decision ‘that the primary object of your operations should now be focused on the morale of the enemy civil population and in particular, of the industrial workers’, and that these operations should take the form of ‘concentrated incendiary attacks’. The letter was accompanied by a list of ‘selected area targets’, at the top of which was Essen. By attacking it first, ‘the maximum benefit should be derived from the element of surprise’. Like the other prime targets, Duisberg, Düsseldorf and Cologne, Essen was without question an industrial city. Yet the criteria listed for calculating the ‘estimated weight of attack for decisive damage’ were the size and population of the built-up area. Attack son factories and submarine building yards were to be considered ‘diversionary’, and were to be undertaken preferably ‘without missing good opportunities of bombing your primary targets’.
What this meant was that a rising proportion of first British and then American resources were diverted into the destruction of German and Japanese cities – in other words, the slaughter of civilians. This was precisely the policy the US State Department had denounced as ‘unwarranted and contrary to principles of law and humanity’ when the Japanese had first bombed Chinese cities. It was precisely the policy that Neville Chamberlain had once dismissed as ‘mere terrorism’, a policy to which ‘His Majesty’s government [would] never resort’.
What made the concept of strategic bombing so appealing? Air war was not necessarily cheaper, since the planes themselves were expensive to produce and the crews expensive to train. For the crews themselves, needless to say, it was a harrowing business. Flying at altitudes of up to 28,000 feet in temperatures so cold that naked flesh could stick inseparably to gun metal and icicles could form on oxygen masks, and with virtually no arm our around them (to minimize additional weight), Lancaster bomber crews were nothing if not brave men. Mortality rates were among the highest in the war; the life expectancy of a Lancaster was estimated at just twelve missions, while the average odds of survival for bomber crews were worse than 1 in 2. Those who made it through multiple missions were often psychologically if not physically scarred for life. Nor did they have the consolation of the laurels that were heaped upon their comrades who flew fighters. Yet, to civilian politicians, strategic bombing was preferable to relying on ground troops because of the comparatively small numbers of men involved. Air war was in large part about the substitution of capital for labour – of machinery for men. A single crew of trained fliers could hope to kill a very large number of Germans or Japanese even if they flew only twenty successful missions before being killed or captured themselves.
Revealingly, Churchill spoke of ‘pay[ing] our way by bombing Germany’ when he visited Moscow in 1942; the currency he had in mind was German lives, not British. The more Stalin pressed the Western powers to open a Second Front in Western Europe, the more Churchill extolled the virtues of strategic bombing, promising attacks that would ‘shatter the morale of the German people’. He was equally sanguine about the benefits of bombing Italy, arguing that ‘the demoralization and panic produced by intensive heavy air bombardment’ would outweigh ‘any increase in anti-British feeling’. In such view she was greatly encouraged by his scientific adviser and head of the wartime Statistical Department, the physicist Frederick Linde-mann. As so often in war, inter-service rivalry played its part, too. In appointing Sir Charles Portal, Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command, to the post of Chief of the Air Staff in October 1940, Churchill ensured that a dogmatic proponent of area bombing would have a seat at Britain’s strategy-making high table. Alan Brooke was sceptical about Portal’s insistence that ‘success lies in accumulating the largest air force possible in England and that then, and then only, success lies assured through the bombing of Europe.’ But he could not prevent the diversion of substantial resources to Portal’s squadrons.
Similar calculations persuaded Roosevelt to invest in strategic bombing: first, wild exaggeration of what German bombers could do to America, then a somewhat smaller exaggeration of what American bombers could do to Germany. To be sure, the American approach was in other respects different from the British. While the British favoured night area bombing, the Americans prided them selves on the greater accuracy of their planes. Equipped with the Norden bomb sight, the Flying Fortress was almost certainly a better machine than its British counterpart. But it was still far less precise than had been hoped, even with the benefit (though also the cost, in terms of greater vulnerability) of attacking during the day. By the time of the
Casablanca Conference of January 1943, the American shad come round to the Churchillian notion that their aim should be ‘the progressive destruction and undermining of the morale of the German people to a point where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened’. Roosevelt’s confidant, Harry Hopkins, was among those who firmly believed this.
The effects of the Allied bombing campaigns against Germany and Japan were, as is well known, horrendous. What the RAF and USAAF did dwarfed what the Luftwaffe had been able to inflict on Britain during the Blitz. Beginning on the night of July 24, 1943 vast swathes of the city of Hamburg were destroyed in a raid codenamed ‘Operation Gomorrah’. Sheltered from detection by the new device known as ‘Window’ (a shower of aluminium strips that smothered German radar), 791 RAF bomber srained down high explosive and incendiary bombs, creating a devastating firestorm* that raged out far beyond the control of the German emergency services. Around three-quarters of the city was laid waste in the succeeding days, as the initial bombardment was followed up by both American and British raids. At the very least, 45,000 people were killed and nearly a million rendered homeless. The flames were visible more than a hundred miles away. The author Hans Nossack, who had left his Hamburg home for a few days in the country, returned to find flies and rats feasting on – and, in congruously, geraniums sprouting from – the charred human remains of his fellow citizens. Inhabitants of the smart suburbs along the Elbe to the west of the city saw their gardens turn grey with ash. All this was achieved at a remarkably low cost to Bomber Command, whose losses amounted to less than 3 per cent of the planes involved. Nor did the Allies relent as the war drew to a close. Around 1.1 million tons of the total 1.6 million tons of explosives dropped by Bomber Command and the 8th US Air Force – some 71 per cent – were dropped during the last year of the war. Once the Allies had developed a long-range fighter escort (in the form of the P-51 Mustang), they were in a position to bomb Germany in daylight with something approaching impunity.
On the night of February 13, 1945 a force of 796 British Lancaster bombers set off to bomb Dresden. They were followed over the next two days by waves of American Flying Fortresses. Among the thou-sands of people in the line of fire wasVictor Klemperer, one of Dresden’s few surviving Jews. For months he had been expecting to be rounded up by the SS. But what if the other side got him first? On September 15, 1944 he had written in his diary:
I am so accustomed to news of cities destroyed by bombing that it makes no impression on me at all… Eva [his wife]’s home town [Königsberg] is 75 per cent destroyed, according to official reports 5,000 are dead and 20,000 injured… That shook me, and in the morning – dark glowing, deep purple dawn – as I washed myself and looked out at the Carola Bridge and the row of houses on the other side, I could not stop imagining that this row of houses was suddenly collapsing before my eyes… Until now Dresden itself really has been spared.
Klemperer’s predicament symbolized the warped morality of the last months of the war. For, on the morning of February 13, 1945 he was ordered to deliver deportation notices to a substantial number of the remaining Jews in Dresden. There was no longer any doubt what deportation meant. And it seemed inevitable that he would be next:
Tuesday afternoon, perfect spring weather… We sat down for coffee at about a half past nine on Tuesday evening, very weary and depressed because during the day, after all, I had been running around as the bringer of bad tidings, and in the evening Waldemann had assured me with very great certainty that those to be deported on Thursday were being sent to their deaths and that we who were being left behind would be done away with in a week’s time.
Yet February 13 was to prove deadly in a very different way – not just for Jews, but for all the city’s inhabitants. For it was now Dres-den’s turn to be on the receiving end of Allied payback:
A full scale warning sounded… Very soon we heard the ever deeper and louder humming of approaching squadrons, the light went out, an explosion nearby… in some groups there was whimpering and weeping – approaching aircraft again, deadly danger once again, explosion once again… Suddenly the cellar window on the back wall opposite the entrance burst open and outside it was bright as day… Fires were blazing. The ground was covered with broken glass. A terrible strong wind was blowing.
The firestorm unleashed on Dresden engulfed 95,000 homes. At the very least, 35,000 people died, including those who sought safety in the city’s fountainsonly for them to boil dry and otherswho were asphyxiated in the bomb shelters underneath the main railway station. A schoolgirl named Karin Busch and her twin brother found themselves wandering the streets in the midst of the firestorm after an unexploded bomb had forced them to flee their family shelter:
Flames were licking all around us and somehow we found ourselves by the River Elbe. I could see phosphorus dancing on the water, so for people throwing themselves into the river to get away from the fire, there was no escape. There were bodies everywhere and the gasmasks that people were wearing were melting into their faces… We started looking for a cellar to hide in, but in every cellar we looked into, we saw people sitting dead because the fires had sucked the oxygen out and suffocated them.
Finally, they found their way back to the family shelter.
Inside, I saw a pile of ashes in the shape of a person. You know when you put wood into a furnace and it burns and becomes red hot and it keeps its shape with an inner glow but when you touch it, it disintegrates? That’s what this was – the shape of a person but nothing left of the body. I didn’t know who it was but then I saw a pair of earrings in the ashes. I knew the earrings. It was my mother.
So intense was the heat that many corpses were reduced to the size of dolls, small enough to be removed in buckets. And yet even in hell, miracles can happen. Clambering out of the bunker designated for Jews, Klemperer ripped the yellow star from his coat and, in the chaos that raged around them, escaped with his wife. They were able to conceal his identity from the authorities until they reached the safety of American-occupied territory. Ironically, had it not been for ‘Bomber’ Harris, we would almost certainly not now have Klemperer’s diary, the most penetrating and insightful account that was ever written of life and death under the swastika.
Was the strategy of area bombing in any sense justifiable? For many years it was fashionable to deny that Bomber Command made any significant contribution to victory. Much continues to be made by critics of the inaccuracy as well as the cruelty of strategic bombing. Even some RAF personnel on occasion expressed concern that they were being asked, in effect, to ‘do in… children’s homes and hospitals’. It has been argued that they would have been better employed bombing the approaches to Auschwitz. It has even been suggested that an offer to stop the bombing could have been used as a bargaining chip to save the Jews destined for the death camps. In the case of Dresden, doubts have been expressed about the official justification for the raid, namely that the Soviets had requested the attacks after a batch of Enigma decrypts revealed German plans to move troops from Dresden to Breslau, where the Red Army was encountering fierce resistance. In fact, the main railway links out of the city survived more or less unscathed; trains were running again within a few days. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the aim of the mission was quite simply to devastate one of the few major German cities that had not yet been hit. In denouncing the bombing war, one German writer has consciously applied the language normally associated with the crimes perpetrated by the Nazis: this was Vernichtung (extermination) perpetrated by flying Einsatzgruppen, who turned air-raid shelters into gas chambers.
To be sure, the effect of such attacks on German morale was far less than the pre-war strategists had predicted. Sir Hugh Trenchard’s pre-war assertion that the moral effect of bombing was twenty times greater than the material effect proved to be nonsense. If anything, the indiscriminate character of the air attacks aroused more defiance than defeatism. While it undoubtedly served to undermine the credibility of the Nazi regime in the
minds of some Germans, it simultaneously enhanced its credibility in the minds of others. One woman, Irma J., wrote an unsolicited letter to Goebbels, demanding ‘on behalf of all German women and mothers and the families of those living here in the Reich’ that ‘20 Jews[be] hanged for every German killed in the place where our defenceless and priceless German people have been murdered in bestial and cowardly fashion by the terror-flyers’. Georg R. wrote from Berlin in a similar vein. ‘Having been burned out once and bombed out twice,’ he indignantly demanded:
No extermination of the German People
and of Germany
but rather
the complete extermination of the Jews.
There can be no question that a campaign aimed at crippling military and industrial facilities would have been preferable. As early as 1942, in his book Victory through Air Power, Alexander Seversky enunciated the principle that ‘Destruction of enemy morale from the air can be accomplished only by precision bombing.’ Economic assets, not populous conurbations, were ‘the heart and vitals of the enemy’. The Allies achieved far more with their focused attack on the German V2 base at Peenemünde on August 17, 1943 than they had achieved the previous month by laying waste to Hamburg. Their attacks on oil-refining facilities were also very successful (see below).
On the other hand, precision attacks could go wrong precisely because the Germans could work out where to expect them – as the Americans discovered to their cost when they attacked Schweinfurt, a centre of ball-bearing production in northern Bavaria, on August 17 and October 14, 1943. In the first raid, thirty-six B-17s were shot down out of an initial strike force of 230; twenty-four were lost the same day in a similar attack on Regensburg. In the October attack – the 8th Air Force’s ‘Black Thursday’ – sixty out of 291 B-17swere shot down and 138 badly damaged. Comparable costs might have been incurred for no military benefit by bombing Auschwitz, significantly further east. The 186 aircraft which flew from Italy (at Churchill’s insistence) to drop supplies to the Poles during the 1944 Warsaw Rising suffered losses at a rate of 16.8 per cent, three times the casualty rate over Germany.
The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred Page 68