Allied Area Bombing Revisited
By Michael Lopez-Calderon
FrontPageMagazine.com | May 26, 2006

“The bomber will always get through …The only defence is offence. You have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourself.” – Stanley Baldwin, November 10, 1932[1]

“War is a nasty, dirty, rotten business. It’s all right for the Navy to blockade a city, to starve the inhabitants to death. But there is something wrong, not nice, about bombing that city.” – Marshal of the Royal Air Force, Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris[2]

On February 13, 2005, a large crowd of Germans gathered in Dresden to mark the 60th anniversary of the Allied bombing of that city. The massive attack carried out by the Royal Air Force Bomber Command (RAF-BC) and the United States Army Air Force (USAAF) over two dreadful nights on February 13-14, 1945,[3] killed an estimated 45,000 German civilians. It along with Hamburg, Monte Cassino, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, remains one of the most controversial Allied military actions of the Second World War. Contemporary Germans and Japanese, fueled in part by growing anti-Americanism, are raising questions about the suffering the Allies inflicted on their people during the Second World War.[4] Many sincerely believe their countrymen were victims of Allied atrocities.[5] While most scholarly critics of Allied “area bombing”[6] are anti-Nazi, several revisionist critics reflexively are anti-American[7] and anti-British. Other critics like University of London Professor of Philosophy, A. C. Grayling, one of Britain’s foremost public intellectuals, retrospectively apply an impossible standard of moral perfection to judge Allied area bombing a war crime. In his new book, Among the Dead Cities, Professor Grayling uses an unyielding just war theory to condemn Allied area bombing during World War II. To his credit, he eschews the evil twins of contemporary liberalism: moral equivalency and moral relativism. However, Grayling’s absolutist moral judgment will be used by leftists, who include in their extensive anti-Western and anti-capitalist arsenal, the charge that Allied area bombing during WW II was a war crime. Unfortunately, the left will find Among the Dead Cities a useful device for undermining Anglo-American legitimacy in the contemporary world.


Second Thoughts Rehashed



Professor Grayling’s work presupposes the viability of moral philosophy operating in a world long since devoid of such thought: “Did the Allies commit a moral crime in their area bombing of German and Japanese cities? This is the question I seek to answer definitively in this book.”[8] Grayling reminds his readers that the mere framing of the question is fraught with unintended consequences, largely the fault of neo-Nazis that wish to exploit the current debate for their own political gain, he argues. However, he neglects to note that leftist intellectuals also have criticized the Allied area bombing campaign, equating it with Nazi and Fascist conduct as part of their relentless attack on capitalist societies. Nevertheless, Grayling insists that criticizing Allied area bombing is legitimate:



“But if the Allied bombing campaign did in fact involve the commission of wrongs, then even if these wrongs do not compare in scale with the wrongs committed by the Axis powers, they do not thereby cease to be wrongs.”[9]



Though Grayling is not a revisionist apologist for Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, he keeps company with the guilt-ridden collective of post-War Anglo-American scholars[10] ensconced in their ivory towers, living a life of comfort and security that was made possible by the blood sacrifice of an earlier generation. He repeatedly warns against those who would read into his study an apology for the Axis, though he never issues the same warning against those that might see in his work an acceptance of the leftist revisionist critique of Allied area bombing:



“Two things must be made emphatically clear at the outset. First, it is unquestionably true that if Allied bombing in the Second World War was in whole or part morally wrong, it is nowhere near equivalent in the scale of moral atrocity to the Holocaust of European Jewry, or the death and destruction all over the world for which Nazi and Japanese aggression was collectively responsible: a total of some twenty-five million dead, according to responsible estimates.[11] Allied bombing in which German and Japanese civilian populations were deliberately targeted claimed the lives of about 800,000 civilian women, children, and men. The bombing of the aggressor Axis states was aimed at weakening their ability and will to make war; the murder of six million Jews was an act of racist genocide. There are very big differences here. … Allied bombing campaigns … do not compare in scale with wrongs committed by the Axis powers … nothing in this book should be taken as any form of revisionist apology for Nazism and its frightful atrocities, or Japanese militarism and its aggressions, even if the conclusion is that German and Japanese civilians suffered wrongs.”[12]



Grayling then takes us through the whirlwind of tactical and strategic changes that began prior to and accelerated during the Second World War: rapid advances in aerial military technology; lessons drawn from the First World War; evolving doctrines of aerial warfare; faulty assumptions of aerial warfare’s impact on an enemy’s will to fight; the tit-for-tat nature of retaliatory strikes; the mindset of the brilliant though flawed aerial commanders; the futile attempts by nations to curtail evolving bomber technology and doctrine via international law; and finally, the indefatigable courage, determination, and sacrifice of the aircrews. Over 55,000 British[13] and 40,000 American bomber crew personnel lost their lives during World War II. While Grayling cautions that great care must be exercised so as not to impugn these men’s sacrifice, his conclusion that the Anglo-American allies indeed committed a major war crime through area bombing is the ultimate imputation. A review of the processes that led to area bombing and its consequences is crucial in comprehending the hubris of Among the Dead Cities.



A Moral Philosopher’s Panache



It remains fashionable for some scholars and laypersons to judge previous generations harshly, applying contemporary standards with utter disregard to the prevailing standards of the past. Professor Grayling attempts to avoid such a pitfall, and ends up doing something worse: citing both St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas[14] as his authorities, he adopts a single moral standard of just war theory that is applied without exception. A philosopher who adheres to a single standard may be called a monist. Through the application of a one-size-fits-all and presumably transcendent morality, Grayling judges Allied area bombing a moral crime. For Grayling, area bombing by itself was not immoral. However, he argues that area bombing became immoral because it was disproportionate in the casualties inflicted on noncombatants; it was unnecessary and came at the expense of what should have been more strategic bombing that would have hastened Germany’s defeat.[15] He is dismissive of the defenders of area bombing and their arguments. We are instructed to be aware of the complexities prior generations faced, and warned to be prudent in our judgment by a man who exercises neither approach. A philosopher’s conceit prevails throughout the book, that is, the privileging of the ideal over the practical, the ephemeral over the substantive. A major weakness is imbedded in Grayling’s work: his acknowledgment of the constant evolution of lethal technology undermines his claims of an evolving morality. A fundamental truth quietly slips in: changes in weaponry determine changes in tactics, not the other way around. If today we use near-perfect precision bombing, it is not due to a higher moral consciousness or an evolutionary advance in international law, both of which he admirably highly recommends we pursue. On the contrary, precision bombing is used today because the technology exists whereas no such technical capability was possible in 1939-1945. Nevertheless, Grayling insists in moving forward with his just war theory and critique; we must first consider three essential questions of Allied area bombing:



“No understanding of the questions about the morality of Allied area bombing in the Second World War can be attempted without having before us the following three matters: what actually happened in the bombing war; what was known, thought, intended and hoped by those who carried it out; and what effect it had.”[16]



Had sufficient empathy been given to “what was known, thought, intended and hoped by those [Allied commanders] who [ordered]” the bombing campaigns, Professor Grayling perhaps would have adopted a less strident tone in his conclusion.



Evolution of Aerial Warfare: Shutting Pandora’s Box



In chapter 4, “The Mind of the Bomber,” Grayling examines earlier attempts to reconcile morality with an increasingly secularized and dynamic material reality. By the late 1860s, the major European powers attempted to reconcile Enlightenment political and moral values as well as mid-Nineteenth century optimism with the era’s evolving military technology. One is struck both by the idealism and naivety. For example, an International Military Commission held in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1868, “agreed to forbid the use of specified projectiles, among them exploding or incendiary bullets.” The myth about human progress being linear is dispelled when we read the elegant words of the St. Petersburg Declaration of 1868—the ideals expressed are as progressive as anything produced by our generation:



“The Contracting or Acceding Parties reserve to themselves to come hereafter to an understanding whenever a precise proposition shall be drawn up in view of future improvements which science may effect in the armament of troops, in order to maintain the principles which they have established, and to conciliate the necessities of war with the laws of humanity.”[17]



That passage was cited in the 1899 International Peace Conference held at The Hague. Several conferences were held at The Hague in the 1890s, all intended to build a consensus for international law. The advice of “outstanding Russian international-law theorist Fedor Fedorovich Martens” was augmented by one of the conference’s most influential persons, Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, and the endorsement of Czar Nicholas II.[18] Buttressed by two royal sponsors, the Declaration, known as The Hague IV, encapsulated the highest ideals of European civilization:



“Until a more complete code of the laws of war is issued, the High Contracting Parties think it right to declare that in cases not included in the Regulations adopted by them, populations and belligerents remain under the protection and empire of the principles of international law, as they result from the usages established between civilised nations, from the laws of humanity and the requirements of the public conscience.”[19]



The nobility of the objectives pursued reveal a European elite committed to humane concepts though woefully naïve of what horrors were already incubating in their midst. Just twelve years later, Italian forces in Libya engaged in combat with the Ottoman Turks, carried out history’s first aerial bombing on November 1, 1911.[20] On the eve of the First World War, few major European powers possessed bomber aircraft; by 1914, the first year of the conflict, all major powers had produced bomber aircraft. The Germans are credited with being “the most adventurous bombers in the Great War, beginning with Zeppelins and later the feared Gotha C-V bomber.”[21] From 1914-1918, German bombers were responsible for killing 1,400 British civilians and injuring another 3,400.[22] Clearly, the ideals advanced at The Hague IV were buried in the rubble of bombed British cities.



Tragically, one of the lessons gleaned from the First World War, i.e., that aerial bombing could bring a faster end to war because the psychological terror inflicted on civilians would debilitate factory workers, undermine morale, and bring pressure on political leaders to sue for peace, was based on the perceived beneficial outcome of initial aerial bombing. When people experience some horror for the first time, the shock of the new can indeed have a paralytic impact. However, the “peculiar psychological potency”[23] of sustained aerial bombing wore off as civilians both adapted to the horror and became increasingly incensed at the enemy. In the interregnum (1919-1939) between the world wars, a number of Italian, British, and American military theorists advanced the efficacy of air power with the noble aim of reducing the length of wars and their bloody tolls by achieving victory as quickly as possible. They believed, on the basis of the available evidence, that aerial warfare would quickly incapacitate an enemy population’s will to wage war. Interestingly, the American advocates of aerial bombing early on broke ranks with their British and Italian contemporaries by stressing strategic bombing over area-bombing. It is important to examine the ideas of these often maligned, but influential theorists of modern aerial warfare.



Douhet, Trenchard, Mitchell, Arnold, and Eaker



One of the earliest theorists of aerial warfare was the Italian Giulio Douhet (1869-1930). His book, Command of the Air (1921, republished again in 1927), emphasized the need to achieve total air superiority. Though he emphasized striking “swiftly and aggressively in mass area bombings against enemy centers of population … to destroy civilian morale,”[24] Douhet’s primary method to achieve air superiority “was to strike [an enemy’s] bases and sources of production,”[25] by use of what he called a “battleplane.” The battleplane was to be a fusion between a fighter and bomber, and it was to be “an all-purpose offensive aircraft … [created] to conquer command of the air.”[26] A British army veteran of the Boer War, Hugh Trenchard (1873-1956), initially was dubious of strategic bombing when he took over the Royal Air Force in 1919. Though he later acknowledged the benefits of strategic bombing, Trenchard saw the long-range bomber as “the counter force … [that] constituted the only defense.”[27] He asserted that the nation which struck hardest first could win by breaking the morale of the enemy population before the he could counter-attack. To accomplish this goal, Trenchard believed “the ratio of moral to material effect created by bombing [should be] 20:1.”[28] This figure had no empirical basis; nonetheless, he asserted the nebulous ratio believing it sufficient to break an enemy nation’s will to fight. In 1925, Trenchard fell under the influence of the distinguished military historian Basil Liddell Hart, who among other things, argued that area bombing would hasten the end of conflict, thus reducing overall death and destruction. Professor Hart even contemplated the use of gas attack from the air as a deterrent; his reasoning that leaders would balk at using such a horrible weapon preceded by decades the same argument put forth by proponents of nuclear weapons.[29] Though Hugh Trenchard moderated his advocacy for area bombing by 1928, he couched his reservations in words that provided “official fig leaf … to justify the area-bombing campaigns”[30] later used by the RAF Bomber Command.



The American William “Billy” Mitchell (1879-1936) served after World War I as assistant chief of the Air Service from 1921-1925, during which he became a bellicose, at times insufferable proponent of air power and pin-point bombing.[31] Unlike Douhet, Mitchell stressed both the fighter plane and the bomber, though he saw limits to area bombing. The fighter plane and bomber could best perform in daylight operations; optimal daylight conditions were imperative for strategic, later called pin-point bombing, asserted Mitchell. Out of the American Air Service Tactical School based at Langley Field, Virginia (founded in 1920), there emerged the formula of American air doctrine.[32] The foundation of American bomber force doctrine consisted of three intertwined parts: daylight operations, high-altitude, and precision bombing. Though a debate raged in the States throughout the 1930s between proponents of pursuit aircraft and those of high-altitude bombers, the basic framework for the model design of aircraft, pilot training, strategic and tactical objectives were established a decade earlier. As historians Stephen L. McFarland and Wesley Phillips Newton noted, “Trenchard, Mitchell, and Douhet were not the only prophets of air power … [t]hey were the ones whom historians have identified persistently as the [men] whose ideas most influenced the development of long-range strategic air forces,”[33] in the United Kingdom and the United States. Their ideas fused aerial warfare doctrines with the advances in aircraft and their increasingly lethal capabilities.



On the eve of the American participation in World War Two, the cumulative work of the Air Corps Tactical School’s Harold L. George, Haywood Hansell, Kenneth Walker, and Laurence S. Kuter paved the way for the Air War Plans Division-Plan 1 (1941). The AWPD-1, issued just before Pearl Harbor, “envisioned bombers winning the war and long-range escorts as technically probable … AWPD-42 (1942) stressed “that unescorted long-range bombers could reach their targets ‘without excessive losses.’”[34] Both plans contained the core of American bombing strategy that has changed little if at all today: destruction of the enemy’s key industrial links and disruption of supplies by pin-point bombing of strategic targets that in turn would snap the vital threads of electricity, transport, oil, machine tool, aluminum and magnesium plants.[35] The confidence in strategic or pin-point bombing was not matched by the available technical capabilities of fixed-wing aircraft. Despite production of history’s first accurate bomb sights, the top-secret Norden Bomb Sight[36] used by American bombardiers, the old adage that weapons force changes in tactics, not the other way around, held. Norden Bomb Sights proved ineffective; the Americans’ desire to avoid civilian casualties was offset by the technical shortcomings of available bombing technology. Here was a case where humane bombing tactics were defeated by inaccurate weapons’ systems. Nevertheless, on the eve of the American entry into World War Two, USAAF General H. H. “Hap” Arnold and Brigadier-General Ira Eaker argued in their jointly authored Winged Warfare,[37] that the United States Army Air Force’s faith in strategic bombing was premised on a solid commitment to that tactic. Their faith in “precision daylight bombing” relied upon two ultimately flawed premises: that civilians would crack under the bombs and an enemy’s vital industrial base could be destroyed.[38] The realities of aerial warfare and bombing would shake their beliefs within less than two years and force a sea-change in strategy.



The two most dynamic political leaders of the free world, British Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill[39] and American President Franklin D. Roosevelt, endorsed air power as a powerful deterrence. If war became necessary, Churchill and Roosevelt considered massive bomber fleets the remedy that would bring about an enemy’s defeat quickly. Historian Richard Overy wrote that President Roosevelt’s



“…confidant Harry Hopkins [a trusted personal advisor] reported in August 1941 that the President was ‘a believer in bombing as the only means of gaining a victory.’ Roosevelt told his Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, that ‘the only way to break the German morale’ was to bomb every small town, to bring war home to the ordinary German.”[40]



Churchill had long been an enthusiast for aerial bombing, going back to the First World War and well into the 1930s. He defended the Royal Air Force in its infancy from attacks by the Royal Navy and army, both which saw the air force as a mere “parvenu service”[41] that lacked the honor and stature of the traditional forces. The Royal Air Force in turn was in search of a role other than reconnaissance for the army and navy. On May 10, 1940, Churchill became Prime Minister and five days later, unleashed his heavy bombers against German targets in the aftermath of the Nazi’s devastating attack on Rotterdam. Though Churchill would in 1943, 1944 and again in 1945 express doubts about area bombing’s efficacy and morality, he had sealed his pact with this method of warfare in an August 1942 address to officers of the British Eighth Army (The famous “Desert Rats”) in Cairo, Egypt: “Germany has asked for this bombing warfare … her country will be laid to ruins.”[42] Those words sealed the fate of cities like Hamburg, Berlin, Nuremberg, and Dresden among dozens of others.

The Bombers’ Impact: German and Japanese Civilian Losses

At the outset of hostilities in September 1939, the Nazi Luftwaffe and the various Allied air forces reverted back to pre-First World War idealism:

“…both Germany and Britain were restrained towards each other in the matter of bombing, which on the British side anyway started immediately: on 3 September itself, within hours of Chamberlain’s declaration of war on Germany, a group of Hampden and Whitely bombers attempted to find and attack a fleet of German warships reportedly at sea near Wilhelmshaven. They failed but even as they returned … from the hunt, a flight of ten Whitley bombers was setting course for the Ruhr – to drop not bombs but leaflets on the civilian population, inviting them to surrender.”[1] [Emphasis added]



The reluctance to bomb Western European civilians ended May 15, 1940 with the Luftwaffe’s bombing of Rotterdam; the Luftwaffe bombed Warsaw in September of 1939, a fact to which few Britons and other Western Europeans paid heed back then because Eastern Europe was perceived to be a distant place geographically and culturally. RAF-Bomber Command would have bombed Germany sooner had it not been in such a weak position at outset of the Second World War. By 1942, all major Allied powers and their Axis foes engaged in both area and strategic bombing. While the RAF, guided by Chief of the Air Staff, Air Marshall Sir Charles Portal and Bomber Command’s Air Marshall Sir Arthur Harris, was committed to area bombing, the USAAF was not. The Americans preferred strategic or precision bombing of German industrial and military targets as the surest path to victory. However, in the case of Japan, the USAAF departed from pin-point bombing. U.S. bombers used massive area bombing tactics for the last nine months of the Pacific war. The most destructive attacks were the March 9-10, 1945 firebombing of Tokyo and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945 respectively.[2] The costs to Germany and Japan were frightful.



In the European Theater of Operations (ETO), Allied air power dropped over 1,360,000 tons[3] of bombs on Germany that left scores of cities in ruins, destroyed or damaged twenty percent of the nation’s housing stock, and killed 305,000 and maimed 780,000 German civilians.[4] In the Pacific Theater of Operations (PTO), the results were no less sanguinary. A total of 168,000 tons of bombs were dropped on the Japanese mainland[5], killing 330,000 Japanese civilians, wounding over 476,000[6], and leaving sixty-six major cities with “40 percent of [their built-up areas destroyed].”[7] Area bombing created an estimated seven million refugees in Germany and nearly nine million inside Japan during the war. Despite this massive devastation, post-war studies conducted in Europe and Japan by the United States Strategic Bombing Survey[8] teams concluded that area bombing failed to weaken civilian support for the enemy regimes. The USSBS studies influenced later generations of military historians who concluded that area bombing was “a regrettable and relatively unsuccessful aspect of the Allied prosecution of the war.”[9] There were, however, irrefutable Allied successes derived from area bombing.



German Military and Economic Losses[10] Due to Bombing



Putting aside for a moment Professor Grayling’s examination of area bombing in the context of the legal and moral principles derived from just war theory, there can be no doubt that area and strategic bombing inflicted considerable military and economic damage on the Axis Powers. The Axis had to commit substantial resources to anti-aircraft defense; recovery and reconstruction; relocation of “de-housed” urban dwellers; and concealment and dispersion of vital industrial resources and war-manufacturing factories. The disruption of Germany’s military transportation network and vital aviation and petroleum industries proved fatal in the end. One often neglected benefit of both Bomber Command’s and the USAAF’s numerous “1,000-bomber” raids was the initial high attrition rate inflicted by bomber gun crews on the Luftwaffe’s experienced, well-trained fighter-inceptor aircraft pilots. “Luftwaffe fighter pilots were initially hesitant about attacking B-17s in formation. No bomber they would confront in the war was so heavily armed,”[11] carrying as many as twelve .50 caliber machineguns. Although German fighter-interceptors[12] eventually overcame the unescorted B-17 Flying Fortress and B-24 Liberator bombers’ gunners, the steady attrition rate coupled with the arrival of longer-range American escort-fighters spelled doom for the Luftwaffe. As American P-51 Mustangs came into service in greater numbers, their extended fuel range meant American bombers were under the protection of fighter escorts for greater distances and time over German airspace. By early 1944, the results were catastrophic for the Luftwaffe.



McFarland and Newton noted one initially unintended benefit of strategic bombing: “The major contribution of strategic bombing by June 1944 was its role in bringing about the weakening of the Luftwaffe’s fighter arm, particularly the day fighters, through attrition.”[13] The USAAF Eighth Air Force bomber gun crews claimed to have shot down 4,176 Luftwaffe fighters from October 2, 1943 to May 30, 1944; the Germans reported smaller figures, ranging from a low of 1,038 to a high of 1,631.[14] Nonetheless, the loss of that many fighters to just one of several USAAF and RAF Bomber Command bomber fleets partially explains why Germany devoted almost seventy percent of her fighter aircraft to defend against the bomber threat.[15] The Luftwaffe simply had to replace their huge losses over German airspace. One particularly costly and brutal bombing campaign named “Big Week” (February 19-26, 1944) cost the Luftwaffe dearly. Succeeding air campaigns over Germany eventually churned up the German Air Force. British Historian Max Hastings noted in his excellent revisionist work on D-Day, Overlord, the steady erosion of Luftwaffe fighter-interceptor aircraft and its veteran pilots[16]:



“…the coming of the marvelous Mustang P-51 long-range fighter to the skies over Germany inflicted an irreversible defeat upon the Luftwaffe … In January 1944, the Germans lost 1,311 aircraft from all causes. This figure rose to 2,121 in February and 2,115 in March. … By June [1944], the Germans no longer possessed sufficient pilots and aircraft to mount more than token resistance to the Allied invasion of France.”[17]



A good number of those German fighter planes were lost defending cities subjected to area bombing.



Big Week also had a devastating impact on German aircraft production on the ground. The USAAF and RAF Bomber Command carried out respectively, 3,823 and 2,351 sorties dropping a total of “18,291 tons of bombs on eighteen German airframe and two ball-bearing manufacturing centers.” “American losses were 227 bombers (5.9 percent[18]), British losses 157 bombers (6.7 percent) … U.S. Strategic Air Forces in Europe launched 4,342 fighters, losing 42 (1 percent). More than 5,000 Allied aircrew either died or became prisoners-of-war”[19] during Big Week. The Luftwaffe suffered fewer casualties, but had fewer to give. One hundred Luftwaffe pilots were killed and between 81 and 282 aircraft were lost in the air. In addition, the Germans saw their Messerschmitt plant at Regensburg utterly destroyed, and heavy damage inflicted on the Stuttgart ball-bearing plant and airframe plants at Augsberg, Furth, and Leipzig.[20] The Germans were forced to disperse airplane assembly plants, a move that saved their airframe manufacturing capacity but hurt efficiency. Prior to Big Week, the above mentioned German aircraft plants each built between 200 and 350 planes a month. After Big Week and the necessary dispersal, none of the plants built more than 150 aircraft a month, and the destroyed Regensburg plant ceased to build any aircraft for the remainder of the war.[21] America’s massive production of planes and output of trained pilots easily replaced the heavy losses suffered during Big Week while “the Luftwaffe lost over one-third of its authorized strength, including a considerable number of irreplaceable veteran pilots and air commanders.”[22] Other Allied bomber operations, including Berlin, ARGUMENT and POINTBLANK would take a terrible toll of the Luftwaffe. By the time of the Normandy Invasion (D-Day, June 6, 1944), the Luftwaffe only had 300 planes based near the Normandy coastline to take on 12,000 Allied aircraft coming from Great Britain.[23] German soldiers joked about this disparity in air power: “[I]f the plane in the sky was silver it was American, if it was blue it was British, if it was invisible it was ours.”[24] For the Wehrmacht and the Third Reich, Allied air superiority had become no laughing matter by 1944 and early 1945.



Allied area and strategic bombing forced Nazi Germany to commit enormous quantities of anti-aircraft guns and ammunition to homeland defense. A large number of 88mm cannons (some put the figure at 10,000) that otherwise would have been used as anti-tank guns on both the Eastern and Western Fronts, had to guard against Allied bombers. If Germany had been assured that her cities were off limits to Allied bombers, perhaps as many as 7,000 of the 10,000 88mm cannons committed to anti-aircraft defense would have been deployed by the Wehrmacht as anti-tank weapons, a sobering thought when one realizes the toll such firepower could have inflicted on American, British and Russian tank-crews. Germany’s defense of her airspace and cities required 900,000 personnel to man the anti-aircraft “flak guns” (Fliegerabwehrkanonen) which numbered 14,250 heavy guns ranging from the superb 88mm to 12.8 cm, 34,750 light to medium guns ranging from 20mm to 3.7 cm, 1,500 barrage balloons, and 6,750 searchlights.[25] Several tens of thousands of additional personnel were occupied with fire-fighting, digging and rescuing bombing victims, recovering the dead for burial, assisting workers and families “de-housed” by bombs, and clearing the rubble. Had German cities received a pass from Allied bombing, the above mentioned personnel and resources invariably would have been used for other military purposes.



German industrial output was hurt by a combination of increased worker absenteeism due to bombing and the outright destruction of industrial plant and equipment. A. C. Grayling noted that by 1943, German industrial production declined 9 percent; it fell by 17 percent in 1944. British estimates were even more reliable since they included larger samples. The British claim German industrial output fell by 8.2 percent in 1943, 7.2 percent after June 1944, and 9.7 percent during the first four months of 1945 (Germany surrendered May 8, 1945).[26] The single greatest damage to the German industrial base fell upon her oil industry. German oil production fell from 316,000 tons a month before May 1944, to 107,000 tons in June 1944, and a pathetic 17,000 tons in September.[27] Had the Allies committed a greater effort to attacking Germany’s oil production, the Nazi war machine would have grounded to a complete halt by late summer 1944. But this is hindsight; in the fog of war, confusion nearly always trumps clarity. Allied commanders were split between three objectives: bombing transportation, bombing cities, and bombing vital industrial targets. It is true that Air Marshal “Bomber” Harris was singularly-minded, some say obsessed, in proving correct the pre-war theory that area bombing ultimately would bring Germany to her knees. However, in the desperate days of World War II, Allied leaders were willing to try any remedy short of genocide to bring about Nazi Germany’s defeat. As defense analyst William Murray and military historian Allan R. Millett wrote in their book, A War To Be Won, in assessing Allied bombing during the Second World War: “In the end, what is certain is that the Combined Bomber Offensive was essential to the defeat of Nazi Germany. It was not elegant, it was not humane, but it was effective.”[28]



Bombing’s Impact on Axis Morale



One of the more tenuous “beneficial” consequences of Allied area bombing was the impact it had on German and Japanese morale. A. C. Grayling argues that the consensus of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS) studies as well as that of later generations of military historians is that area bombing stiffened enemy resistance. However, much of that claim is based on embittered recollections by German and Japanese bombing survivors; subjected to endless questionnaires by post-war survey teams, perhaps many felt victimized by a new form of bombardment.[29] American historian Richard Overy noted the appreciable increase in absenteeism among both German and Japanese workers:



“The impact of bombing was profound. People became tired, highly strung and disinclined to take risks. Industrial efficiency was undermined by bombing workers and their housing. In Japan, absenteeism from work rose to 50 percent in the summer of 1945; in the Ford plant in Cologne, in the Ruhr, absenteeism rose to 25 percent of the workforce for the whole of 1944. … Even those who turned up for work were listless and anxious … [f]or the bombed cities the end of the war spelt relief from a routine of debilitating terror and arbitrary loss. No one could doubt who walked through the ghost towns [Dead Cities] of Germany and Japan …that bombing shattered civilian lives.”[30]



Nazi Minister of Enlightenment and Education, Joseph Goebbels, noted the devastating impact of area bombing on the German cities of Lübeck (1942) and Dortmund (1943), and worried about morale: “The damage is really enormous … It is horrible. One can well imagine how such a bombardment affects the population.” “Hell itself seems to have broken loose upon us.”[31] The Nazi Propaganda Minister organized morale-boosting parades through bombed cities, calling them victory marches and declaring that by decorating the rubble with Nazi flags, the people were celebrating Germany’s victories. While Germans struggled under the bombs, the circumstances for Japan’s civilians were equally horrendous, if not worse. After all, most of Japan’s built up areas consisted of structures and dwellings made from wood and paper, thus making them extremely vulnerable to incendiary bombing. The American General Curtis LeMay changed tactics once he realized that strategic bombing of Japan was failing. He shifted the focus to area bombing with a heavy emphasis on use of incendiaries. “We scorched and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo that night of March 9-10 [1945] than went up in vapour in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined,"[32] said LeMay. It is estimated that some 8,500,000 Japanese civilians[33] were forced to evacuate cities for the countryside in order to escape the fire-bombings. In an era of “total war” that saw civilians mobilized into mass production and other means of supporting the war effort, the specific targeting of the enemy home-front, including densely-populated urban areas, was consistent with all the prevailing military doctrines in the years prior to and during World War II. Thus Allied area bombing was yet another in a litany of the necessary horrors of waging total war against the formidable Axis foes.



Grayling’s Judgment and the Men That Gave All of Their Tomorrows



A. C. Grayling has been unfairly criticized by reviewers who appear not to have read his book carefully. For example, Max Hastings[34] accused Grayling of writing a polemic that gave short shrift to Axis mendacity. A reader who complained in the Washington Post’s “Book World” asked if Grayling wrote “a 361-page tome without so much as mentioning Warsaw, Coventry, Rotterdam, London and, even before that, Guernica?”[35] In fact, Grayling repeatedly emphasized throughout Among the Dead Cities that he is not a moral relativist nor is his work an exercise in moral equivalency. He does not shy away from the brutalities of Nazi Germany and Imperial-Fascist Japan. However, Grayling’s flawed assumptions and use of hindsight in his critique of Allied area bombing as a war crime, and his recommendations for our times leave him open to legitimate criticism. Concerning his flawed assumptions and hindsight:



· He argues that Bomber Command should have “devoted its energies to making [precision bombing] … safer for its bombers” by developing long-range escort fighters and bombing at daylight as the Americans had done.[36] This overlooks the fact that the RAF was committed to area bombing as a matter of strategic planning. Grayling assumes that the RAF’s change from daylight precision-bombing to nighttime area bombing was a tactical shift brought about by the horrific losses suffered in the early stage of the war—from 1939-1941, Bomber Command had attrition rates[37] of 20 to 28 percent. On the contrary, Bomber Command’s Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris saw an opportunity to move area bombing from the abstract to the actual, and thus seized the moment. The RAF would engage in area bombing at night, the USAAF would commit to strategic bombing during daylight, exactly as planners for both air forces had advocated years earlier.

· Grayling would have RAF Bomber Command give the Third Reich’s cities a free pass, and instead concentrate bombing vital industrial targets with precision bombing technology that simply did not exist in 1939-1945. While the USAAF’s commitment to strategic bombing against Germany was noble, it relied more on wishful thinking than on actual capabilities.[38] Military historian James H. Kitchens III, a leading expert on World War II aerial bombing, noted the near-impossibility of precision bombing:



“B-17s and B-24s …cruised at 180 to 190 miles per hour and were designed to bomb from fifteen thousand to thirty thousand feet. Unfortunately, from these heights the pickle barrel placement required to hit chosen buildings without collateral damage was utterly impossible, a fact made crystal clear by the USSBS … and countless other sources. Normal bomb patterns from the heavies extended hundreds of yards from the aiming point and it was quite common for bombs to fall a mile or more away from the target. On 15 April 1945, for example, the Eighth Air Force’s 467th Bombardment Group achieved that air force’s most accurate bombing of the war. In striking a coastal artillery battery in France … B-24s … managed to put just 50 percent of their bombs within a 500-foot radius around the guns. This was accomplished only with long experience, a 15,000-foot drop altitude, near-perfect weather, and no resistance.”[39] (Emphasis added)



Likewise, historian William D. Rubinstein noted, with hindsight of course, the American-British failure to knock out the German electrical grid:



“As astonishing as it may seem, the Allies failed to destroy that grid … No more than one hundred power stations in Germany provided over 56 per cent of all electricity generated; a further 300 supplied another 25 per cent. Both the power stations and the lines of the grid were extremely vulnerable, the location of the stations was well known and, most importantly of all, since electricity cannot be stored, the Germans would have had no way of compensating for the losses endured. Albert Speer later stated that the loss of about 60 per cent of German electricity capacity … would have brought German industry to a standstill … only 0.12 per cent of Allied bombs [were] expended on the German power grid.”[40]



Part of the reason for the failure to destroy the German electrical grid stemmed from the above mentioned inaccuracy of bombing even under the best conditions—Northern Europe typically has cloud cover for two-thirds of the year, a fact that would contribute to inaccurate bombing during World War II. Add heavy anti-aircraft fire (flak) and German fighter planes, not to the mention frayed nerves and fatigue of the bomber crews, and bombing inaccuracy became inevitable. Of course, there also was the matter of a prior commitment to area bombing that the iron-willed Air Marshal Harris was intent on carrying through no matter what the costs.



· Grayling’s argument that the Germans would have had to maintain fighter-aircraft and anti-aircraft guns to defend vital industrial and strategic targets overlooks one important fact: the number of anti-aircraft guns needed to defend those targets would not have required the estimated 48,000 to 55,000 that Germany committed to defend vital military targets and her cities. Surely several thousands of 88mm guns would have been transferred to the front for use as anti-tank guns had the Allies not implemented area bombing. In addition, thousands of Luftwaffe fighter-aircraft would have been freed up to strafe American and British soldiers on the beaches of Normandy and attack Soviet infantry and armored columns advancing through Poland.



On the matter of Grayling’s recommendations for then and now:



· He appears to have forgotten the adage that “the past is a different country,” i.e., perspectives, values, varying senses of time and space differ between people separated by generations. Grayling condemns Allied area bombing as a war crime and a moral outrage; however, pre-war efforts by the United States and Europe to outlaw area bombing via international protocol collapsed on account of failure to reach a consensus that area bombing constituted a war crime. He points to the Geneva Protocol 1, Article 52 (1) of 1977 that forbids attacks on civilians and civilian targets. Michael Burleigh of the Sunday Times notes thus that Grayling “fully enters into the spirit of his own time, with his lawyerly attempt retrospectively to criminalise Bomber Command under laws that only became explicit after the war in the 1977 Additional Protocol to the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention — that is, 32 years later.”[41] (Emphasis added)

· Grayling reveals his thinly veiled agenda—he is after all, a leading “public intellectual” in Britain—in the concluding chapter, “Judgement.” He laments current U.S. interpretation of the “International Humanitarian Law (the Geneva 1949 conventions and their two protocols,”[42] the military campaigns in Afghanistan, Iraq and maybe one day against Iran. Grayling condemns surprise attacks on civilians: “…there comes to seem very little difference in principle between the RAF’s Operation Gomorrah [bombing of Hamburg], or the USAAF’s atom bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the destruction of the World Trade Center,”[43] a problematic comparison he admits comes close to moral equivalency. Grayling stands by his condemnation of Britain and the U.S., and maintains his faith in institutions like the International Criminal Court (ICC) and Geneva protocols. One critic noted that the professor of philosophy may wish for “his book … to increase the likelihood that contemporary American (and British) pilots will face that prospect [of being hauled before the ICC] every time one of their precision bombs hits a collateral target.”[44] The critic’s observation is not farfetched.

Are they going to haul in a suicide bomber or his family? Or someone from Hizbullah or Al Queda for killing innocents?

This is so frickin gay, ICC, maybe that should be the next target to bomb! I will never get over these dips thinking they know it better than everyone else. Maybe someday they should have to fight to preserve their freedoms, then maybe they will understand that unconditional war means UNCONDITIONAL war!

I have not read all the text Rock (it's a bit too long) but the denunciation of massive bombings par the Germans is a unavoidable and comprehensible thing

What was shocking in these bombings is that their military impact was probably very limited (untill the last days of the war, the german factories have worked and have worked as well as in 1940); apparently the aim of all that consisted in punishing the Germans (notably for having bombed London); because of these bombings the Germans have long regarded themselves as ONLY victims of the WW2 and have forgotten that they had been criminals

Today I would say that the things have changed, the Germans want just to remind to the others that they were not the only country who has committed bad acts and even crimes of war

History is always more complex than we think

"History is always more complex than we think"

Yes, it is. The victors get to decide who committed war crimes. But in the end, applying rules to warfare is just ridiculous. It's like trying to govern by anarchy. They are inherently contradictory.

crapaudazur:

because of these bombings the Germans have long regarded themselves as ONLY victims of the WW2 and have forgotten that they had been criminals

I don't know about the Germans, but have you seen the Japanese movie Rhapsody in August?

When the grandchildren go to see the war memorials in Nagasaki, Shinichiro, points out there's no memorial from the United States, and his elder sister, Tami, replies, "Of course not, they're the ones who dropped the bombs." Throughout the entire movie, viewers are hammered with the message that the Japanese were the victims of WWII and it is the responsibility of Americans to show humility and regret if they're ever to be forgiven. I know this isn't believed by all Japanese but I've met a number of otherwise extremely nice Japanese who do. Somehow, Pearl Harbor, the rape of Nanking, Japanese treatment of POWs and Unit 731 are all forgotten because of two bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

Brits still remember the Blitz and it sounds like Germans still remember Dresden. So high-intensity civilian bombings don't seem like the sort of things people are prepared to forget, even long after a war has ended.

Lots of leftists and euros now think that germany winning would have been a great thing. Same can be said for the cold war. Those are two of the main reasons that there is such anti-Amercanism both here and in the museum.

Don't worry when the euros start their next war they will be begging for our help and complaining that we didn't come sooner to fix their own mistakes.

Seriously, if euros could live together in peace we wouldn't have to be over there. Unfortunately, when euros war (make no mistake it is their nature/culture to war) the USA has to come clean up the mess. It is tough to be the only adult in the world but it is cheaper in treasure and blood if we are.

However, I make this pledge that I will personally do everything in my power to make sure that the USA is never entangled in another european war.

jukinj3:

Lots of leftists and euros now think that germany winning would have been a great thing. Same can be said for the cold war. Those are two of the main reasons that there is such anti-Amercanism both here and in the museum.

Bullshit.

because of these bombings the Germans have long regarded themselves as ONLY victims of the WW2 and have forgotten that they had been criminals

Hmmm, who told you that?

I have probably seen dozens of documentaries about the "Bombenkrieg" on German TV. None of them got by without repeating like a mantra "who sows wind will reap storm", so much actually that I grew inceasingly annoyed by this self-flagellating and overzealous justification of total and disproportionate war against one's own civilians.

The traumatic effect of the often total destruction of cities from the air has in fact been almost tabooed for decades. Only a few years back a national debate on assessing the bombing campaigns started for real, triggered by Jörg Friedrich's "Der Brand" (The conflagration), a painstaking and painful in depht account of the impact of the area bombing warfare. It is telling that the book was written by a self-taught amateur historian, Germany's history establishment has largely dodged the topic altogether and concentrated on German perpetrators and all conceivable aspects of the Holocaust instead. The same applies largely to novelists - hardly any fiction-book dealt with the topic although it was the one aspect of the total war that afected the nation as a whole in the most direct way.

Someone should remind the germans and japanese who STARTED WW2.

On a more practical level, historians routinely debunk the writings of their teachers just to have something new to say. Publish or perish is a wonderful concept.

Lots of leftists and euros now think that germany winning would have been a great thing. Same can be said for the cold war. Those are two of the main reasons that there is such anti-Amercanism both here and in the museum.

Jukinj3, explain to me how it is possible that you utter such nonsense without perishing out of overwhelming embarassment? I am lost for words. This is way too deranged to merit a rebuttal.

Don't worry when the euros start their next war

STOP.

You have understood nothing about what has happened in the last 50 years in history. You are too busy bashing the EU to actually understand the historically unique achievement of reconciliation and political integration of the countries of the European Union.

they will be begging for our help and complaining that we didn't come sooner to fix their own mistakes.

Seriously, if euros could live together in peace we wouldn't have to be over there. Unfortunately, when euros war (make no mistake it is their nature/culture to war) the USA has to come clean up the mess.

Don't you think you are a tad oldfashioned in the head? You are stuck in the first half of the last century, Buddy. I know, dealing with the two world wrs is so much more exiting than getting to grips with the European integration since the early 1950s. But, alas, it keeps you from understanding presnt-day Europe.

It is tough to be the only adult in the world but it is cheaper in treasure and blood if we are.

Being bigger and stronger than your neighbours in the western hemisphere whom you have invaded countless times since your inception doesn't make you any morally superior. How "adult" and noble was it to invade Nicaragua half a dozen times at least? Does it make the US morally superior that Nicaragua coud never fight back?

"How "adult" and noble was it to invade Nicaragua half a dozen times at least?"

Ortega's clan was a bunch of property-seizing commies. It was both adult and noble. Thanks President Reagan.

"Does it make the US morally superior that Nicaragua coud never fight back?"

Yes.

SchlockoftheBarn, let's keep it legalistic and let's keep funding irregular fighters and mining civilian harbors out of the definition of invasion for a moment (the ICJ ruled it as state terrorism though in 1986). I was of course also referring to the half dozen invasion BEFORE Ortega was elected in Nicaragua.

What did make THAT so noble and adult?

Unitedfruit über alles or what?

"Does it make the US morally superior that Nicaragua coud never fight back?"

Yes

What precisely makes it morally superior to invade a small country time and again when it can't fight back?

My father was in Germany right at the end of WWII and I keep the medals he received for his work on the Berlin Airlift. But I can recall his vivid description of what Germany was like during those years--and particularly the image he painted of Hamburg as a city of rubble. I also remember him telling me about a German girlfriend he had and about her father and her father's friends (businessmen all) whom he witnessed greeting one another with fascist salutes. I grew up with my father singing and strumming his guitar to German songs. Germany had a big influence on him because it was the first part of the world he ever saw outside of America and in a strange way he remembered it fondly. He was just 17 years old.

I have not read all the text Rock (it's a bit too long) but the denunciation of massive bombings par the Germans is a unavoidable and comprehensible thing

Dealing with cretins...




Fact of the matter, Sir Georges Harris won the war over the ostaires for churchill....
leftists would have lost it, of course...

keeping communism out of Central America during the Cold War was both noble and adult. ask chesty pully what he thought of nicaragua. semper fi motherfuckers.

We have one say here: "he who sows the wind, he harvets the storm"

Japanese and Germans now whine a helluva lot over Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Who started that war in the first place?

Idiots!

You didn't even pretend to answer the question

How sad is that.

United Fruit über alles.

have you ever heard of the monroe doctrine? it is our business what goes on in our hemisphere.

You know, Rock, Oldtits just told us the nexus of the problem not only for himself and many in Europe, but also the Left here in the United States. They cannot understand that war is something that doesn't require a noticed motion hearing. It's another thing entirely. They want to make and enforce laws that hobble any state that can project power outside its own borders, for good or ill, it simply doesn't matter to them. Take the case of Bosnia. Europe was impotent without the United States. They thought that was a good war and quite legal in spite of the fact their were no UN resolutions that sanctioned the carnage. But the minute our involvement in Iraq threatened their business in the region, well, it was an unjust war. I'm sorry, Altes, we are not going to exchange briefs with terrorists or with their enablers. We will kill them, rip out their entrails and let crows feast on the remains. If you have a summons for our President, Vice President or Secretary of Defense, try to serve it and see what happens.

Schlock, you don't know shit about your own country's Monroe doctrine. It say that outside powers shall no more meddle in the affairs of the now independent and sovereing nations of the Western hemisphere. It's a No-No against foreign invasion, not a card blanche for anyone strong and shrewed enough to make a war of aggression.

Nots, look up the difference between Kosovo and Bosnia, you obviously mixed up the two.

Good night.

"have you ever heard of the monroe doctrine? it is our business what goes on in our hemisphere."

it is not forbidden to respect the other nations nevertheless .

in this case, one can say that ussr had a " monroe doctrine" in the east europe .

ok ?

There was extensive Soviet and Cuban involvement in the spread of communism in South and Central America. We met their meddling with meddling of our own. It's an imperfect world but that's life. It's kind of cute to now see the left getting excited again about Latin America. Will they ever learn?

Somehow, Pearl Harbor, the rape of Nanking, Japanese treatment of POWs and Unit 731 are all forgotten because of two bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

The Japs don't teach thier kids about any of that...they tell them they were trying to "help" the Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos, ect. when we nuked them for no good reason.

How "adult" and noble was it to invade Nicaragua half a dozen times at least? Does it make the US morally superior that Nicaragua coud never fight back?

Well you take a very deep view of the wars of your own nation but a very shallow one of the wars of mine. Would it have been preferrable to let the commies take what they want? Perhaps the side we backed wasn't pure either, but they were preferrable. It was the same with our support of Stalin when he fought hitler, and with saddam against the mullahs.