Abbreviations Used in the Notes
|
BCWD |
Bomber Command War Diaries |
|
OH |
Official History, from Charles Webster and Noble Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany 1939–45, HMSO, 1961 |
|
USSBS |
United States Strategic Bombing Survey AHB |
|
AHB |
Air Historical Branch |
2 The Bomber War
1 W. G. Sebald, The Natural History of Destruction, London, 2003, pp. 27–29.
2 Ibid.
3 The story of Operation Gomorrah is told in detail by Martin Middlebrook in his The Battle of Hamburg, London, 1980, one in his excellent series of volumes on aspects of the bomber war.
4 The Firestorm Raid, OH, vol. II, pp. 154–5. For casualty figures and Bomber Command losses see Henry Probert, Bomber Harris His Life and Times, London, 2001, p. 261.
5 Quoted by Middlebrook, Battle of Hamburg, p. 251.
6 See chapter 3 below for a discussion of the significance of the post-Hamburg panic in Germany, and the degree to which it confirmed Sir Arthur Harris’s belief about the ‘moral effect’ of large-scale targeting of civilian populations by bombers.
7 Chapter and verse for this claim occurs in the appropriate places below, where the effects of the bombing campaigns are discussed. See especially chapters 3 and 8.
8 The idea that Allied thinking canvassed the idea of an effective ‘culturecide’ of Germany by means of bombing all its major cities and turning the country into a farm must not be taken as an excuse for forgetting that the Nazi regime in Germany, with the active support of many among its population, not only contemplated but enacted an actual genocide against European Jewry, and had plans to do the same for East Europe’s Slavic population too, except in so far as it could be useful as slave labour. I repeat the point, however, that the fact that a wrong is less than a competing wrong does not make it a right; and the fact that the Allies seriously contemplated permanently crippling German – and Japanese – culture, and set about doing so by means of the area-bombing campaigns, is one that must be looked squarely in the face.
9 This shows how much emphasis was placed on naval considerations in war planning before the outbreak of hostilities. Some argue that over-concentration on naval planning was typical of British thinking, given the country’s splendid naval history and the great power of its fleets, but was not tailored to the realities, as they proved, of the Second World War. This is so even when one considers the importance of the war at sea; if Britain had lost the Battle of the Atlantic it would have lost the war as surely as if it had lost the Battle of Britain. But the war at sea was only marginally about great battleships and cruisers – it was much more about long-distance aircraft hunts for submarines, the technique of convoy sailings, the courage and endurance of merchant crews, and the weather.
10 In 1918 the newly formed RAF consisted of 188 operational and 194 training squadrons.
11 Denis Richards, The Hardest Victory: RAF Bomber Command in the Second World War, London, 1994, chapter 1 passim.
12 Ibid., p. 4.
13 It was followed by further schemes, not all accepted; for example, Scheme H was put before the British Cabinet in 1937, calling for 2,500 front-line aircraft of which 1,659 were to be bombers. The figures were arrived at by looking at what the Luftwaffe had available, and aimed at parity. The scheme was rejected, because the British government, on the basis more of wishful thinking than clarity of vision, believed German assurances that Luftwaffe strength would not be so great that such an expansion of British air power would be needed.
14 The new bomber specifications that eventuated in the Halifaxes and Lancasters that became the mainstay of Bomber Command – this especially true of the latter, a magnificent aircraft ideally suited to the task and the conditions of the time – were laid down in 1936.
15 The fighter specifications had been laid down in 1934.
16 See Robert Jackson, Before the Storm: The Story of Bomber Command 1939–42, London, 1972, chapter 2 passim.
17 In the period of expansion before the war the RAF also had, among other quickly obsolescent types, the Handley Page Harrow and the Wellesley long-range bomber. The latter saw some service in the early part of the war in the Middle East, and because of its geodetic design (one of its designers was the remarkable Barnes Wallis) it was 40 per cent lighter than it would have been if conventionally constructed. This is what helped to give it an enormous range. Both types would have been a terrible liability in the air war as it evolved from 1940 onwards.
18 Quoted in Jackson, Before the Storm, p. 76. The preceding account is based on Before the Storm, pp. 70–5.
19 Ibid., p. 89.
20 Robert Jackson, Bomber! Famous Bomber Missions of World War II, London, 1980, pp. 21–8.
21 Of these bombing episodes and their effect on modern consciousness, more below.
22 In the first five days of Germany’s invasion of the Low Countries and France, the Luftwaffe lost over 539 aircraft, while the RAF lost 205 of all types. At that point in the war, however, the relative rates of attrition were not the concern; that was a consideration for the longer term. Rather, as Dowding’s worries showed, it was the absolute rate of the RAF’s own losses that mattered for the immediate future: the days, weeks, and at most months ahead in 1940.
23 Admittedly, sometimes by single aircraft.
24 See Denis Richards, Portal of Hungerford, London, 1977, p. x.
25 T. Taylor, The Breaking Wave, London, 1957, p. 157–8; newsreel footage.
26 General Paul Deichmann (ex-Luftwaffe), The Karlsruhe Studies; ‘Reasons of the Luftwaffe for changing over to mass attacks on London’ 1953–8; reprint of USAF Historical Studies.
27 USSBS interviews with Werner Junck, 20–4 April 1945.
28 T. Taylor, Breaking Wave, p. 44. See the excellent account given by John Ray in The Night Blitz 1940–41, London, 1996, which has been a helpful guide here.
29 Quoted in Ray, Night Blitz, p. 103.
30 This much-rehearsed accusation is discussed at length in (e.g.) Group Captain F. W. Winterbotham, The Ultra Secret, New York, 1974; Cave Brown, Bodyguard of Lies (2 vols) New York, 1974; William Stevenson, A Man Called Intrepid, New York, 1976; etc. An apparently definitive statement of the case is given by one who was intimately in the know: John Colville, who worked in Downing Street in the war years. In his The Churchillians (London, 1981, p. 62) he writes: ‘All concerned with the information gleaned from the intercepted German signals were conscious that German suspicions must not be aroused for the sake of ephemeral advantages. In the case of the Coventry raid no dilemma arose, for until the German directional beam was turned on the doomed city nobody knew where the great raid would be. Certainly the Prime Minister did not. The German signals referred to a major operation with the code name “Moonlight Sonata”. The usual “Boniface” secrecy in the Private Office had been lifted on this occasion and during the afternoon before the raid I wrote in my diary (kept under lock and key at 10 Downing Street), “It is obviously some major air operation, but its exact destination the Air Ministry find it difficult to determine”.’
31 BCWD, p. 103.
32 Official Narrative.
33 As an indication of the relative inefficacy of aerial bombing at this juncture of the war, the figures scrupulously kept by the city of Cologne – subject of the devastating 1,000-bomber attack in July 1942 – showed that in the period June 1941 to February 1942 the city was bombed 33 times, but that only 17 per cent of the tonnage dropped fell within the city limits. Although houses and factories had been damaged, and over 13,000 people temporarily dehoused, only 138 people had died in all those raids.
34 Quoted Richards, The Hardest Victory, p. 97.
35 OH, vol. IV, pp. 135–40.
36 On the night of 16–17 December 1940, as a retaliation for the Coventry raid, an area-bombing attack was carried out on Mannheim. The largest assembly of RAF bombers so far gathered for a single mission – 134 aircraft – took part in the attack, which killed forty-seven people and demolished nearly 500 buildings. But this raid, although ‘Coventry-style’, did not by itself herald the onset of area bombing, though of course it made the later acceptance of the policy easier.
37 Edmund Fawcett drew my attention to the fact that the striking photograph showing the dome of St Paul’s floating in a sea of fire was in fact concocted for propaganda purposes; it was by Harry Morgan, as reported in St Paul’s: The Cathedral Church of London 604–2004 edited by Derek Keene, Arthur Burns and Andrew Saint, New Haven, CT, 2004.
38 Sir Arthur Harris, Bomber Offensive, London, 1947, pp. 51–2.
39 OH, vol. IV, pp. 143–8.
40 Harris, Bomber Offensive, pp. 115–17.
41 Ibid., p. 115.
42 Richards, The Hardest Victory, p. 120.
43 Other towns are sometimes included in the Baedeker raid story: Ipswich, Cambridge, Bury St Edmunds and Great Yarmouth; but these were small raids and did nowhere near as much damage as the principal Baedeker attacks.
44 Quoted Richards, The Hardest Victory, p. 127.
45 Harris, Bomber Offensive, p. 113.
46 BCWD, p. 297.
47 This crucial point is discussed along with others in the next chapter.
48 Harris believed that the formation of an élite corps would damage Bomber Command morale, and in this he was supported by all of his Group commanders. In the event a force was constituted by having the best crews nominated by Groups themselves, and it was placed under the charge of an extremely able Australian airman, Donald Bennett, an expert in navigation as in other aspects of the air arts. Harris devised the name ‘Pathfinder Force’ (abbreviated to ‘PFF’) and invented a badge for it: an eagle.
49 The superb Mosquito was also in service with Bomber Command by now too, flying with the Pathfinder Force and also able to bomb and photograph by day, because its speed and altitude were able to keep it for the most part away from fighters.
50 Probert, Bomber Harris, pp. 252–3.
51 Ibid., p. 253.
52 Richards, The Hardest Victory, pp. 172–3.
53 OH, vol. II, p. 291.
54 Richards, The Hardest Victory, p. 196.
55 Quoted in Probert, Bomber Harris, p. 263.
56 Ibid., p. 266.
57 OH, vol. II, p. 193.
58 The statistics are these: the sixteen major raids between mid-November and the end of March involved 8,700 sorties, from which about 500 bombers failed to return. This is a loss rate of 5.8 per cent, above the ‘acceptable’ upper limit of 5 per cent. In the view of commentators favourable to Harris, he did not call off the ‘Battle of Berlin’ because he felt, as the official historians did, that it was a defeat, but because preparations for Operation Overlord – the D-Day landings – and the Combined Offensive required the attention of Bomber Command elsewhere. One possibility is that if Overlord had not been imminent, and if the USAAF had not still been having doubts about deep-penetration attacks into Germany, Harris might have continued – with yet worsening results. The German defences were at this stage more than equal to the challenge, though very soon they were to suffer defeats, and continuing attrition, as the Allied offensives on all fronts wore with increasing effectiveness on their capacity.
In a detailed account of the bomber war, there would appear at this juncture an account of a catastrophically unsuccessful raid on Nuremberg at the end of March 1944 which cost Bomber Command many aircraft and air crews for scarcely any return, most of the bomber force being blown far off target by unexpectedly strong winds, and finding navigation difficult because of adverse weather generally. Harris never spoke of this débâcle, but it is likely that if the Combined Offensive had not begun at about the same time, with some major successes to show for itself, this single disaster might well have cost Harris his job.
59 Quoted Richards, The Hardest Victory, p. 217.
60 Probert, Bomber Harris, p. 293.
61 Ibid., p. 291.
62 Ibid., pp. 291–2.
63 Richards, The Hardest Victory, p. 233.
64 Ibid., p. 239.
65 Quoted Probert, Bomber Harris, p. 305.
66 Ibid., p. 308.
67 Ibid., p. 311.
68 Richards, The Hardest Victory, p. 270.
69 Widely divergent figures are given for the dead in the Dresden raid, from 25,000 to 150,000. I give the most conservative figure, though the number of unrecognisable bodies, and the number of refugees, probably means that the figure should be higher. See Frederick Taylor, Dresden, London, 2004, pp. 370–1.
70 AHB Narrative, vol. IV, p. 203.
71 See Hermann Knell, To Destroy a City: Strategic Bombing and its Human Consequences in World War II, Cambridge, ma, 2003, p. 17 et. seq. Knell was a boy in Würzburg when it was destroyed in air raids in February and March 1945. The main reason for its being a target seems to be that its population was just over 100,000, and hence ‘on the list’ of cities to be destroyed.
72 OH, vol. III, p. 112.
73 US Strategic Bombing Survey Summary Report (USSBS) (Pacific War), Washington dc, 1 July 1946, p. 16.
74 Ibid.
75 The USSBS said 185,000 dead; see ibid., p. 20; subsequent reports lower the figure to 100,000. The exact number will of course never be known, but it is likely to be somewhere between these figures, perhaps in the region of the lower of them.
76 Ibid., p. 20.
77 Ibid., p. 24.
78 I return to all these points in later chapters.
3 The Experience of the Bombed
1 Quoted Middlebrook, Battle of Hamburg, p. 257.
2 Ibid., p. 258.
3 Ibid., pp. 258–9.
4 In London such an area lies between King’s Cross, Hyde Park, the Thames and the Tower of London; in New York it would be all of Lower Manhattan from Madison Square Park to Battery Park. See ibid., p. 263.
5 Ibid., p. 265.
6 Earl R. Beck Under the Bombs: The German Home Front 1943–45, Lexington, ky, 1986, p. 69.
7 Ibid., p. 70.
8 W. G. Sebald, Natural History of Destruction, p. 29.
9 Middlebrook, Battle of Hamburg, pp. 264–5.
10 Ibid., p. 266.
11 Ibid., p. 268.
12 Ibid., p. 274.
13 Ibid., p. 275.
14 Ibid., p. 276.
15 Quoted in Christoph Kucklick, Feuersturm: Der Bombenkrieg gegen Deutschland, Hamburg, 2003, p. 32.
16 See Churchill’s ‘exterminating attack’ remark.
17 Beck, Under the Bombs, p. 60.
18 Ibid., p. 62; Beck is here describing the experiences reported by Josef Fischer, a citizen of Cologne who made a record of his experience under bombing.
19 See chapter 7 below, where I discuss the question of when the Allies knew that victory, even if it still had to be fought for, was inevitable given their industrial and manpower superiority over the Axis.
20 Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse 5, New York, 1969, p. 157.
21 John Hersey, Hiroshima, London, 1946, p. 68.
22 USSBS Pacific, p. 17.
23 Ibid., p. 20.
24 Hersey, Hiroshima, p. 182.
25 USSBS Pacific, p. 21.
26 The figures are quoted in Beck, Under the Bombs, pp. 8–9.
27 Ibid., p. 9.
28 Ibid., p. 111.
29 Richard Overy, War and the Economy in the Third Reich, Oxford, 1994, p. 312. Overy’s book is an excellent study of the German war economy, and provides correctives to what had hitherto been a number of misconceptions about it. See also Gitta Sereny, Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth, New York, 1995; Joachim Fest, Speer: The Final Verdict, London, 2001.
30 USSBS Europe, p. 2.
31 The photographs in Antony Beevor’s marvellous Berlin – The Downfall 1945, London, 2002, reveal as much; the text testifies to the ferocity of the German resistance, impossible without at least the basic equipment.
32 It is a fact forgotten by many that the giant Skoda armaments works in Czechoslovakia, and the separate Skoda automative works, were leaders in their fields in central Europe, for the country had been the industrial powerhouse of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and its genius for design was second to none.
33 In Britain the labour shortfall occasioned by men going into the armed forces was made up by women entering the workforce. In Germany this did not happen; the percentage of women in work in Germany was the same before and after 1939. Contract and prisoner labour in wartime Germany included women, but the proportions of them depended on the status of the group from which they came. Thus, Jewish and Slav women were allowed, or made, to work, whereas French and Dutch women were not.
34 Richard Bessel, Nazism and War, London, 2004, pp. 132–3. The prisoners of Mittelbau-Dora remind one of the Earthmen in C. S. Lewis’s The Silver Chair, slaves of the Lady of the Green Kirtle.
35 Richards, The Hardest Victory, p. 194.
36 Ibid., p. 195.
37 Robin Neillands, The Bomber War: The Allied Air offensive Against Germany, New York, 2001, p. 343.
38 Richards, The Hardest Victory, p. 301.
39 The Goebbels Diaries, London, 1948, p. 113.
40 Ibid., p. 393.
41 Ibid., pp. 496–8.
42 Ibid., pp. 425–7.
43 Ibid., p. 485, and Richards p. 212.
44 Quoted Beck, Under the Bombs, pp. 87–8.
45 Middlebrook, Battle of Hamburg, p. 360.
46 Princess Marie Vassiltchikov, The Berlin Diaries, London, 1985. Admittedly, ‘Missie’ Vassiltchikov had aristocratic and well-placed friends, and after being bombed out could resort to the commodious hospitality in Potsdam of Count Gottfried Bismarck-Schonhausen. But the contrast between this and families sharing a cellar is one of degree not kind: the point was that everyone pulled together, even those who – like Count Bismarck-Schonhausen, shortly afterwards put on trial for anti-Hitler activities – had no interest in a German victory in the war.
47 Beck, Under the Bombs, p. 108.
48 The horrific story of the Russian advance at the end of the war is told by Antony Beevor in his excellent and excoriating Berlin, London, 2002.
49 USSBS Europe, p. 15.
50 Ibid., p. 14.
51 Richards, The Hardest Victory, p. 303.
52 John Terraine gives a graphic account of the Typhoon attacks on Panzer divisions in the attempted counter-thrust by the Wehrmacht on 7 August 1944 westward from Mortain. As the rocket-firing Typhoons of the Second Tactical Air Force defeated the tanks, fighters from the Ninth Air Force kept the Luftwaffe fighters away. Terraine quotes Sir A. M. Coningham: ‘This was to date one of the best demonstrations of the tactical use of air power which had been given in this war. It showed that a Tactical Air Force may be a decisive battle winning factor, and it showed the smooth co-ordination of air effort which could be achieved at short notice by the team work which had been perfected between the Ninth Air Force and the second Tactical Air Force.’ John Terraine, The Right of the Line: The Royal Air Force in the European War 1939–1945, London, 1985, p. 661.
53 Probert, Bomber Harris, p. 293. In May 1944 Harris told a meeting at Montgomery’s HQ: ‘it can be stated without fear of contradiction that the heavy bomber is a first-class strategic weapon and one of the least effective tactical weapons.’
54 Ibid., p. 297.
55 Beck, Under the Bombs, pp. 130–1.
56 Neillands, The Bomber War, p. 336.
57 USSBS Europe, p. 8.
58 Harris, Bomber Offensive, p. 233.
59 USSBS Europe, p. 9.
60 Ibid.
61 Figures quoted in Richards, The Hardest Victory, pp. 301–2.
62 Alfred Mierzejewski, Collapse of the German War Economy 1944–1945: Allied Air Power and the German National Railway Chapel Hill, nc, 1988, p. 192.
63 Robert A. Pape, Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War, Ithaca, ny, 1996.
64 Ian Buruma The Wages of Guilt Memories of War in Germany and Japan, London, 1994.
65 During a spell as Visiting Professor at Tokyo University I had the opportunity to visit Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and heard this view at first hand in conversations in both cities. What is said in the course of such conversations might be demurred in more public contexts, but the sense that at least some Japanese have of Japanese victims of area bombing being victims is not equally the default attitude among Germans of the war and immediately post-war generations, at least in anything like the same straightforward way. That attitude is now changing.
66 Buruma, Wages of Guilt, p. 12.
67 Ibid., p. 11.
68 Ibid., p. 162.
4 The Mind of the Bomber
1 Beck, Under the Bombs, p. 64.
2 Henry Probert’s Bomber Harris is a sympathetic portrayal, intended – and with a good measure of success – to redress the balance of hostile opinion that Harris attracted whenever the ethics of Bomber Command’s activities in the war was at issue. Whatever else might be said about Harris, he was clearly an outstanding leader, and his concern for the welfare and proper reward of those under his command does him credit. He had his callous and uncompromising side, he was arguably wrong-headed in his larger theories, and he was not an easy subordinate for the Air Staff to manage, to the point of reducing the effectiveness of the air contribution to the war. But most men are of mixed alloy, and Probert does a masterly job in leaving one with a sense of Harris’s large qualities while not masking his warts and failings.
3 No doubt some would say that being cultured and yet still able to carry out such policies is worse; the thought has weight – for this must have been true of many German SS personnel.
4 Probert, Bomber Harris, pp. 154–5.
5 Ibid., p. 223.
6 Ibid., pp. 193–4, 227.
7 Ibid., p. 208.
8 See A. Nussbaum, ‘Frédéric de Martens, Representative Tsarist Writer on International Law’, XXII Acta Scandinavica juris gentium (in: Nordisk Tidsskrift for International Law), 1952, pp. 51–66.
9 Information about the effects of the German bombing assault on the British Isles in the First World War can be found in Colin McInnes and G. D. Sheffield, (eds.) Warfare in the Twentieth Century, London, 1988. See the article by J. Pimlott ‘The Theory and Practice of Strategic Bombing’ in McInnes and Sheffield, p. 121.
10 Caparetto is now Kobarid in Slovenia. Its battle is the setting of Hemingway’s, A Farewell to Arms.
11 Douhet’s book appeared in English twenty years later, translated by Dino Ferrari (New York, 1942; all references here are to this edition) but its tenets were widely known and discussed long before this.
12 Douhet The Command of the Air, pp. 28, 47–8, 57–8, 309.
13 Quoted Pape, Bombing to Win, pp. 60–1.
14 Quoted ibid., p. 61.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid., pp. 61–2.
18 Basil Liddell Hart, Paris, or the Future of War, London, 1925.
19 Ibid., p. 50.
20 Ibid., p. 45.
21 Quoted in Brian Bond, Liddell Hart, London, 1979, p. 145.
22 Memo of May 1928 to fellow service chiefs, quoted in OH, vol. IV, p. 74.
23 A. D. Harvey, ref p. 665.
24 Ibid., p. 663.
25 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 99.
26 Pape, Bombing to Win, p. 63.
27 Ibid., p. 63–4.
28 Ibid., p. 64.
29 The lecturer quoted by Pape is M. S. Fairchild, an instructor at the Air Corps Tactical School. These lectures were given in 1939, and are to be found in the archives of the US Air Force Historical Research Agency at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. Ibid., p. 63.
30 Quoted ibid.
31 Like Douhet, Mitchell’s passionate enthusiasm for air power got him into trouble. He had shown brilliant imagination in using massed air power in support of ground operations in the reduction of the St Mihiel salient in the last year of the First World War, while in charge of the US combat aircraft in France; but his outspokenness in criticising US Army and Navy foot-dragging over air-power matters resulted in a court martial in 1925, and the end of his military career. At the time of the court martial he held the rank of brigadier-general. He wrote several books on air strategy, and a bomber aircraft was posthumously named after him, a tribute after the dust of old political rivalries had settled down.
32 Pape, Bombing to Win, p. 65.
33 Ibid., p. 66.
34 Quoted ibid.
35 The field manual in question was the War Department Field Manual 100–20 (FM 100–20, Command and Employment of Air Power), the ‘Declaration of Independence’ of the US air force. It embodied a good deal of Air Corps Tactical School pre-war thinking, not least in asserting that ‘concentrated use of the air striking force is a battle winning factor of the first importance. Control of available air power must be exercised through the air force commander if this inherent flexibility and ability to deliver a decisive blow are to be fully exploited’.
36 This is said to have been the work of a pro-German US Senator called Burton Wheeler, who gave copies of AWPD-1 to the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Times-Herald in the autumn of 1941.
37 Stewart Halsey Ross, Strategic Bombing by the United States in World War II: The Myths and the Facts, Jefferson, nc, 2003. He points out that trying to hit a target smaller than a football field from five miles up in the air with an ordinary (that is, unguided or ‘unsmart’) ‘iron bomb’ would be extremely difficult in the best circumstances, let alone in combat conditions. The point is well made.
38 Ibid., chapter 5, passim.
39 Almost any town in Germany during the war could be claimed to have some military importance; German war production had been widely dispersed, rail links were always a target, refugees were everywhere, and of course the premise of area bombing is that civilians support their country’s military effort. Frederick Taylor in his Dresden shows how much can be nominated as having military and strategic value in that city and its environs. Two observations are relevant: Dresden doubtless had some military value to an attacker, but its cultural value might have been a better reason for not bombing it; and in the case of Wurzberg and other historical towns, the same definitely applies.
40 Presciently Grey said when hostilities began, ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.’ Given that the events of 1914 ushered in hot and cold war for the next seventy-five years, until the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, he was right.
41 The relatively successful naval conferences were held in 1921, 1927 and 1930. Frank B. Kellogg and Aristide Briand were respectively the US Secretary of State and the French Foreign Secretary who originally brokered the treaty.
42 This commission was established following the agreement reached in the Locarno Pact, establishing the borders of Germany. It seemed, but did not prove to be, an auspicious moment for continuing the peace process with a discussion about limiting the means to war.
43 Philip S. Meilinger (US Naval War College), ‘Clipping the Bomber’s Wings: The Geneva Disarmament Conference and the Royal Air Force 1932–34’, War in History 1999 6 (3).
44 Ibid.
45 Ibid.
46 Quoted in F. Emme (ed.), The Impact of Air Power, Princeton, nj, 1959, pp. 51–2.
47 Hansard, House of Commons, 14 September 1939.
48 Spencer Weart and Gertrude Szilard, Leo Szilard: His Version of the Facts, Boston, ma, 1979 pp. 54–5.
49 Quoted by Gerard DeGroot in his excellent history of the development of the atom bomb, The Bomb, London, 2004, p. 24.
50 Ibid., p. 28.
51 Ibid., p. 69.
52 The meeting took place on 19 September 1944 at Roosevelt’s country retreat of Hyde Park. Ibid., p. 70.
53 Ibid., p. 74.
54 Ibid., p. 77.
55 Ibid., p. 85.
56 Ibid., p. 103.
57 Quoted ibid., p. 96.
58 Quoted ibid.
59 Sebald, Natural History of Destruction, p. 99.
60 Revisionist and neo-Nazi historians alike claim that the true architect of the Morgenthau Plan was Harry Dexter White, Morgenthau’s influential aide in the Treasury Department, who in the McCarthy era was accused of being a Soviet spy, and who is (therefore) said by revisionists and neo-Nazis to have invented the idea of the ‘pastoralisation’ of Germany so that it would fall all the more readily into Communist hands. This is among the more moderate of the conspiracy theories that all too fruitfully spring up in this connection. The theorists’ speculations are fuelled by the fact that the McCarthy witch-hunts embroiled a number of Treasury Department officials, and that White himself, after his appearance before the Un-American Activities Committee, died of a heart attack just a few days later – suspected by the conspiracy theorists, of course, of having committed suicide. His two daughters have consistently defended their father’s probity, as recently as 2003 writing to the Washington Times to protest against a repeat of the McCarthy accusations in a new book.
61 Ralf Georg Reuth, Goebbels: The Life of Joseph Goebbels, translated by Krishna Winston, London, 1993, p. 339.
62 Joseph Goebbels, ‘What Is At Stake’, Das Reich, 27 September 1944. Source: ‘Was auf dem Spiele steht’, Der steile Aufstieg, Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1944, pp. 3–9. One wonders, if those who proposed bringing up German children away from the influences that made Nazism possible were ‘deranged’ to propose this, what description is to be given to people who gassed children to death in Auschwitz and elsewhere. Interestingly, in the earlier part of this article Goebbels wrote: ‘Those who bear no responsibility have the prerogative to think about life and the world however they wish. Those in government are different. They must represent the whole interest of their people, not only the interests of the present, but even more importantly those of the future. Their wishes and actions must follow rules that take account of the most varied factors affecting the life of their nation, as well of the nations in their sphere of influence . . . One cannot accuse the German government of ever violating this principle in the course of the war. It has carefully avoided laying out broad theoretical war goals, always limiting itself to fighting for the freedom, independence, and vital living space of its people. Most of its military actions were forced upon it. Its offensives always had their origins in a desire to defend the nation. After defeating an enemy, it made reasonable demands that were both practical and absolutely necessary.’ Ibid.
63 The source for these putative facts is the Morgenthau Diaries, held at Hyde Park, the Roosevelt house in New York State, and this interpretation of their contents is owed to a paper by Anthony Kubek, ‘The Morgenthau Plan and the Problem of Policy Perversion’, in a revisionist publication called The Journal for Historical Review (vol 9 no 3 Summer 1989) pp. 287 et. seq. Because of this provenance the report to this point here is tentatively given. Morgenthau’s book is however in the public domain, and responsible historians have acknowledged its degree of influence on Roosevelt and Churchill independently; for example, Martin Gilbert, The Second World War, 2nd edn, London, 2000, p. 592.
64 Gilbert, ibid.
65 Lord Moran, Diary (unpublished) 13 September 1944; see Lord Moran, Churchill at War 1940–1945, London, 2002, pp. 177–8.
66 In his Memoirs Cordell Hull was unequivocal in his condemnation of Morgenthau’s interference in what was mainly State Department business: ‘Emotionally upset by Hitler’s rise and his persecution of the Jews, Morgenthau often sought to induce the President to anticipate the State Department or act contrary to our better judgment. We sometimes found him conducting negotiations with foreign governments which were the function of the State Department. His work in drawing up a catastrophic plan for the post-war treatment of Germany and inducing the President to accept it without consultation with the State Department, was an outstanding instance of this interference.’
67 One of the very first calls for Germany to be diminished in size and/or broken up into smaller states, de-industrialised or not, came from France in the earliest part of the war. The proposals were not taken seriously by those, among them H. G. Wells in What Are We Fighting For (London, 1940), who were thinking instead of what kind of international regime should come into existence after the war to prevent future wars – the failed promise of the ‘war to end all wars’ that had not quite succeeded in ending war twenty years before.
68 B. E. Schmitt’s speech was reported in Time magazine for 1 December 1941, pp. 57–8, under the title ‘History Lesson’. See also Bernadotte Schmitt, What Shall We Do with Germany?, Public Policy Pamphlets no 38, University of Chicago Press, 1943.
69 The entire text of this extraordinary book has been reprinted by the revisionist Institute for Historical Review and placed by it, with other documents conducing to its view of the past, on the internet, where it is easy to find. For its bona fides as not being a forgery, it has Library of Congress call number DD222.K3; and it can be purchased through Amazon.com.
70 Kaufman’s book was reviewed in, among other places, Time (24 March 1941, pp. 95–6).
71 Louis Nizer, What to Do with Germany, Chicago and New York, 1944, p. 13.
72 Ibid., p. 17.
73 Ibid., pp. 18–19.
74 Norman Cousins, ‘The Time for Hate Is Now’, The Saturday Review of Literature, 4 July 1942, pp. 14–18, quoted in James Martin, ‘The Bombing and Negotiated Peace Questions – in 1944’, Rampart Journal, vol. IV, no. 1, Spring 1968, p. 78.
75 Martin, ibid., p. 79. Clifton Fadiman was the host for many years of a popular radio show called ‘Information Please’, and he is otherwise best known for the anthologies of children’s literature he edited. He condensed the Encyclopaedia Britannica, chaired the selection process for the Book of the Month Club and died in 1999 at the age of ninety-five. From such genial material could come ‘the fury of the non-combatant’, in C. E. Montague’s pungent phrase. To him is owed the remark that ‘The German mind has a talent for making no mistakes but the very greatest’.
76 Robert Lord Vansittart, Bones of Contention, London, 1945. See the review in Time, 16 July 1945. According to Anthony Eden, Vansittart was ‘a sincere, almost fanatical, crusader’ rather than ‘an official giving cool and disinterested advice’.
77 Hansard, House of Lords, 10 March 1943. For the whole question at issue here see also: Steven Casey, ‘The Campaign to Sell a Harsh Peace for Germany to the American Public 1944–48, History, 2005, vol. 90, no. 297, pp. 62–92.
78 I reviewed this book on its first appearance, in the Financial Times in 1996. For a longer and more detailed criticism of the book see Richard Neuhaus in First Things 65 (August–September 1996), pp. 36–41.
79 See Knell, To Destroy a City, chapter 1 passim.
80 Ronald Schaffer Wings of Judgment, New York, 1985, p. 153.
81 Quoted ibid.
82 Ibid.
83 Ibid., p. 154.
84 Curtis LeMay, Mission with LeMay: My Story, New York, 1965, p. 387.
85 See Thomas M. Coffey, Iron Eagle: The Turbulent Life of General Curtis LeMay, New York, 1986.
86 Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, War Diaries 1939–45, edited by Alex Danchev and Daniel Todman, London, 2001. The diary is littered with exclamation marks, sometimes two or three at a time, and reports of bird-watching excitements, making the book read like a boy-scout memoir at times. Alanbrooke had a reputation for imperturbability and sang-froid to which the diary gives the lie.
87 Ibid., p. 460.
88 Ibid., p. 547.
89 Ibid., p. 325.
90 Ibid., p. 586.
91 Quoted Richards, p. 97; see chapter 2 above.
92 An account of this meeting is given in Richard Overy’s powerful and absorbing analysis of the Allied victory in World War Two, Why The Allies Won, London, 1995, p. 102.
93 Ibid.
94 The phrase ‘combined offensive’ is not exactly descriptive; in fact the two air forces continued more or less separate campaigns, occasionally bombing the same targets on alternating nights and days, but generally speaking each following a different drum.
95 OH, p. 112.
96 Quoted ibid.
97 This has been suggested a number of times as part of the reason for the Dresden attack.
98 Richards, The Hardest Victory, p. 270.
5 Voices of Conscience
1 Corder Catchpool, On Two Fronts: Letters of a Conscientious Objector, London, 1918.
2 Quoted in Paul Berry and Mark Bostridge, Vera Brittain: A Life, Boston, ma, 2002, p. 431.
3 Given that the appointment to Canterbury effectively lay in Churchill’s gift, and that Bell was regarded as the natural successor to Temple, it is clear that Bell’s opposition to the bombing aspect of the war effort was an irritant to the government.
4 Vera Brittain, Seed of Chaos, London, 1944. Published for the Bombing Restriction Committee by New Vision Press.
5 Seed of Chaos was republished just as this book was going to press, by Continuum in London. It is included in Vera Brittain, One Voice: Pacifist Writings from the Second World War.
6 Ibid., p. 7.
7 Ibid., pp. 7–8.
8 Ibid., pp. 8–9. The comment quoted occurred in the New Statesman, 18 December 1943; Churchill’s remark about an ‘experiment’ is from an interview in Time magazine, 7 June 1943.
9 Ibid., p. 9, italics in the original.
10 Ibid., p. 10.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid. The Shaw remark comes from a letter by him to the Sunday Express, 28 November 1943. As the highly contemporary nature of Brittain’s quotations show, the debate about the bombing was a lively one in the pages of the national press.
13 Ibid., p. 11.
14 Ibid., p. 12.
15 The results of this poll were published in the News Chronicle, 2 May 1941.
16 The speech was given on 15 July 1941. Ibid., p. 13.
17 Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, made this speech on 27 January 1940.
18 Brittain, Seed of Chaos, p. 16.
19 Ibid. The speech was made on 19 May 1943.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid., p. 17.
22 Ibid., p. 18.
23 Ibid., pp. 19–20.
24 Ibid., p. 20.
25 Ibid., p. 21.
26 Harris, Bomber offensive, p. 92.
27 Brittain, Seed of Chaos, p. 25, quoting the Daily Telegraph of 12 August 1943, itself in turn quoting German claims about how RAF Bomber Command was operating. Given the difficulties of accuracy in night area bombing, the claim might relate to an aspiration rather than a standardly successful practice on Bomber Command’s part.
28 Ibid., p. 24.
29 Quoted ibid., p. 25.
30 Quoted ibid.
31 Ibid., p. 26.
32 Time magazine, 7 July 1943, quoted ibid., p. 27.
33 Ibid., p. 34.
34 Quoted – and with names of the signatories appended – ibid., p. 37.
35 Quoted ibid., p. 97.
36 Letter to the Hull Daily Mail, 26 November 1943, quoted ibid., p. 98.
37 Quoted in Paul Berry and Mark Bostridge, Vera Brittain: A Life, Boston, ma, 1995, p. 438.
38 Brittain, Seed of Chaos, p. 97.
39 Article in Evening Standard, 4 January 1944, quoted ibid., p. 100.
40 Article in the Daily Mail, 6 January 1944, quoted ibid.
41 Quoted ibid., p. 102.
42 Corder Catchpool in the Friend, 25 June 1943.
43 Hansard, House of Commons, 28 July 1943 – in the midst of Operation Gomorrah.
44 Quoted ibid., pp. 104–5.
45 Quoted ibid., pp. 106–7.
46 Ibid., p. 108.
47 Ibid., p. 114.
48 Ibid., p. 115.
49 The signatories were George A. Buttrick, J. Henry Carpenter, Allan Knight Chalmers, Henry H. Crane, Albert E. Day, Phillips P. Elliott, Harry Emerson Fosdick, Georgia Harkness, John Hayes Holmes, Allan A. Hunter, Josephine Johnson, E. Stanley Jones, John Paul Jones, Rufus Jones, John H. Lathrop, Kenneth Scott Latourette, W. Appleton Lawrence, Elmore M. McKee, Walter Mitchell, Kirby Page, Clarence Pickett, Edwin McNeill Poteat, Richard Roberts, Paul Scherer, Ralph Sockman, Earnest F. Tittle, Oswald Garrison Villard, and Winifred Wygal. Most of these were widely known in their own day. The US did not have an anti-area-bombing campaign as such, apart from the support given to Brittain’s pamphlet, but it had a small and courageous pacifist movement, much vilified and often physically attacked by members of the public and armed forces on leave.
50 Berry and Bostridge, Vera Brittain, p. 439.
51 James Martin, ‘The Bombing and Negotiated Peace Questions – in 1944’, Rampart Journal, vol. IV, no. 1, Spring 1968, p. 112.
52 Quoted ibid., p. 113.
53 Ibid., p. 114.
54 Ibid.
55 Ibid.
56 Berry and Bostridge, Vera Brittain, p. 440.
57 Ibid.
58 Ibid.
59 Charles E. Montague, Disenchantment, London, 1922, p. 220.
60 George Orwell, ‘As I Please,’ Tribune, 19 May 1944.
61 Ibid.
62 Ibid.
63 Berry and Bostridge, Vera Brittain, p. 441.
64 Quoted ibid.
65 Ibid.
66 Ibid., p. 442.
67 See Benjamin King and Timothy Kutta, Impact: The History of Germany’s V-Weapons in World War II, Cambridge, ma, 1998.
6 The Case Against the Bombing
1 Augustine ref.
2 For completeness it is worth pointing out that the justum bellum is one that has both justum ad bellum – just causes for war and aims in them – and jus in bello – just practice in the conduct of war. On this definition if either justum ad or jus in fails, there is no justum bellum. In my remarks here I am implicitly arguing that a war can remain just given its causes and the aims of the (so to say) aggrieved combatant, even if some aspect of jus in bello fails. But too much of the latter must threaten to impugn the justice of the whole; there is a question of proportions. The thought here is that even if World War II Allied area bombing turns out on examination to be unjust, it does not make the war as a whole so from the Allied point of view.
3 Otto von Gericke, ‘The Sack of Magdeburg,’ Readings in European History, ed. J. H. Robinson, New York, 1906.
4 Hugo Grotius, De Jure Belli ac Pacis, Book III, chapter 1, section iv; chapter 4, section ii.
5 Ibid., chapter 4, section ix.
6 Ibid., chapter 5, section i.
7 Ibid., chapter 5, section ii.
8 Voltaire, Candide, chapter 3, ‘How Candide Escaped from the Bulgarians and What Befell Him Afterwards’.
9 Sun Tzu, The Art of War, translated by Lionel Giles, London, 1910, chapter II.
10 See US Congress, House, The Trial of Henry Wirz, 40th Cong., 2nd sess, 1867–8. H. Doc. 1331.
11 One of the earliest of these was published in 1908 by a man who had himself been a Union prisoner of the Confederate forces; James Madison Page, The True Story of Andersonville Prison: A Defence of Major Henry Wirz, New York, 1908. Wirz was a captain at the time of the atrocities, a major by the time of his trial.
12 Geoffrey Best, War and Law Since 1945, Oxford, 1994, p. 41.
13 This is the text of the relevant part of Convention IV ‘respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land and its annex: Regulations concerning the Laws and Customs of War on Land’. This version was deposited at The Hague on 18 October 1907.
14 Self-denying ordinances like the Gas Protocol of 1925 would doubtless not be observed in war if the advantage of violating the protocol outweighed the disadvantage. But the combatant nations had learned in 1914–18 that the vagaries of the wind made gas an unreliable friend; considerations of prudence probably had a greater part to play than principle in the ‘restraint’ shown by the Allied and Axis forces in this regard.
15 Best, War and Law, p. 185.
16 In this connection one must see a book of quite exceptional interest, A World at Total War, edited by Roger Chickering, Stig Forster and Bernd Greiner, Cambridge, 2005. The Introduction is a brilliant survey of the questions prompted by the idea of ‘total war’. Some of the points raised by the papers in this volume come into focus in the next chapter.
17 Joseph E. Persico, Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial, New York, 1994, pp. 33–4.
18 Ibid., p. 33.
19 Ibid., p. 35.
20 See Antony Beevor’s excoriating account of the atrocities involved in Soviet–German fighting in the last months of the war in Berlin – The Downfall 1945. As regards the ‘tu quoque’ problem, Persico, Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial.
21 See Best, War and Law, pp. 180–1.
22 Ibid., p. 181.
23 Ibid., p. 81.
24 Hansard, House of Commons, 5th Series, 1937–8, vol. 337, col. 937.
25 Harris, Bomber Offensive, p. 177.
26 Best, War and Law, p. 201.
7 The Defence of Area Bombing
1 Harris, Bomber Offensive, p. 176.
2 Perhaps his claim becomes understandable when we remember that Harris was a gourmand.
3 Quoted Schaffer, Wings of Judgment, p. 146.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid., p. 148.
6 Overy, Why the Allies Won, p. 124.
7 Ibid., p. 198.
8 See Chickering, Forster and Greiner, A World at Total War: Global Conflict and the Politics of Destruction 1937–1945, Cambridge, 2005.
9 Ibid., p. 3.
10 Ibid., p. 7.
11 Taylor, Dresden.
12 Ibid., p. 406.
13 Overy, Why the Allies Won, pp. 128–30.
14 Quoted Taylor, Dresden, p. 406.
15 Harris, Bomber Offensive, p. 144.
16 But one should add: with the honourable and important exception of its contribution to staving off the invasion threat of 1940.
17 Neillands, The Bomber War, p. 343.
18 Terraine, The Right of the Line, p. 663.
19 Richards, The Hardest Victory, pp. 298–9.
20 Ibid., p. 289.
21 Thomas L. Friedman, International Herald Tribune, 25 March 2005.
22 Neillands, The Bomber War, p. 386.
23 Clausewitz and Macaulay, quoted ibid.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid.
8 Judgement
1 Schaffer, Wings of Judgement, p. 196.
Postscript
1 Captain S. W. Roskill, The War at Sea 1939–45, London, 1954–6, Volume 2, pp. 83–5.
2 Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, London, 2006, p. 650.
3 Ibid., p. 626.