Chapter 3
On the evening of 27 July 1943 the western districts of Hamburg were still dotted with fires from the first RAF attack three nights earlier. Stocks of coal and coke heaped in the open air were smouldering fiercely, and at night made a vivid glow that could be seen for scores of miles in every direction. This posed an air-raid danger, so the authorities ordered a maximum effort to extinguish the fires. When the bombers returned for the great firestorm attack of 27–8 July, their bombs fell chiefly in the east of the city; the municipal fire-fighting appliances were still struggling with the coal fires in the western districts.
Most of the civilians ‘dehoused’ in the first attack had been evacuated, and although many others had also been trying to leave they were discouraged by the authorities because of strain on transport facilities. Reinforcements were arriving in the city in the form of extra flak batteries, and in the warm summer nights their crews slept on the ground next to their guns.
Many of the city’s residents did likewise, finding patches of grass outside the public air-raid shelters and resting their heads on their bundles, ready to hurry into the shelters as soon as bombing started. When the air-raid warming sounded on 27 July everyone readied themselves to take shelter, but for more than an hour nothing happened: no bombing, no bombers, no flak; so they hesitated at the entrances of the shelters, and after a time returned to their patches of grass. The citizens of Hamburg did not know it, but the bomber stream was passing to the north of the city, ready to swing round and attack from the east. Bomber Command planners hoped that an approach from this unexpected quarter of the sky would disorganise the defences. And so it did. The attackers’ bombs fell on the most densely populated districts east of the Elbe – Billwarder Ausschlag, crammed with eight-storey workers’ apartment blocks, St Georg, Barmbek, Wandsbek, and the three areas of Hamm – Hamm-Nord, Hamm-Süd and Hammerbrook.
Gunners manning flak batteries could not take shelter as others could, and for that reason had a perilous grandstand view of what happened as the bombers arrived over their target. Leutnant Hermann Bock – who had been born in Hamburg, and was now commander of a flak battery which had been sent hastily from Mönchengladbach to strengthen the defences of his native city – wrote:
Hamburg’s night sky became in minutes, even seconds, a sky so absolutely hellish that it is impossible even to try to describe it in words. There were aeroplanes held in the probing arms of the searchlights, fires breaking out, billowing smoke everywhere, loud, roaring waves of explosions, all broken up by great cathedrals of light as the blast bombs exploded, cascades of marker bombs slowly drifting down, stick incendiary bombs coming down with a rushing noise. No noise heard by humans – no outcry – could be heard. It was like the end of the world. One could think, feel, see and speak of nothing more.1
Hamburg’s citizens had to take turns as fire wardens in their places of work. They had uniforms and steel helmets, some rudimentary training, and instructions to watch for fires and put them out as quickly as possible. In some cases the ‘fire wardens’ were, despite the appearance of authority and expertise bestowed by the uniforms, just young teenagers (as also were the gunners on flak batteries). One, a sixteen-year-old girl, described how she cowered in a cellar as the walls around her shook and cracked, while she and her companions prayed silently. One of their number, another young girl, became hysterical – as if presciently so: the girl’s mother and grandmother were killed at her home that night.2 Another fire warden, older and more experienced, described trying to remain on watch on the steps of his shelter, ready with his comrades to hasten out at the first sign of flames, when the firestorm struck without warning:
Suddenly there came a rain of fire from heaven. We tried to get out to pump but it was impossible. The air was actually filled with fire. It would have meant certain death to leave the shelter . . . Smoke seeped into the shelter through every crack. Every time you opened the steel doors you could see fire all around . . . Then a storm started, a shrill howling in the street. It grew into a hurricane . . . The whole yard, the canal, in fact as far as we could see, was just a whole, great, massive sea of fire.
Another survivor described the howling of the firestorm as ‘the devil laughing’.3
The firestorm started in Hammerbrook at about 1.20 a.m., the ferocious heat of the inferno sucking in air at hurricane speeds and reaching temperatures of 800 degrees centigrade or more. The bombing was still in progress, and lasted for another half an hour, spreading the area of the firestorm beyond its original core to the outer suburbs and into the city centre. In all, an area of about four square miles (ten square kilometres) was effectively incinerated.4 The firestorm raged until 3.30 a.m., more than an hour after the last bombs had been dropped.
During the firestorm its victims were confronted with a terrible choice: to stay in their cellars, where the temperatures were rising to impossible heights, the air was filling thickly with smoke, and the buildings above them were crashing down; or risk running outside where the air itself seemed to be aflame. Survivors from the margins of the firestorm – few people within its perimeters survived – described the scene in apocalyptic terms.
They spoke of the tremendous force of hot, dry winds against which even strong men were unable to struggle, and which forced open doors of houses and broke the glass in their windows. Anything light was immediately whipped away, bursting into flames as it went . . . what appeared to be ‘bundles of flames’ or ‘towers or walls of fire’ sometimes shot out of a burning building and along a street. There were ‘fiery whirlwinds’ which could snatch people in the street and immediately turn them into human torches while other people, only a few yards away, were untouched. The wind was always accompanied by clouds of sparks which looked like ‘a blizzard of red snowflakes’ and all survivors remember the shrieking, howling of the storm as it raced through the streets.5
In the ‘pan of a gigantic oven’ that Hamburg had become, the searing winds changed direction violently and unpredictably, sweeping the walls of fire along with them. Women found their light summer frocks bursting into flame, and tore them off to run naked from the inferno.6 In the cellars, otherwise unscathed people suffocated to death. Police reports and eyewitness accounts later confirmed many of the horror stories told ‘of demented Hamburgers carrying bodies of deceased relatives in their suitcases – a man with the corpse of his wife and daughter, a woman with the mummified body of her daughter, or other women with the heads of their dead children’7. One of these shocking details is to be found in an account, quoted by W. G. Sebald, given by someone who saw refugees from Hamburg trying to board a train in Bavaria, in the struggle dropping a suitcase which ‘falls on the platform, bursts open and spills its contents. Toys, a manicure case, singed underwear. And last of all, the roasted corpse of a child, shrunk like a mummy, which its half-deranged mother has been carrying about with her, the relic of a past that was still intact a few days ago’.8
Some families survived together: ‘Mother wrapped me in wet sheets, kissed me, and said, Run!’ reported Traute Koch, aged fifteen at the time of the attack, and living in Hamm.
I hesitated at the door. In front of me I could see only fire – everything red like the door of a furnace. An intense heat struck me. A burning beam fell in front of my feet. I shied back, but then when I was ready to jump over it, it was whipped away by a ghostly hand. I reached . . . the building in front of which we had arranged to meet again . . . Someone came out, grabbed me in their arms, and pulled me into the doorway. I screamed for my mother and somebody gave me a drink – wine or schnapps – I still screamed and then my mother and my little sister were there. About twenty people had gathered in the cellar. We sat, holding tightly to each other and waited. My mother wept bitterly and I was terrified.9
Others were not so lucky. Rolf Witt, who lived in Borgfelde, close to the epicentre of the firestorm, made a dash for freedom from the chokingly smoke-filled cellar where he was sheltering with his parents and others. He thought his parents were following close behind, but when he looked back they were not there, and he saw that their apartment block had collapsed. ‘I never found my parents and it was never sure where or how they died. I have always felt guilty that I abandoned them. Later, when their shelter was cleared, they found fifty-five bodies – at least they found fifty-five skulls . . . I never met another survivor from my home or the houses at the back.’10
A greengrocer who lived near the canal in the Loschplatz told the compiler of a police report following the raid:
Many people started burning and jumping into the canal. Horrible scenes took place at the quay. People burned to death with horrible suffering; some became insane. Many dead bodies were all around us and I became convinced that we too would perish here. I crouched with my family behind a large stack of roofing material. Here we lost our daughter. Later on, it transpired that she had jumped into the canal and almost drowned but was saved by an army officer and she returned to us early next morning. Please spare me from having to describe further details.11
When the firestorm was over, a stream of refugees began to leave the city, first in a trickle, then in a mighty flood. Traute Koch and her mother and sister at first went home, only to find the house a pile of rubble. They could not stand staring at it for long because the ground beneath their feet was too hot.
We came to the junction of the Hammer Landstrasse and Louisenweg. I carried my little sister and also helped my mother climb over the ruins. Suddenly, I saw tailors’ dummies lying around. I said, ‘Mummy, no tailors lived here and, yet, so many dummies lying around.’ My mother grabbed my arm and said, ‘Go on. Don’t look too closely. On. On. We have to get out of here. Those are dead bodies.’12
A fireman searched for his war-disabled brother.
I only got to the Heidenkampsweg. In the entrance to the Maizena Haus [a large office building] I saw a lot of dead, naked people on the steps. I thought that they had been killed by a blast bomb and been blown out of the basement air raid shelter. What surprised me was that the people were all lying face downwards. Only later did we find out that these people had died there through lack of oxygen. I climbed over the ruins further into the damaged area. There were no people alive at all. The houses were all destroyed and still burning. In the Süderstrasse I saw a burnt out tramcar in which naked bodies were lying on top of each other. The glass of the windows had melted. Probably these people had sought refuge from the storm in the tram. I eventually reached my brother’s home on the Grevenweg; it was just a heap of smoking bricks. I helped to clear their shelter five weeks later. There was only charred bones and ash. I found a few objects that belonged to my relatives – their house keys and some coins that my nephew was always playing with.13
A woman who hurried to Hamburg the day after the firestorm to find her parents, had to fight with sentries posted to keep people from entering the worst-affected areas. Anne-Lies Schmidt said,
My uncle and I went on foot into this terror. No one was allowed into the devastated district but I believe that one’s stubbornness becomes stronger at the sight of such sacrifice. We fought bodily with the sentries on duty and we got in. My uncle was arrested.
Four-storey-high blocks of flats were like glowing mounds of stone right down to the basement. Everything seemed to have melted . . . Women and children were so charred as to be unrecognisable; those that had died through lack of oxygen were half charred and recognisable. Their brains tumbled from their burst temples and their insides from the soft parts under the ribs. How terribly must these people have died. The smallest children lay like fried eels on the pavement. Even in death they showed signs of how they must have suffered – their hands and arms stretched out as if to protect themselves from that pitiless heat.
I found the bodies of my parents but it was forbidden to take them because of the danger of epidemic. Nothing to remember them by. No photographs. Nothing! All their precious little possessions they had taken to the basement were stolen. I had no tears. The eyes became bigger but the mouth remained closed tight.14
When the bombers left Hamburg that night they could see it burning from 120 miles away. Two nights later they were back; and they were back yet again a further three nights after that.
* * *
The distinguished Australian statesman Richard Casey, later Lord Casey of Berwick, kept a diary while serving in Churchill’s War Cabinet. He recorded watching with Churchill a film showing RAF bombers in action over the Ruhr. ‘All of a sudden Churchill gives a start,’ Casey wrote, ‘and he says to me “Are we animals? Are we taking this too far?” I tell him it wasn’t us who had started all this and that this was what it was about: us or them.’15 Casey’s robust reply forms part of the standard justification given for the bomber war, but the Prime Ministerial pang of conscience thus recorded was by far not the only one Churchill had – though at other times, especially earlier in the war, he made uncompromising pronouncements about the necessity of unleashing an ‘exterminating attack’ on the Nazi homeland16 – nor does it represent more than a hint of the reason why he had it. This was that Churchill knew what relatively few others did: exactly what was being dropped from the bombers as they passed high over the flashes of explosions and the pulsing regions of fire below them.
To say that the bomb loads consisted of a mixture high explosive and incendiary weapons does little to convey what that meant in practice. Those sheltering in cellars during a Bomber Command raid felt the mighty thud and tremor of high explosives falling about them, and the accompanying alternation of suction–pressure–suction–pressure they caused.17 They learned to distinguish by sound the different kinds of incendiaries that showered down among the big bombs. A rustle like a flock of birds suddenly taking off represented a stick of incendiaries breaking apart as it neared the ground, sending individual incendiaries in all directions. An explosion like a sudden crack was a 12-kilogram fire bomb, shooting out flames to a distance of eighty metres. A big splash was a 14-kilogram fire bomb, which spread liquid rubber and benzene over a radius of fifty metres. The sound of a wet sack flopping heavily down was a canister containing twenty litres of benzol. A sharp explosion heralded a 106-kilogram bomb that hurled out rags soaked in benzene or heavy oil, or it was a 112-kilogram bomb that ejected a thousand patties of benzol and rubber over the surrounding area.18 Phosphorus, magnesium and thickened or gelled petroleum (the best example of which is ‘napalm’, invented at Harvard University in 1942 and used by the USAAF in Japan later in the war) were almost impossible to extinguish, splashing viscously and adhesively over buildings and people like lava, and burning at ferocious temperatures. People who leaped into canals when splashed with burning phosphorus found to their horror that it would spontaneously reignite when they got out of the water.
Among the incendiaries were scattered 2-kilogram ‘X’ bombs with a delayed fuse, designed to explode later when fire-fighters and other emergency workers had arrived on the scene.
The firestorm of Hamburg on the night of 27–8 July 1943, heralded as one of RAF Bomber Command’s greatest successes in its area-bombing campaign, does not have the historical status of the firebombing of Dresden on the night of 13–14 February 1945, nor of the firebombing of Tokyo on 9–10 March 1945, nor of the atom bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August 1945 respectively. The reasons are obvious ones. Dresden was a city of great beauty, one of the cultural treasures of Europe, and its immolation occurred at a time and in circumstances which many have found hard to justify. (I return to the Dresden bombing later.) The firebombing of Tokyo caused even greater immediate loss of life than the devastation of Hiroshima. The atom-bomb attacks were different again; they were sui generis, involving the use of a new weapon of unprecedented destructive power, the manner of whose effects on the cities and the people – especially, as regards the latter, the lingering effects of radiation sickness, and the still longer-term effects of illness and trauma – had no parallel even in the worst episodes of bombing in that or any other war. (I return to the Japanese bombings later, too.)
But there are other questions about Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They fall into a category made special not just by their character but by their timing. The bombing of Hamburg in Operation Gomorrah took place at the height of the war, when the outcome of the struggle was not yet certain, even though the Allied powers knew that they had industrial and manpower advantages that so far outstripped those of the Axis states that the balance of likelihood already lay well on their side.19 These other, later, bombings occurred when almost everyone involved could see that the war’s end was approaching. One can seriously ask for their justification even if one is already persuaded that such area attacks as Operation Gomorrah, conducted at the height of the war, were necessary or at least warranted by the circumstances at the time.
This is not intended to beg a question about any part of the Allies’ area-bombing campaigns. If Operation Gomorrah cannot be justified on moral grounds, then the massive deposit of explosive and incendiary power unleashed by the Allies between September 1944 and August 1945 has less chance of being so. Of this, more later.
In any case, the experience of those subjected to bombing in Hamburg can serve as an example of what it was like for those subjected to bombing anywhere, whether in Coventry early in the war or Tokyo close to its end. For each individual who experienced the terrifying ordeal of being on the receiving end of tons of high explosives and incendiaries, there can be no fine distinctions between occasions. There is scarcely need for a competition in ghastliness here. In recalling details of the aftermath of the firebombing of Dresden, the writer Kurt Vonnegut – a prisoner of war in Dresden at the time – described how the asphyxiated but otherwise unscathed bodies of victims in cellars were cremated by flame-throwers directed down the cellar stairs from the street.20 In recounting the experiences of individuals in Hiroshima, John Hersey described how a Jesuit priest found a group of about twenty soldiers who had been looking up at the Enola Gay as it flew above them high over the city, and whose eyes had in consequence been liquefied by the flash of the bomb, so that the jellies ran down their cheeks like tears.21
In the latter case the frisson of dread created by the thought of what atomic weaponry can do affects those who contemplate it more than those who actually suffer from it; for whether it is an atom bomb rather than tons of high explosives and incendiaries that does the damage, not a jot of suffering is added to its victims that the burned and buried, the dismembered and blinded, the dying and bereaved of Dresden or Hamburg did not feel.
This remark applies to the immediate trauma, of course: the real difference came afterwards, for to their blast deaths and injuries the atom bombs added years of illness and later premature deaths from cancer and other diseases. But from the point of view of those who dropped the bombs, these latter longer-term consequences were at best matters of speculation. What they knew when they planned to drop the atom bombs is what they knew when they planned to drop tons of high explosive and incendiaries on urban areas: that they would kill many, among them the elderly and children, and would destroy much in the way of buildings, facilities, schools, clinics, shops, houses, libraries, bus stations, vehicles, and an uncountable number of valuable things, even if only sentimentally so. That was the certainty on which the attacks were premised. And that is what they made happen. This is a bare statement of fact, on which all can agree, whether or not area bombing was right or wrong, necessary or otherwise.
Even before the war in Europe was over, the US authorities instituted a survey of the effects of strategic bombing on Nazi Germany. The resulting Summary Report of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (European War) was published on 30 September 1945. One of its principal aims was to provide information for use by the high command in the Pacific theatre as it pondered the application of air power to the war against Japan.
After the surrender of Japan a Strategic Bombing Survey was instituted for the Pacific theatre too. It resulted in a much longer Summary Report, which was published on 1 July 1946. The reason for the greater length of the Pacific report was its detailed focus on the results of the atom-bomb attacks, and the fact that the survey team had longer to collect and digest its data.
Both reports are models of their kind, and make absorbing and instructive reading for anyone wishing to understand the reasons for, and the value of, the strategic bombing carried out in the Second World War, and the difference made by the advent of atomic weapons.
As one would expect, to a great extent the effects of the bombing campaigns depended upon how well prepared Germany and Japan respectively were for aerial attack, and how their populations responded to it. In the Pacific report the US survey team stated that ‘Japan’s will and capacity for reconstruction, dispersal, and passive defence were less than Germany’s’.22 This might have been a function of the fact that whereas Germany sustained five years of bombing attacks – in three of these years very heavy attacks – Japan experienced nine months of bombing, and in that time suffered nearly the same number of civilian casualties as did Germany. The survey gives the figures as follows:
Total civilian casualties in Japan, as a result of 9 months of air attack, including those from the atomic bombs, were approximately 806,000. Of these, approximately 330,000 were fatalities. These casualties probably exceeded Japan’s combat casualties [that is, soldiers, sailors and airmen] which the Japanese estimate as having totalled approximately 780,000 during the entire war. The principal cause of civilian death or injury was burns. Of the total casualties approximately 185,000 were suffered in the initial attack on Tokyo of 9 March 1945. Casualties in many extremely destructive attacks were comparatively low. Yokahoma, a city of 900,000 population, was 47 percent destroyed in a single attack lasting less than an hour. The fatalities suffered were less than 5000.23
One reason for the high casualty rate in Tokyo was the relative unpreparedness of the population, and the firestorm that raged through the wooden city. As a result of the Tokyo bombing, other cities made fire breaks by tearing down whole streets of buildings. In some cities the fear of an attack grew proportionally with the length of time that the city remained unscathed. ‘The day before the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima,’ writes John Hersey, ‘the city, in fear of incendiary raids, had put hundreds of schoolgirls to work helping to tear down houses and clear fire lanes. They were out in the open when the bomb exploded. Few survived.’24
This, though, was five months after the Tokyo attack, which suggests that organisation of defence against air attack was not optimal. The main precaution taken by Japanese civilians was to flee the towns; an estimated eight and a half million urban dwellers sought shelter in rural districts. Everywhere in Japan civilians could see American aircraft flying overhead, on their way to or from bombing raids, unchallenged because the Japanese air force had ceased to resist. The demoralising effect of this was as great as that caused by actually being a victim of an air raid.
A striking aspect of the air attack was the pervasiveness with which its impact on morale blanketed Japan. Roughly one-quarter of all people in cities fled or were evacuated, and these evacuees, who themselves were of singularly low morale, helped spread discouragement and disaffection for the war throughout the islands. This mass migration from the cities included an estimated 8,500,000 persons. Throughout the Japanese islands, whose people had always thought themselves remote from attack, United States planes criss-crossed the skies with no effective Japanese air or anti-aircraft opposition. That this was an indication of impending defeat became as obvious to the rural as to the urban population.25
Matters were considerably different in Germany. Its Nazi rulers – the Party and the State were one and the same – anticipated war because they knew they were going to start one, and as early as 1935 had begun to plan air-raid alarm systems and shelters, first-aid services, and methods for dealing with gas attacks. Large underground shelters and massive above-ground shelters were built, and the entire programme of defence against bombing was intensified in 1940 when an emergency decree from the Führer’s office nominated eighty-two cities as key sites for special air-raid defence.
One of them was Cologne. By the time of the 1,000-bomber raid on 30–1 May 1942 the city had public shelters for 75,000 people, with twenty-five special deep bunkers for a further 7,500 (and twenty-nine additional such bunkers in process of being built). A total of 42,000 small air-raid shelters had been provided under or next to houses and apartment buildings for residents. Fourteen auxiliary hospitals had been constructed, giving an extra 1,760 emergency beds. The total cost of air-raid defences in Cologne prior to the 1,000-bomber raid was thirty-nine million marks. It was money well spent. The 1,000 bombers dropped 2,500 tons of high explosives and incendiaries, and destroyed centuries of history; the German dead numbered 469.26
Very soon after the drone of bombers had receded westwards in the early hours of 31 May 1943, the roads to Cologne started to fill with lorries bringing relief supplies – 34,000 items of clothing for adults, 50,000 items of clothing for children, 61,000 sheets, 90,000 boxes of soap powder, 100,000 metres of curtain material, 700,000 cakes of soap, 10,000,000 cigarettes. Bonn and Dusseldorf sent clerks to help local officials in Cologne deal with claims for war damage, and within a month 140,000 claims had been processed. When all claims had been processed (370,000 of them) a total of 126 million marks was paid out in damages to citizens. A small army of helpers arrived to assist the 5,200 workmen in Cologne detailed to clean up the city: 2,500 soldiers, 3,400 glaziers, and 10,000 building workers.27
The pattern was repeated whenever and wherever severe bombing occurred, at least up until the later part of 1944. When Frankfurt was repeatedly bombed in February and March 1944, losing the whole of its old city centre and large tracts of its suburbs, relief trains arrived after the raids bringing kettles of noodle soup with meat, bread and butter, and sausages.28
The efficiency and energy of the German people comes as no surprise, and prompts two immediate and contrary questions. The first is: how could Bomber Command hope to defeat a people capable of such swift and robust responses to what it could drop on them in the way of bomb loads? And the second is: what would Germany have been capable of as a military power, if it had not had to repair homes and water supplies, and supply sheets and soap to bombed cities?
Hamburg is an example of Bomber Command’s efforts to answer the first question. If a German city could bounce back so quickly from a massive bombing attack, as Cologne had done after the 1,000-bomber raid of the previous year, then the bombing attack needed to be even more massive. The target needed to be attacked again and again, both before recovery could start, and afterwards to hamper its efforts. The weight and frequency of attack was the crucial factor; early in the war Bomber Command could not mount anything like the scale of assault required to demoralise Germany’s populace and paralyse it logistically. In mid-1943 it was able to manage an Operation Gomorrah. By the last year of the war, and certainly in its last six months, Bomber Command and the Eighth Air Force between them were close to the required scale, and their effect on the urban landscape of Germany was clear for all to see.
The answer to the second question is one that plays a significant part in defences of the Allied bombing campaign. It is related to a larger fact about the effects of bombing on Germany: which is that it did not halt the growth of productivity in German industry, whose output grew throughout the war until its last months, and was at a markedly higher level at the end of 1944 than it had been in 1940. The question: what might Germany have done if it had not been bombed almost daily for all those years? takes on extra weight in the light of this consideration.
The facts and figures of Germany’s war production are themselves a matter of record, but controversy surrounds their significance. Until 1942 the Germany economy was far from being on a ‘total war’ footing, partly because the Nazi leadership believed that its wars would be quick and successful, and partly because it wished to keep economic activity as normal as possible in order not to burden the populace, wishing to avoid a repeat of the situation that followed the First World War when economic dislocation stirred popular unrest. This is not to say that Germany’s economy was functioning exactly as normal; to pay for their military adventures in the war’s opening years the Nazi government increased taxes sharply between 1938 and 1941, and limits on consumer activity raised levels of saving fivefold in the same period.
But when by the beginning of 1942 Germany found itself facing a longer and more demanding struggle than it had anticipated – by then it was fighting on several fronts simultaneously and suffering serious reverses on two of them (Russia and North Africa) – it accepted the need to move the economy on to a more dedicated war footing. On 8 February 1942 Hitler appointed Albert Speer as Minister of Armaments and Munitions, a post made vacant that same day by the death of Fritz Todt in a somewhat mysterious air crash. Todt was convinced that the difficulties being experienced on the Eastern Front portended the defeat of the Reich, and he ill-advisedly told Hitler so. A few hours later he was dead, and a few hours after that, Speer was given his job. Speer had until then been Hitler’s architect, and because architecture and grandiose schemes for magnificent Thousand-Year Reich cities stood high among Hitler’s hobbies, Speer was a favourite. He had designed and in a remarkably short time built Hitler’s splendid new Chancellery in Berlin, and had even designed the furniture for the Führer’s office in it. Hitler thought him the man for the job; and he was abundantly proved right.
Speer’s standing with Hitler meant that it was easy for him to take responsibility for war production away from Hermann Goering’s Reichswerke and Four-Year Plan, and from the Wehrmacht’s Armament Office, which had made itself unpopular with industry because of its continual interfering. By centralising and streamlining the organisation of procurement, thereby improving the co-ordination of industrial efforts to meet both military and domestic demand, Speer rapidly increased output. This was not achieved by converting more German industry to military production – a fuller war mobilisation of the economy came later, after Speer had with great difficulty persuaded Hitler to allow him to do it – but by making better use of what was already being done.29 The US Strategic Bombing Survey for Europe points out that the German economy’s ability to keep increasing production year on year to the end of 1944 showed that it was very under-utilised in the war’s early years. ‘Germany’s early commitment to the doctrine of the short war was a continuing handicap,’ the Survey team wrote:
Neither plans nor state of mind were adjusted to the idea of a long war. Nearly all German sources agree that the hope for a quick victory lasted long after the short war became a long one . . . The increase [in production] cannot be considered a testament to the efficiency of dictatorship. Rather it suggests the degree of industrial under-mobilisation in the earlier years. An excellent case can be made that throughout the war top government management in Germany was not efficient.30
However inefficient government management was, the result of Speer’s appointment was that between 1942 and the autumn of 1944 the production of rifles doubled, the production of hand grenades trebled, and the production of artillery pieces increased sevenfold. Three times as many aircraft were built in 1944 as in 1941. At the war’s end Nazi Germany had ten million men between the ages of 18 and 38 in uniform (this ignores the additional numbers, effectively useless, of the ‘Volkssturm’ home guard, in which boys from the age of 16 and men up to the age of 60 served). Despite the stories of bootless troops wearing summer uniforms on the Russian front in winter, which happened not because of production failures but because of military failures, the soldiers fighting in the streets of Berlin in May 1945 still had boots, rifles, artillery pieces, ammunition and hand grenades.31
How did the German economy sustain this prodigious effort? One factor was that Germany had conquered almost all of Europe, and had its resources to use at will. The industrial and agricultural capacity of occupied and client states was available for the Reich’s purposes, for example the bread-basket of the Ukraine, the coal and iron reserves of Silesia, the Romanian oil fields of Ploesti, and the sophisticated automotive, aircraft, electronics and armament factories of France, Czechoslovakia and Holland.32
Another factor is the immense labour resource that fell into Germany’s hands by the same means. Contract labour from conquered and client states, slave labour and prisoners of war, added vastly to Germany’s productive capacity. By the end of 1941 there were 3.5 million foreign labourers in Germany, including prisoners of war; a year later there were 4.6 million, most of the new influx from the Soviet Union; and by the autumn of 1944 there were 7.65 million, of whom 1.9 million were prisoners of war. These foreign workers accounted for more than a quarter of all those employed in the German economy. They made up half of the agricultural labour force, and a third each of the mining and construction industries. The largest contingents consisted of Russians and Poles, numbering respectively 2.12 million and 1.68 million. When not actually prisoners – who were paid nothing, and were effectively worked to death if they were Jewish or from the East – the foreign workers were paid relatively little, and not very well fed.33
It is no exaggeration to say that prisoners in the SS concentration camps were worked to death. One of the most notorious of the work camps was Mittelbau-Dora, which existed to serve armaments production – most notoriously, of the V2 ‘wonder weapon’ – in a vast network of underground tunnels near Nordhausen. The eleven-mile tunnel system had been built before the war to store Germany’s strategic oil reserves. In the damp chilly air where the prisoners both lived and, for long arduous hours, worked, fed on minuscule rations, the death rate was very high. Not many lasted more than a matter of weeks even if they arrived in good health.34
The presence of foreign labourers, under whatever guise, meant that although the Wehrmacht made heavy demands on home-grown German manpower, the supply of labour was always sufficient for large numbers to be diverted to repair bomb damage in cities, factories and railway marshalling yards, to clear rubble, and to collect and cremate the dead, without compromising industrial and agricultural production.
A third factor is that Germany plundered a vast amount of wealth from the conquered territories, and from its own and conquered Jewish populations. Jewish banks were taken over by German ones, shops and factories, homes and their contents, indeed fixed and liquid assets of all kinds, together amounting to the wealth of an advanced country, were taken costlessly into German hands; and supplemented yet further the Nazi state’s productive capacity.
With these advantages it is not surprising that German production quickly recovered from any industrial damage that occurred as a result of bombing attacks, even those as devastating as Operation Gomorrah. Of the 574 large factories in Hamburg, 186 were completely destroyed in Operation Gomorrah, and with them 4,118 of the 9,068 small factories. Half the workers in war-related industrial production in Hamburg were laid off for up to two months.35 The precision daylight bombing of the harbour and submarine works by Flying Fortresses of the US Eighth Army Air Force sank or damaged 180,000 tons of shipping and, according to post-war calculations, diminished total wartime U-boat production by 26 or 27 vessels. But the net loss of production in Hamburg’s big factories amounted to a mere 1.8 months’ output only; ‘Patriotism, the German character and the SS were enough to ensure that in the absence for many months of further heavy raids, Hamburg made a remarkable recovery.’36
Speer was very anxious when he first received news of the damage caused by Operation Gomorrah. He said that another half-dozen such raids would cripple Germany’s war production and force it to surrender. When he saw how quickly Hamburg recovered, however, he revised his opinion. Moreover, the expense of effort by Bomber Command was such that it could not mount any more Operation Gomorrahs for a while, not least because the cities Speer was worried about – Berlin, Munich, Stuttgart, Frankfurt, Leipzig and Augsburg – required such long flights over enemy territory that to attack them would invite high losses. Indeed, the ‘Battle of Berlin’ waged by Harris in the winter of 1943–4 in his effort to prove that bombing alone could win the war, proved this very point. The ‘Battle of Berlin’ was a costly defeat for Bomber Command, and it was not until Germany was on its knees in the winter of 1944–5 that Bomber Command could begin to ‘knock Germany flat’ as Harris phrased it: which in effect meant that Harris could achieve his aim only when Germany was already all but defeated.37
The second question, what would German industry have succeeded in doing if there had been no area-bombing campaign has in fact received quantified answers. According to the US Strategic Bombing Survey for Europe, German industry lost 9 per cent of production in 1943 and 17 per cent in 1944 because of area bombing. The figures were based on a small sample, so the British figures might be more indicative, though they are even less flattering: they have it that in the second half of 1943 German industrial production was down 8.2 per cent, in the second half of 1944 it was down 7.2 per cent, and in the first four months of 1945 it was down 9.7 per cent. The figures for specific areas of war production are the significant ones: the British survey estimated that armament output was down by about 3 per cent in 1943 and less than 1 per cent overall for 1944. ‘Considering that urban bombing had taken up about 45% of Bomber Command’s efforts in terms of tonnage dropped,’ writes Denis Richards, ‘these estimates seemed to show that the area offensive had profoundly disappointing results.’38
The principal target of Bomber Command’s area-bombing endeavours, remember, was ‘morale’ – the ‘will of the people’ of Germany to continue making war. On this point the man responsible for keeping up German morale was, to begin with, even more worried than Speer about the ability of Germany to survive, although in this case the anxiety concerned the psychological survival of its people. The man in question was Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda.
After Lübeck was bombed on 28–9 March 1942 as an experiment in incendiary attack, Goebbels wrote in his diary, ‘The damage is really enormous. I have been shown a newsreel of the destruction. It is horrible. One can well imagine how such a bombardment affects the population.’39 During the Battle of the Ruhr in the following spring and summer he visited some of the target cities, in Dortmund exclaiming that the raid of 23–4 May 1943 had ‘virtually totally destroyed’ the city.40 He was, however, surprised and pleased when, going on a walkabout in Berlin during the 1943–4 winter blitz of the city, crowds cheered him and patted him on the back: the Berliners were angered by the bombing, and welcomed the speeches in which he spoke of revenge.41 This was so despite the ferocity of the attacks. ‘The picture that greeted my eye in the Wilhelmplatz was one of utter desolation,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Hell itself seems to have broken loose over us.’42 And he had no illusions about the extent or importance of the damage that was being done. After the bombing of Leipzig on 2–3 December 1943 he wrote, ‘The centre of the city was especially hard hit. Almost all public buildings, theatres, the University, the Supreme Court, the Exhibition Halls etc have been completely destroyed or seriously damaged. About 150,000–200,000 people are without shelter.’ (He did not mention that the Exhibition Halls had been commandeered for the production of Junkers aircraft.)43
But until the closing months of the war, morale did not break. Even those actively opposed to Nazism were made grimly determined by the bombing, if only to weather the storm: ‘We repair because we must repair,’ wrote Ruth Andreas-Friederich, an anti-Nazi activist,
because we couldn’t live another day longer if one forbade us the repairing. If they destroy our living room, we move into the kitchen. If they knock the kitchen apart, we move over into the hallway. If only we can stay ‘at home’. The smallest corner of ‘at home’ is better than any palace in some strange place. For this reason all who have been driven out of the city by the bombs return home someday. They work with shovel and broom, with hammer, pliers and pick-axes. Until one day over the bombed-out foundations a new ‘at home’ exists. A Robinson-Crusoe lodge perhaps. But it is still ‘at home’. The last thing one saves from a burning house is a pillow because it is the last piece of ‘at home’.44
Goebbels sought to counter the morale challenge of bombing with an incessant stream of speeches and articles. He was still doing so even in the last devastating weeks of the war, with an article entitled ‘Life Goes On’ in Das Reich for 16 April 1944. In it, in a vein by then far too falsely optimistic, he spoke of the spirit with which the German people had survived under bombing – helping each other, pooling their resources, rebuilding their homes and factories, getting to work even if they had to walk miles over rubble-strewn streets, bearing hardships patiently and with humour. This picture was true of Germany at least into the autumn of 1944. Survivors of Operation Gomorrah reminisced that bombed-out families lived communally together in cellars, sharing everything and encouraging one another.45 The Berlin Diaries of Marie Vassiltchikov describe the mutual help that was commonplace during the winter of the Berlin blitz.46 It was even possible to say that the frequency of the bombing raids ‘began to convert the experience of living under the bombs almost into a routine’.47
But as the bombing and the ground fighting intensified hugely in the final months of the war, turning Germany into a horrendous killing-ground and displacing millions of its people, the spirit cracked; Goebbels’ ‘Life Goes On’ was published as the exact opposite was happening.
But the collapse of German morale at the very end of the war was not the result of bombing alone, nor was it even largely because of it. What finally unnerved a population that had borne so much during the final three years of the war, were two things. One was the newly severe hardships of the last months under the inexorable and palpable inevitability of defeat. The other was panic fear of the Russians – a fear exacerbated by the Nazi leadership’s years of hysterical anti-Soviet propaganda, which proved self-fulfillingly true as a result of the cruel treatment to which the Germans had subjected the Russians, who now in their own turn, as the Red Army fought its way to Berlin, unleashed a season of terror on their defeated enemies, in the form of a revenge orgy of brutality and rape.48
But until those final months the effect of years of bombing on German civilian morale was very limited, even indeed counterproductive. So also – and this might well be part of the reason why – was the effect on the material conditions of German civilian life, despite the huge amount of attrition to the country’s housing stock, 20 per cent of which was destroyed or damaged (485,000 dwellings were totally destroyed, and 415,000 heavily damaged).49 The US Strategic Bombing Survey for Europe is unequivocal on this score:
A word should perhaps be added on the effect of the air war on the German civilian and on the civilian economy. Germany began the war after several years of full employment and after the civilian standard of living had reached its highest level in German history. In the early years of the war – the soft war period for Germany – civilian consumption remained high. Germans continued to try for guns and butter. The German people entered the period of the air war well stocked with clothing and other consumer goods. Although most consumer goods became increasingly difficult to obtain, Survey studies show that fairly adequate supplies of clothing were available for those who had been bombed out until the last stages of disorganisation. Food, though strictly rationed, was in nutritionally adequate supply throughout the war. The Germans’ diet had about the same calories as the British.50
What, then, did the bombing achieve in quantifiable terms? In the war as a whole, according to the US Strategic Bombing Survey, bombs killed 305,000 German civilians and injured 780,000. Other estimates give an upper limit on the number of German bombing dead as close to 500,000. Some of these deaths were caused by the Eighth Army Air Force, but by far the greater part was the result of RAF area bombing.
In return for this number of civilian deaths in Germany, Bomber Command suffered the deaths of 55,000 of its own members. Taking the highest figure for German civilian deaths, this makes a ratio of one Bomber Command airman killed for every 9 German civilians killed. Taking the lower estimate, it is a ratio of one British airman for every 5.5 German civilians.
In 1940 Bomber Command dropped 5,000 tons of bombs on Germany. In 1941 it dropped 23,000 tons. In 1942 it dropped 37,000 tons. In 1943 it dropped 180,000 tons. In 1944 it dropped 474,000 tons. And in the four months January–April 1945 inclusive, when the war was already palpably won, it dropped a mammoth 181,000 tons (an annual rate of 724,000, just for comparison). This last figure is nearly one fifth of the total for the whole war put together, and it represents a bombing inundation. These totals exclude US Eighth Army Air Force tonnages.
At a rough estimate, these figures suggest that it took 2.25 tons of bombs to kill one German civilian. It also means that it took one ton of bombs to destroy or damage one German flat or house. The number of Bomber Command aircraft lost in the process was 7,700.
Just in material terms, therefore, Bomber Command’s war on Germany represents a very expensive campaign indeed.
The fact that it took so many tons of bombs to kill people and destroy buildings is partly a function of the fact that a high proportion of the bombs were dropped well away from their intended targets, many of them in open fields, because of problems with navigation and bomb-aiming. This was diminishingly so as the war went on, but optimal conditions for bombing – in clear daylight without interference from defences – were only achieved very late in the war in Germany, and in the nine months of the US bombing of Japan. In fact, the ‘good bombing conditions’ of the USAAF campaign over Japan explain why the casualty and destruction figures in Japan exceed those of Germany, despite the fact that the latter was bombed continuously for five years and the former for less than one year.
What the figures just given for Germany do not yet show is the military cost to Germany of defending against air attack – specifically, in terms of the number of anti-aircraft guns and fighter planes required for home defence, therefore keeping them away from the Eastern and later Western front lines. Justifiers of the RAF area-bombing campaign keenly stress this point. Historians of the air war point out that some 10,000 of the Germans’ excellent 88-mm. artillery pieces had to be deployed as anti-aircraft guns in the homeland when they could have been used in their other chief role on the Eastern Front as anti-tank guns. They also point out that the necessities of air defence meant that aircraft production had to be focused on fighters rather than bombers, which further weakened German capacity to wage war effectively. (They have in mind the tactical use of bombers over battlefields.) Moreover, of the bombers Germany produced, none were heavy bombers, and its light bombers were in no position to compete with the tonnages that the RAF’s Lancasters and Halifaxes could carry.
And finally, the historians point out that a million men were required to man the homeland defences, and a further million to serve as emergency workers in the cities, representing a significant drain on manpower resources – all directly attributable to the bombing campaign.51
These are good points, though not quite as good as they look. Those who manned the anti-aircraft guns were not suitable as frontline troops, and had much more the character of ‘Volkssturm’ recruits than fully trained soldiers. They included boys as young as sixteen and men over thirty-eight years of age. The majority of the men and women who manned emergency services were not additional to factory and business workers, but the self-same people detailed to take their turn on air-raid precaution and fire-watch duties. The lack of bombers, heavy or light, was not regarded as a problem by the German leadership because throughout the war they were busy devising missiles to take the place of bombers – the V1 and V2 rockets were merely the beginnings of what was planned to be an arsenal of such. It is true that Hitler personally delayed the ME 262 jet fighter’s appearance in the war because he mistakenly demanded that it should be converted into a bomber for tactical use, suggesting a belated awareness of a deficit in this aspect of Germany’s air capabilities. But it is likely that he thought of this as a stop-gap while the missile programme was under development.
Taken all in all, the argument that the bombing campaign diverted a slice of Germany’s war effort to home defence is correct, but as these remarks show, the diversion was not as significant as an unqualified statement of it suggests.
Almost every authority on the subject of Bomber Command’s area-bombing campaign agrees that it was a failure – a failure in military terms, that is; answers to the question of its ethics come later. It sought to undermine the morale and weaken the will of the German people, and it signally failed to do either. It has been pointed out that it represented the war’s single longest continuous battle, in which its front line was engaged with the enemy on most days of the war. This extraordinary fact is a testament to the fortitude and endurance of air crews and ground crews, the energy of the force’s high command, the dedication of factory workers who produced the bombers and the bombs, and the ingenuity of scientists who waged a war of ideas against an equally clever and inventive enemy. But for the mighty endeavour thus represented, the result of its effort to break the enemy’s heart was not just null but actually contrary to hopes.
The question whether the area-bombing effort to some extent slowed the pace of increase of German war production remains open. It certainly did not halt it, or prevent it from growing. And when, close to the end of the war, German production did at last falter and finally halt, other and more compelling factors had become operative in causing that to happen – among them precision bombing of the kind to which most of the US Eighth Army Air Force’s effort had been dedicated.
This last point leads to something else that almost every authority is in agreement about, namely what the successes of the bombing campaigns in Europe actually were. There were two. One was the precision bombing carried out throughout their presence in the European theatre by the US Eighth Army Air Force and later the Fifteenth Army Air Force operating from Italy, and (with a few honourable exceptions such as the Dam Busters raid) late in the war by Bomber Command too. The other was the contribution made by tactical bombing to the success of the invasion on and after D-Day in 1944.
An examination of the details of this latter show that in post-D-Day operations in the invasion area, ground-attack fighters and fighter-bombers were the major air factor in assisting the Allied struggle.52 Nevertheless before the invasion, and in the two months immediately following it, bombing forces of the RAF and the US Eighth Army Air Force played a major role in reducing defences on the invasion coasts, and disrupting communications behind the German lines. The bombers were far from perfect tactical weapons – a point on which Sir Arthur Harris always vigorously insisted – but they proved much more effective in the role than he expected or, presumably, wanted.53 They attacked harbours, fuel and ammunition dumps, and at times enemy forces in strongholds preventing the advance of the Allied ground forces. One such was Caen, which (with great loss of French civilian life) Bomber Command reduced to rubble on 7 July 1944 after Montgomery had requested that it be softened up before an infantry advance upon it. As it happened, this speciality of Bomber Command was not quite what the troops on the ground needed, for the rubble blocked their way, and if it did not make capture of Caen more difficult, it certainly introduced new difficulties in place of the old.54
Harris laid on a spectacular 1,000-bomber raid to clear the way for the Canadian First Army in its advance towards Falaise on 7–8 August 1944. A War Office observer was deeply impressed by the sight, as were the Canadian troops themselves: the noise, flame and smoke were tremendous. A week later in the same combat zone some of Harris’s bombers strayed off target and killed sixty-five Canadians in a ‘friendly fire’ incident that took the shine off the previous week’s efforts. But when in September 1944 Bomber Command was released from its obligations to the ground war, Harris received fulsome thanks from Eisenhower for what the Command had done, and Harris himself was awarded the US Order of Merit by President Roosevelt.
Much more important still, however, was the success of what many, and especially the American bomber leaders, regarded as the true strategic value of the bomber: the attack on crucial sectors of Germany’s war production, and, most crucially of all, its oil supplies. If there is a single thing that bombing can be said to have contributed to Allied victory over Nazi Germany, it is precisely this: its success in severely limiting the fuel supplies needed by the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe. Harris, it will be remembered, was strongly against the ‘panacea’ of singling out oil or anything else – ball-bearings, or railway marshalling yards – that the economic warfare experts had identified at their desks as a bottle-neck in German production, and which, if pinched, would strangle the German war effort. But Harris was wrong, and the experts and the Americans were right.
Repeated bombing attacks on the oil fields of Romania and Hungary, on synthetic oil plants in Germany, and on oil refineries near Vienna, Bleckhammer and Odenthal, in the end proved fatal to Germany. The oil campaign started in earnest in the spring of 1944 when attacks were mounted – and sustained – on the synthetic oil plants at Leuna, Brux, Bohlen, Zeitz, Lutzendorf, Magdeburg and a number of other sites. Speer sought an emergency meeting with Hitler to press him to take emergency measures in response. As a result, Hitler appointed Edmund Geilenberg to the post of Reich commissioner with special responsibility for oil supplies, and gave him priority to requisition 350,000 workers for repair of oil plants and for the task of moving production to new underground sites. But the effort had come too late; as fuel supplies dwindled during the rest of 1944 and into the final months of the war, aircraft were grounded, tanks halted, training for replacement pilots could not be maintained, and most of the new and highly effective Messerschmitt 262 jet-fighter aircraft, of which over 1,200 had been produced by the end of 1944 and which might have considerably prolonged the war, had neither fuel to fly nor trained pilots to fly them.55 The ME 262s were anyway extremely fuel-hungry aircraft, and those that went into action had to be towed to the end of their runways to conserve fuel – by cows, so Adolf Galland reports, to further save the fuel of tractors and lorries.56
Speer’s acute anxieties over fuel were fully justified. Before bombing attacks on the oil infrastructure began in May 1944, Germany was producing an average of 316,000 tons a month. Bombing caused production to fall to 107,000 tons in June 1944, and 17,000 tons in the following September. Aviation fuel from the synthetic-oil plants fell from 175,000 tons in April 1944 to 30,000 in June and then to 5,000 tons in September. In his letter to Hitler of 30 June 1944 Speer wrote, ‘The enemy has succeeded in increasing our losses of aviation gasoline up to 90 percent by 22 June. Only through speedy recovery of damaged plants has it been possible to regain partly some of the terrible losses.’57
Despite his wholly misplaced scepticism about the oil ‘panacea’, Harris came to recognise the value of the attack on oil – after the war’s end. In his memoirs he wrote,
In the weeks before the end of the war all the German armed forces were immobilised by lack of fuel. The amount of oil produced by the synthetic oil plants and other factories was so little that it would not have paid the enemy to use up fuel in conveying it to the armed forces. The triumph of the offensive against oil was complete and indisputable.58
One cannot help feeling that Harris, now wise after the event, was exploiting what turned out to be one of the few unequivocal successes that could be claimed for bombing. He had not been merely sceptical, he had been scathing about the oil ‘panacea’, and – worse – had bitterly resisted the efforts of Portal and the Air Staff to make him concentrate upon it. As an officer he had of course eventually obeyed, grudgingly and a little belatedly, and during the course of the four combat months of 1945 Bomber Command carried out seventy-four operations against oil targets, half of them by day and half by night, dropping 43,636 tons of bombs in the process. The RAF effort against oil was however far less than that of the USAAF; between them the lion’s share of the work was done by the US Eighth Army Air Force from its bases in England and the US Fifteenth Army Air Force from its bases in Italy, profiting from their greater experience of accurate daylight bombing.
An example of the effort made is the series of attacks on Leuna, the Germans’ largest synthetic-oil plant. It was strongly defended by effective smoke-screen machines and a massive anti-aircraft-gun concentration. It was one of the least popular assignments for air crews in the war, because it was one of the most dangerous. Leuna was attacked twenty-two times between May and December 1944, twenty times by the US Eighth Army Air Force and twice by the RAF. Every time it was attacked it was repaired, but always at a lower level of output, averaging a mere 9 per cent of full capacity over the period.59 The US Strategic Bombing Survey reported:
Consumption of oil exceeded production from May 1944 on. Accumulated stocks were rapidly used up, and in six months were practically exhausted. The loss of oil production was felt acutely by the armed forces. In August the final run-in time for aircraft engines was cut from two hours to one-half hour. For lack of fuel, pilot training, previously cut down, was further curtailed. Through the summer, the movement of German Panzer Divisions in the field was hampered . . . By December, according to Speer, the fuel shortage had reached catastrophic proportions. When the Germans launched their counter-offensive on December 16, 1944 [the Ardennes offensive], their reserves of fuel were insufficient to support the operation. They counted on capturing Allied stocks . . . In February and March of 1945 the Germans massed 1200 tanks on the Baranov bridgehead at the Vistula to check the Russians. They were immobilised for lack of fuel, and overrun.60
It is right to add that although attacks on oil plants proved far more than the ‘panacea’ Harris believed it to be, major war production declined in almost all sectors from the autumn of 1944. On 27 January 1945, in a letter to General Heinz Guderian, Speer reported that coal and steel output were sharply down, as was aircraft production. Speer had planned to manufacture 12,000 fighter planes in the last three months of 1944, but only 8,600 were actually built. (One might, in the circumstances, write ‘only’.)61 The fact that output was at these levels so late in the war is itself a function of the bombing campaign, which had caused aircraft factories to be dispersed and hidden.
It is also right to add that the historians disagree among themselves as to whether the laurel should be given to attacks on oil supplies or on transportation in the final year of the war. The US Strategic Bombing Survey for Europe was definite in its opinion that oil mattered most, whereas others focus on the disruption of railway links within the Reich. In a detailed study of the German war economy Alfred Mierjewski concluded that the transportation crisis caused by bombing of railways in the autumn of 1944 meant that coal supplies from the Ruhr and Silesia to factories everywhere in Germany were interrupted, and were responsible for their downturn in output. Speer organised a rapid transfer of labour to railway-repair work, and supplies moved again; but when the transport links were attacked again in the first months of 1945, the progress of Allied ground forces from both east and west meant that the problem had become irremediable.62
But now a new question has to be asked, suggested by the contrast between the bombing of Germany and the bombing of Japan. In the case of Japan, a relatively short and catastrophic air attack was quickly followed by Japanese surrender. It is too easy to conclude a causal connection between the facts here; ‘this follows that so that caused this’ is a logical fallacy. At the same time it seems highly relevant to ask whether there is a causal connection, especially given that the devastating bombing campaign was concluded by the atom bomb attacks, followed within mere days by the unprecedented appearance of Emperor Hirohito on national radio to announce his country’s surrender.
If it turns out that American bombing of Japan is the key factor in ending the Pacific war, then it has to be concluded that Sir Arthur Harris and all the theoreticians of bomber power (see the next chapter) were right in holding that a sufficient weight of aerial attack will bring an enemy to his knees and thus end a war. And then the explanation of why this did not happen in the case of Germany would be that, until the closing stages of the war, the Allies simply did not have enough bomb weight – as for example would have been provided by the atom bomb – with which to achieve this effect.
One can imagine someone arguing that too little weight of attack would indeed have effects contrary to the desired one; the effects, that is, of strengthening an enemy’s morale, and – worse – the enemy’s capacity to survive and resist bombing. For if a bombing attack was incremental from a low starting level, as happened with Bomber Command’s activities from 1940 onwards, enemy defences and preparedness would increasingly learn how to deal with it, so that even as the weight of attack increased, its effect would be negated by the equally increasing capacity of the enemy to absorb it.
But if enough – so this argument continues – in the way of aircraft and bombs had been available to deliver a massive and sustained assault right from the beginning, the war would have ended in months rather than years, as happened when at last Japan came under just such bombing.
Are these arguments right? It all turns on whether there are factors other than bombing involved in Japan’s surrender, and on their relative degree of significance. The answer to this in turn depends upon whether the reason for Japan’s surrender was civilian or military. If civilian vulnerability was what impelled surrender, then bombing probably played a large part in it. Civilian vulnerability could be a function of hunger or other privations, but in the circumstances it would be plausible to see it as arising either from the shock of bombing, or fear of further devastation of the kind wrought by atomic bombs, or both.
If, however, the reason for Japan’s surrender was military – that is, based on a realisation that the war could not be won – then bombing was not the decisive factor, even if it was a contributory one. In this latter case, Sir Arthur Harris and the theoreticians of bombing as a war-winning strategy could not appeal to the Japanese example as a vindication.
The question of why Japan surrendered in August 1945 is a complex one, and this is not the place for a full analysis of it. The conclusion reached by Robert Pape in his detailed and masterly dissection of the matter is however unequivocal:
The principal cause of Japan’s surrender was the ability of the United States to increase the military vulnerability of the home islands sufficiently to persuade Japanese leaders that their defence was highly unlikely to succeed. The key military factor causing this effect was the sea blockade, which crippled Japan’s ability to produce and equip forces necessary to execute its strategy. The most important factor accounting for the timing of the surrender was the Soviet attack against Manchuria [9 August 1945, the same day as the Nagasaki bomb], largely because it convinced recalcitrant Army leaders that the homeland could not be defended.
Contrary to the assertion of the Strategic Bombing Survey that bombing was so effective that even if there had been no atomic bomb, Soviet attack, or planned American invasion, surrender would have occurred at exactly the same time, in actuality the naval blockade, invasion threat, and Soviet attack ensured that surrender would have occurred at precisely the same time even if there had been no strategic bombing campaign.63
Pape’s view is based on an examination of Japan’s military and civilian leadership decisions in the final year of the Pacific war. As he states, he expressly dissents from the conclusion of the US Strategic Bombing Survey for the Pacific war, which was that even without the atom bombs the strategic-bombing effort was the decisive factor. This conclusion might appear odd to some, for whom the atom-bomb attacks appear to be precisely what adds the final weight of force that the area-bombing campaign over Germany lacked. If anything could be supposed to render the USAAF campaign against Japan decisive, therefore, the atom bombs would be it. Yet the Survey concluded that they were inessential to the outcome.
That surprising view, and the fact that Pape’s analysis, careful and convincing though it is, no doubt remains controversial among some historians of the Pacific war, can be left as open matters here, for the present concern is tangential to them. The present concern requires only that we note that the claim that area-bombing was a major factor in victory is hotly disputed for Japan and denied for Germany. This matters because defenders of the campaigns draw heavily on their supposed military efficacy or even necessity.
More important still is how these considerations bear on the question of the morality of area bombing. If area bombing was unavoidable as a means of defeating the Axis powers – especially given the moral status of the Axis powers themselves – a claim of justification, or at very least mitigation, must be entertained. If area bombing was not an essential component in the defeat of the Axis powers, the degree of their exposure to moral questioning rises. To this matter, of course, I return in detail later.
The longer-term effects of area bombing on Germany and Japan – not just on the physical fabric of their countries, but more importantly on the psychological fabric of their societies – constitutes an entirely different story, and a very complex one. It figures as part of the much larger story of post-war German and Japanese attitudes to the war as a whole, and it takes contrastingly different forms in the two nations. (An excellent place to begin exploring these matters is Ian Buruma’s The Wages of Guilt64). The guilt felt about the Holocaust by most individual Germans of the immediate post-war generations, and by German society as a required collective stance, for long made it impossible for them to see the catastrophe they experienced in 1945 as anything other than deserved punishment. Japanese attitudes to the war as a whole lie behind a characteristically equivocal mask of demurral; but when one talks to individuals about the atom bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, one learns that Japan sees them as war crimes.65
This makes some Japanese intellectuals angry with their own. Buruma reports an occasion on which the writer Kenzaburo Oe castigated his country as racist and as never having faced up to its crimes in the Second World War.66 Oe was in conversation with Günter Grass at a book fair just at the time that the separated parts of Germany were reuniting, an event that Grass deprecated: ‘Auschwitz should have made reunification impossible; a unified Germany was a danger to itself and the world,’ he said.67 Whereas Grass’s assertion was characteristic of a standard German attitude, Oe’s was uncharacteristic of Japanese attitudes. But as Buruma points out, even though Japan had to answer for atrocities in China and against prisoners of war, the sexual slavery of Korean women, the notorious ‘Unit 731’ in Manchuria, where appalling medical experiments were conducted on live human guinea pigs referred to by the Japanese staff as ‘logs’, and the acts of aggression in precipitating war first against China and then against the United States, it nevertheless had no Holocaust to answer for, and Nazi Germany had all these things or their equivalents to answer for and the Holocaust.68
The Holocaust throws such a deep and jagged shadow over the Second World War that the sum total of harm done by all other non-Holocaust-related means is diminished by it; which is one reason why there has been so little said about culpabilities on the Allied side of the struggle – culpabilities which pale in comparison to Nazi atrocity, and which the victor nations have therefore allowed themselves to neglect. Dresden makes periodic appearances on public consciousness, but very few people (apart from apologists for ultra-right-wing interests; but they are not interested in truth or historical proportion; they have other fish to fry) see that the Allied area bombing campaigns over Germany and Japan merit inspection and evaluation. For if they constitute a wrong, even though it is dwarfed by the Holocaust and other Axis-committed aggressions and atrocities, they would still be a wrong. And that, to repeat, is what is being examined here.