Chapter 4

The Mind of the Bomber

After the operation Gomorrah attacks on Hamburg, Bomber Command’s chief, Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, said ‘I had always wanted to have a real dead set at Hamburg. It was the second biggest city in Germany and I wanted to make a tremendous show.’¹ Hamburg’s size was one reason why it was chosen for a major display of bombing power. A big city could be hurt even if bombing was not especially accurate. Another reason was that it is relatively easy to find, because it lies on the River Elbe near a coast with a shape easily recognisable from high in the air even at night. A third reason was that it is relatively easy to get to, not involving too long a trip for the bomber stream, which meant less time exposed to Luftwaffe night-fighters; and moreover much of the trip there and back could be carried out over the North Sea, empty of flak, searchlights and Luftwaffe airfields.

Harris’s remark is interesting as giving a glimpse into the mind of a man who, on an almost daily basis, planned bombing raids – ‘area bombing’, ‘carpet bombing’, indiscriminate raids – upon densely inhabited cities, and sent hundreds of aircraft, carrying tons of explosives and incendiaries, to carry them out. The remark has an impersonal air, which does not quite represent the man who made it; for it is false to say that Harris was merely a callous and unimaginative man for whom mass killing by bombing was a matter of indifference. He was indefatigably concerned with the welfare of his Bomber Command personnel, he was fully conscious that he was sending young men in his charge to their deaths almost every day – and having lived in London during the Blitz, and watched the City burning around St Paul’s Cathedral, he had a clear idea of what he was unleashing on German civilians.² He was not a man of culture, and he was certainly capable of the kind of toughness required to carry out a policy of mass killings on a regular basis; but balance requires that one remember that (in the phrase much then employed) ‘there was a war on’, and he took himself to be in command of a campaign that would not only defend his own country from a dangerous aggressor, but would win the war to boot, and thereby destroy the regime which had plunged the world into catastrophe.³ And like other proponents of area bombing as a war-winning strategy, he could claim to believe that it would shorten the war and therefore save lives overall – especially on his own side, by rescuing tens of thousands of young soldiers from the hazards of invasion. This, certainly, is what Americans claimed after the war in defence of their bombing of Japan, and especially the atom-bomb attacks.

Some might say, regarding the point about Harris’s personal experience of watching London burn after the Luftwaffe’s big fire raid of 29 December 1940, that his knowledge of what he was inflicting on Germany was not only clear but vengefully so. An anecdote is often repeated to illustrate this. Harris, driving himself at high speed back to his HQ in High Wycombe after an Air Ministry meeting in London, was stopped by two police motor-cyclists. One of them said, ‘Sir, you are travelling much too fast; you might kill someone.’ Harris replied, ‘I’m on important business. Now that you mention it, it is my business to kill people: Germans.’ Allegedly the policeman replied, ‘Are you Air Marshal Harris, sir?’ and when Harris confirmed that he was, the policeman said, ‘That’s different, sir; sorry I stopped you. Follow us,’ and the two acted as outriders to speed Harris home. Harris told an aide afterwards, ‘It was the quickest trip I ever made – they must have liked me.’⁴

Harris’s assertion about the nature of his business was not merely flippant. In a discussion with the Air Ministry about the types of bombs to be used in attacks on German cities, Harris maintained that the proportions should be two-thirds incendiaries to one-third high explosives. This was in response to the Air Ministry’s view that the blitz on Britain, and the RAF’s experimental incendiary bombing of the wooden city of Lübeck, suggested that bomb loads should consist wholly of incendiaries. ‘I am always being pressed to concentrate entirely on incendiaries,’ he wrote to the Ministry,

but I do not agree with this policy. The moral [that is, psychological] effect of HE is vast. People can escape from fires, and the casualties on a solely fire-raising raid would be as nothing. What we want to do in addition to the horrors of fire is to bring the masonry crashing down on top of the Boche, to kill Boche, and to terrify Boche; hence the proportion of HE.’⁵

Had Harris known of the horrific effects of firestorms rather than just City of London-type fires, he might have been as sanguine and sanguinary about incendiaries as high explosives. At any rate, his attitude to the purpose of area bombing was unequivocal, and thus on record: ‘we want . . . to bring the masonry crashing down on top of the Boche, to kill Boche, and to terrify Boche.’

Nor did he think that this purpose should be disguised. In November 1943, effectively announcing the launching of his ‘Battle of Berlin’, he stated publicly that Berlin, the heart of Nazi Germany, would be attacked repeatedly ‘until it ceased to beat’. Lord Salisbury, a vocal critic of the area-bombing policy, wrote to the Minister for Air, Sir Archibald Sinclair, complaining that Harris’s statement was contrary to official government policy, which was that bombs were aimed only at industrial and military targets, not at civilian areas. Since the government was loath to acknowledge the area-bombing policy publicly, Sinclair gave a prevaricating reply. Harris was annoyed by this on two counts. First, he thought that his air crews would not get proper recognition for their endeavours if the endeavours themselves were not officially recognised. And second and relatedly, since area bombing at night was a largely inaccurate proceeding, any suggestion that Bomber Command was trying to hit precise targets would inevitably invite criticism, because by that criterion Bomber Command would always appear to fail.⁶

Harris’s attitudes to area bombing, which he said required that people with ‘sensitive minds’ should not seek leadership positions in the bombing force,⁷ rested on his unshakeable belief that war was to be won by attacking the morale of an enemy population until its will to resist was broken. He had seen the trenches of the First World War from his biplane, and he thought that the pain and expense of ground fighting could be made unnecessary by the right application of enough power from the air. This fixed belief governed his thinking to such an extent that, as noted in the preceding chapter, he could not accept the logic of precision bombing – in the case of his virtual insubordination to the Air Staff, of oil targets – except as a minor ancillary to the main task.

But in thinking this way, Harris was merely following the precepts of earlier theorists of air power, and they in turn had extrapolated their views from the experience of bombing in the first three decades of flight (that is, from 1910 to 1939) in the First World War, colonial wars, and the Spanish Civil War. Understanding the development of this thinking explains the beliefs and intentions in the minds of those responsible for bombing policy in both the British and American militaries (and as we have already seen, British and American thinking about bombing diverged significantly for a time). This is crucial, for in seeking to judge the morality of the Allied bombing campaign, one has to have a clear picture of what was known, what was believed, and what was hoped by those who carried it out.

One also has to know the circumstances that influenced their thinking in carrying it out – specifically, the state of the war at the time they committed themselves to one or another policy. This chapter concerns the first of these two crucial matters; the second I defer to chapter 7 where arguments in defence of area bombing are considered.

In 1899 an international peace conference was held at The Hague. It had been suggested by an adviser to Russia’s Czar Nicholas II, the outstanding Russian international-law theorist Fedor Fedorovich Martens, as an appropriate sequel to a series of conferences held in The Hague earlier in the 1890s, all aimed at building a regime of international law.

Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands served as the 1899 conference’s host, so that with its two royal sponsors it had the highest official sanction. Its purpose was not to settle a current war (though one was just then beginning in South Africa between the British and the Afrikaaners of the Boer Republics, and a short but highly consequential one had just ended between the United States and Spain, extending American influence from the Caribbean to the Pacific). The conference’s aim, rather, was to frame the conditions for lasting international peace. The principal behind it is summarised in the celebrated ‘Martens clause’, named for the conference’s prime mover, which gave preliminary encapsulation to the idea of a legal framework governing conflict between nations:

Until a more complete code of the laws of war is issued, the High Contracting Parties think it right to declare that in cases not included in the Regulations adopted by them, populations and belligerents remain under the protection and empire of the principles of international law, as they result from the usages established between civilised nations, from the laws of humanity and the requirements of the public conscience.⁸

The eloquence of the last thirty-seven words of this passage well suits the ideal they express: populations and belligerents remain under the protection and empire of the principles of international law, as they result from the usages established between civilised nations, from the laws of humanity and the requirements of the public conscience.

With remarkable prescience the conference gave consideration to the matter of aerial bombing, in the form of ‘projectiles or explosives’ launched from balloons (heavier-than-air manned flight was still four years away). The preamble to the Declaration accordingly drawn up, known as Hague IV, quoted the St Petersburg Declaration of 1868, in which an International Military Commission hosted by Russia’s Imperial Cabinet agreed to forbid the use of specified projectiles, among them exploding or incendiary bullets. The St Petersburg Declaration reads:

On the proposition of the Imperial Cabinet of Russia, an International Military Commission having assembled at St. Petersburg in order to examine the expediency of forbidding the use of certain projectiles in time of war between civilised nations, and that Commission having by common agreement fixed the technical limits at which the necessities of war ought to yield to the requirements of humanity, the Undersigned are authorised by the orders of their Governments to declare as follows:

Considering:

That the progress of civilisation should have the effect of alleviating as much as possible the calamities of war;

That the only legitimate object which States should endeavour to accomplish during war is to weaken the military forces of the enemy;

That for this purpose it is sufficient to disable the greatest possible number of men;

That this object would be exceeded by the employment of arms which uselessly aggravate the sufferings of disabled men, or render their death inevitable;

That the employment of such arms would, therefore, be contrary to the laws of humanity;

The Contracting Parties engage mutually to renounce, in case of war among themselves, the employment by their military or naval troops of any projectile of a weight below 400 grams, which is either explosive or charged with fulminating or inflammable substances . . .

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

Were we discussing these matters viva voce, it might be appropriate to pause for a minute’s silence to ponder the good sense and humanitarian impulse animating these words, written down now so long ago, in their effort to restrain the murderous uses to which misapplications of burgeoning science were even then tending. The men gathered in St Petersburg could not see what science would produce by 1945, as proved on two August mornings in Japan that year; but they felt the onrush of dangers, and were men of good faith. The key words are unequivocal: ‘The Contracting or Acceding Parties reserve to themselves to come hereafter to an understanding whenever a precise proposition shall be drawn up in view of future improvements which science may effect in the armament of troops, in order to maintain the principles which they have established, and to conciliate the necessities of war with the laws of humanity.’

Inspired by this example, and looking ahead, those gathered at The Hague in 1899 agreed to ‘prohibit, for a term of five years, the launching of projectiles and explosives from balloons, or by other new methods of a similar nature’. As the time restriction to five years implies, the Declaration was meant to be a stop-gap until a formal Law of War could be agreed by the international community. The absence of agreement on a Law of War – wars, such as the Boer War and the Sino-Japanese war, among other things, put talk of such a thing far on to the back burner – made it necessary for the stop-gap to remain in force, so Hague IV was renewed by another Hague conference in 1907, and in the same terms. By this time the phrase or by ‘new methods of a similar nature’ had taken on added meaning; the air was already filling with aeroplanes. This gave the irony that attends human endeavours full play, for it meant that the declaration was still in force when – inevitably, and in defiance of Hague IV – the first bombs were dropped from the air on 1 November 1911, by a pilot in the Italian forces fighting the Ottoman Turks in Libya.

As we know too well, agreements and declarations, however full of good sense and humanity, have no hold on mankind when fighting starts; but they provide a benchmark for thinking about the rights and wrongs of what happens once it does; and they seldom leave much room for excuses. The principles, and even more the spirit, of both the St Petersburg Declaration of 1868 and the Hague IV Declaration of 1899 and 1907, are crystal clear; and the first act of bombing in the Libyan desert blew a hole right through them both.

That first bombing was carried out by Lieutenant Giulio Gavotti, an artillery spotter in the Italian army. Entirely on his own initiative he took four grenades with him on a flight over the Ottoman army encampment at Ain Zara, and threw them from his Taube monoplane on to the angry Turks below. No one was hurt. News of the escapade was greeted with disgust and disdain by civilised opinion, which chiefly thought it unsporting. But military men thought otherwise, and immediately began to research ways of making it an effective resource of war.

All the major nations of Europe designed and produced bomber aircraft during the First World War, and some of them began before the war started. Both France and Germany did so, the former developing its Voisin bomber and the latter adapting the Zeppelin dirigible for the purpose. Appropriately therefore, one of the earliest air actions of the First World War was the bombing of the Zeppelin base at Metz-Frascaty by Voisin aircraft on 14 August 1914. The Voisin was a durable steel-framed pusher biplane which, as the war went on, was equipped with increasingly more powerful engines, in the end allowing it to carry 300 kilograms of bombs (660 lb.). France had a force of about 600 Voisins which it used to attack the German lines of the Western Front. It did not have the range to penetrate Germany itself, and the French were loath to use it against occupied areas where French citizens lived; so its use remained purely tactical. The Zeppelin, as we shall see, was by contrast the first truly strategic bomber, being used in raids against towns in England.

Russia and Italy were not far behind France in acquiring bomber aircraft. The Imperial Russian Air Service provided itself with the giant ‘Ilya Mourometz’ designed by Igor Sikorsky, the first-ever four-engined aeroplane. It was a prodigy for its time; able to stay in the air for over five hours at a stretch, with a speed of 85 miles an hour and a ‘ceiling’ of 9,000 feet, it bristled with machine guns and was capable of carrying a maximum bomb load of 700 kilograms (1,540 lb). The Imperial Russian Air Service trained its bomb-aimers well, and the Ilya Mourometz had an excellent record for bombing accuracy. Under the command of Major-General M. V. Shidlovski the Russian bomber fleet was one of the successes of that country’s generally unsuccessful endeavours on the Eastern Front.

Italy entered the war relatively late, in May 1915, and although otherwise ill-prepared for taking part in a major conflict, it by that time had a force of three-engined Caproni bombers in service. The Caproni was capable of crossing the Alps at 95 miles per hour, carrying 540 kilograms of bombs (1,190 lb), and accordingly did so, seeking targets in Austro-Hungarian territory.

The United States was neither a major producer of aircraft nor a major air power in the First World War. It had the Curtiss ‘Jenny’ biplane on which its pilots trained (and which after the war became the staple of the ‘barnstormer’ fliers), but when US army aviators entered the war in the spring of 1918 they were equipped with the French-made Nieuport and Spad fighter planes, and took no part in bombing activities.

In August 1914 Britain had no bomber aircraft, though soon after hostilities began, the Royal Navy indented for some, offering a design specification for an aircraft of modest capacity compared to those in service elsewhere among the belligerents: a twin-engined two-seater which could fly at 75 miles per hour and carry 50 kilograms of bombs (110 lb). The result was the Handley Page 0/100, which entered service in November 1916. Although at first reserved to navy-related operations, it soon saw service on the Western Front and as a night bomber.

It was the Germans who proved the most adventurous bombers in the Great War, beginning with Zeppelins and later the feared Gotha C-V bomber, whose enormous 24-metre wingspan made it a terrifying sight when it swept over civilian targets, dropping explosives. Between them, Zeppelins and Gothas mounted 103 raids over Great Britain, ostensibly attacking industrial and military targets but in fact bombing towns and cities. Between January 1915 and November 1916 Zeppelins conducted 208 sorties, and from May 1917 to May 1918 Gothas conducted 435 sorties, between them dropping approximately 300 tons of bombs on Britain in what was a curtain-raiser for the practice of area bombing. In the process they killed 1,400 Britons and injured 3,400 more, and did about three million pounds’ worth of damage to property at 1914 values.

But most of all the Zeppelins and Gothas created great panic, and gave rise to the belief – the false belief, as it too late proved – that bombing civilian populations is a weapon of peculiar psychological potency. For by one of the more terrible of history’s ironies, hindsight shows that a little bombing or even the mere sight of bombers swooping overhead, terrifies populations that are not used to them; but a bit more bombing than Britain received in the First World War has a rebound effect on morale, as witnessed in both Britain and Germany in the Second World War. If Germany had mounted a more sustained and weighty area-bombing attack on British towns and cities in 1916–18, intelligent observers would have seen that it was in fact counter-productive – and therefore, although murderous and destructive, uselessly so.

Indeed, intelligent observers might have recognised this truth anyway. At first there was great panic in towns struck by Gothas. Their first attack fell on Folkestone in May 1917, killing 95 people and injuring 195, the largest single blow of any bombing raid to that date. A wave of horror ran through the country. But it quickly subsided; no mass hysteria followed, nor any uprisings against the government, making popular demands to end the war. Instead the Gotha raids provoked a strong military reaction. A home-defence fighter group came into existence (Arthur Harris among its pilots) to defend against bomber raids, which it did with such success that, first, Zeppelins had to be withdrawn from the attack, and then Gothas had to switch to night bombing. Moreover a ring of barrage balloons went up to protect London, tethered so high that Gothas had difficulty overflying them; and searchlights and anti-aircraft guns entered service. These formidable defences proved effective. Between September 1917 and May 1918, sixty-one Gothas were shot down over the British Isles, an attrition rate too great for the Germans to sustain. After May 1918 the bombers were limited to attacking along the Western Front; they had been seen off.⁹

But although the Gotha bombings did not cause a collapse in civilian morale, it was understandable enough why observers concluded the contrary. They played the game of extrapolation. The citizens of Folkestone were shocked by the Gotha raid. In other towns workers had to quit their benches to take shelter when an attack occurred, or if the attack came at night they were tired the next day as a result of the sleeplessness caused. Imagine – so the observers told themselves and one another – bomber fleets tenfold, a hundredfold, larger, coming over every day and dropping many more bombs. Of course it was easy for them to conclude that the result would be devastating to civilian ability to function. Here was the seed of subsequent theory about bombing.

In the first years of manned heavier-than-air flight it was noted that biplanes flew better than monoplanes. It was predicted that the aeroplanes of the future would therefore have twelve wings. This is an example of the game of extrapolation and its too frequent result. The game of bombing extrapolation followed this pattern. However, it did so only for the natural extension of Gotha and Ilya Mourometz bombers to Lancasters. With their heavy bomb loads the Lancasters multiplied the quantum of death and destruction in area bombing, but this not only diminished the effect on morale, it reversed it.

But what if the extrapolation were carried on, beyond the bombing capacity of a thousand Lancasters, all the way to the nuclear weapons of the post-Second World War period? Perhaps here at last the doctrine about morale comes into its own; for the very thought of the area-bombing effect of nuclear weapons has, at time of writing, been enough to stop anyone actually using them, and has kept wars ‘local’ (not that this is any consolation to those involved in them). To stop a war starting has to be the desirable logical limit of a bombing policy which sees bombs as a way of stopping wars once started. Does this mean that the strategic-bombing theory is, after all, right – provided that the bombing capacity is such that a single attack could wipe out entire cities in a blow, killing millions rather than ‘merely’ tens of thousands?

One thought in response might be to say that the aptly named ‘MAD’ thesis applied to nuclear weapons – ‘mutually assured destruction’ – is such that if it advanced beyond its deterrent purpose and a major nuclear exchange occurred between two or more nations, the area bombing thus carried out would end the war not because of effect on morale (although such an effect would certainly exist) but because the combatant nations would be physically incapable of continuing after the first assaults. To have a war-winning effect on morale, nuclear weapons would best be deployed by one country against another which could not retaliate in kind.

But this, again, would quite likely be self-defeating in another way, for the victor country would not be able to exploit any advantages over the defeated country, tracts of which would be uninhabitable as a result of radioactive fall-out, and the citizens of which would likely be in a highly dependent state, placing great and costly long-term demands on medical services and other aid, which the putative victor would have to provide.

These considerations suggest that if the theory of the effect on morale of area bombing is thought to come into its own at last in the nuclear age, it continues to do so self-defeatingly. Were Sir Arthur Harris still alive, he would see that even the ‘right’ weight of bombing power would still not be much use as a war-winning weapon, even if, as in this last scenario, it indeed won a war – with the hollowest of victories.

The rapid evolution of aircraft and their impact on warfare had an electric effect in the years 1914–18. In Britain the air forces of the British army and navy – respectively, the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service – were reorganised jointly into the Royal Air Force, and in 1918 a dedicated bomber command was set up within it, led by the redoubtable Sir Hugh Trenchard. Remarkably, the British air force had leaped from practically nothing in 1914 to a force of 300,000 men by the war’s end, and in that same four-year period Britain manufactured 50,000 aircraft of all military types. These prodigious facts in part explain why it is that in the decade and more after the war, even though air forces in most countries (and not least the United Kingdom) were rapidly reduced in size, military theoreticians should dwell on the possibilities of air warfare, and why some diplomatic initiatives among the major powers should try – futilely as it proved – to bring about international agreement on limiting or even banning the military use of aircraft, especially for bombing.

The theoreticians were quickly off the mark. In fact the first of them, in order both of time and significance for the area-bombing theory, had arrived at his views well before the outbreak of the First World War, after he had seen just three aircraft and before he had himself flown in one. This was Giulio Douhet, an extraordinary individual from the Savoy region of north Italy, who wrote books about military theory (and plays and poems besides) before enlisting in the Italian military in 1909. He was put in command of the fleet of nine aircraft sent to Libya for the war there with the Turks, and was therefore in charge when three aerial firsts were scored: the first aeroplane reconnaissance in combat conditions, which occurred on 23 October 1911, the first bombing (see p. 124) on 1 November 1911, and the first aircraft shot down (by Turkish rifle fire).

As a result of his Libyan activities Douhet was given command of the Italian army’s newly formed aviation battalion. He had ideas about how an Italian air capacity should evolve, and lobbied tirelessly but fruitlessly for purpose-built bombers for his force. In the end he commissioned a bomber aircraft on his own initiative from the aero designer Gianni Caproni, who as a result produced the eponymous three-engined bomber described above. But since Douhet had done this without official sanction he was stripped of his aviation command and sent to an infantry regiment instead. His military career came to an end when he was court-martialled and imprisoned for a year after writing an article predicting disaster for the Italian army on account of its many deficiencies. (He was all too soon proved right; the disaster duly occurred at Caparetto in 1917 where, in their worst-ever defeat, Italy’s forces suffered over half a million casualties.¹⁰)

Released from military duties and obligations, Douhet devoted himself to writing about the future of war. He produced a book that has become a classic of its kind: The Command of the Air, published in 1921. In it is set out the theory adopted, in all fundamentals, by RAF Bomber Command in the Second World War.¹¹ It was also highly influential on American air-power thinking, as we shall see.

The nub of Douhet’s thesis is by now familiar, since it is exactly the thesis premised by Bomber Command from February 1942 onwards, and constituted Sir Arthur Harris’s article of faith. It is that bombing should be targeted at the civilian population of an enemy state in order to break its morale and make it force its government to sue for peace. Terror, material destruction and privation caused by shortages of food and other necessities are the key elements.

Take the centre of a large city and imagine what would happen among the civilian population during a single attack by a single bombing unit [Douhet wrote]. I have no doubt that its impact on the people would be terrible . . . What civil or military authority could keep order, public services functioning, and production going under such a threat? . . . A complete breakdown of the social structure cannot but take place in a country subjected to this kind of merciless pounding from the air. The time would soon come when, to put an end to horror and suffering, the people themselves, driven by the instinct for self-preservation, would rise up and demand an end to the war.¹²

This thesis might as well be called the Douhet–Trenchard thesis, for when Sir Hugh Trenchard was placed in charge of the newly formed RAF’s bombers in 1918, he set about building a force that would put exactly this view into effect. The British members of a group set up in 1917 to co-ordinate British, French and American air policy, the Inter-Allied Aviation Committee, expressed Trenchard’s view in words that might have directly inspired Douhet: ‘[the effect of bombing civilian targets] would be that the German government would be forced to face very considerable and constantly increasing civil pressure which might result in political disintegration.’¹³ The war ended before Trenchard could carry out the policy to any great extent, but he adhered vigorously to it in thinking about how to prosecute a war against Britain’s natural enemy – the French: ‘I feel that although there would be an outcry,’ he wrote in 1925 after asserting that the French population should be bombed if hostilities resumed between the neighbours, ‘the French in a bombing duel would probably squeal before we did.’¹⁴ Believing that wars would be very short if civilian bombing were central to them, Trenchard argued that there would be no point in attacking industrial targets. Like Douhet his entire focus was on the ‘moral [i.e. morale] effect’: ‘The nation that would stand being bombed longest would win in the end . . . The end of war is usually attained when one nation has been able to bring such pressure to bear on another that public opinion obliges the government to sue for peace.’¹⁵ This has the further implication that it is vital to get in the earliest blows, before the enemy can mount an attack on the morale of one’s own civilians.

For reasons that no one has been able to fathom, and on no known empirical basis, Trenchard asserted that the ratio of moral to material effect created by bombing is 20:1. But together with his general view it gave rise to the belief that what would win a war consisting of a bombing duel is national character; and naturally Trenchard and most of his fellow officers felt that this gave the British a long head start over possible Continental adversaries, especially the French.¹⁶ Pape quotes one senior British officer remarking that during the First World War ‘casualties affected the French more than they did the British. That would have to be taken into consideration too, but the policy of hitting the French nation and making them squeal before we did is a vital one – more vital than anything else’. The underlying assumption here appears to be, to put it bluntly, racist. It was, for example, claimed by J. F. C. Fuller that the people who most had panicked during Gotha raids on London in 1917 were ‘East End Jews’. In the 1920s, British forces used bombing to keep order among Iraqi and Afghanistani tribesmen, and the ease with which bombing pacified them was taken as confirmation not only of the general efficacy of bombing but its peculiar efficacy in cases where people ‘lacked moral fibre’ – a failing universally attributed by British colonisers to those they colonised. Not coincidentally, Arthur Harris served in the Middle East in command of a bomber force at that time, and doubtless his Douhet–Trenchard outlook was much boosted by the experience.¹⁷

As mentioned in chapter 2, during the 1920s the RAF was fighting for its separate existence against the encroachments of the Royal Navy and the Army, and Trenchard, now chief of the RAF, needed arguments to persuade the government to keep in being what had become a rump force. The bombing arguments played a crucial part. It was not only Trenchard who advanced them; he had compelling support from the distinguished military historian Basil Liddell Hart, who in a book published in 1925 made an eloquent case for the idea that bombing would make wars shorter and cheaper, and would save lives overall.¹⁸ ‘When it is realised that [strategic bombing would inflict] a total of injury far less than when [a war is] spread over a number of years, the common sense of mankind will show that the ethical objection to this form of war is at least not greater than to the cannon-fodder wars of the past.’¹⁹ He went so far as to add that the war would end even more quickly and cheaply (in lives lost) if gas were used: ‘gas may well prove the salvation of civilisation from the otherwise inevitable collapse in the case of another world war.’²⁰ An implication of Liddell Hart’s view was that the deterrent effect of gas attacks from the air might prevent war altogether – an argument standardly deployed by those in favour of nuclear weapons.

Trenchard was so taken with these views that he had copies of Liddell Hart’s book sent to his senior colleagues and to the new RAF staff college at Andover. He was not to know then that Liddell Hart would later dramatically change his mind; in 1942, when the true effects of area bombing were plain to see, Liddell Hart wrote, ‘It will be ironical if the defenders of civilisation depend for victory upon the most barbaric, and unskilled, way of winning a war that the modern world has seen . . . We are now counting for victory on success in the way of degrading war to a new level – as represented by indiscriminate (night) bombing and indiscriminate starvation.’²¹

By 1928 Trenchard found it necessary to qualify the expression of his views, if not the views themselves, no doubt because the nagging voice of moral conscience was intruding from directions outside RAF staff-college seminars. In a memo to other service chiefs in the Army and Navy – the source of these doubts – he now conceded that it is ‘contrary to the dictates of humanity [to carry out] the indiscriminate bombing of a city for the sole purpose of terrorising the civilian population’. But he maintained that it was wholly legitimate to demoralise munitions workers and stevedores loading military supplies. Why should the person who made the gun be less a target than he who fired it? ‘Moral effect is created by bombing in such circumstances but it is the inevitable result of a lawful operation of war – the bombing of a military objective.’²² Thus was developed the official fig leaf used throughout the Second World War to justify the area-bombing campaigns. But it does at least raise a legitimate question: what is a ‘military objective’? Where is the front line in modern war – surely the armaments factory is on it too?

So far did the British believe their own theoreticians on the subject of the effect of bombing that in 1939 the government made the following preparations for London: it estimated 250,000 dead in the first three weeks of suffering attack by bombers, with 3–4 million refugees flooding into the surrounding countryside. It predicted three million psychiatric cases from terror and confusion. It estimated that 50 per cent of London would be destroyed in that same first three weeks. Even before then the mathematicians had been at work, calculating the number of deaths and injuries per ton of bombs dropped, on which basis they estimated a monthly need for 2.8 million hospital beds and twenty million square feet of coffin timber. As part of the preparation for this horrendous disaster, the Ministry of Health – in one of those gestures that amaze by their sheer futility – issued an extra million death certificates to local authorities.²³

It was not just the words of the theoreticians that convinced the British government to think in these terms; it was the continued trickle of apparent empirical confirmation from sites of conflict. The Italians bombed Addis Ababa in 1936, the Japanese bombed Nanking in 1937, and in that same year the German Condor legion in Spain carried out the Guernica bombing, killing a thousand people and destroying 70 per cent of the town. Because Spain was close to home in Europe, extreme shock was caused by reports of the screaming Stuka dive-bombers and what they did to the town and its people, whom they strafed as they fled into the surrounding fields. The atrocities in Nanking, immensely greater but on the other side of the world and anyway a matter between orientals, had nothing like the same impact. Even so, the mere report of yet another demonstration of the horrors of air power fed into the fear everywhere felt. That these attacks took place in ‘ideal bombing conditions’ – there was no air defence, and the attacks took place in daylight – did not then make a difference to calculations. The corpses and the smoking ruins seemed to speak far too eloquently even for mildly sceptical voices to be heard.

All through the 1930s the British, and not them alone, were repeatedly told of the horrors of bombing and the immense threat it posed. Liddell Hart, not yet converted from his views, wrote a graphic account of terrified civilians fleeing bombed cities in the Daily Telegraph in November 1933.²⁴ In London the government decided to build up fighter defences against bomber attack. Bomber Command, so named, had come into official existence in 1936, but as described in chapter 2, although plans were simultaneously laid for a bomber force (including the large four-engined heavy bombers that eventually came into service when Sir Arthur Harris was chief of the Command) it now took second place to the urgent need for fighter defence. Moreover Bomber Command’s first directive unequivocally stated that its role was not to enact the Trenchard–Douhet–Liddell Hart thesis, but to provide army support and to attack enemy airfields only. It was explicitly told ‘to do nothing that might be construed as an attack on civilians and so to give the enemy an excuse to do likewise’.²⁵

In fact so great was the desire not to provoke an enemy – now recognised to be Germany – into applying the Trenchard–Douhet thesis to British cities, that a special subcommittee of the Committee on Imperial Defence, assigned to examine the whole question of bombing, suggested that the government should publicly offer to refrain from bombing Germany’s industrial Ruhr region, and also not to impose a naval blockade given that it would impose privations on German civilians, in the hope that Germany would reciprocate with restraint in the matter of bombing cities.

American air-power theory was wholly different. It was also aimed at causing an enemy collapse, but not by attacking civilians directly. Instead it focused on the idea of destroying key industrial links in the enemy economy, which would have the effect of disrupting supplies required to sustain the enemy population, and therefore its willingness to continue supporting a war. The doctrine was devised by a group of officers at the Air Corps Tactical School, the top American air-officer academy, during the 1930s. Four of the officers from this academy, Harold L. George, Haywood Hansell, Kenneth Walker and Laurence S. Kuter, wrote the first United States air-strategy plan in 1941, the ‘Air War Plans Division Plan 1’ (AWPD-1 for short).

The premise on which the theory underlying AWPD-1 turned was that the stresses imposed on an economy by war would be such that a relatively small number of bomber aircraft, dropping a relatively small quantity of bombs on carefully selected targets, would snap vital threads in the enemy’s ‘industrial web’, and as a result secure a quick victory. The primary objectives specified by AWPD-1 were electricity, transport, and oil. Failure of these economic essentials, so the plan’s authors claimed, would soon cause civilian discomfiture; indeed, they believed that the enemy would surrender within six months if fifty-four nominated targets in these sectors were hit. The plan recognised that accurate bombing required control of the air, and so as supplementary objectives it specified attacks on enemy air bases, on aircraft factories, and on sources of indispensable raw materials for aircraft production, such as aluminium and magnesium.

The credo at work in this view is expressed with commendable clarity in lectures given at the Air Corps Tactical School in 1939, quoted by Robert Pape in his study of the coercive use of air power. ‘The ultimate object of all military operations . . . is to destroy the will of the people at home, for that is the real source of the enemy’s national policy,’ says a lecture entitled ‘The Aim of War’; ‘the loss of morale in the civilian population is far more conclusive than the defeat of the soldier on the battlefield . . . Air forces are capable of immediate employment towards accomplishing the ultimate aim. They can be used directly to break down the will of the mass of the enemy people.’²⁶

Another lecture sets out the ‘industrial web’ thesis: ‘Modern warfare places an enormous load upon the economic system of a nation, which increases its sensitivity to attack many-fold. Certainly a breakdown in any part of this complex interlocked organisation must seriously influence the conduct of war by that nation, and greatly interfere with the social welfare and morale of its nationals.’ The lecture goes on to invite the audience to consider what would happen in the United States if ‘section after section of our great industrial system [ceased] to produce all those numberless articles which are essential to life as we know it’.²⁷ A third lecture applies these tenets to a practical example: if New York City’s water supplies were stopped, the city would soon have to be evacuated because of thirst, the danger of fire, and the undermining of sanitation. If railway bridges were wrecked by bombs, shortages in supplies of foodstuffs would quickly become apparent and make the city ‘untenable’ – so once again the population would have to be evacuated. This applies also to bombing of electric power stations: lack of electricity ‘would cause refrigerated food to spoil’.²⁸

In the light of what people can put up with in real rather than imagined war, it is obvious that the unwitting premise of these last remarks is that what would quickly end a war is a population’s effeteness or softness, its inability to do without refrigerators or WCs. The lecturer had evidently forgotten that the majority of his contemporaries in the world lived reasonably happily without refrigerators and WCs. As the bombed civilians of the Second World War all over the world proved beyond a shadow of doubt, human beings are – short of devastating atomic bomb attack – much harder than the Air Corps Tactical School lecturer seemed to realise.²⁹

These remarks show a marked parallel, noticed by Pape, with the views of a Russian-born American theorist of air power called Alexander de Seversky, who argued in a book on the subject that the civilian will to support war would surely be broken by ‘destroying effectively the essentials of their lives – the supply of food, shelter, light, water, sanitation, and the rest’.³⁰ Evidently there was a wide consensus among those in the United States applying their minds to the use of air power. On its merits the thesis seemed plausible, and the empirical evidence until then available appeared to support it.

But as always, the merits and evidence were not the only factors in play. Inter-service politics had their part in shaping the debate. Just as the Royal Air Force managed to maintain a separate identity after the First World War by appeal to the risks and promises of bombing – the risks implying a need for a separate fighter defence force against enemy bombers, the promise implying quicker and cheaper victories over enemies by bombing them first – so in America military fliers were able to compete for resources by emphasising the risks and promises of their craft likewise. They had long since been helped in this by their first and most enthusiastic prophet of bomber war, General William ‘Billy’ Mitchell, who in 1921 had given an apparently irrefutable demonstration of his thesis by sinking six surplus-to-requirement warships in a bombing demonstration that radically changed United States thinking about air power.³¹ Mitchell later appeared to have hindered rather than helped the air-power cause by outspoken criticism of colleagues in the US Army and Navy who were sceptical about his views; indeed he succeeded in getting himself court-martialled and cashiered because of the heated and intemperate remarks he made about them. But by the time the Air Corps Tactical School was producing a cadre of air theoreticians of its own, they had arguments to bring to bear that the War Department in Washington could no long ignore.

Received wisdom in the US was that America was so far from potential major enemies, whether to the east or the west, that it was in no danger of aerial bombing. The risk, if it faced any, was from an enemy navy. To trump the US Navy’s card on this score, the new theoreticians of air power pointed out – with Billy Mitchell’s ringing lesson in mind – that bombers were the surest defence against naval attack. This of course meant precision bombing. One of the immediate effects of this tack was that the US Army Air Force therefore developed one of the first accurate bomb-sights, the famous Norden sight, and was so jealous of it that it refused to share it even with its British friends. Happily for the air theoreticians, enemy warships and ‘industrial web’ targets both made the same demand for a precision-bombing capacity, so its proponents could offer Washington a compelling twin-track argument that offered both.³²

In Pape’s view there was an additional motivation for the precision-bombing strategy adopted by the US Army Air Force. This was that the constrained economic conditions in America in the 1930s made it necessary to devise strategies that would be relatively cheap.

Attacking the enemy’s will through the more humane and economic method of selective attack made sense in the 1930s [he writes], because the total budgets of the Army, of which the Air Corps was part, were in decline. Accordingly the Air Corps required a doctrine that promised victory not only at less cost relative to the Army and Navy but cheaply in absolute terms.³³

Added to this was the thought that liberal sentiment in the United States would not readily tolerate ‘the mass slaughter of civilians’. In an interestingly temporising remark, two men who were to have responsibility for carrying out American air strategy in the coming war, General H. H. ‘Hap’ Arnold and General Ira Eaker, wrote in their jointly authored book Winged Warfare – published mere months before America entered the war – ‘Human beings are not priority targets except in special situations. Bombers in far larger numbers than are available today will be required for wiping out people in sufficient numbers by aerial bombardment to break the will of a whole nation.’³⁴

When AWPD-1 was presented to the War Department in Washington in 1941, the Department’s joint Army-Navy Board responded with scepticism to its claim that air power could by itself bring victory, asserting that ‘only land armies can finally win wars’. The Board therefore allocated to the Army air corps a lesser role, that of supporting the other forces by gaining air superiority, weakening the effectiveness of the enemy forces, reducing the capacity of the enemy economy, and (the last item on its list) undermining civilian morale. This response meant that American air units were to remain under the control of land-force commanders, something that the American fliers had hoped AWPD-1 would free them from. It was not until mid-1943 that the US air arm gained operational independence, as the result of the issue of a new Field Manual for the US Army, which gave much greater autonomy and flexibility to air commanders – a first major step to the ultimate independence of the American air arm as the United States Air Force (no longer the United States Army Air Force) after the end of the war.³⁵

Because the new Field Manual’s directions on the use of air power incorporated pre-war Air Corps Tactical School thinking, it can be regarded as a partial triumph for AWPD-1, and so it was. But the precision-bombing versus area-bombing argument had long been won by the draughtsmen of AWPD-1; in theory that had never been in question. This was so even though AWPD-1 had officially been abandoned in favour of a second air-war plan, called AWPD-42, as the result of AWPD-1 being leaked to the press soon after it was submitted to the War Department.³⁶ In most essentials the two plans were similar, the differences being mostly of emphasis in their respective lists of crucial targets. Whereas AWPD-1 had been drafted by fliers, AWPD-42 was drafted by a committee of economic experts and industrialists. In revising AWPD-1 the committee revisited the question of which bottle-necks in Germany’s economy would be the right ones to target in order to strangle the German war effort. But as this implies, the official air strategy of US bomber forces remained – indeed, was reinforced in the direction of – precision bombing.

When the USAAF arrived in Britain to take its part in the attack on Nazi Germany, reality proved a harsh spoiler of hopes. Europe’s weather – low cloud, rain, patchy mist, dense fog, hazy days, abrupt and unreliable changes from sun to showers – would by itself have made the ideal of precision daylight bombing a hard enough thing to achieve, if it were not for the added and infinitely worse disruptions of the Germans’ anti-aircraft guns and Messerschmitt fighters. The fabled Norden bomb-sight required a straight and steady run of many miles with the bomb-aimer in clear visual command of the approaching target, no problem in training conditions in the United States but very hard to achieve in actual war conditions in European weather. In a deeply sceptical account of what really happened when the B-17s came to Europe, Stewart Ross – an academic historian with experience of analysing bombing-accuracy tests on behalf of the US Army Ordance Corps – claims that there was vastly more myth than fact in the accounts given of USAAF endeavours.³⁷ One of his conclusions is that although US bombers were officially required to attack only military or industrial targets and to avoid deliberate bombing of civilians, in practice any city with a population over 50,000 was regarded as likely to contain military or industrial assets and accordingly to be a legitimate target, and that therefore the USAAF not only conducted area bombing by default when ‘blind bombing’ (through cloud, at targets picked out by H2S radar), but when area bombing as such. He traces the Americans’ increasing acceptance of area bombing in the European theatre to its logical conclusion in the explicit and open area bombing conducted by Curtis LeMay’s XXI Bomber Command in its war over Japan.³⁸

This suggests that the difference between RAF Bomber Command practice and USAAF practice in the European theatre was less than might be implied by the express rhetoric of USAAF bombing principles. But two points merit mention. The first is that the RAF always attempted to give the impression officially – as noted, to Harris’s annoyance – that it was not indiscriminately bombing civilians, but attacking the enemy industrial capacity. The fact that it was doing so by bombing the workers (and everyone else around them) rather than their factories, and trying to undermine the German economy’s effectiveness by demoralising, ‘dehousing’ and causing privations to those who survived bombing attacks, was cloaked in rhetoric similar to that used by the Americans. But whereas the Americans wanted to conduct precision bombing and were forced by circumstances to engage in area bombing, RAF Bomber Command wanted to engage in area bombing and used the rhetoric of attacking industrial and military targets as a conscious cover for what they were really doing.

The second point is that when the USAAF Eighth and Fifteenth Army Air Forces were able to engage in precision bombing, they did so; this happened principally in the closing months of the war when the Allies had greater command of the skies, and the Flying Fortresses had better ‘bombing conditions’ for their attacks on vital sectors of German war production, especially oil – with, as we have also seen, decisive effect. In that same period Bomber Command continued to carry out area bombing – in fact, Harris positively insisted on bombing those cities on his list which remained unbombed; and so his aircraft destroyed cities like Würzburg and Hildesheim, noted far more for their historical beauty than for their military importance.³⁹

This fact, however, only increases the contrast between the American efforts in the European theatre and the area attacks carried out by XXI Bomber Command under Curtis LeMay in the Pacific theatre. Even here an effort, though not an especially great one, was made to disguise area bombing as directed at war production. Claiming that the Japanese produced military equipment on a cottage-industry basis, in which parts were manufactured in the little wooden houses of the civilians, LeMay said after the firebombing of Tokyo on 9–10 March 1945, ‘There are no innocent civilians . . . The entire population got into the act and worked to make those aeroplanes or munitions . . . men, women, and children.’

The mind of the Bomber II: The fate of Gomorrah

All the theory and practice described in the last chapter had not been taking place in a vacuum. The efforts made at the Hague conferences of 1899 and 1907 to prevent the sky becoming another scene of war did not end there. It was the opinion of Sir Edward Grey, British Foreign Secretary from 1905 to 1916 and therefore one of those involved in – some say, one of those responsible for – the outbreak of the First World War, that the accumulation of armaments in the years prior to 1914 was a major factor in the war’s occurrence.⁴⁰ The fourth of Woodrow Wilson’s famous Fourteen Points iterated the need for limitation of armaments: ‘Adequate guarantees [must be] given and taken that national armaments will be reduced to the lowest point consistent with domestic safety.’ Throughout the inter-war years efforts were made to limit the size of armies and navies, and to place constraints on the kinds of weapons that might be used; and this included air power. This was an obligation to which all participating members of the League of Nations and signatories to the Treaty of Versailles committed themselves after the First World War.

Some success in limiting naval forces was reached in 1922, and an important rhetorical moment occurred when the Kellogg–Briand Pact was signed in 1928, this being the international treaty signed by many members of the League of Nations – chief among them the United States, Britain, France and Germany – renouncing war as an instrument of policy.⁴¹ But the question of air power proved greatly more difficult to resolve. The fullest and most thoughtful attempt to provide rules for air warfare was made at a conference held at The Hague between December 1922 and February 1923. The then five major powers of Britain, France, the United States, Italy and Japan took part, neither Germany nor Russia then being in a position to count as such. The articles drawn up by the conference were never signed by the participating governments, so no Rules of Air Warfare came into existence; but the draft rules arrived at by the participants are fascinating, showing as they do how clearly the dangers of air power were foreseen. What happened in conflicts after the powers considered these rules, and especially what happened in the Second World War, has to be measured against the principles they embody.

ARTICLE XXII

Aerial bombardment for the purpose of terrorising the civilian population, of destroying or damaging private property not of a military character, or of injuring non-combatants, is prohibited.

[. . .]

ARTICLE XXIV

1) Aerial bombardment is legitimate only when directed at a military objective, that is to say, an object of which the destruction or injury would constitute a distinct military advantage to the belligerent.

2) Such bombardment is legitimate only when directed exclusively at the following objectives: military forces; military works; military establishments or depots; factories constituting important and well-known centres engaged in the manufacture of arms, ammunition, or distinctively military supplies; lines of communication or transportation used for military purposes.

3) The bombardment of cities, towns, villages, dwellings, or buildings not in the immediate neighbourhood of the operations of land forces is prohibited. In cases where the objectives specified in paragraph 2 are so situated, that they cannot be bombarded without the indiscriminate bombardment of the civilian population, the aircraft must abstain from bombardment.

4) In the immediate neighbourhood of the operations of land forces, the bombardment of cities, towns, villages, dwellings, or buildings is legitimate provided that there exists a reasonable presumption that the military concentration is sufficiently important to justify such bombardment, having regard to the danger thus caused to the civilian population.

ARTICLE XXV

In bombardment by aircraft all necessary steps must be taken by the commander to spare as far as possible buildings dedicated to public worship, art, science, or charitable purposes, historic monuments, hospital ships, hospitals, and other places where the sick and wounded are collected, provided such buildings, objects or places are not at the time used for military purposes. Such buildings, objects and places must by day be indicated by marks visible to aircraft. The use of marks to indicate other buildings, objects or places than those specified above is to be deemed an act of perfidy. The marks used as aforesaid shall be in the case of buildings protected under the Geneva Convention the red cross on a white ground, and in the case of other protected buildings a large rectangular panel divided diagonally into two pointed triangular portions, one black and the other white.

A belligerent who desires to secure by night the protection for the hospitals and other privileged buildings above mentioned must take the necessary measures to render the special signs referred to sufficiently visible.

ARTICLE XXVI

The following special rules are adopted for the purpose of enabling States to obtain more efficient protection for important historic monuments situated within their territory, provided that they are willing to refrain from the use of such monuments and a surrounding zone for military purposes, and to accept a special regime for their inspection.

1) A State shall be entitled, if it sees fit, to establish a zone of protection round such monuments situated in its territory. Such zones shall in time of war enjoy immunity from bombardment.

2) The monuments round which a zone is established shall be notified to other Powers in peace time through the diplomatic channel; the notification shall also indicate the limits of the zones. The notification may not be withdrawn in time of war.

3) The zone of protection may include, in addition to the area actually occupied by the monument or group of monuments, an outer zone, not exceeding 500 meters in width, measured from the circumference of the said area . . .

The failure of this effort, and slow progress on other fronts, prompted the League of Nations to convene a full conference of all members in order to achieve disarmament – or more accurately, arms control, which is a different thing. A preliminary commission sat between 1925 and 1932, trying to establish a basis for discussion on which arms would be limited, and how.⁴² When the Geneva Disarmament Conference officially began in February 1932, most of the attending powers were in agreement that air attacks on civilians were in violation of fundamental principles; but the conference as a whole quickly stalled on the political realities of the time. France did not wish to limit its forces, fearing hostilities from Germany. Germany stated that unless the rest of the world disarmed to its own level as specified by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, it would regard itself as entitled to rearm to the point where it achieved equality with the other powers. During one of the adjournments of the deadlocked conference Hitler came to power, and not long afterwards withdrew Germany from the conference. Although officially the conference remained in (mainly adjourned) session until 1937, the hope of preventing war by limiting the means for making it had long since vanished.

When the conference began, with calls from various countries about abolishing submarines and limiting the armaments of battleships, Italy and Japan called for the outlawing of aerial bombardment. France wanted bombing to be forbidden beyond a radius of a given number of miles from the front lines – which assumed that there would be front lines, as in 1914–18; but the British were determined that there should be no repeat of such a thing. Both Britain and to a lesser extent France had far-flung empires, parts of which occasionally needed to be bombed in the interests of good order, so neither was keen on an outright bombing ban. The conference contemplated banning offensive weaponry but permitting defensive weapons, only to find that what counted as either was a matter of perspective: submarines for Germany were defensive weapons against British naval blockade, while for the British they were offensive weapons against Britain’s sea trade routes. The same difficulty affected the question of bombs.

At one point it was (in the crazed way understandable among the impasses of a major international conference) mooted that flight itself should be banned, since while it existed – even for civilian purposes – it was a certainty that someone would assuredly use it to bomb someone else. Stanley Baldwin, former British Prime Minister but at the time of the conference serving as President of the Board of Trade, was profoundly concerned about the threat of bombing. He told the US delegate that ‘the course we are now following is straight toward the destruction of our civilisation and something radical has to be done unless we are all going down together’. His proposal, slightly less swingeing than the ban on flight as such, was the ‘total abolition of all military aviation’.⁴³ When Sir Anthony Eden took over as representative at the conference he suggested instead severe limitations on when bombing would be permissible, but in any event he suggested a prohibition against air attacks on civilian populations. The RAF suspected that Eden was moving in the direction of a complete ban on bombing, and were very unhappy about it. The then chief of the RAF, Sir John Salmond, wrote to Eden with his ‘deep misgivings’ about the tendency of the British proposals, saying that in circumstances where a country is fighting for its very life it would be ‘inconceivable’ that it would not use bombing to defend itself; the idea ‘has nothing in logic or common-sense to recommend it’.⁴⁴ Although he was opposed to the bombing of civilians – ‘no military advantage is likely to accrue to a country which employs its bombing aircraft to terrorise rather than to disarm its opponent’, Salmond wrote – he was adamant that bombing was a necessary weapon of war, and that therefore the main thrust of British efforts should go to defining what a ‘military target’ is, for in the absence of a definition belligerents would simply resort to indiscriminate bombing.⁴⁵

At one point discussion at Geneva really did seem to be tending towards an outright ban on aerial bombing, and both the US and British governments, the latter in the teeth of RAF opposition, were in favour. But difficulties of detail kept arising, chief among them the position of civil aviation in the light of such a ban – for, again, it is easy to convert an airliner to a bomber, and no country, especially not the United States, was prepared to retrench on civil aviation. Disillusioned by the lack of progress, on 10 November 1932 Stanley Baldwin made a famous speech. ‘The bomber,’ he said, ‘will always get through . . . The only defence is offence. You have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves.’⁴⁶ It is interesting to note that these remarks were then found highly offensive by the RAF, thus in effect accused of wishing to make war on women and children, whereas – so its leaders then passionately believed – bombing would shorten war and make it less costly in life overall, and perhaps even have the deterrent effect of preventing war altogether.

As usual, of course, RAF objections to banning bombers were intimately linked to the very survival of the RAF, for in the event of a ban the non-bombing remnants of the force would be returned to the Army and Navy for adjunctival roles. From the RAF point of view, therefore, it was as well that the conference collapsed in 1934; from the point of view of humanity it was not.

The failure of efforts to secure international agreement limiting bombers and restraining bombing meant that when a widening of hostilities threatened in 1939, Britain’s then Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, was very anxious. The country was still under-strength in its air defences and its ability to retaliate if a bombing war started, and the government was alarmed by the propaganda that the British had themselves been promoting about the horrors of air war, horrors repeatedly insisted upon by the RAF in seeking to preserve not just its independence but its existence, and by politicians like Stanley Baldwin who saw all too clearly what unrestrained air war would be like. So when on 1 September 1939, two days before Britain declared war on Germany, President Roosevelt made his radio broadcast calling upon the European powers to promise not to bomb civilians, Chamberlain was eager to respond in the affirmative, as much out of conviction – he was by instinct a pacific man – as canniness, hoping to stave off devastating aerial bombardment of Britain at least until Britain was ready to counter such an attack. In his broadcast Roosevelt said that he was afraid ‘hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings who have no responsibility for, and who are not even remotely participating in, the hostilities’ would be killed. He asked the world’s nations ‘to affirm [a] determination that [their] armed forces shall in no event, and under no circumstances, undertake the bombardment from the air of civilian populations or of unfortified cities’.

Chamberlain was not alone in responding positively to the President’s appeal; so did the French – and so did Hitler, at the very moment that the Luftwaffe’s Stukas were bombing Warsaw. Even if there was a measure of calculation in Chamberlain’s public pronouncements about abjuring the bombing of civilians, the frequency with which he made them and their emphatic character suggest an at least equal measure of genuine sentiment. In the House of Commons on 14 September 1939 he made his commitment in the clearest terms: ‘His Majesty’s Government will never resort to the deliberate attack on women and children and other civilians for the purpose of mere terrorism.’⁴⁷

There was a greater victim of the failure of international efforts during the 1920s and 1930s to limit armaments and to outlaw bombing attacks on civilians. This victim, without overmuch drama, might be described as the future of mankind itself. For in the absence of agreements to restrict the development of new and more dangerous weapons, the race to produce atom bombs was by default allowed to go ahead. Not only were they used against the civilians of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but they have held the world to ransom since, and it is only a matter of time before such a weapon is used – experts on conflict say: at the minimum either by terrorists, or in a regional war in (for example) south or east Asia.

From the outset the meaning of atomic weapons was clearly understood by those engaged in researching their production, and to many of these, in turn, their moral repugnance was equally clear. The Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, who had fled his homeland in 1933, was so concerned by the possibilities that he urged his colleagues in the field of atomic research to keep their findings secret. When he discovered in March 1939 that a uranium nucleus would emit two neutrons if penetrated by one neutron, which meant that chain reactions are possible, he was filled with terrible foreboding. ‘That night there was very little doubt in my mind that the world was headed for grief,’ he said.⁴⁸ He and a colleague persuaded Einstein to write to Roosevelt to explain the dangers – and the possibilities; for Szilard and others thought that in the parlous international situation it was advisable for the democracies to develop atomic weapons before the dictatorships did. In one respect they were right; in Germany, despite the fact that its scientific community had been depleted by expulsion of ‘non-Aryans’ in the Civil Service Restoration Law of 1933, which removed Jewish scientists from the country’s leading universities and laboratories (almost all went to Britain or America), work was under way on atomic weapons in a research project headed by Werner Heisenberg. (To a much lesser extent similar research programmes had also begun in Russia and Japan.) Some of the German scientists were as worried by the moral implications of atomic weapons as their colleagues elsewhere. But once the promise and dangers had been grasped by the politicians on both sides of a rapidly impending war, the production of atomic bombs had ceased to be a matter for moral anxiety, and had become an inevitability.

Before this, though, development of atomic weapons by the United States and Britain was almost stalled – not by moral scruples, but by bureaucracy; for in both countries committees were set up to evaluate the claims that scientists were making about atomic potential, and to consider the costs and benefits of experimental application of their theories. The US committee was especially sceptical; at its first meeting its members scornfully told the scientists presenting the possibilities of atomic weapons (Szilard among them) that it was the morale of troops, not the power of bombs, that eventually won wars. In Britain in 1940 a crucial breakthrough in the study of chain reactions in uranium-235 brought the reality of a bomb much closer, thereby prompting the setting-up of a British committee headed by the physicist G. P. Thomson. Although it agreed with its American counterpart in initially thinking that research into the possibility of a bomb was a ‘wild goose chase’, Thomson’s committee changed its mind in the summer of 1941, and reported to Churchill that atom bombs were a genuine possibility and could have a decisive influence on the war. When this was communicated to Roosevelt in the early autumn of 1941 he immediately ordered a full-scale development effort. Thus the Manhattan Project came into existence; the rest is history.

The men who made the breakthrough in research into chain reactions in U-235 were Otto Frisch and Rudolph Peierls at the University of Birmingham in England. When they had made their calculations on the size of the critical mass required to produce reactions reaching temperatures equivalent to those in the centre of the sun, they were staggered: the required quantity was only two or three pounds of material rather than the tons they had expected. ‘We stared at each other and realised that an atomic bomb might after all be possible,’ Frisch said. Their figures told them that 2–3 lb of U-235 would cause an explosion equivalent to several thousand tons of TNT, and that the radiation released would be ‘fatal to living beings even a long time after the explosion’. They further saw that nothing could resist the power of such an explosion, that wind would spread radiation far beyond the blast area and that therefore an atom bomb ‘could not be used without killing large numbers of civilians’ – which they therefore thought meant that ‘this may make [atom bombs] unsuitable as a weapon for use by [Britain]’; and finally they concluded that if ‘Germany is, or will be, in possession of this weapon [the] most effective reply would be a counter-threat with a similar weapon’.⁴⁹

This memorandum by Frisch and Peierls succinctly and effectively covers the ground as regards atomic weapons: their immense danger, their moral repugnance, their inevitability, and the need to counter their threat with a threat of the same: a prefiguring of the doctrine of deterrence.

Whereas scientists were mainly thinking in terms of a deterrent, Roosevelt and his military advisers, and with them Churchill, thought explicitly in terms of a weapon for deployment when ready. Roosevelt’s Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, said after the war that he never heard Roosevelt say that atomic bombs should not be used; rather, their role as a decisive war-winning instrument was alone what justified the effort and cost involved in developing them. Churchill concurred: ‘the decision whether or not to use the atomic bomb,’ he later wrote, ‘. . . was never an issue. There was unanimous, automatic, unquestioned agreement.’⁵⁰

There was no ‘unquestioned agreement’ among those who really understood the implications. Niels Bohr managed to secure a personal meeting with Churchill on 16 May 1944 to press upon him how awful an atomic bomb attack would be, and to urge him not to allow one to be made. Churchill impatiently replied, ‘I cannot see what you are talking about. After all this new bomb is just going to be bigger than our present bombs. It involves no difference in the principles of war. And as for any post-war problems there are none that cannot be amicably settled between me and my friend President Roosevelt.’⁵¹ Bohr had no more luck with Roosevelt, whom he saw on 26 August 1944, and whom he urged to arrange for international controls on atomic weaponry and for the Russians to be included in knowledge about them. Roosevelt’s friendly manner gave Bohr the impression that he had succeeded with the President where he had failed with the Prime Minister. But at a meeting between the two Allied leaders the following month it was Churchill’s attitude that prevailed: the atom bomb was going to be kept secret, so no steps would be taken to institute international control of its use; the bomb would be used against Japan if ‘after mature consideration’ it was deemed necessary; and Professor Bohr was to be watched to ensure that he did not pass information about the atom bomb to the Russians. Churchill indeed thought he ought to be imprisoned as a security measure.⁵²

Bohr was far from alone among scientists in campaigning to stop Washington’s political and military leaders actually using the bomb, rather than brandishing it as a threat. In June 1944 a group of Chicago scientists lobbied Washington not just on the moral question, but on the pragmatic grounds that use of the atom bombs would trigger a disastrous arms race. They argued that the US government should announce to the world that it had the bomb but would not use it, and would indeed renounce it if everyone else would join them in forswearing the military use of atomic power.

In July 1944 Leo Szilard also renewed his efforts by submitting a petition, signed by himself and sixty-nine fellow physicists, insisting that the government had an ‘obligation of restraint’. But the government had already resolved to use the atom bomb; its committee overseeing deployment of the new weapon noted the scientists’ concerns in its minutes, but without further comment simply iterated its decision that the bomb should be deployed ‘at the earliest opportunity . . . without warning’.⁵³

There was one senior member of the Washington government who was not in favour of the bomb, and who used his position and influence first to try to stop its use, and when this failed, to try to mitigate its use. This was Henry Stimson, the Secretary of War to President Roosevelt and then to President Truman. One thing Stimson managed to do was to strike Kyoto off the list of possible targets. It had been selected as such along with Hiroshima, Kokura and Nigata, all of which were left unbombed by conventional means after the decision to use the atomic weapon had been taken, so that its effects on them could be measured more clearly. Kyoto was the capital of Japan from 794 until the seat of imperial government was moved to Edo, later called Tokyo, in 1868. A city of nearly 2,000 temples, monasteries and gardens, it was then as it is now the chief repository of Japan’s culture and traditions, and Stimson was very much alive to its significance. General Leslie Groves, the military head of the Manhattan Project, was annoyed that Stimson had removed Kyoto from the list, but Stimson told him that ‘such a wanton act’ as dropping an atom bomb on Kyoto would make the post-war task of managing a conquered Japan vastly more difficult.

Stimson was also worried by the targeting policy adopted for the atom-bomb attack. The group of White House advisers considering this aspect of the matter, the Interim Committee, concluded that the bomb should be dropped over a city centre, not on the outskirts where industrial or military targets would usually be located, because there its effects would be diminished by the proximity of sparsely inhabited countryside. In any case, said the committee, industrial targets in large cities would be too small and insignificant as targets per se. Stimson objected to targeting city centres, arguing that it would give the United States a ‘reputation for outdoing Hitler in atrocities’. He argued that the Japanese should be warned in advance of an attack so that the US could avoid ‘the opprobrium which might follow from an ill-considered employment of such force’.⁵⁴ His efforts, together with those of several junior members of the government who agreed with him, were of course unavailing. President Truman was more inclined to listen to the man he had appointed as his Secretary of State, James Byrnes. In the Roosevelt administration Byrnes served as Director of the Office of War Mobilization, and as such had worked hard to ensure that the Manhattan Project received priority in money and manpower. Now he was determined that the effort should be seen to bear fruit. At a meeting of the Interim Committee on 1 June 1945 Byrnes strongly recommended that the atomic bomb should be used on an urban area, and very soon; and his principal reason was that the United States should demonstrate to Russia the considerable edge that possession of atomic weapons gave it, in order (as Leo Szilard observed) to ‘make Russia more manageable in Europe’.

This motivation has been much discussed, and figures as part of the defence of the use of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The point therefore comes back into focus in chapter 7 below.

In a discussion of the ‘mind of the bomber’ – which is to say: the attitudes of those who planned and ordered bombing, especially of civilian targets – it is not possible to leave the story of the atom bomb without noting the effect of its dropping. One of the witnesses in the B-29 that accompanied the Enola Gay on 6 August 1945 was Luis Alvarez, a Manhattan Project scientist. On the return flight from the sky above Hiroshima where the mushroom cloud still stood, he felt he had to write to his four-year-old son. ‘What regrets I have about being party to killing and maiming thousands of Japanese civilians this morning,’ he wrote, in stricken mood, ‘are tempered with the hope that this terrible weapon we have created may bring the countries of the world together and prevent future wars.’ Robert Lewis, a member of Enola Gay’s crew, shouted as he watched the effects of the explosion, ‘Look at that! Look at that! Look at that! . . . My God! Look at that son-of-a-bitch go!’ In his mission log shortly afterwards, when reflection had replaced excitement, he wrote, ‘My God, what have we done?’⁵⁵

Popular sentiment in America was one of exhilaration and triumph; polls showed 85 per cent of people in favour. But on both wings of the political spectrum there were grave regrets. A liberal commentator, Dwight McDonald, wrote sadly of America’s ‘decline to barbarism’, while the conservative David Lawrence said, ‘[appeals to] military necessity . . . will never erase from our minds the simple truth that we, of all civilized nations . . . did not hesitate to employ the most destructive weapon of all times indiscriminately against men, women and children’.⁵⁶

Of great interest is what President Truman thought and said at the time. In response to urging from a US Senator to use the toughest means possible to force Japan to surrender, Truman replied in a letter dated 9 August 1945 – that is, three days after the Hiroshima bomb and on the same day as the Nagasaki bomb – in the following terms:

I know that Japan is a terribly cruel and uncivilized nation in warfare but I can’t bring myself to believe that, because they are beasts, we should ourselves act in the same manner. For myself, I certainly regret the necessity of wiping out whole populations because of the ‘pigheadedness’ of the leaders of a nation and, for your information, I am not going to do it unless absolutely necessary . . . my object is to save as many American lives as possible but I also have a humane feeling for the women and children in Japan.⁵⁷

Next to this passage must be placed one from a speech broadcast by Truman on the radio that same day:

The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians. But that attack is only a warning of things to come. If Japan does not surrender, bombs will have to be dropped on her war industries and, unfortunately, thousands of civilian lives will be lost. I urge Japanese civilians to leave industrial cities immediately, and save themselves from destruction.⁵⁸

As these passages show, the same official line was adopted by the United States for the atom-bomb attacks as by the British government for RAF area bombing of Germany: that the targets were industrial and military. It is significant to note that in public statements of this line, no effort was made to redefine civilians as legitimate military targets in circumstances of total war; that thought was reserved for discussions within government and high-command circles, and later among defenders of the bombing strategies adopted by the Allies in the Second World War.

A thorny problem now faces this examination of the attitudes of those who planned and directed Allied bombing campaigns. Why was it taken by Air Marshals Portal and Harris to be acceptable that, as a means of beating Germany, its cities should be destroyed? It cannot be that they saw nothing beyond the goal of victory in itself; they must have thought about how things would be in Germany after victory was secured. In the months following the D-Day landings they had direct knowledge of difficulties caused to Allied troops who were obliged to move – and more to the point, fight – across areas of France and the Low Countries which had been severely damaged by Allied bombing. Caen was a striking instance. Its streets were so piled with rubble that vehicles could not move through them until they had been cleared, and it was obvious that a part-demolished urban environment was excellent territory for defenders, who could only be defeated building by broken building. The Air Force chiefs, and their political masters, must assuredly have realised that a pulverised Germany was going to present an even more difficult task for troops on the ground.

But what about their forward planning for the situation when Allied forces would be in possession of Germany? Did it not occur to the Air Force chiefs and their political superiors that a defeated population would need to be governed and policed, and in the process at very least fed, watered, housed, and given medical attention? Portal and Harris themselves might have thought that this would be the responsibility of others, and that their task was solely to beat Germany into surrender, after which they could wash their hands of the affair. This would have involved taking a very limited view of matters. Suppose they did so; did not higher authority have a view on the matter? What was government on both sides of the Atlantic thinking about post-war affairs? What plans were being made, and why did they not take into account the potential difficulties represented by the immense material damage daily being made worse in Germany’s main cities even as the war drew to a close?

Or were these considerations indeed being taken into account, and welcomed?

At the end of The Natural History of Destruction W. G. Sebald reports receiving a letter from one Dr H, a citizen of Darmstadt. ‘I had to read it several times, because at first I could not believe my eyes,’ Sebald tells us.

It propounds the theory that the Allies waged war in the air with the aim of cutting off the Germans from their origins and inheritance by destroying their cities, thus paving the way for the cultural invasion and general Americanisation that ensued in the post-war period. This deliberate strategy, continues the letter from Darmstadt, was devised by Jews living abroad, exploiting the special knowledge of the human psyche, foreign cultures and foreign mentalities that they are known to have acquired in their wanderings.⁵⁹

Sebald was rightly disturbed by this letter, the anti-Semitism of which betrays its affinities with German neo-Nazism. Had Sebald consulted the internet he might have seen there that neo-Nazis everywhere, and not least their North American ‘white supremacist’ subset, make common cause in racism and conspiracy theories of the kind suggested by Dr H. Unhappily, some of the thinking put forward during the course of the Second World War about what to do with post-war Germany plays directly into their hands – just as it played into Goebbels’ hands during the war, giving him a propaganda coup and the Nazi regime an excuse for encouraging Germany as a whole to fight to the very last ounce of its strength in 1945. For alas, responsible individuals in Roosevelt’s government did indeed put forward a plan for post-war Germany that, if not quite Dr H’s fantasy, was uncomfortably close to it. The area bombing of Germany’s cities meant destroying its libraries, schools, universities, theatres, museums, art galleries, shops, monuments, architectural treasures, clinics, hotels, workshops, studios, concert halls – in short: its cultural fabric, its embodied memory and character. And this was in addition to the destruction of its houses and factories, municipal offices and waterworks, roads and bridges, to say nothing of its people – in short: its capacity to function. This pulverisation of the physical, cultural and human fabric of Germany was allowed to continue on a massive scale until the very last month of the war, not just unabated but with increasing intensity; which makes it natural to wonder whether it represented an intention to so cripple Germany that it could not revive to become yet again, as it had twice been in the preceding thirty years, a dangerous and oppressive destroyer of world peace.

For material destruction is merely instrumental to a more profound kind of destruction – the destruction of what has since come to be called ‘social capital’, in the form of the institutions and culture on the basis of which a society functions. No one wished Nazism and its institutions to survive, for very good reasons; but the question is, was the area-bombing campaign in any way an adjunct to a desire to put an end to Germany as such? Was it an attempt at what might be called ‘culturecide’?

The controversial plan for post-war Germany briefly accepted by Roosevelt and Churchill is known as the Morgenthau Plan after the man who devised it, Henry Morgenthau Jr, Secretary of the Treasury to President Roosevelt for eleven years from 1934 to 1945, and therefore a key figure in Roosevelt’s New Deal. As the war in Europe was reaching a climax Morgenthau put forward a plan to de-industrialise the Ruhr, reassigning parts of Germany to France and Poland, and divide the remainder of Germany into two purely agricultural states. The aim of weakening and ‘pastoralising’ Germany was of course to ensure that it could not again become powerful; and as Morgenthau’s book Germany Is Our Problem (1945) argued, it was necessary to ensure this by institutional means, since the Germans were in his view by nature ‘militaristic’.⁶⁰ After initial acceptance by both Roosevelt and Churchill at the second Quebec conference in 1944 it was abandoned by both, partly through the efforts of the indefatigable Henry Stimson, and partly because Churchill recognised that a restored Germany would be needed in the coming standoff with the Soviet Union in Europe. At one point, indeed, he contemplated quickly allying the Allies with a post-Nazi Germany so that the Wehrmacht could be used in fighting back a Soviet advance which – so Churchill for a time feared – might go all the way to the Atlantic coast.

But the rejection of the Morgenthau Plan did not happen quickly enough to escape the notice of Goebbels, who made good use of it to stiffen German fighting resolve. Any Germans contemplating surrender to the Allies in the West, in order to forestall too great a conquest by the Soviets in the East, were discouraged by the ‘apocalyptic vision’ that Goebbels could now paint of life under Allied occupation, given the terms of the Plan.⁶¹ Alluding also to suggestions put forward by others who thought that radical steps should be taken to prevent Germans from again being a threat to peace, he wrote:

[Our enemies say] that Germany had been treated too mildly by the Treaty of Versailles, and that it must be entirely beaten down after this war . . . A few days ago, the official English news agency Reuters carried a cable from an overseas émigré newspaper supported by the British government. It proposed that all German children between two and six years of age should be taken from their mothers and sent abroad for 25 years. This would lead the Germans, it said, to forget their nationality. A mixed ethnic brew would result that could no longer be called German. Had Reuters not carried this nonsense, one might have done the English government the favour of assuming that this outrageous proposal was the result of a deranged mind . . . Our women know what their sons are fighting for, and our women know what their husbands are fighting for. Each worker and each farmer is more certain than ever before of why he is swinging his hammer or standing behind his plough. Millions of children look to us. The enemy sees our future in them, and wants to destroy them. So let us get to work! The enemy has told us what is at stake.⁶²

The Morgenthau Plan’s negative effects seem to have been felt after the war, at least in an indirect and temporary way. They did this by influencing Roosevelt’s attitude to the concessive plans drawn up by his State and War Departments for post-war Germany. These plans jointly envisaged a self-supporting Germany in which a reasonably high standard of living would be maintained, and for this to happen (so the State Department plan required) there should be ‘no large-scale and permanent impairment of . . . German industry’. Roosevelt, apparently at Morgenthau’s insistence, sent a highly critical memorandum to Stimson and Secretary of State Cordell Hull, saying that these plans were unacceptable because they would bring Germany too rapidly back to its pre-war state.⁶³

Roosevelt and Churchill agreed to the Morgenthau Plan on 15 September 1944 at the second Quebec conference, initialling a draft of it which provided for ‘eliminating the war-making industries in the Ruhr and the Saar’ and ‘looking forward to converting Germany into a country primarily agricultural and pastoral in character’. Anthony Eden, Churchill’s Foreign Secretary, and Cordell Hull, his equivalent in the Roosevelt administration, were both horrified when they found this out. In his memoirs Eden wrote, ‘I did not like the plan, nor was I convinced that it was to our national advantage.’ Hull called it ‘a plan of blind vengeance’, and Stimson said it was ‘just fighting brutality with brutality’.⁶⁴

It seems that Churchill had at first been hostile to the idea, telling Morgenthau that it meant Britain would be ‘chained to a dead body’; but he was then temporarily induced into accepting it by two considerations. One was that Britain was in desperate need of funds, and Morgenthau had given him to understand that 6.5 billion dollars’ worth of post-war Lend-Lease arrangements were on offer. Since Roosevelt was in favour of the Plan, and since Churchill was the beggar not the chooser at the conference table, he felt that it would be politic to go along with it.

The other consideration was that his adviser Lord Cherwell (Professor Frederick Lindemann) persuaded him that the Morgenthau Plan would be to Britain’s economic advantage in another way too. Cherwell claimed (in a communication to Churchill’s physician Lord Moran) that Churchill began by saying that the plan was ‘a cruel threat to the German people’ – as indeed the Germans themselves did not need Goebbels’ help to see – but that Cherwell had ‘explained to Winston that the plan would save Britain from bankruptcy by eliminating a dangerous competitor . . . Winston had not thought of it in that way’.⁶⁵

In the event Eden was able to dissuade Churchill, and more importantly Hull and Stimson were able to dissuade Roosevelt, and the plan was dropped.⁶⁶ In Churchill’s case it did not take long to restore him to his first instinctive distrust of the idea of an economically inert Germany which could not be a trading partner for Britain and a market for British goods – to say nothing of needing profitable British input in the reconstruction process. But he had also quickly come to see the point earlier made, that a restored and viable Germany was needed for what would prove to be the coming Cold War, which Churchill foresaw with greater clarity than most, as his celebrated ‘Iron Curtain’ speech soon showed.

If the Morgenthau Plan had been a single instance of punitive thinking about Germany’s post-war future, it might not be such fruitful terrain for far-right-wing apologists for Germany’s Nazi past. But there were other advocates of a reduction of Germany, not a few of them calling for further and sometimes more extreme measures.⁶⁷ One was Bernadotte Schmitt, the Professor of Modern History at Chicago University, who specialised in Germany. He had first visited that country in 1906 while a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, and had taken a profound dislike to it because of its militaristic character. ‘I have never trusted Germany since’, he wrote. In a speech to the National Council for Social Studies at Indianapolis in late November 1941, just over a week before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he called for a reduction of Germany’s population from eighty million to thirty million, so that it would be less of a cuckoo in the European nest. He did not say how this was to be done.⁶⁸

More extreme was Theodore Kaufman’s Germany Must Perish!, self-published in 1940. It is an egregious example of the genre; it called for the systematic sterilisation of the German people so that once the existing German population died out there would no longer be an aggressive militaristic nation in the world to threaten its peace. ‘Today’s war is not a war against Adolf Hitler’, the book begins.

Nor is it a war against Nazis. It is a war of peoples against peoples, of civilised peoples envisioning Light, against uncivilised barbarians who cherish Darkness . . . [Hitler, the Kaiser, Bismarck are] merely mirrors reflecting centuries-old inbred lust of the German nation for conquest and mass murder . . . This time Germany has forced total war upon the world. As a result, she must be prepared to pay a total penalty. And there is one, only one, such Total Penalty: Germany must perish forever! In fact – not fancy!⁶⁹

And so on. It is noteworthy that although this book was published by its own author, it was widely and on the whole positively reviewed; and this was before the United States entered the war, and before the mass murder of European Jewry in the Holocaust had fully begun.⁷⁰

In 1944 a lawyer called Louis Nizer published (with a reputable publishing house, unlike Kaufman) What to Do with Germany, calling for the Nazi leadership, Gestapo and SS, army officers about the rank of colonel, officials of the German People’s Courts (the kangaroo courts used for summary despatch of Nazism’s opponents, ‘defeatists’, and others), and members of the Reichstag, to be put on trial for murder; and arguing that Germany should be de-industrialised, or at least that German industry be placed under foreign control. His indictment of the German character is uncompromising:

[N]o people can be innocent who have twice in one generation burst forth in aggression against all their neighbours, near and far. How is it that one spot on the surface of the earth, no larger than Texas, should so persistently explode and ravage the world?

And what were the toasts, the slogans, the anthems, the battle cries of this people? ‘Der Tag’ – when Germany will rule the world. ‘Deutschland über Alles’. ‘Tomorrow we will rule the world.’ Rule the world! Rule the world! No people who can thrill to such a mission are innocent victims of wicked leaders.⁷¹

Worse, Nizer accused the Germans nation of being psychiatrically ill, suffering from a variety of sexually based disorders, principally sadism, homosexuality and bestiality. In a flight of rhetoric not entirely consistent with this thesis he asks, ‘Is it possible that German cruelty and blood lust is traceable to sexual inhibitions? Is there significance in the pornographic tendencies of the German fed by such official documents as Streicher’s Stuermer?’⁷²

And so on again. But one refrain in Nizer’s book, for all its mixture of intemperance and legalism – which no doubt struck a chord with many, given the degree of animosity against ‘the Boche’ during the war years – was the idea that the German people, not just its leaders but the people as a whole, bore a common responsibility for the engulfment of the world in war. This was because as a people – the generalisation comes all too naturally in such arguments – Germans are possessed of excessive characteristics that have always made them a menace to peace and stability. ‘Under [Hitler, the Kaiser, Bismarck, Charlemagne] millions of Germans fought fanatically, heroically, sacrificially. Theirs was not conduct induced by compulsion,’ Nizer argued, ‘theirs was a will to execute a program and a readiness to die for it. The vaunted efficiency of German aggression depends on millions of little cogs acting in perfect co-ordination which involuntary compliance could not possibly produce.’⁷³

The chorus of anti-German sentiment in the United States was a large one. Norman Cousins, editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, argued for the necessity of ‘deep burning hatred’ of Germans to potentiate the struggle against them.⁷⁴ The level of rhetoric rose when Rex Stout and Clifton Fadiman joined sixteen other literary figures on America’s War Writers Board, a department of the Office of War Information responsible for propaganda. The Board provided the Office of War Information with supportive pens when skilful writing tasks needed to be done. According to James Martin, ‘Fadiman was regarded by some as the most towering Germanophobe throughout the war, while others had as their outstanding figure in the field of action such as Lord Vansittart of England, and such Americans as Shirer, Kaufman, Quentin Reynolds, Walter Winchell, Ben Hecht, Stout, Louis Nizer, and Henry Morgenthau, though a full roll-call would number in the hundreds.’⁷⁵

The term ‘collective guilt’ as applied to the German people was coined by Robert, Lord Vansittart, who had been secretary to Stanley Baldwin and Ramsay MacDonald, and then Permanent Under-Secretary of State in the Foreign Office until his outspoken Germanophobia and his hostility to ‘appeasers’ led him to be sidelined in 1937 in a notional promotion to ‘Foreign Office adviser’. (There is some suggestion that either then or during the course of the war he had a role in the intelligence services; he was described in the Canadian press in 1945 as ‘a spokesman for British intelligence’.) In the mid-1930s British opinion about Hitler and Germany was deeply divided, and much acerbity infected the opposition between the two views. The Times newspaper was the flagship for pro-German and indeed pro-Hitler sentiment, while Churchill, Vansittart and others maintained a robust anti-German line, warning of the dangers posed by Hitler and the prospect of revived German military adventurism. In the event they were proved right, but in Vansittart’s case the argument went beyond the need to defeat Nazi Germany; he wanted to see measures that would decisively and permanently prevent Germany from a second resurrection as a military menace.

Vansittart was raised to the peerage in 1940, and used the House of Lords as a platform for proposing harsh measures against Germany once the war was over. So uncompromising were his views that extremer versions of Germanophobia came to be called ‘vansittartism’. In his book Bones of Contention (published just before the war’s end, in March 1945) he wrote ‘The Germans are savage to a degree almost inconceivable to anyone who has not had actual experience of them, and are a people born to deceit.’ These were not his own words; he was quoting the first-century Roman historian Paterculus, and he went on to quote Tacitus, Seneca, Claudian, Nazarius, Ammianus, Marcellinus, Ennodius, Quintilian and Josephus to the same effect.⁷⁶ In the House of Lords on 10 March 1943, during the course of a debate on the question of post-war Germany, he said,

I am not wishing to destroy Germany. I desire only . . . to destroy Germany utterly and for ever as a military power; and I further desire . . . to make an end for ever of all German pretensions, intrigues and efforts to gain economical hegemony of Europe . . . Subject to those trifling reservations, I welcome the survival of Germany with one proviso only, and that is that it shall be a totally different Germany.⁷⁷

Akin to the ideas of ‘collective guilt’ and ‘flawed national character’ is the premise for Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, published in 1996, which imputes to the entire German people a practically genetic anti-Semitism and therefore capacity for genocide, in which any ‘ordinary German’ is by his nature capable of participating, and for which the character of the German people as a whole is responsible. Goldhagen’s book was controversial not only for reviving this view, but for the questionable character of its scholarship, which is a separate matter.⁷⁸ The point of interest for present purposes is that if in 1996 such indictments of the German people as a whole were still possible, attitudes during the war itself to the question of post-war Germany were, obviously and at least, as likely to be coloured by generalised thinking of just that kind. The examples cited of extreme views such as Kaufman’s and Nizer’s, and views that almost translated into policy such as Morgenthau’s, accordingly provide a background to understanding the thinking of those directly engaged in the struggle with Germany. Army men had the opposing army to fight; the Navy had the opposing navy to fight; the RAF alone had the towns, cities and people of Germany deliberately and literally in its sights, and therefore the question of what might be done during the course of the war to influence matters after it, was much more present for them than for those in the army and navy. (Given the precision-bombing aspirations of the USAAF in the European theatre, consideration of its leaders’ attitudes are more relevant to the question of post-war Japan.)

A way of viewing this point from another perspective helps to clarify it further. In the Bosnian war of 1992–5, ultra-nationalist Serbs targeted Sarajevo’s library in order to destroy the thousands of Ottoman, Persian and Arabic manuscripts held there. The Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo described this as an attempt to kill Bosnian Muslim memories and to make way for a new Serbian mythology of conquest. He called it ‘memoricide’. In fact and legend alike the examples of memoricide, or what I suggest more generally and accurately might be called culturecide, are legion; history runs over with stories of the sack and destruction of cities, the extinction of cultures (think of native cultures in North and Central America, the ancient Celts of Western Europe, the aboriginals of India), iconoclasm (the Puritan destruction of murals, statuary and devotional objects), the burning of books and those who wrote them (by Qin Shi, the First Emperor of China; by the Inquisition) – examples are legion.

For some – and this does not include latter-day neo-Nazis and their like, for whom such questions are not matters of serious speculation but rabid certainty – it matters to ask how different was the attempt to raze Germany’s major cities to the ground. Such an attempt was made: so much is fact. What was the intention? A city does not consist just of houses and factories (we are leaving aside for the moment the question of the people living there). To repeat and re-emphasise: it has libraries, schools, hospitals, universities, theatres, museums, monuments, churches, meeting halls, laboratories, concert halls with violins and pianos in them, art galleries with paintings and sculpture in them, craft workshops, antique shops, bookshops, newspaper offices, buildings of architectural importance, in fact the whole array and panoply of culture, education, literacy, artistic endeavour and civilised life. In the immediate aftermath of a bombing attack the survivors need victuals and shelter. But in the longer term, water, food and a place out of the rain are not enough for permanency, still less for revival and growth. And once the inheritance of a community has gone, it takes time to build a new one. Many of Germany’s cities were places of beauty and charm before the Nazi period; when it was over, 40 per cent of the seventy largest cities had been demolished, mainly by bombing. Tracts of them are functional and visually rather sterile places now. Is it possible to believe that this programme of destruction was carried out without any thought of its effect on the post-war situation, and even the longer-term future of the country and its population?

As shown by how Eden, Cordell Hull, Stimson and eventually Churchill reacted to the Morgenthau Plan, there was in the end no serious possibility that a Morgenthau-style policy would be implemented in full for post-war Germany – although in the event Germany was indeed divided, a result that was accepted with a degree of satisfaction in some quarters, despite the Cold War implications. Correlatively, given the need seen by the Allied leadership for the eventual reconstruction of at least West Germany and its post-Nazi rehabilitation into the international order, there can also have been no intention to so pulverise Germany that recovery would be impossible. Yet the bombing of Germany gives every appearance to hindsight of a concerted smashing of as much of Germany, its people and its cultural heritage as possible. The same can be said of the USAAF’s area bombing of Japan. If the war in either the European or the Pacific theatre had lasted months more, or another year, with the area-bombing campaigns continuing their intensifying curve, the impression given would be one of an attempt at annihilation. Harris, famously or notoriously, had a list of cities to be bombed, and which he insisted on bombing. In February and March of 1945 his bombers systematically sought them out and bombed them – which meant that they destroyed ancient and beautiful German towns with little or no military significance, as the destruction of Würzburg and Hildesheim shows.⁷⁹

What explains the large and apparent discrepancy between the continued campaign of destruction and the fact that the thrust of official Allied policy on post-war Germany was that it would be de-Nazified, reconstructed, and returned to the international fold?

The answer I offer has to be tentative because it is speculative. In the case of RAF bombing in the European theatre, two factors were jointly operative. One was the relative autonomy of Bomber Command, and the other was the dynamic of its constantly growing number of bombers and bombs, all needing to be used, and in the closing period of the war in skies far less dangerous than in the early years. This gave an impetus to its campaign like the gathering speed of a lorry without brakes rolling down a hill. Until April 1945 the Wehrmacht was resisting on the Western Front with tenacity, and Allied progress was painfully slow. So the continued use of every available means of battering the enemy – even the bombing of unmilitary towns behind the front – continued to be permitted, though the strategic (as opposed to tactical, i.e. battlefield) bombing was not regarded by army commanders on the ground as having much relevance to their immediate task.

In the case of the USAAF in the Pacific theatre, the ferocity and destructiveness of its area-bombing campaign there is also explainable by two factors. One was the belief and hope that a bombing campaign could win the war against Japan without an invasion. The other was – to use blunt terms – racism towards and anger against the Japanese. There were at least four main reasons for this. One was the perfidy of the Pearl Harbor attack. Another was Japanese cruelty to American prisoners of war as testified by those liberated during the American advance along the Pacific islands. A third was the ferocity of the Japanese as fighters in contesting those advances. The fourth was the tactic of Kamikaze attacks, displaying what the Americans took to be a repugnant degree of weird oriental fanaticism. All these factors made the Japanese seem subhuman. American propaganda at the time portrayed them as such, in words and pictures, and the attitude was not merely rhetorical.

Ronald Schaffer remarks that American attitudes to the Japanese had begun to harden well before Pearl Harbor, not least because of stories about the atrocities they committed in China. They knew about the infamous Bataan Death March before their bombers had bases within range of the Japanese home islands, and they knew that captured American airmen had been executed by Japanese troops. All this made American military attitudes to the Japanese deeply hostile. General ‘Tooey’ Spaatz reported after the war that there was a widespread feeling in the US Army Air Force of repugnance for the Japanese; General Haywood Hansell said it was a ‘universal feeling’ among American airmen and troops that the Japanese were ‘subhuman’.⁸⁰

The USAAF’s chief, General ‘Hap’ Arnold, shared this view. He wrote in his diary for 16 June 1945 after visiting Manila, lately liberated from the Japanese:

Apparently the atrocities by the Japs have never been told in the US – babies thrown up in the air and caught on bayonets – autopsies on living people – burning prisoners to death by sprinkling them with gasoline and throwing in a hand grenade to start a fire. If any tried to escape they were killed by machine guns as they came out of the door. More and more of the stories which can apparently be substantiated.⁸¹

He heard stories about rape and murder, and found that those who had suffered at the Japanese troops’ hands had no thought of ‘sparing any Japs, [whether] men, women or children’, but instead a desire ‘to use gas, fire, anything to exterminate the race’.⁸²

The next entry in Arnold’s diary is the sketch of a plan for the air attack on Japan, ‘to completely destroy Jap industries and major cities’ and ‘complete destruction of Japan proper’. This was very different from the ‘Hap’ Arnold of the European theatre, one of the architects of precision bombing. Schaffer records a telling anecdote about a meeting after the Hiroshima bomb was dropped, at which Leslie Groves, the director of the Manhattan Project, was told by General George Marshall not to rejoice too much about what had happened, because of the civilian deaths caused. Groves replied that his thoughts were not on the Japanese dead but the men of the Bataan March. Outside Marshall’s office Arnold slapped Groves on the back and said, ‘I’m glad you said that – that’s just the way I feel.’⁸³

General Curtis LeMay, in charge of the area bombing of Japan, felt the same way as his comrades did. He described the firebombing of Tokyo in uncompromising terms: ‘We scorched and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo on that night of March 9–10 than went up in vapour in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.’⁸⁴ He is famous for saying, ‘Killing Japanese didn’t bother me very much at the time . . . I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal . . . every soldier thinks something of the moral aspects of what he is doing. But all war is immoral and if you let that bother you, you’re not a good soldier.’ And he is equally famous for saying, when Chief of Staff of the US Air Force during the early years of the Vietnam War, that he planned to bomb the North Vietnamese ‘back to the Stone Age’.⁸⁵

It might seem odd to invoke the autonomy of RAF Bomber Command as an explanation for the unremitting character of its area bombing of Germany as the war approached an end. Two facts explain it. One is an examination of the diaries of Lord Alanbrooke, who as Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke was Chief of the Imperial General Staff during the Second World War, and therefore chairman of the Chiefs of Staff (COS) committee comprising the heads of the British army, navy and air force. His diaries show – and they give one a frisson of surprise in doing so – how very little importance was attached by COS and the British government to the area-bombing campaign carried out by Bomber Command.⁸⁶ That is to say: COS and Churchill’s war cabinet were content to let the entire apparatus of bombing continue to function, from aircraft and bomb production to Harris’s almost independent direction of efforts at the sharp end, partly because they thought it kept general pressure on the enemy, and partly because it would have been more complicated to stop it than to leave it running.

In Alanbrooke’s diary every COS meeting is mentioned, and its topic; these meetings were held on an almost daily basis. Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris is mentioned just twice in the whole diary, both times disparagingly. On 13 October 1943, as Bomber Command’s endeavours were gearing up towards the Battle of Berlin, Alanbrooke wrote (with his characteristic plethora of exclamation marks):

Bert Harris came to see us this morning during the COS meeting. According to him the only reason why the Russian Army has succeeded in advancing is due to the results of the bomber offensive!! According to him I am certain that we are all preventing him from winning the war. If Bomber Command was left to itself it would make much shorter work of it all!⁸⁷

On 15 May 1944 Alanbrooke recorded the meeting at which General Eisenhower, King George VI, all the British and American Chiefs of Staff, and commanding officers in positions like Harris’s, were present to review the D-Day plans. He writes, ‘Bert Harris told us how well he might have won this war if it had not been for the handicap imposed by the existence of the other two services!’⁸⁸

Sir Charles Portal figures much more in Alanbrooke’s diaries, because the two were colleagues on the COS committee and therefore in continual contact. As shown in chapter 2 above, Portal began as an eager advocate of area bombing’s war-winning potential, but in the later stages of the war he also saw the point of precision attacks on vital industries such as oil. As already noted, he conducted a long-running tussle with Harris to try to get the latter to redirect Bomber Command’s energies towards this task. The very fact of this tussle is proof of the high degree of independence Harris enjoyed as a result of the relative irrelevance of his area-bombing campaign to the rest of the war effort. ‘Spent afternoon in the office battling with Portal’s latest ideas for the policy of conduct of this war. Needless to say it is based on bombing Germany at the expense of everything else,’ Alanbrooke wrote on 29 September 1942.⁸⁹ Portal’s commitment to the idea that bombing wins wars never diminished. Alanbrooke reports that at a ‘long and difficult’ COS meeting on 1 May 1945, devoted to discussion of the war in the East, Portal tabled a proposal ‘to establish long range bomber groups on an island near Formosa’.⁹⁰

It is clear that Alanbrooke and Churchill were in agreement about what could be expected from bombing, namely, that at most and best it was an ‘annoyance’ to Germany. Churchill, it will be remembered, said as much after receiving the Butt report on bombing accuracy (or more correctly, inaccuracy): ‘It is very debatable whether bombing by itself will be a decisive factor in the present war . . . the most we can say is that it will be a heavy and I trust seriously increasing annoyance.’⁹¹

Bomber Command did have two other uses, though. One was its utility as a morale-booster on the home front, as shown by the excitement generated in the press by the 1,000-bomber attack on Cologne, the Dam Busters raid, the firebombing of Hamburg, and stories about the pounding given to Berlin in the winter before the invasion. There was nothing adventitious about the improvement in civilian morale thus generated. In a long war whose first years had been gloomy and fraught with danger, the knowledge that Britain was hitting back was a powerful psychological support. It released other feelings too, at least for some, of satisfaction that the Germans were being paid in kind, and more, for what they had done to British cities and towns in the Blitz of 1940–1.

The other major use of the area-bombing campaign was as a means of pacifying Stalin – at least to some extent – who was desperate for the western Allies to take action in their region of the war to ease the pressure on the Eastern Front. What he most wanted was a Second Front – an invasion of the European continent from the west – and he wanted it in 1942, long before it was possible for the western Allies to contemplate such a thing. Temporising, they made vague promises to the effect that a Second Front would be opened in that year, but what happened instead was that Rommel captured Tobruk, and Germany seemed poised for victory. The Russians by sheer blood and guts turned the balance of the war by themselves in the closing weeks of 1942. In the preceding summer of that year relations between Russia and the western Allies were strained by Stalin’s accusations against them of bad faith, weakness and cowardice. Provoked by this, at the end of July Churchill suggested to Stalin that they meet face to face, and Stalin invited Churchill to the Kremlin. Churchill arrived in Moscow on 12 August 1942, and set about explaining to Stalin why nothing could be done about a Second Front in the remainder of that year.⁹² It began as a bad-tempered meeting, with Stalin accusing the Allies of being afraid of the Germans and reluctant to take risks, without which, he said, wars cannot be won. But Churchill had two trump cards to play; one was the plan for Operation Torch, the Anglo-American landings in North Africa in the rear of Rommel’s army; and the other was the plan for a massive assault on Germany by Bomber Command. Richard Overy describes what happened when Churchill told Stalin of these prospects:

The mood of the meeting lightened. Stalin liked Torch. He saw straight away that it would secure the defeat of Rommel, and speed up the withdrawal of Italy from the war. But what he liked most was the bombing. The American envoy, Averill Harriman, who was present throughout the meeting, wired Roosevelt the next day that the mention of bombing elicited ‘the first agreement between the two men’. Stalin came to life for the first time in the conference. He told Churchill to bomb homes as well as factories; he suggested the best urban targets. ‘Between the two of them,’ Harriman continued, ‘they had soon destroyed most of the important industrial cities of Germany.’ The tension eased. Stalin accepted that the British could, as Churchill put it, only ‘pay our way by bombing Germany’. [Churchill] promised a ‘ruthless’ bombardment to shatter the morale of the German people.⁹³

And so Bomber Command was set on its course, interrupted only by the temporary needs of the invasion in 1944, but able to return to the path Harris regarded as its destiny in the autumn of that year. It had already been given its area-bombing remit in the directive of 14 February 1942, and that remit was reinforced by the ‘Pointblank’ directive agreed between Britain and the United States at the Casablanca conference of January 1943, which outlined the direction of the combined offensive to be undertaken by the RAF and USAAF bomber forces: the former to continue its night attacks, the latter to seek its targets by day.⁹⁴

Apart from the efforts made by Portal to engage Harris in attacks on oil late in the war, the only move made to redirect or limit area bombing thereafter came when Churchill issued his famous minute of 28 March 1945, at last questioning the area-bombing strategy.⁹⁵ A point not often stressed in connection with this minute relates to its concluding paragraph: ‘The Foreign Secretary has spoken to me on this subject, and I feel the need for more precise concentration upon military objectives, such as oil and communications behind the immediate battle-zone, rather than on mere acts of terror and wanton destruction, however impressive.’⁹⁶ This minute was withdrawn after protests from Portal and the Air Ministry, but it had let a cat out of the bag. Sir Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, had evidently become anxious about post-war reflection on the nature of the area-bombing campaign, perhaps as a result of discussions with Stimson, whose views on the subject were clear. Eden evidently therefore decided to urge Churchill to the same thoughts, and the 28 March minute was the result. Just before the Dresden bombing six weeks earlier, Churchill had been enthusiastic for a blow to show support for the Russian advance; and perhaps, in the same spirit as American use of atomic bombing to educate Russian sensibilities, he also wished to show the Russians what British bombing could do.⁹⁷ At the Yalta conference Stalin had asked for communications behind Germany’s Eastern Front to be attacked, to interdict the movement of reinforcements. Berlin and Leipzig were mentioned as targets, but not Dresden, one important reason being that the Russians ‘clearly preferred to keep the RAF and USAAF away from territory they might soon be occupying’.⁹⁸ Whatever the logic, by the time Churchill came to write the 28 March minute, his attitude to the area-bombing campaign had changed. If beforehand it had been an alternating mixture of interest and relative indifference, it was now negative. In his victory broadcast on BBC radio on 13 May 1945 he did not mention Bomber Command. No campaign medal was struck for those who took part in Bomber Command’s work, and Arthur Harris was not allowed to publish his final Despatch summarising his command’s activities in the war.

The speculative conclusion that might be reached, in the light of all this, is that although there was no Allied policy to cripple Germany so badly that after the war it would be fit for nothing but ‘pastoralisation’, nevertheless the quasi-autonomy of Bomber Command meant that right until the last weeks of the war it continued to act in ways that gave every impression of trying to bring about just such a result. In the minds of Harris especially and of Portal too, a perhaps unspoken assumption seems to have operated: that a bombing strategy aimed at destroying the will and capacity of the German people to wage war easily translates into the thought that such bombing also ensures the destruction of the will and capacity to be in a position to wage war again or at least later, once the present war was over.

It would I think be too much to claim that RAF Bomber Command in a semi-autonomous way consciously attempted a kind of Morgenthau Plan of its own. But by default that is exactly what the tendency of massive urban destruction was. Note that this is a point still independent of the question whether the area-bombing campaign was morally right or wrong. After all, there were voices, among them Morgenthau’s, arguing that this was the right thing to do. But Harris and Portal cannot themselves be blamed or praised alone – depending on point of view – for the Morgenthau-like tendency of the bombing campaign. The top level of Allied, and especially British, military and political leadership have to accept the major share of responsibility for initiating it and for letting it continue. Whether that responsibility is culpable is the chief point at issue in this book.

One very important point remains to be discussed to complete an understanding of the mind of the bombers, which is to comment on the war circumstances in which their thinking unfolded. These circumstances explain the reasons for the change in British and American thinking about air strategy, which in turn led to changes in practice from attempts at precision bombing to area bombing. For the British this change occurred in February 1942, and for the Americans it occurred in the Pacific theatre in late 1944. In the case of both countries the policy followed the facts rather than the other way round. Bomber Command’s navigational and bomb-aiming difficulties meant that it had in practice been bombing civilian areas already, although trying to hit more specific targets, before the area-bombing directive of 14 February 1942. The same applies to the endeavours of the Eighth and Fifteenth Army Air Forces over Europe. But the practical difficulty of hitting precision targets was only one factor in forcing that change. More significant were the war situations in both Europe and the Pacific. It is these that are standardly invoked as part of the justification for area bombing in both theatres. A discussion of these factors is given in chapter 7 below.