Chapter 7

The Defence of Area Bombing

In his memoir of the bombing war Sir Arthur Harris wrote,

In spite of all that happened at Hamburg, bombing proved a comparatively humane method. For one thing, it saved the flower of the youth of this country and of our allies from being mown down by the military in the field, as it was in Flanders . . . But the point is often made that bombing is specially wicked because it causes casualties among civilians. This is true, but then all wars have caused casualties among civilians. For instance, [in] the last war . . . our blockade of Germany . . . caused nearly 800,000 deaths – naturally these were mainly of women and children and old people because at all costs the enemy had had to keep his fighting men adequately fed.¹

There is a double defence of Bomber Command’s war in this paragraph, though both parts are aimed at supporting the conclusion that bombing is ‘relatively humane’ as a weapon of war. Harris’s claim that bombing saved Allied military lives is the same justification given by the United States for its area bombing of Japanese cities, and constitutes the main defence of its atom-bomb attacks. Harris’s second claim, that civilians have always been targeted in war, has the merit of being true; the figure he cites for civilian deaths by blockade-induced starvation in Germany during the First World War is likewise correct.

These are just two of the arguments deployed by defenders of the Allied area-bombing campaigns. They offer at least five others. They say that area bombing undermined enemy civilian morale; that it reduced the capacity and efficiency of enemy war industries; that it created logistical difficulties for the German economy and administration by obliging them to deal constantly with repairs and refugees; that it kept soldiers, guns and fighter planes away from the battlefronts to protect the cities instead; and that it distracted enemy soldiers at the front by making them worry about what was happening to their families at home.

Officially it was easy to claim that area bombing’s main aim was the enemy’s war industry, and that civilian casualties were an unavoidable side-effect. When challenged on the disproportion of this side-effect, defenders of the strategy were apt to say that the enemy started it first, that the enemy’s crimes deserved punishment, that it was ‘them or us’, and that war is not a place for sentiment but requires resolution and tough choices in the effort to survive and win. This, after all, was a war against a formidable and dangerous enemy, and – for the British – well into 1942 the outcome was not merely uncertain, but threatening, for although the United States had entered the war in December 1941 – which meant that in the longer term victory was more likely than not – in 1942 the forces of the United States were not yet mustered in sufficient strength in the European theatre to help protect against, for example, another attempt by Germany to invade the British Isles. At that point practically the only means available to Britain for fighting back against Germany was bombing. Thus a strongly urged argument was that the resort to area bombing was the result of the necessities of war, implying that it was crucial that enemy morale and industry should be attacked, and that civilian casualties were an unavoidable outcome of doing so.

Among these arguments the four that are especially relied upon by post-war defenders of the area-bombing campaigns are: the effect on enemy war industry, the logistical difficulties created for the economy and administration, the holding-back of military resources from the battle-fronts, and the fact that area bombing was a major means, and for a time the only means, of ‘carrying the war to Germany’.

Before turning to these, let us consider Harris’s two arguments first, since evidently they were the ones that sustained him, as Bomber Command’s chief, during the arduous years of sending bombers over Germany on every night that the weather allowed.

The answer to the first point he offers – that bombing civilians saved soldiers’ lives – was given by Vera Brittain in her Seed of Chaos. It is that saving military lives by substituting civilian deaths for them is no different morally from a soldier on the battlefield using a civilian as a shield. Soldiers are contracted, trained and armed for battle, and although they are placed in danger, their commanders usually try to keep as many of them unharmed as possible, by appropriate tactics. Civilians are in a very different situation from soldiers. Many, whether or not in a minority, will not be willing parties to the war that affects them. Civilians also have efforts made on their behalf to protect them, but the conditions of modern war – especially in respect of bombs and missiles from the air – place them in great hazard despite all that defence measures can do.

The defender of bombing can reply to this, in turn, that an army is equipped, fed, and otherwise supported by the civilian population at home, and there is in principle no difference between the civilian factory worker who makes a gun and the soldier who fires it. Therefore the civilian armaments worker is a legitimate target. And if he is a legitimate target in his factory, why is he not a legitimate target in his home?

This answer is in part right. War industries are certainly a legitimate target for military action. But it is obviously better to destroy the factory than to kill the people who work in it; and if their deaths are covered by the principle of double effect – as the ‘collateral damage’ done in the process of the factory being destroyed – killing their families and neighbours is not. Killing their families and neighbours instead violates the principle established by Aquinas and Grotius that a just action in war is a proportionate one. To stop guns being made by killing an armaments worker and his family and neighbours is disproportionate.

Sometimes the argument about the relation of civilians to war is extended to the limit, by saying that in modern war there are no non-combatants: ‘everyone is in the front line’. This assertion is alas true, but not because infants and the elderly are somehow indistinguishable from armed and trained infantrymen or bomber crews in their aeroplanes. Rather it is because civilians are placed on the front line by having military attacks launched at them. If any civilians are involved in working to support the military efforts of their country, it is because they are specifically the workers and technicians in the industries crucial to the military effort; they and they alone are legitimate targets for attack therefore; and they are certain to be a minority of the civilian population as a whole.

The question of proportion is a major one for the area-bombing war. Bomber Command sought to demoralise the German population by killing as many of its members as possible, and by ‘dehousing’, terrorising, and causing hardship to the survivors. That was a direct assault on non-combatants, unacceptable on moral grounds even allowing that living among them they had that minority directly engaged in war-supporting activities. But in claiming that this was not only damaging the will but the ability to continue the war – that is, that it was reducing the capacity of Germany’s war industries – the means was obviously disproportionate to this latter end. This is not a point about the fact – though fact it is – that area bombing did not reduce German war production; it is a point about the fact that there were other ways of aiming to hurt war production that greatly lessened impact on civilians, for example precision bombing, as with the American endeavour in the European theatre, which in the end – in its attack on oil – proved highly effective. The American oil attack was proportionate and pertinent; it could also legitimately claim to be a necessary part of the effort to defeat Germany. The area bombing of civilian populations was not necessary.

Harris’s attempt to defend the area-bombing strategy by saying that civilians always die in war – his second argument – is no defence, nor is the game of numbers he adds to it. He says in effect that his killing civilians was licensed by the fact that civilians have always been killed in war; and anyway he killed fewer than were killed by the First World War blockade. To see what is wrong with this argument, imagine someone who has done something wrong and who asks to be let off on the grounds that wrongs have always been done, and that some of them were greater wrongs. For a robust example: imagine a murderer defending himself by saying that there have always been murders, and that anyway he only murdered two people when someone else had murdered five. Would this argument exonerate him? It would not. But this is exactly the form of Harris’s ‘blockade’ argument; and these analogies dispose of it. A shorter way of putting the point is to recall that a greater wrong does not excuse a lesser; and that two such do not make a right.

Harris also claimed, in connection with his blockade example, that the means by which civilians died in previous wars was sometimes crueller than death by bombing. But it is debatable whether starvation is a crueller form of death than being blown up, burned, crushed under a fallen building, or asphyxiated in a cellar.²

One point that Harris mentions by implication rather than directly, and which post-war defenders of area bombing no longer mention much if at all, is the once-vaunted bombing aim of ‘undermining civilian morale’. This was thought to be a key part of the aim of shortening the war, and that is what Harris meant in talking of saving young soldiers’ lives. As we saw, it turned out that heavy bombing did not undermine civilian morale – where it did not buoy it, it numbed it – nor therefore did it cause a collapse in the will to fight or work, nor did it precipitate a revolution. But a thought canvassed earlier was that this perhaps was because the weight of bombing was still insufficient, even by the measure of the closing months of the war in Europe. By contrast, the claim is often made that the atom-bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the last straw for Japanese morale, and that it was these particular instances of area bombing that won the war in the East.

If civilian morale were a decisive factor, was it necessary to kill so many residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Could not the same result have been attained by means of dropping a demonstration bomb, either within sight of a major Japanese population centre, or showing this on film to the Japanese? It might well have been enough to give a demonstration of the atom bomb to the Japanese forces.

In his account of the American bombing war over Japan, Ronald Schaffer notes that at first this was precisely the intention. Truman at one point instructed his Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, to arrange matters so that ‘military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children . . . The target will be a purely military one and we will issue a warning statement asking the Japs to surrender and save lives’.³ There was quite a wide consensus among scientists working on the bomb, and among some of the military high command, that this was the appropriate way to proceed.

And indeed half of this way of proceeding was to some extent implemented. At the Potsdam Conference on 26 July 1945 a warning was issued to Japan that if they continued with the war they would meet with the ‘utter destruction of their homeland’.⁴ Nothing was said about a new kind of weapon being used, and by this time the decision to opt for a demonstration explosion rather than an attack on a city had been changed – in favour of the latter. The Japanese had for some time already been making tentative approaches to end the war, not directly but through the Russians (who were then not yet at war with Japan); but some commentators allege that Russian designs on Japanese-controlled territory in the East meant that they delayed passing on to the western Allies details of Japan’s approaches, and misrepresented them when they did.

In the event, when the order reached General Carl ‘Tooey’ Spaatz, now in command of the USAAF strategic bombing in the Pacific, to drop an atom bomb on Hiroshima, he requested the order in writing, not wanting an imputation of responsibility on his own head. He did not believe that dropping an atom bomb was necessary; like his colleagues in RAF Bomber Command, although as a late and surprising convert, he believed that massive conventional bombing was enough. Still, he carried out his orders. He then suggested that the second bomb be dropped on an unpopulated area ‘so that it would not be so devastating to the city and the people’.⁵ His orders were otherwise, and the Nagasaki bomb was duly dropped.

It is very hard now to see what possible justification can be given for the atom-bomb attacks, though explanations abound: among them the desire to make a demonstration to the Russians of the new access to American power, and the frank desire to wreak retribution on Japan, perceived as an evil and brutal aggressor which had given America a humiliating surprise at Pearl Harbor, threatened to dominate America’s Pacific back-yard, and needed to be taught a severe lesson. The atom bombings were intended to be that lesson – though many would judge the Tokyo firebombing, the devastation of other Japanese cities, and the imminence of total defeat, as more than enough punishment already.

Harris’s conception of a bombing war, as we have seen, was to have forces so overwhelming that every night they could reproduce an Operation Gomorrah, or more than an Operation Gomorrah, destroying one major city after another until the population of Germany could take it no longer. He fervently believed that bombing was a war-winning weapon, and he did everything possible – to the point of near-insubordination – to prove the point right.

And some, to repeat, might argue that he was indeed right. They might point at Hiroshima and Nagasaki to show that he was right, and that the reason why people thought he was mistaken was that even at the war’s end he still did not have enough pulverising power available. If he had possessed atom bombs, and had dropped them on Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Cologne, the Ruhr cities, one per night, night after night, the war would have ended very quickly. In the big attacks he mounted, the 1,000-bomber raids and the repeated attacks on Berlin, he was seeking to bring about the crushing effect that was only achieved when atomic bombs were available.

The biggest problem with the idea of winning a war by city bombing, however, is that it involves the mass killing of civilians to do so. And if winning by the means just described – a series of atom-bomb attacks until either the enemy surrenders or there is no enemy left – is the logical extension of the belief that bombing can win war, then it offers an appalling prospect of what such bombing would have to be like to make this belief true. As argued in chapter 4, this technique at least would be self-defeating: the saying ‘to make a wasteland and call it peace’, with ‘victory’ substituted for or added to ‘peace’, applies here.

Let us now examine the other main arguments offered by area bombing’s defenders, returning to the European theatre in search of justifications because that is where the area-bombing campaign was carried out if not more comprehensively, then for longer.

One of the arguments is that area bombing prevented Germany’s 88-mm. anti-aircraft guns and Messerschmitt fighters from being used on the battle-fronts. This is a significant matter, for the 88-mm. guns could have been used as highly effective anti-tank guns against the Russians on the Eastern Front, and 70 per cent of the Luftwaffe’s fighter force was detained in the home arena to defend against the bombers. Because it was recognised by the Eighth Army Air Force that the key to the success of their precision-bombing efforts was control of the skies – a mirror-image of the situation in 1940 and the Battle of Britain – a major effort was made to achieve exactly that. In the closing months of 1943 the long-range Mustangs, Lightnings and Thunderbolts quadrupled in number; the Luftwaffe losses grew alarmingly, and began to outstrip production. The Eighth Army Air Force attacked the Luftwaffe on the ground too – its factories and airfields, its fuel, the aircraft factories’ component suppliers – and the result was that by the time D-Day arrived, the Luftwaffe had 300 operational aircraft to pit against 12,000 Allied aircraft.⁶ On the Eastern Front 500 Luftwaffe fighters faced 13,000 Soviet aircraft. This is one good reason why an observer in the summer of 1944 could see that the war was won.

It is therefore true to say that the bomber campaign kept the 88-mm. guns and the Messerschmitts in Germany instead of the battle-fronts. But note that what kept the Luftwaffe at home was the presence of bombers in the German sky, whether they were bombing precision targets as the Eighth Army Air Force attempted to do, or whether they were bombing urban areas as the RAF did. It was not necessary that the bombers were seeking to attack cities; it was sufficient that they were there at all. If a principal aim of the bombing campaigns was to anchor defensive resources to Germany, then however inaccurate the attempts to bomb factories, power stations, railway lines and marshalling yards, airfields, canals, bridges, harbours, dams and coal mines, the mere effort would have been enough to achieve this aim.

Moreover, the troops who manned searchlights and anti-aircraft batteries in Germany were not front-line troops. Many of them were youths and older men. The airmen in the fighter-defence force were certainly front-line material; and doubtless their absence from the Eastern Front made a difference. But they were not absent from the Western Front during the crucial invasion period, because Bomber Command and the Eighth Army Air Force were busy at the Western Front too. So the argument that the bombing campaign kept military resources confined in Germany is, though true up to a point, not quite the truth defenders of bombing wish it to be, and anyway – as just noted – would have happened whether or not the bombing attempted to be precise.

Mention of the anti-aircraft guns and Luftwaffe fighters reminds one that Bomber Command turned to area bombing because it found precision bombing too dangerous by day and too difficult by night. Is this fact a moral defence against the charge that deliberately targeting civilians is wrong? It is not. Consider an analogy: politicians have sometimes failed to persuade their publics by argument, and have therefore resorted to coercing them instead, by imprisoning and even shooting them, as in Stalin’s Russia and Pinochet’s Chile. This in effect is what Bomber Command did, and with the same degree of moral justification. Arguably, its action in this respect was worse, because its early precision-bombing efforts were expressly premised on the attempt to avoid or at least limit civilian casualties; so the switch to area bombing was a complete reversal of policy and an abandonment of avowed principle. The discovery of its inability to achieve its ends without performing a moral volte-face as to means comes nowhere near a defence of those means.

The argument that area bombing put logistical pressure on German resources because of the need for burying the dead, caring for the injured, housing those whose homes had been demolished, dealing with refugees, clearing rubble, restoring electricity, water and sewerage services, and getting food and clothing to those who had been bombed out, is not a strong one. As shown in connection with the efficient management of affairs after the 1,000-bomber raid on Cologne, Germany was well able to deal with the problems caused by bombing until the last months of the war, when the overall degree of social disorganisation swiftly reached critical levels. This was in large part a result of the remorseless bombing of the last months, but also because of the approach of hostile armies and the final breakdown of supplies.

Germany had an abundance of slave and prisoner labour available for the disagreeable task of clearing corpses and shovelling rubble, and an army of foreign workers for repair and restoration work. The capacity of its economy (as discussion of the next point shows) was such that it could absorb and deal with bomb damage without major distraction from either the military or the industrial tasks it faced; in the latter sense it had surplus capacity.

This leads directly to the argument that area bombing affected German industry in general and its war industry in particular. The argument was discussed and dismissed in chapter 3. As there shown, the rate of output of German industry increased until the last months of the war, and it was precision bombing not area bombing that then had an impact – on oil certainly, and on the movement of coal from the mines to the industrial plants that needed them. When Albert Speer was in prison in Nuremberg, awaiting trial, he was invited to give a lecture to an Allied group interested in German industrial activity during the war. What he told them about the way industry in the Third Reich continued to increase output despite years of bombing should not have surprised them; with the possible exception of the Soviet Union, all the major combatants had spare industrial capacity – and in the United States, spare manpower – throughout the war, which if necessary could have been adapted to meet military demand. ‘Throughout the war,’ writes Richard Overy, ‘the German economy produced fewer weapons than its raw resources of materials, manpower, scientific skill and factory floor space could have made possible.’⁷

This point is cited by Roger Chickering and Stig Forster in questioning the concept of ‘total war’ as applied to the Second World War, a pertinent challenge given that area bombing is sometimes exempted from moral critique on the grounds that it was one element in a ‘total war’ with all the implications of this for seeing every individual member of a society as pitched in battle against every member of the enemy society. The phrase ‘total war’ implies just that: that everyone was in fact or potentially on the front line of a war that had no traditional front lines.⁸

The shocking figures bear out the fact that the Second World War was certainly a war of peoples even more than of armies: an estimated 15 million soldiers, sailors and airmen were killed in all theatres of the war between 1939 and 1945, whereas in excess of 45 million civilians were killed. ‘The preponderance of civilians was no accidental or peripheral feature of this war; it reflected the central significance of civilians in the conflict, the indispensable roles that they played in the war’s outcome, as well as the vulnerabilities that they shared, as a direct consequence, with the soldiers.’⁹

But there is of course an elision of ideas here. Even if ‘total war’ means that everyone in a society is affected or involved in some way by the fact of their country’s being at war – and this was certainly so in the belligerent nations of Europe, far less so in the United States, and only so in the last six months of the war in Japan itself – it does not make every individual himself or herself a combatant. But the fact is that the Second World War was not a ‘total war’ in this or indeed any sense, as Chickering and Forster argue. Most of the land surface of the world was unaffected, many nations were bystanders merely, and the engaged nations (other possibly than Russia) had not put their every last tooth-pick and shoe-horn to the struggle.¹⁰

Industry was a legitimate target, yes. The move from this to seeing the workers as legitimate targets too, given the difficulty of hitting their factories, meant a slide to accepting that their families and neighbours were legitimate targets. This was the point at which moral trespass occurred, because it is where disproportion enters. It is sometimes said that we make virtues of our necessities; in this case we allowed what we mistakenly supposed was a necessity to make our vices.

A defender of area bombing might be prepared to concede that bombing the whole city where an industry was located, rather than trying to hit the industry itself, is questionable; but he might then say: what if the city was full of troops on the move towards a front line, contained many refugees who if caught up in bombing attacks might create serious difficulties for military movement and for logistics, and also had several crucial war-industry plants, and was an equally crucial transport hub? Would not such a target be a legitimate and indeed important one, if it was located close to an important stretch of the front?

Just this argument has been offered in defence of the bombing of Dresden on 14 February 1944, in the outstanding book by Frederick Taylor which examines the attack in detail, and offers the fullest picture of the circumstances yet given.¹¹ Taylor points out that the degree of devastation suffered by Dresden was partly the result of unfortunate weather conditions – the prevailing wind helped create the firestorm that did much of the damage and caused many of the deaths, so this aspect of the raid’s consequences was not intended by the attackers, who, at the request of the advancing Russian forces, had seen Dresden as an important choke-point for supplies and troops moving east, and refugees streaming west. Moreover, says Taylor, the air-raid precautions were inadequate, and the city’s residents were inexperienced at being bombed; and the absence of fighter defences, and the presence of good luck for the attackers, for whom everything went smoothly, made this ‘the raid which went horribly right’.¹²

Taylor agrees with the conclusion reached by the distinguished historian Richard Overy in his Why the Allies Won, that Allied bombing was a decisive factor in the victory over Germany and Japan (Overy says that ‘bombing mattered most’ in the victory over Germany). It is interesting therefore to note that Overy’s analysis of how this was so focuses on the two points that, first, the bombing campaign kept guns and fighter aircraft away from the fronts to defend the homeland, and second, that by January 1945 bombing had at last so depleted Germany’s industrial capacity that Speer was moved to write to Hitler saying that ‘realistically, the war is over in this area of heavy industry and armaments’.¹³

This however is not a vindication of area bombing. For once again one has to point out that precision-bombing efforts against industry, transport, power and military targets would have kept those guns and fighter planes in Germany; and once again one has to point out that it was precision-bombing endeavours against oil and transport, not area bombing, that forced German war production to diminish and at last falter in the closing months of the war.

In this sense bombing was decisive; but not area bombing. And it is area bombing which is the moral issue at stake here.

Among the questions that might be asked about the bombing of Dresden are these. Given that the chief point of bombing Dresden was its importance as a transport hub close to a region where crucial military events were unfolding, why was the bombing effort not directed at the railways and roads in the environs of the city, or leading to and from the city along the crucial west–east axis? The aiming-point issued to Bomber Command crews was not the railway yards, but a stadium close to the city centre.

The city was known to be full of tens of thousands of refugees fleeing the approach of the Soviet troops. Was this a reason to bomb the city? Why was it not, on humanitarian grounds, a reason not to bomb the city?

Indeed, instead of asking what the reasons were for bombing the city (rather than others nearby also involved in the movement of troops and refugees), one might ask for the reasons not to bomb it, and the answer might have been the same that America’s Secretary of State Henry Stimson gave when he struck Kyoto off the list of possible targets for atom-bomb attack.

It is recognised that one of the main motives for the atom-bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was to demonstrate to the Russians the superiority in weaponry that the United States had attained. In the case of Dresden something similar is regrettably true. Max Hastings, a trenchant critic of the area-bombing campaigns carried out by the Allies, quotes a briefing note sent out to Bomber Command squadrons detailed for the attack on Dresden. Its final paragraph reads: ‘The intention of the attack is to hit the enemy where he will feel it most, behind an already partially collapsed front, to prevent the use of the city in the way of further advance, and incidentally to show the Russians when they arrive what Bomber Command can do.’¹⁴ Considered in hindsight, the degree of moral set-aside obvious here in the idea of ‘hitting the enemy where he will feel it most’ – that is, a civilian population in an iconic city – and the calculation involved in using civilian lives and the precipitates of history to make a gesture in a game of diplomatic politics, is breathtaking.

* * *

Another argument offered in defence of area bombing is that for the first half of the war at least it was the only means Britain had of ‘carrying the war to Germany’, and since precision bombing was impracticable, area bombing had to be the means employed.

The phrase ‘carrying the war to the enemy’ is not a very clear one, though at the least it means ‘reminding the enemy that there is a war on’, and perhaps also reminding the enemy ‘that we are still here and in pugnacious mood’, which is certainly the message Britain wished to convey in the perilous period between the summer of 1940 and the turn of the tide in late 1942. Because this aim was not being realised by precision attacks, in February 1942 the fateful decision was taken to switch to area attacks. Was area bombing the only way to ‘carry the war to the enemy’ in this sense? Obviously not. Almost any belligerent act, such as attacking the enemy’s navy and harbours, and harassing its military dispositions in the occupied territories of France and the Low Countries, as well as attempting precision attacks on important industrial and transport targets, would have constituted ‘carrying the war to the enemy’. Area bombing was not exclusively the right way to do it, though it perhaps carried the satisfaction that it was causing pain, grief and damage to part of the enemy’s corporate being, however little real impact it was having on the course of the war.

The war situation was a factor in the bombing campaign in a number of ways. From the summer of 1940, when the British army was rescued without its equipment from the beaches of Dunkirk, until the tide of war began to turn strongly and permanently against Germany in late 1942, Britain was in a perilous state. It had seen off the invasion threat of 1940, and Germany’s attack on Russia in 1941 meant that there was unlikely to be a repeat of that threat at least for a year or two. But the ‘Battle of the Atlantic’ was a serious worry; throughout the period between Dunkirk and the crisis of this battle on the high seas in early 1943, the threat to Britain’s lifeline across the ocean to America was very real. In reminiscing about the war once it was safely over, Churchill said ‘the only thing that ever really frightened me was the U-boat peril’. A combination of factors won the Battle of the Atlantic for the Allies, after a terrible struggle in which millions of tons of shipping were sent by U-boats to the seabed. The principal ones were British decipherment of the Enigma code, the development of long-range aircraft for anti-submarine operations, and the fact that the Americans built ships (the famous ‘Liberty’ ships) faster than Germany’s U-boats could sink them. In the end this last factor was by far the most important; once again, the war was a matter of numbers: industrial output, shipping tonnages, personnel, resources in general.

In this period Britain carried the struggle against Germany alone. The United States presence in the European theatre began in a small way with advance units of its Army Air Force in 1942, but it was well into 1943 before the American bomber force began to have the numbers and the right methods to make an impact on the aerial campaign over Germany. By this time the Allies were fighting their way up Italy, albeit slowly and painfully; Germany was in retreat from Russia; and the build-up had begun towards the continental invasion that took place on D-Day. Harris himself nominated 5 March 1943 as the moment that Bomber Command was at last ready to get down to the kind of work he wanted from it; that was the date on which the navigational aid OBOE was at last fully operational, and when Harris was beginning to have the kind of aircraft in the kind of numbers he saw as desirable.¹⁵

But it is an interesting fact that Bomber Command’s readiness for its major area-bombing campaign coincided with the turn of the tide in the Allies’ favour. The argument that says that Bomber Command was the only means of ‘carrying the war to Germany’ during Britain’s time of greatest weakness, when it was alone in the struggle and woefully undermanned and under-equipped for the task, overlooks the fact that during that fragile time Bomber Command was itself very limited in both respects, meagre in capacity and range, and ineffective as an instrument of war.¹⁶ And for a large part of that period anyway – from the outbreak of hostilities until February 1942 at the earliest – Bomber Command was still ‘hamstrung’ (as Portal and Harris saw it) by not having carte blanche to conduct area bombing of German towns and cities by night.

When that carte blanche was given in February 1942, Harris began preparing the three 1,000-bomber raids of the coming summer. The raids effectively shot Bomber Command’s bolt for that year, and were propaganda successes merely; Cologne was badly damaged, but its civilian casualties were low, and the two succeeding big raids did little harm because they were so off-target. As far as 1942 was concerned, on a few occasions Bomber Command’s activities managed a certain amount of sound and fury, but with disappointing results in concrete terms.

So the anomaly is that area bombing began in full earnestness only when the tide of the war had already begun to run against Germany, and it reached its most devastating proportions when Germany’s defeat was recognised to be a matter of time only – in the last six months of the war.

As the discussion of America’s air war over Japan has already shown, the same applies. The defeat of Japan was not in question when the Tokyo firebombing happened in March 1945, and it was certainly not in question when the atom bombs were dropped in August of that year. Victory in the war as a whole was a matter of numbers – of industrial capacity and manpower reserves – and once America was in the war, the Allies were in effect guaranteed victory. The Axis powers’ only hope was to induce a favourable early ending to hostilities by some decisive or lucky stroke that would make the Allied powers decide that the process of gaining victory would be too long or costly, even though inevitable in the long run. That eventuality was made unlikely by the Allied decision at the Casablanca Conference in early 1943 to seek nothing less than unconditional surrender from the Axis powers; but the combination of hope for a lucky break, and having nothing to lose given the unconditional terms, kept the Axis powers going until the last drop of fuel – in Germany’s case – and in Japan’s case, the last drop of hope. Japan’s military command had come to recognise, by the spring of 1945, that the defence of the home islands was a lost cause, and from then on – four months before the atom-bomb attacks – they began to send out feelers to discover what the prospects were for an end to the war.

These points – that the defeat of Germany and Japan were seen to be inevitable, months if not indeed years before they actually happened – is vigorously contested by some, who say that the outcome of the war was in doubt in both theatres until close to the end, and that continued assault from all quarters on all aspects of the military, civil and administrative organisation of the Axis powers was required to realise the overwhelming necessity of the war, which was to defeat them.

Does this objection have weight? On the question whether it was unclear that the Allies had won until close to the end, one need only quote the agreement of the historians. Robin Neillands says that by September 1944 ‘Germany was going to lose the war, and quite soon – that much was clear’.¹⁷ John Terraine agrees; ‘By the end of August, 1944, Germany was palpably defeated.’¹⁸ One could quote the same from many sources, and for Japan too.

The point about the ‘overwhelming necessity of the war was to win’ is a good one. In light of it, it is often argued that the greatest immorality would have been to lose the war, and that since this is so, anything and everything done to win it was legitimated by this overriding aim.

It can certainly be granted that the overwhelming aim was to defeat the Axis powers, and it is surely right that it would have been an act of immorality not to strive fully and effectively to achieve that goal. But it is wrong to use this to justify indiscriminate bombing of towns and cities, for the familiar reason that ends do not automatically justify means. Suppose that the Axis powers had won the war: would that fact justify everything they did in the course of it? Obviously not. In practice victory tends to provide absolution for all wrongs, since the victor is the judge and jury in his own behalf – and history is written by victors. In the same way, the victor nations of the Second World War have allowed their victory to excuse them from self-examination over some aspects of their behaviour. But that is a wrong in itself.

Let us for a moment suppose that all the arguments of the defenders of area bombing are correct, namely, that it damaged enemy morale, reduced enemy industrial capacity, kept enemy military resources away from battle-fronts, reduced military deaths, and ‘carried the war’ to the enemy. We have seen that these arguments do not persuade; but let us for a moment accept them. Do they make area bombing morally acceptable? One thing would be needed to make an affirmative answer more likely, namely, the claim that there was no other way to survive against the Axis powers than by carrying out area bombing. Is this true? Manifestly not. For one thing, Britain survived its greatest threat from Nazi Germany in the two years before area bombing became its policy. For another, the effects claimed by defenders of area bombing, and which we are temporarily granting, could have been gained, as we have seen, by efforts at precision-bombing – and may indeed have been more successfully gained by it. This too shows that area bombing was not necessary.

Remember the criteria for jus in bello: that the means employed be necessary, and proportional. Area bombing was neither necessary nor proportional, and it was neither of these things by quite a long way.

It is striking to notice the judgements made by historians, even those sympathetic to the endeavours and sufferings of Bomber Command, about the merits of its campaigns in the Second World War. In his excellent history of Bomber Command’s war, Denis Richards lists its outstanding achievements as follows. First, there were its mine-laying activities, which interrupted the movement of merchant ships supplying Germany, kept U-boats in their bases at the time of critical operations such as Operation Torch in North Africa in 1942, and Operation Overlord on 6 June 1944. Moreover, the mine-laying interfered with U-boat training in the Bay of Danzig when Admiral Dönitz was trying to bring his new large submarines into service for the Atlantic struggle.¹⁹ Bomber Command also sank or put out of action six of Germany’s twelve major warships; its epic sinking of the Tirpitz involved three raids, one from temporary bases in Russia which the attacking Lancasters had to use as a staging post before trying to bomb the battleship in its hiding place in Kaafiord. The same Lancasters eventually sank the Tirpitz on 12 November 1944 at moorings near Tromsø. Finally, Bomber Command delayed and reduced V-weapon production by its attacks of Peenemunde and rocket-launch sites, making a valuable impact on the missile attacks on London in the summer and autumn of 1944.²⁰

Note that these are all precision attacks. To them can be added Bomber Command’s help in preventing the threatened invasion of 1940, and its contribution to the strangulation of Germany’s fuel supplies in the last months of the war – though this was chiefly an American success. These again were precision attacks. The only recognition given by Richards to area bombing is its role in helping to persuade the Italian populace to change sides in the war. Almost any of the military actions of the Allies in the Italian theatre could be praised for this, but it is only fair to include Bomber Command, whose crews found that attacks on Milan, Genoa and Turin were relatively safe in comparison to the danger posed by fighter planes and anti-aircraft defences in Germany. It is easy to be dismayed by the thought of the indifference thus displayed to the centuries of cultural treasures cavalierly subjected to bombing, though the indifference to the possibility of civilian deaths – children, women and the elderly almost certainly the majority among them – is infinitely worse.

Naturally, and rightly enough, the defender of bombing will respond to all the foregoing criticisms of the area-bombing campaign by asking: what should the Allies have done instead? The answer is given in the mere process of making the question itself more precise: what should the Allies have done instead of area bombing? The answer is: Bomber Command should have continued its efforts at precision bombing, and devoted its energies to making this tactic safer for its bombers and more effective. The fact that precision bombing proved highly dangerous in the early years of the war was the practical reason for switching to area bombing, but there was an alternative which, if the principle of limiting harm to civilians had been maintained, could and doubtless would have been taken: namely, seeking remedies to the danger – as the Eighth Army Air Force did, finding their answer in long-range fighter escorts. The RAF made no efforts in this direction, because it chose to concentrate on night area bombing. But the same quantum of effort could have been devoted to making daylight precision bombing practicable, exactly as the Americans did.

All four of the desiderata specified by the main defence of the bombing campaign would have been realised by a precision bombing effort. Anti-aircraft guns and fighter planes would have had to remain in Germany. The war would have been ‘carried to’ Germany. A concentrated effort at precision bombing of crucial industrial and economic targets might have reduced the capacity of Germany’s war industries far earlier than the actual precision-bombing efforts by the Eighth Army Air Force did – and as area bombing did not – thus perhaps genuinely shortening the war. And this in turn might have had an impact on morale too, and where it mattered most: not so much the morale of the civilian population, but of the troops kept short of equipment and fuel and thus made more vulnerable to their enemies.

And all this would have been achieved without the deliberate targeting of civilians, and therefore with lower civilian casualties. The Allies could accordingly have maintained moral standards throughout, consistently with their professions before and at the beginning of the war that they would never stoop to deliberate bombing of civilians.

A point that defenders of area bombing might make at this juncture is to say that it was not obvious, at the time that the bombing campaign was actually going on, that it was having little effect on Germany’s war industry or on the population’s morale. The hope that it would shorten the war by making German civilians demand that their leaders end it, was a real hope, and if it does not justify area bombing at the very least it excuses it, or allows a plea of mitigation to be entered on its behalf.

To this the answer is that the conductors of area bombing knew, from pre-war discussions and widely advertised fears, and from the pre-war efforts to limit civilian bombing by international agreement, that the very act of targeting civilians was wrong. Indeed at the outset of war the British government had repeatedly and pointedly forsworn the idea of targeting civilians as a barbarous and uncivilised technique of war. So not being aware of its ineffectiveness, yet hoping that it was effective enough that it might shorten the war, cannot be invoked as a justification nor even as an excuse. The combination of ignorance and hope might be an explanation of why the conductors of area bombing chose it as a strategy and allowed it to continue; but an explanation is not an excuse.

For a perspective on the standards Roosevelt, Chamberlain and others sought to uphold in respect of bombing at the outbreak of the Second World War – in Chamberlain’s case, as earlier chapters showed, partly out of conviction and partly out of a pragmatic desire to dissuade Germany from area-bombing Britain – a much more recent example might be given. Writing in the spring of 2005 on the subject of US treatment of prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq, the American commentator Thomas Friedman said:

Yes I know war is hell and ugliness abounds in every corner. I also understand that in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, America is up against a vicious enemy, which, if it had the power, would do great harm to the United States. You do not deal with such people with kid gloves. But killing prisoners of war, presumably in the act of torture, is an inexcusable outrage. The fact that Congress has just shrugged this off, and no senior official or officer has been fired, is a travesty.²¹

The comment can be applied retrospectively to the Second World War, with a few changes of names and nouns, and exactly the same principle holds: civilised standards have to be made to apply even in severe situations, both for intrinsic reasons and because there is, properly, a reckoning always to come.

There is one final throw of the dice for defenders of area bombing, and that, with respect to the points just made, is to ask, ‘Has morality any place in war at all?’ If it does not, then anything goes, and with it area bombing of civilian targets. This would be the ultimate defence of anything done under the cloak of war – and alas, it often is, given the frightful facts of war, from terrible battles like Stalingrad, to the atrocities, bombing victims, Japanese prisoner-of-war camps, men dying in submarines at the bottom of the sea or burning in the cockpits of aeroplanes – and so on and on – the list is ghastly and endless, and as one contemplates it, the refined nuances of ethical debate seem wholly out of place.

Robin Neillands, whose question ‘Has morality any place in war at all?’ I quote, cites both Clausewitz and Macaulay in support of the idea that once war has broken out the only aim is to win it ‘at any cost, and especially if that cost can be met by the enemy’.²² Clausewitz says that the will of the enemy is a legitimate target: ‘the destruction of his capacity to resist, the killing of his courage rather than his men’ is what warfare is about. For Macaulay, writing in 1831, ‘The essence of war is violence; moderation in war is imbecility’.²³ For Neillands, the idea that war is something to be won at any cost, preferably to be paid by the enemy, is ‘a point that can be endlessly debated by moral philosophers, who tend to find so blunt a point unacceptable; but wars are not usually fought by moral philosophers’.²⁴ Interestingly, the convergence between the views of moral philosophers, on the one hand, and on the other hand soldiers who have seen the battlefield, tends to be greater than between the latter and the historians of their doings. Hereby hangs a tale. But Neillands continues, ‘[Wars] are fought by ordinary people . . . once they are in it they find moral questions largely academic; their main aim is to stay alive, and to win.’ This is doubtless true. But the high command in wars, both military and political – the people who make the choices and take the decisions – are not the ordinary soldiers who find themselves reluctantly at war. This implies an important difference. Greater responsibility demands a more encompassing view not just of the strategic but of the political, diplomatic, and finally human implications of what is involved in going to war, and in the conduct of war.

Yet even the ordinary people who get caught up in war might find themselves doing some moral philosophy after all, as Neillands now changes tack to acknowledge:

To win, these people may be obliged to do dreadful things to their fellow men, often in the interests of personal survival, but most of these ordinary people would agree that even in war some actions are beyond the pale. The killing of prisoners or women and children is certainly among them. In short, there has to be morality in war; to suppose otherwise is to condone barbarism.²⁵

This last remark, I think, says it all. It is of course infinitely easier to say than to apply in times of dreadful emergency. But it is the mark of a truly civilised arrangement that in even such emergency, the effort is made, not abandoned.

I conclude that the defences offered for area bombing are unpersuasive, and that therefore the indictment stands.