Chapter 8
Throughout this book the principal example I have cited of a bombing assault on civilians is Operation Gomorrah, the Hamburg raids of July–August 1943. I could have cited Dresden and the atom-bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as my central examples; but I chose Hamburg. Why?
Readers will note that with one exception all my sources for this discussion have been works in English. I could have given attention to the recent spate of publications in German about the experience of German civilians under bombing in the Second World War, but I chose to approach the question of the morality of Allied area bombing from the point of view of the literature on the subject in the language of the victor nations. Why?
My reasons for both these things are conscious and deliberate, and they are as follows.
The bombing of Dresden and the atom-bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are, for very good reason, obvious targets for moral disapprobation when area bombing is criticised. Earlier I offered reasons why they are special. They took place when the war was effectively over, and each has a particular claim to notice. Dresden’s claim is the terrible casualties suffered by its residents, and the horror of the way they were crushed, asphyxiated and burned to death by the attack, so at odds with the great beauty and cultural significance of their city. The atom-bombed cities’ claim is that they were destroyed by a horrific new weapon, and remain unique – at time of writing – in being so; and that the attacks left a poison in the survivors, which killed them over the months, years and decades following, a hellish legacy that seems unjustifiable on any grounds.
However, I choose Operation Gomorrah as the principal example of an area-bombing atrocity because it took place when the war was, although running in the Allies’ favour, by no means securely won. It was conducted by means that were ‘conventional’ for the Second World War, at least until August 1945; that is, a mixture of incendiary and high-explosive bombs. It clearly and unequivocally targeted the civilian population of a large city, which was carpet-bombed at night to fulfil the aim, graphically described in Sir Arthur Harris’s own words, quoted earlier, of ‘crushing Boche, killing Boche, terrorising Boche’.
If Operation Gomorrah was an immoral act, then how much more so were Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If Operation Gomorrah was unnecessary and disproportionate, to use the language of just-war theory, then how much more so were the attacks on Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki – and indeed the firebombing of Tokyo and other Japanese cities, the bombing of Berlin, and the destruction of Würzburg and so many other German towns indiscriminately bombed in the very last months of the war for no better reason than that they were unbombed, and that there were many bombers and bombs waiting to be used.
If Operation Gomorrah was a moral crime, then the area-bombing campaigns of the Second World War were as a whole morally criminal. Bombing attacks that were genuine attempts at precision bombing – targeting oil, V-weapon launch sites, railway lines, U-boat pens – killed people too; but here the defence applies that there was a war on, and that these things happen in war. It cannot be said that deliberately targeting civilians and dropping thousands of tons of bombs on them remorselessly over many years is a side-effect of war.
The second point is that I have used only English-language sources in compiling this account. Most of these, it is true, themselves rely partly on German sources in their turn, and facts, figures and anecdotal material culled from German sources therefore finds its way into these pages by their means. And a couple of my sources are books by Germans either written in English or translated into English. But I have deliberately avoided drawing on such recent publications as Jorg Friedrich’s Der Brand and Brandstatten, or the collection edited by Volker Hage, Hamburg 1943: Literarische Zeugnisse zum Feuersturm, or Christoph Kucklick’s Feuersturm: Der Bombenkrieg gegen Deutschland. These books invite their German readers to set alongside the national sense of guilt for the Nazi era a second thought, which is that hundreds of thousands of Germans suffered in the war years from the area-bombing attacks, which not only killed over 300,000 people but did immense damage to the built fabric and cultural heritage of Germany. Two of these books, Friedrich’s Brandstatten and Kucklick’s Feuersturm, provide photographic evidence of the devastation and the torment of the casualties, some of it never seen before; and the first of them constitutes a photographic essay on the architectural treasures that were lost under the bombs, and by implication what they contain – for in Der Brand Friederich gives an account of the cultural losses too, in the form of the contents of historic buildings, churches, palaces, museums, and libraries.
These books seem to me to be legitimate and now timely contributions to the process of discussion required for putting the Second World War into proper proportion. I neither expect nor wish that this will change anything on the question of Nazi war crimes and crimes against humanity, which so weigh against the Germany of the time that nothing can excuse or abate what happened in it, or in its name. The point is not to make up a balance sheet, and by entering into it the sufferings of Germans under area bombing, thereby to diminish the culpability of Nazism. This is what neo-Nazis try illegitimately to do. I do not think that Germany’s responsible historians are seeking to do this. But at any rate, what I have written here, and what I judge on the basis of it, is independent of their view of the matter, however closely in many points their conclusions and mine converge. In writing this book I wished to view the matter solely from the standpoint of someone in one of the victor nations, who inherited the benefits of that victory, but hopes that by now there is enough perspective available for a frank acknowledgement of the wrongs done in the course of how it was won.
There are two major reasons why it matters to recognise and accept that the Allied bomber forces’ area-bombing campaigns constitute moral crimes. One is so that we in the victor nations can face up to our part in committing crimes in the course of that terrible war; crimes by a long way far less in magnitude than those committed by Nazism, though in the matter of comparisons the culpability of Allied area bombing should prompt uncomfortable reflections about the moral company it keeps, given that it is more akin to Japanese actions in their infamous attack on Nanking than it is to, say, Henry Stimson’s withdrawal of Kyoto from the list of atom-bomb targets. It is an obvious enough comment that only if a civilisation looks at itself frankly and accepts what it sees, can it hope to learn from the exercise, and progress in the right way and direction thereafter. The cliché, no less true and pertinent for being one, that applies here is that we owe it to our future to get matters straight about the past.
The second reason is that we are at risk of repeating mistakes if we do not face up to their commission in the past. There is a very particular reason for being anxious about this. Look at what the United States military forces recently have to say in their interpretation of those aspects of International Humanitarian Law (the Geneva 1949 conventions and their two protocols) which protect civilians. The Geneva Convention Protocol 1 of 1977 forbids military attacks upon civilians and civilian targets, and these latter are defined in Protocol I, Article 52 (1) as follows: ‘Civilian objects are all objects which are not military objectives.’ Article 52 (2) defines military objectives as ‘those objects which by their nature, location, purpose or use make an effective contribution to military action and whose total or partial destruction, capture or neutralisation, in the circumstances ruling at the time, offers a definite military advantage’. Now observe the very wide latitude that US military manuals apply here: ‘Military advantage may involve a variety of considerations, including the security of the attacking force . . . Economic targets of the enemy that indirectly but effectively support and sustain the enemy’s war-fighting capability may also be attacked’ (Annotated Supplement to the Commander’s Handbook on the Law of Naval Operations, 8.1.1.); ‘The official US Air Force doctrine suggests that the morale of the civilian population may, in itself, legitimately be targeted since weakening of the will to fight would offer a military advantage’ (Air Force Doctrine Document 1: Air Force Basic Doctrine, AFDD-1 (1997)). In other words, the US Navy and Air Force still think in Second World War terms about ‘civilian morale’ and the legitimacy of attacking what can be described as ‘economic’ targets – not, note, ‘war industries’ or some more closely defined economic target such as oil, electricity, transport or water. ‘Economic targets’ covers far too much.
Such interpretations of the Geneva Convention and protocols are not permissible in the light of an acceptance that Allied area bombing in the Second World War was a moral crime. This acceptance places much sharper constraints on such interpretations. It therefore matters.
To see the hard truth about the morality of Allied area bombing, we need only ask the relevant questions. Was it necessary? Was it proportionate? Is it really true that all civilians without exception belong in the front line of war? Why do Western militaries try so hard now – even if only in theory; even if it is only a matter of lip-service or propaganda – to avoid ‘collateral damage’? Why did we come up with the Geneva Convention provisions in 1949 to protect civilians in time of war, and more explicitly so in the protocols to that convention? Does the Allies’ Second World War area bombing pass the test of the Nuremberg principles drawn up by the Allies themselves? How does Allied area bombing square with the sentiment behind the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights?
Talk of declarations and conventions on rights and on lawful practice in war in the wake of 1945 was the result of a determination to try to avoid the gross human-rights violations that had taken place during the war. They came in the immediate wake of the war’s horrors as a judgement on them, and as a statement of what was unacceptable in what had happened. The Holocaust properly occupied centre stage in thinking about these matters; but that thinking also embraced other atrocities of the war, and as the evolution of the fourth Geneva Convention shows, area bombing was a part of that, though its chief perpetrators – the British and Americans – did not permit a specific reference to it. The history behind the provisions of the 1977 first protocol to the Geneva Convention of 1949 is left in silence by it. But its meaning is crystal clear: as a retrospective judgement on area bombing, it nominates it as a crime.
The questions can go on, adding to the discomfiture they cause. What is the moral difference between bombing women and children and shooting them with a pistol? Is it that when you bomb them you cannot see them – you did not intend that particular woman and that particular child to die – and anyway they might escape the bombing, perhaps by reaching a shelter? But if they are here against a wall just feet away from the muzzle of your pistol they cannot escape: it is more personal; you can see their eyes. Is that the difference – the anonymity of the act of killing from 20,000 feet?
On the basis of the foregoing chapters the answer I give to the following questions are these:
Was area bombing necessary? No.
Was it proportionate? No.
Was it against the humanitarian principles that people have been striving to enunciate as a way of controlling and limiting war? Yes.
Was it against general moral standards of the kind recognised and agreed in Western civilisation in the last five centuries, or even 2,000 years? Yes.
Was it against what mature national laws provide in the way of outlawing murder, bodily harm, and destruction of property? Yes.
In short and in sum: was area bombing wrong? Yes.
Very wrong? Yes.
And now there come some very hard questions for us to ask ourselves about our own airmen – our own kinsmen.
Should airmen have refused to carry out area-bombing raids? Yes. In the hypothetical ideal world which does not exist and certainly not in wartime, they should have insisted on being sent against genuine industrial and military targets, and unavoidable ‘collateral damage’ should have been the worst they accepted as regards the effects of their actions on civilians. Doubtless many thought or made themselves think that this was what they were doing anyway; and standardly they were told as much, and doubtless some chose to believe the line in psychological self-defence. But many also knew full well what they were doing, and accepted it, or suffered silently because of it, or regretted it. But in wartime people are taught to hate their enemy, and in the Second World War the Allied fliers had good reason to believe that the enemy regime was a bad lot. Bomber Command crews, and in the Pacific theatre USAAF crews, had the backing of most of the public and their seniors for their area bombing of civilian populations, and they needed both, together with the conviction that they were fighting a just war – which was true – to give them the courage to go and do a job which, whatever else might be said about it with this comfort of hindsight, was a very dangerous one.
In warfare, the ‘element of surprise’ is regarded as a valuable tactic, and all military planning is kept secret unless the threat of an attack has propaganda value or is aimed at distracting enemy resources. When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941 the Unites States forces were wholly unprepared, and suffered major losses. A student of Japanese military strategy would have known that the sudden surprise attack was a Japanese speciality – in 1905 the Russian fleet in Port Arthur was surprised by Japanese forces in a manner closely prefiguring Pearl Harbor. Naturally, the United States represented the Japanese attack as ‘perfidy’. This is not a rhetorical notion only; perfidy is forbidden by the laws of war, though rather futilely so, given what war is. By a superb act of historical management, and by its resounding victory in the war, the United States has changed perceptions of Pearl Harbor from an ignominious defeat into a noble national tragedy.
But at least the Pearl Harbor attack was aimed at military assets. On the second night raid of Operation Gomorrah, the one that created the horrific firestorm, Bomber Command created the equivalent of the element of surprise by flying past Hamburg to its north, as if proceeding to targets deeper into Germany; only to swing round and unexpectedly attack the city from the east. Here the target was the civilian population. Similarly, the lone aircraft droning above Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 gave no cause for alarm to the hundreds of thousands of people below, who accordingly went about their normal business, taking no precautions. When the first atom bomb exploded in the sky above the city’s centre, not one individual in the purlieus of the blast expected it.
A surprise attack on a civilian population aimed at causing maximum hurt, shock, disruption, and terror: there comes to seem very little difference in principle between the RAF’s Operation Gomorrah, or the USAAF’s atom bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York by terrorists on 11 September 2001. And this latter, prescinding from differences in scale and the drama of the target, is no different in turn from terrorist bombings carried out in Madrid by Basque separatists or in London by the IRA. All these terrorist attacks are atrocities, consisting in deliberate mass murder of civilians to hurt and coerce the society they belong to. To say that the principle underlying ‘9/11’, Hamburg and Hiroshima is the same is to say that the same moral judgement applies to all three.
No doubt these will seem unduly provocative comparisons. It can be pointed out that the Allied bombings were carried out in time of declared war, in which offensive operations are in effect a form of defensive operation, given that the enemy will seek to do the same if given an opportunity; whereas Pearl Harbor and 9/11 were perfidious attacks on unprepared targets, the first military and the second civilian.
This point is a good one, for there is indeed a difference here, though some will attempt to make it a debating point whether those who carry out terrorist attacks believe that they are at war and that their offence is in the same way a form of pre-emptive defence. Very well: grant the difference; yet focus on the net effect. In all these cases the centre-piece is an attack on a civilian population aimed at causing maximum hurt, shock, disruption and terror. This is what these events have in common, whether in the midst of declared war or not, and so far as this core point is concerned, adjustments of fine moral calibration are at best irrelevant. All such attacks are moral atrocities.
Recognising this ought to bring home with full force the degree of moral concern raised by Allied area bombing in the Second World War. It should by now be time for a mature and dispassionate acceptance of this point. The benefit of accepting it is that it secures the importance of the 1977 first protocol to the fourth Geneva Convention protecting civilians, one day perhaps enforceable in an international court; and explains why it is genuinely important that so much attention is paid to avoiding ‘collateral damage’ in wartime – again: no doubt too often as lip service merely; but the aspiration is what matters as a start.
Above all it will help to infuse a more honest appreciation of the character of the war fought by the Allies against the Axis between 1939 and 1945: a just war against morally criminal enemies, in which in some important respects the eventual victors allowed themselves to join their enemies in the moral depths, a fact which should be profoundly and frankly regretted.
Getting the record straight is all that can be done now. But it is far from little. Speaking from the point of view of an inheritor of the triumph of morally better forces over worse in the epic conflict of 1939–45, I think it places on even firmer footing our just condemnation of the atrocities of Nazism in particular and Axis aggression in general, because we do not pretend to have clean hands ourselves. What we can claim is that they were far cleaner than those of the people who plunged the world into war and carried out gross crimes under its cover, and that the explanation – not the excuse – for why we allowed our own hands to get dirty at all is because of what we had to clean up.
A fitting conclusion to the debate is provided by someone who was a participating witness to the Second World War, and whose judgement about the use of area bombing was made in an interesting context. This was a navy airman, Admiral Ralph Ofstie of the United States Navy, who contributed to the post-Second World War debate in his country about the role of atomic weapons in its future military arrangements. Part of his qualification for doing so – and it was an excellent one – was that he had served on the US Strategic Bombing Survey. He told a hearing of the House Armed Services Committee that as the Allied bombing campaigns of the war had shown, strategic bombing was ‘inherently inaccurate’ and no matter how its objectives were defined it inevitably involved ‘mass slaughter of men, women and children in the enemy country’. It was not only militarily ineffective but with its ‘ruthless, barbaric methods’ it lowered the moral standards of the society whose forces carried it out. ‘Must we,’ asked Admiral Ofstie, ‘translate the historical mistake of World War II into a permanent concept merely to avoid clouding the prestige of those who led us down the wrong road in the past?’1
And a fitting envoi is provided by the closing words of Vera Brittain’s Seed of Chaos. From the very midst of war she prophesied with ‘complete confidence that the callous cruelty which has caused us to destroy innocent human life in Europe’s most crowded cities, and the vandalism which has obliterated historic treasures in some of her loveliest, will appear to future civilisation as an extreme form of criminal lunacy with which our political and military leaders deliberately allowed themselves to become afflicted’.