The question examined in the previous chapters – did the United Kingdom and the United States commit what we would now call a war crime by ‘area bombing’ civilian populations in the cities of Germany and Japan during the Second World War? – is given an unequivocally affirmative answer in the final chapter. This conclusion predictably caused controversy for and against, both among historians who specialise in the Second World War and veterans of the Allied air forces who took part in it.
Two equally controversial corollaries that also drew attention were, first, that if given the choice, Allied aircrews should have elected to attack genuine military and industrial targets exclusively, rather than to participate in indiscriminate attacks on civilian populations in urban areas; and second, that in a single crucial respect the terrorist atrocities of 11 September 2001 and others like them resemble ‘area bombings’ of civilians, namely, in their aim of assaulting and undermining the morale of the attacked population by hurting and terrorising it.
In this postscript I take the opportunity to reflect on the debate generated by my arguments here, and especially these main points of contention.
One premise of this book is that the Second World War was a just war for the Allied side – one of the very few just wars in history – fought against dangerous and wicked aggressors whose atrocities far outweigh anything that the Allies might or might not have done in the course of it. Losing the war would have been a disaster of epochal proportions for the Allied nations and the world at large. And yet, if the Allies did indeed do anything questionable in the course of fighting that just war, we as the survivors, veterans and descendants of the Allied side should have the maturity and moral courage to acknowledge the fact and learn from it, because we are still fighting wars, and may have to fight yet more – and we should wish to fight them justly even if we fight them with all our might and determination.
Indeed, a primary motivation for writing this book was that too many parts of the world were (and, as this postscript is written, still are) convulsed in military and terrorist violence, including acts that horrify one’s conscience. I thought that one of many needful tasks was that of recalling and fully understanding the lessons of crucial aspects of past conflicts, for our own sakes and that of the future.
Among those who contacted me to express support for my conclusions were veteran airmen, both British and American, who typically reported the doubts they felt about area bombing even at the time they participated in it. One, Harold Nash, told me a touching story. He was shot down while on a bombing raid over Hanover, captured the next morning, and taken under guard to Hanover train station where refugees from his bombing raid were assembling to leave the ravaged city. In his state of anxious trauma he expected that the German civilians, recognising his RAF flying gear despite its dirt and disarray, would turn on him in anger. Instead, two women gave him bread.
There is an analogue of this in the attitudes of British victims of the Blitz in 1940–1, which was an aerial assault of traumatic proportions despite being tiny in comparison to the years of massive obliteration bombing unleashed by RAF Bomber Command on Germany and by the single horrifically intense year of bombing of Japan carried out by the USAAF. This was that people in the bombed cities of Britain were far less keen, when asked by the British government’s polling organisation, to see German cities bombed than were the residents of unbombed cities. The Allied civilians most keen on bombing Germany and Japan were American, whose cities were not bombed in World War II. There is a speaking moral in these facts, and they go some way to explaining why Harold Nash was given bread by refugees whose homes he had participated in destroying the previous night.
My critics focus on three main areas. They defend the bombing campaign against Germany by saying that it hampered the Nazi war effort because it kept troops, guns and aircraft on the home front, thus weakening the eastern and western military fronts, and at the same time slowing industrial production. The bombing of Japan, and particularly the atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is defended on the grounds that it shortened the war against Japan and saved the lives of many thousands of American troops who might otherwise have had to engage in a land invasion.
The critics next say that to describe area bombing of civilians as any kind of crime is to make a judgement of hindsight, using concepts – particularly that of a ‘war crime’ – which did not exist until later.
The historians among my critics say that because they have touched on the bombing controversy in their own books, the matter has already been addressed and that therefore there is nothing new to add. The implication is that the tacit prevarications of debate subsequent to World War II have effectively put the area bombing question to rest in the consciences of the Western allies.
These criticisms are wrong on all counts. Consider the last point first. As the preceding chapters show, a vigorous debate about bombing had started as early as 1899, even before manned flight began, when the Hague Conference outlawed throwing grenades from balloons. The experience of the First World War, in which German Zeppelins and Gothas bombed a number of British towns, made international fears about bombing so acute that during the Geneva disarmament conferences of the 1920s and 1930s some delegates went so far as to suggest banning flight itself. The reason for this anxiety was that bombing theory, from Douhet and Trenchard onwards, was unequivocal in predicting that bombing would cause terrible casualties and destruction, threatening civilisation itself. Historians of the Second World War ignore this background because it places Allied decisions to commence area bombing in a very exposed position: the planners of area bombing well knew what they were doing – and hoping.
The historians also often ignore the fact that during the first three years of war the British government publicly foreswore any plans to bomb civilian populations, and changed tack only in the third year of war – in February 1942 – when whole urban areas and their civilian inhabitants were nominated as the primary target for Bomber Command efforts. The historians ignore the Morgenthau Plan for a divided, de-industrialised, entirely rural post-war Germany. The bombing campaign tacitly served this aim by destroying the libraries, schools, universities, archives, concert halls, art galleries, studios, monuments and architectural treasures that sustained German culture. They also ignore the anti-bombing campaign in Britain itself, and play down Winston Churchill’s own ambiguous attitude – and his eventual serious doubts – about its legitimacy.
Until now, discussion of the Allied bombing campaigns has focused on a few egregious events, such as the attacks on Dresden and Hiroshima. The foregoing chapters here put the morality of the entire bombing war under scrutiny, and bring in to relief not just the forgotten great pre-war debate about bombing and the Morgenthau Plan, but also the nature of the attacks and the weapons used in them, such as an early form of napalm and the phosphorus bombs whose use is now outlawed.
This book is the first to bring all the foregoing points together, and they throw the question of area bombing into a sharp new light. We do not like to admit that we took decisions to employ bombing as a tactic of terror and mass civilian death, but so we did; and we did so despite – and in important senses because of – the background of decades of debate and anxiety about doing so. This is precisely the fact that has to be confronted and honestly acknowledged if we are to recognise why we are under an obligation to adjust our moral attitude to how we conduct ourselves in times of conflict hereafter.
The first of the critics’ points mentioned above was that the bombing kept substantial German forces on the home front. This is true, but it is not quite the truth that the critics wish it to be. The same effect would have been achieved if, instead of indiscriminately targeting the civilian populations of cities, the bombing effort had been directed at transport links, factories, airfields, harbours and, above all, coal, gas and oil plants. This is just what, in the European theatre, the USAAF did, and it was their tactical (as opposed to area) bombing that had a real effect on Germany’s war effort, as the post-war bombing surveys of the UK and US governments found. By the most conservative calculations, if all the bombing effort had been directed at these crucial targets, the war might have been shortened by a year or more.
This same effect might have been achieved if RAF bombing efforts had focused on long-range anti-submarine search and destroy missions in the north Atlantic, protecting that vital supply route. This is a major point. Churchill wrote that the only thing that kept him awake at night with anxiety was the Battle of the Atlantic. In The War at Sea 1939–45, S. W. Roskill wrote, ‘In the early spring of 1943 we had a very narrow escape from defeat in the Atlantic; had we suffered such a defeat, history would have judged the main cause had been the lack of two more squadrons of very long range aircraft for convoy escort duties.’1
The historians correctly point out that the RAF switched to night bombing, with its necessary corollary of imprecision in targeting, because bombing by day was highly dangerous and costly. This is an explanation not an excuse; the USAAF persisted in seeking ways to make daylight bombing safer and more effective, and eventually succeeded, to greatly important effect in the European theatre. This route was open to RAF Bomber Command too, and it was not chosen. Instead it bombed civilians by night.
Moreover, area bombing of cities did not harm civilian morale in Germany, as it was intended to do: rather, it strengthened it, an effect that many in Britain recognised from their own experience of the Blitz. Thus it was that Joseph Goebbels was cheered in the streets of Berlin (a hitherto largely anti-Nazi city) in early 1944 after the winter-long ‘Battle of Berlin’ waged by seemingly endless fleets of RAF bombers – a battle lost by the RAF on more than just the morale front, at great sacrifice to our own courageous airmen.
Those who manned the searchlights and 88mm anti-aircraft guns in Germany were boys and older men, not front-line troops. On the day that Berlin fell in 1945, Germany still had ten million men between the ages of 18 and 35, booted and fully equipped, in service on the eastern and western fronts. Yes, the Luftwaffe had been defeated by USAAF daylight forces principally, but indiscriminate bombing of cities had given Germany more reason to fight to the end than otherwise.
As for the question of German war production, the plain fact is that German output increased every year of the conflict until the end of 1944, and the country’s economy was never put on a full war footing. With the manpower and resources of vast conquered territories in Europe, Germany was in a position to sustain the war for a number of years. What won the war in Europe for the Allied powers was Russian infantry and tanks, and USAAF daylight precision bombing of Germany’s energy supplies, aircraft factories and (with the RAF) transport links. The interdiction of fuel supplies was one of the single most important successes of the bombing war. In Europe the USAAF aimed for the jugular vein of the Nazi war machine – energy supplies – and succeeded in slashing it. The critics’ claim that area bombing ‘slowed the rate of increase’ of Germany’s industrial output is an unquantifiable surmise, for all its plausibility, whereas the effect of attacks on fuel supplies was palpable and decisive.
If anything further needed to be said on this point, the magisterial examination of Germany’s wartime economy by Adam Tooze in The Wages of Destruction, published after this book was completed, should put the matter to rest. His book shows two things: the importance of the bombing effort specifically directed against industrial, military and fuel targets, and the ineffectiveness of area bombing. ‘The correlation between the area bombing of Germany’s cities and the collapse of its war production was loose, at best,’ he writes. ‘The wanton destruction of German cities could disrupt production, but it could not bring it to a complete standstill. The way in which the bombers achieved that effect was by severing rail links and waterways between the Ruhr and the rest of Germany.’2 Tooze describes the ‘Battle of Berlin’ – the months of attacks on Berlin between the autumn of 1943 and the spring of 1944 – as ‘perverse’, and it stands in sharp contrast to the major utility of the kind of bombing that really had an impact, such as USAAF bombing of German oil refineries and aircraft factories. As regards this last, the ‘Big Week’ American air raids of 20–25 February 1944 dealt a heavy blow to German aircraft production from which it struggled to recover. Along with the attrition of Luftwaffe forces in the air, now that the American raids had superb fighter cover, the ability of Germany to defend itself in the air was fast collapsing.3
The critics’ remaining main point, concerning hindsight, is the least cogent. One wonders where the world would be without hindsight, which is the principal resource for learning from experience. In the case of area bombing there is much to profit from it. For one thing, it reminds us that there had been 40 years of pre-Second World War debate about the morality and legality of area bombing, a fact that explains why Neville Chamberlain, while Prime Minister, twice told MPs that bombing civilians was not British government policy because – as he himself put it – it would constitute a crime in international law.
But in fact one scarcely needs hindsight if one knows anything about the St Petersburg Declaration of 1868, or has read Hugo Grotius’ 1625 book on the morality and laws of war, or Thucydides’ account of the Mytilenean Debate, in which the Athenians discussed a plan to massacre the entire population of an enemy city. The place of civilians in war has been debated in the Western tradition for 2,500 years, and for the past 300 years has turned on the notion of international norms. How, therefore, can assessing our deliberate mass bombing of civilian populations for its morality and its status in international law be considered as mere hindsight? By this reasoning, we would be obliged to say that the Nazis did not commit horrendous crimes against humanity because the concept of crimes against humanity was not defined until the post-war Nuremberg Principles.
One of the most contentious points in the whole bombing debate is the USAAF atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, still vigorously defended on the grounds of saving US military lives and ‘shortening the war’. But the key point here is that Japan had been suing for peace for months before the atom bomb attacks took place. The US government refused to talk on the grounds that it would accept nothing less than unconditional surrender, whereas the Japanese asked for one condition: retention of their Emperor. The US refusal was in line with the Casablanca agreement between Roosevelt and Churchill that only unconditional surrender would be accepted. The Japanese request concerning their Emperor was eventually granted, but not before the atom bombs were dropped. The reasons for the delay, and the suspicions it invites, constitute serious questions against US conduct in this regard, and this book is not alone in questioning it: perhaps the single most telling revelation in this arena is what Robert S. McNamara had to say in the compelling documentary film The Fog of War.
One point of surmise in the preceding chapters concerns the apparent autonomy of RAF Bomber Command in the prosecution of its own war, at times in direct opposition to demands for redirection of its efforts, as in the tactical bombing campaign associated with the D-Day landings, and the attack on enemy oil installations. Since pointing out in these pages what looks almost like indifference on the part of Churchill and Sir Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, to Sir Arthur Harris’s endeavours, an interesting hint arrived in a letter from R. E. George concerning the role of Churchill’s scientific advisor, Viscount Cherwell (Frederick A. Lindemann). It would seem that Cherwell was as persuaded as were Portal and Harris about the war-winning potential of bombing, and his support must therefore have been a factor in the independence of Sir Arthur Harris at Bomber Command, and the continued volume of resources poured into its efforts. P. M. S. Blackett, who had served on the Tizard Committee on early air warning systems before the outbreak of war (Cherwell did not believe in their efficacy and argued that efforts to develop radar should cease), reported a discussion with Cherwell in 1942 in which the latter said ‘that he considered any diversion of aircraft production and supply to the anti-submarine campaign, to army co-operation, or even to fighter defence, in fact to anything but bombing, as being a disastrous mistake.’ This view so closely parallels Sir Arthur Harris’ own that it is hard not to believe that either Cherwell or Harris was quoting the other here. Almost certainly it was the advisor quoting the Air Marshall, but the advisor had the ear of Churchill and the War Cabinet.
As noted, controversy was also generated by two corollaries to my conclusion that, in fighting a just and justifiable war against the criminal Nazi regime and Japanese aggression, the Allied air forces committed a wrong by engaging in area bombing of civilian populations. One corollary was that in ideal circumstances Allied aircrews should, had they been given the choice, have elected to attack genuine military and industrial targets only, rather than participating in indiscriminate attacks on civilian populations. The other was that in a crucial respect the terrorist atrocities of 11 September 2001 in New York and Washington and others like them (for example, the subsequent terrorist bombings in Madrid, London and Bombay) resemble ‘area bombing’ of civilians, namely, in their goal of assaulting and undermining the morale of the attacked population, by hurting and terrorising it.
On the first point all that is needed is iteration of what is said about it in the final chapter, which is that of course this would be the ideal option, but that it is understandable and highly mitigatable that most aircrew did not even consider this option. In large part this was because their duties were presented to them as genuinely aiding the war effort against a pernicious enemy, and moreover they were under military discipline in doing so, a point worth acknowledging despite the fact that international law since the American Civil War has not recognised a defence of ‘following orders’ in the commission of crimes. A dispassionate consideration of the point would recognise the joint validity of saying this is what in the ideal aircrew should have done, and that aircrew are nevertheless not individually culpable for being required to carry out the plans and directions of those focally responsible for it – in the UK, Sir Charles Portal and Sir Arthur Harris, with the morally lax supervision of Sir Alan Brooke, the equivocal position of Sir Winston Churchill, and the questionable agreement of the War Cabinet. In the US a similar distribution of responsibility could be made, reaching from Presidents Roosevelt and Truman down to General Curtis Le May.
And even at this level of responsibility a far bigger picture is required: whereas Sir Arthur Harris and General Curtis Le May were the principal hands-on architects of campaigns of mass murder by bombing, the others to whom responsibility also devolves were responsible for a broader and more complex set of urgencies aimed at defeating wicked aggressor regimes, and it would be nothing more than naive puritanism to say that the wrong of area bombing trumps the claim of overall victory. What is needed is an ability to hold together in one’s mind all the elements of the picture, and to see the rights and wrongs in their due proportion and relationship. Simple finger-pointing gets us nowhere.
The 9/11 point is a different matter. Those who have most belligerently opposed the comparison, such as Christopher Hitchins, are right to point out that whereas World War II area bombing occurred in the setting of declared war between states whose military forces were engaged in combat to the death, the 9/11 attacks were acts of terrorism carried out not by one state against another, but by an egregiously nasty private organisation with no interest in anything other than the unrestrained furtherance of its agenda. I grant this, and indeed all the other differences, and acknowledge that there is no moral equivalence between Allied military endeavours against the Nazi and Japanese regimes, and the 9/11 attacks, both taken on their own inclusive terms. Instead I argued that in one crucial respect – one respect only – there is a dismaying similarity between area bombing and terrorist bombings: namely, that they both seek to coerce a people by blowing up as many of them as possible and thereby terrorising and demoralising the rest. In this single respect, all acts of mass murder are indeed morally equivalent: and their equivalence lies in their being great wrongs. That was my point; and I adhere to it, because it is surely a profoundly educative one, since it allows one to make a simple but profound emotional connection between one’s horror at the 9/11 attacks in which 3000 people died in a single atrocity, to one’s horror at the deaths of ten and sometimes twenty times as many in each of the bombings of such places as Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This way of grasping the purport of what area bombing meant, really meant, is vital to making a difference to how we behave and what we accept today in the conduct of conflicts. There is nothing abstract or theoretical about the mass murder in which bombing consists: it is real and terrible, and anything that drives the point home has its place in the debate, for in the end the effect on victims, and the atrocity of the act, are indeed one and the same in all cases – in this one crucial, central respect.