Epilogue
After 1945 the terms in which a bombing war came to be understood were dominated by the reality of nuclear weapons, which were only used at the end of the conflict in the Pacific War. Until the missile age, the long-range intercontinental bomber was designed to deliver a first- or second-strike nuclear attack of annihilating power against the enemy. This did not rule out the use of conventional bombing (as the wars in Korea and Vietnam made evident), but it forced the Allied air forces to think about the lessons of the Second World War, in terms of both what the campaigns had achieved and projected future war.
On one thing the two major air forces, the RAF and the USAAF, were agreed: the third world war if it came would be another total war of even greater proportions than the last. When the postwar RAF chief of staff—now marshal of the Royal Air Force, Lord Tedder—was invited to give the Lees Knowles lectures on military affairs in Cambridge in the spring of 1947, he assured his audience that in the future “war will inevitably be total war and world-wide.”1 In October 1946, Major General Lauris Norstad, head of the Plans and Operations Division in the U.S. War Department, and a wartime air commander, briefed President Harry Truman on the shape of the postwar American military. He concluded his presentation by repeating what he had already claimed several times: “We must plan for the next war to be in fact a total war.”2 A lecture to the National Industrial Conference Board in the spring of 1947 by General Brehon Somervell, the officer responsible during the war for creating the Pentagon, began from the premise that the next war would be worse than the last: “Let no man question that World War III will be a total war of a destructiveness and intensity never yet seen.”3 It was also understood that this war of the future should not be fought as if it were World War II. Tedder told his listeners that the fighting services “must discard old shibboleths and outworn traditions”; for future security “we must look forward from the past and its lessons, not back to the past.” Norstad told the National War College in Washington, D.C., shortly after his briefing of the president that it was a mortal danger “to cling for security in a next war to those things which made for security in a last war.”4
There were nevertheless important lessons to be drawn. In August 1947, Tedder organized a major RAF exercise code-named Thunderbolt to study the lessons of the Combined Bomber Offensive for the future of war. Senior airmen, government scientists, and politicians were invited, though Portal and Harris, architects of the offensive, chose not to attend. There were five senior American air force officers, including General Kepner, victor of the “Battle of Germany.” The conference opened at the School of Air Support at Old Sarum, near Salisbury, on August 11 and lasted five days.5 Although some defense was made of the bomber offensive, the general tone of the assembly was critical. The failure to destroy the enemy economy or seriously to dent enemy morale was admitted; so too the slowness of the buildup of Bomber Command during the war and the failure to exploit science fully enough.6 The exercise was an opportunity to think about the advent of entirely new weapons, including atomic bombs, and to decide how the air force should be organized to exploit them. The result was a vision of future air war not very different from the strategic fantasies of General Douhet, first elaborated in the wake of the Great War in his book Command of the Air, which was finally translated into English in 1942.
Like Douhet, the key priorities identified were the need to be prepared fully for the moment when a war breaks out, to strike ruthlessly and swiftly using any weapon available, and to target the enemy civilian population as the key to destroying the will to resist in days rather than years. Tedder had identified in his Cambridge lectures the key importance of being ready to strike at once when hostilities began, not an “embryo Goliath” like Bomber Command in 1939, which took years to develop after the outbreak of war, but “a fully grown David, ready to act swiftly and decisively.”7This meant choosing weapons that could deliver a sudden annihilating blow. During Exercise Thunderbolt the possibility was proposed of using atomic weapons, which Britain did not yet possess; Henry Tizard, the government scientist, thought that 500 atomic bombs might bring about a swift end to any war. Norman Bottomley, Harris’s successor as commander in chief of Bomber Command, presented a paper on biological warfare as an even more effective instrument for total war since it killed only people rather than destroying cities, as incendiary or atomic bombings had done. Carried in cluster bombs or rocket warheads, biological agents used as a strategic weapon against the civilian population would be, ton for ton, more deadly than poison gas and likely to be available sooner than nuclear weapons.8 In both cases, nuclear war and biological war, airpower would deliver the rapid and decisive blow it had failed to deliver effectively enough before 1945.
Douhet was even more in evidence in the conclusions drawn by the American military leadership. In his speech to the National Industrial Conference Board, Somervell described World War III in terms every bit as lurid as the scaremongering visions of the 1930s:
What kind of war would the third world conflict be? Would it be a Buck Rogers affair with atomic bombs bursting everywhere, bacteria of all kinds falling on us from the sky like angry winter rain, rockets moving with uncanny precision thousands of miles to the most remote inland target hidden in a cave in the Rockies, with one-half or two-thirds of our population or that of the enemy wiped out or crawling about maimed by radioactive emanations or crippled by loathsome or incurable disease . . . ? Would it be over as quickly as that, with one or both combatants totally destroyed and their civilization wiped out? God only knows.9
Somervell reflected the prevailing postwar view that a future world war would be over quickly, despite all the lessons of the recent conflict, and that it would be even more destructive than the damage inflicted from the air in the wartime offensives. In a speech on “Strategy” to the National War College in January 1947, General Albert Wedemeyer, architect of the American Victory Program in 1941, told his audience that the next war would swiftly assume “the characteristics of a war of extermination” involving ultra-destructive atomic and bacteriological weapons. Since the United States had failed to rearm in the 1930s in the face of Axis aggression, Wedemeyer warned against the typical American attitudes of “indifference and apathy” when confronted by the emergence of yet another totalitarian menace to Europe.10
The Soviet Union was regarded as the successor to Hitler’s Third Reich, but a state potentially capable of stockpiling weapons of mass destruction and inflicting them in a sudden preemptive strike against the American mainland, which Germany had not been able to do. Norstad told Truman that the Soviet Union was the only possible enemy and that war against communism “is the basis of our planning.”11 American thinking, like that of the RAF, focused on the need to build up overwhelming striking power in peacetime to counter such a threat and to be prepared to use all and any weapons, including bacteriological, chemical, and nuclear payloads, so as to be certain of victory against an apparently ruthless dictatorship. Arnold’s final report for the president in 1945 stressed the need in the future for an atomic capability that would allow “immediate offensive action with overwhelming force,” which the American air force had demonstrably lacked in 1941.12 For American planners this meant retaining a strategic air force capable of mounting an immediate air offensive, and in 1948 the Strategic Air Command was activated for this purpose under the former Eighth Air Force wing commander General Curtis LeMay. He welcomed the assignment and had no regrets about wartime bombing. “Enemy cities were pulverized or fried to a crisp,” LeMay wrote in 1965. “It was something they asked for and something they deserved.”13 The RAF bomber force was less fortunate after 1945. Bomber Command was almost entirely demobilized, its Air Striking Force reduced to ten squadrons by 1946.14 By the 1950s Britain could no longer afford to be a major player in the air war of the future. No effective heavy bomber was developed for the postwar force, and in 1950 the RAF had to borrow seventy B-29s from the United States.
The possession of nuclear weapons now made the city-busting strategy of the Second World War a possibility. Though the object of a nuclear arsenal was to deter an aggressor, both Britain and the United States prepared plans for the point where deterrence failed. By the early 1960s American air forces, using missiles or aircraft, possessed the means to obliterate most Soviet cities and to kill more than 80 million of their inhabitants in a first or second strike.15 British planners, working with a much more limited nuclear capability, identified fifty-five Soviet cities for destruction. The so-called JIGSAW committee set up in 1960 to investigate the strategy was instructed to consider only the effects on the population, “the aim being to select target cities so as to pose the maximum threat to the greatest possible number of Russian people.” The Air Ministry was particularly interested in learning lessons from the bombing of Germany to decide what level of destruction was needed for “knocking out” a city. It was calculated that Hamburg had received the equivalent of a five-kiloton bomb during the war, which encouraged confidence that the large megaton bombs now available really would be able to paralyze a city at a stroke.16 The principal lesson learned from the bombing campaigns of the Second World War was the need for even greater and more indiscriminate destruction of the enemy if ever World War III materialized.
The experience of the bombing war helped to shape the Cold War confrontation of mutual destruction or mutual deterrence. It was under this shadow that European nations began the process of reconstructing the bombed cities and towns and counting the cost of the cultural damage they had sustained. The programs were ambitious and optimistic despite the threat of nuclear obliteration hanging over them.17 Recovery was in this sense like recovery from a natural disaster—a volcanic eruption or a major earthquake—in the knowledge that another geological shift might undo the urban rebuilding at a stroke. The reconstruction began at first against a background of economic crisis and legal wrangling over ownership of the ruins, and in many cases the bolder plans were shelved in favor of cheaper or more feasible solutions.18 The most ambitious building took place in Germany, where more than half the urban area in the major cities had been destroyed. Some thirty-nine cities had at least a million cubic meters of rubble to clear, but in Berlin the figure was 55 million, in Hamburg 35 million, and in Cologne 24 million.19 Coping with life among the ruins were millions of Germans who lived for years in cellars and shacks, short of food, supplies, and schooling. A delegation of British peace workers visiting Lübeck in 1947 were shown weekly food rations consisting of just two pounds of bread, a half liter of skimmed milk, half a herring, one ounce of butter, and four ounces of sugar. They found 4,000 people in the port still being fed a watery soup daily from a communal kitchen. Accommodation was rationed in Hamburg to 5.6 square meters per person; the water supply was poor, electricity irregular. The women they met expressed strong sentiments “against all forms of militarism or war.”20
Neither in Germany nor elsewhere in Europe were the heavily bombed and depopulated cities abandoned. In France there was a move to keep the ruined peninsula of the Channel port of St.-Malo as a memorial to the bombing and to relocate the town on the mainland, but tradition prevailed and St.-Malo was rebuilt on the existing site. The only place to be moved as a result of bombing was the Italian town of Cassino. The ruins on the mountainside were declared a national monument and a new and larger town was built on more level ground a mile away from the original site. City centers, where much of the damage had occurred, were also generally restored, with the exception of the heavily bombed British port of Bristol and the German port at Kiel, where there was sufficient bomb damage to allow the relocation of the center to a more geographically convenient quarter.21 In Germany the reconstruction was slower than elsewhere because of occupation and economic crisis, but here too the cities were all restored on their original sites despite the exceptional level of destruction. This strong sense of belonging, even to a ruined landscape, was explained by a senior German officer to his fellow prisoners of war early in 1945:
If there is such a thing as existence in spirit or will alone, without body or matter, that is the life of the German cities. Only their sentimental appeal still holds them together. Cologne has been evacuated time and time again, but the inhabitants still manage to drift back to the heaps of rubble simply because they once bore the name “home.” Past associations are so much more powerful than the necessities of war that the evacuees resent leaving and rush back again long before the danger is over.22
Nevertheless, German cities were remodeled after the bombing, while their demographic geography changed. By 1950, cities with more than 100,000 people made up 27 percent of the population in West Germany, whereas they had constituted one-third in 1939; the population of communities with fewer than 20,000 inhabitants increased from 53 percent to 59 percent over the same period. Hamburg, where the damage and depopulation had been among the most extensive, almost recovered its prewar population level by 1950, but experienced a substantial relocation of population within the city limits. The inner zones housed 850,000 people in 1939, but by 1950 only 467,000; the outer zones increased from 848,000 to over a million.23
The geographical relocation was typical of much of the postwar reconstruction, since the destruction of older urban environments presented an opportunity to build modern residential housing with less congestion and more amenities. Wider roads and open spaces were regarded by town planners as desirable improvements to old-fashioned and inconvenient urban structures. “The Blitz has been a planner’s windfall,” wrote the British scientist Julian Huxley about the British experience. “It is the psychological moment to get real planning in our towns.”24 In reality the expense involved and the persistent arguments between local authorities and architects about what was desirable or expedient left many of the plans on the drawing board. The American social scientist Leo Grebler investigated twenty-eight western European cities from four countries in 1954 and found that in general there was little radical urban rebuilding and strong pressures for continuity. The actual amount of damage, even in heavily bombed cities, was less than the immediate images of smashed streets and housing suggested. The temptation for municipal authorities all over Europe (who needed to restore local tax revenues) was to use what was still standing as fully as possible and to rebuild around it rather than engage in further demolition.25 In Germany the extent of the problem of homelessness was amplified by the large-scale refugee problem as Germans expelled from eastern Europe arrived in the western zones of occupation. This forced migration encouraged the rapid rebuilding and repair of existing structures alongside cheap standard housing built on existing foundations. By 1961, 3.1 million houses had been restored or rebuilt.26 In no case did Grebler find evidence that the threat of nuclear bombing influenced city planning or house design, a discovery that he attributed partly to “improvidence or defeatism” in the face of the nuclear menace, but principally to the willingness to take high risks for the sake of restoring what had been temporarily sacrificed in wartime.27
The physical rebuilding of Europe after 1945 was bound up with the way bombed populations came to terms with the human costs of the bombing war. The psychological impact was difficult to gauge after 1945, and little effort went into analyzing the scale or nature of the traumatic impact on those who experienced air raids. The longer-term effects on civilians have been little studied in comparison with the postwar psychological damage done to soldiers as a result of the stresses of combat. The memory of bombing as an expression of collective public awareness of the victims (though not of the survivors) was also much less developed than the public memory of military losses. Much of that public memory was linked to religious monuments as symbols of the injury to Europe’s Christian values in the vortex of total war. In Britain part of Coventry Cathedral was kept in its ruined state as both a local and a national monument; in Germany the Frauenkirche in Dresden was a standing indictment of the firestorm until its rebuilding in the early twenty-first century as a symbol of reconciliation and a final settlement of postwar accounts.28 The Nicholas Church in Hamburg and the Kaiser Wilhelm Church in the center of Berlin were also left in their ruined state as a visible reminder to the German people of the cost of war against the home front. In Germany the memorializing of the dead from the bombing has been a process shot through with evident ambiguities. For years the memory was suppressed or subdued because of the difficulty of seeing Germans as victims rather than the collective perpetrators of a barbarous European war. The publication in 2002 of Jörg Friedrich’s bestseller Der Brand (The Fire) opened up a new wave of debate over the extent to which the victimhood of ordinary people in the bombing war can be reconciled with a persistent collective guilt for the crimes of the Hitler regime.29 Outside Germany, the memorialization of victims of bombing has been unevenly applied. Established habits of remembering the fighting man have prevailed over public acknowledgment that in total war civilians are as likely to be victims as soldiers.30 Only in recent years have lists of the civilian victims of bombing been added to a number of local war memorials in Italy and France.
The ambiguities have also extended to the way in which those who carried out the bombing have been remembered after 1945. The U.S. Air Force established a major monument at Madingley, outside Cambridge, where thousands of American aircrew were buried. But Bomber Command was for decades after 1945 denied a collective monument to the dead. The erection of a statue to Harris in 1992 outside the RAF church on London’s Strand provoked widespread criticism, protest, and demonstrations. A memorial to the dead of Bomber Command was finally erected and dedicated only in 2012, in London’s Green Park, but once again it provoked renewed debate about whether those who inflicted such damage on civilian communities ought to be remembered in the same spirit in which the “Few” of the defensive Battle of Britain have been lionized in British public history. This is not the only example of a surviving tension in the way the bombers and the bombed are remembered. In Bulgaria, almost a century after the serendipitous invention of the modern bomb by the Bulgarian army captain Simeon Petrov, the U.S. authorities chose in October 2010 to erect a modest stone monument in the grounds of the American embassy in Sofia to the 150 American airmen who lost their lives flying over Bulgarian territory or bombing Bulgarian targets. The event was marked by protests from Bulgarian political parties at what was regarded as an unjustifiable celebration of a murderous policy that resulted in widespread Bulgarian deaths. At a demonstration organized on December 18, 2010, there were placards that read “No to the monument of shame!” A Facebook protest group was organized dedicated “to remove the monument to American pilots who bombed Sofia.”31 Nevertheless, the monument still stands. It performs the conventional function of honoring the military dead who contributed to the well-known history of European liberation—yet it is also a ready reminder that the price of that liberation was not only the death of 1,350 Bulgarians, but of over half a million other European civilians.