Read The Scientist as Rebel Online
Authors: Freeman J. Dyson
The Scientist as Rebel (20 page)
There is overwhelming evidence that the bombing of cities strengthened rather than weakened the determination of the Germans to fight the war to the bitter end. The notion that bombing would cause a breakdown of civilian morale turned out to be a fantasy. And the notion that bombing would cause a breakdown of weapons production was also a fantasy. After a devastating attack on a factory, the Germans were able to repair the machinery and resume full production in an average time of six weeks. We could not hope to attack the important factories frequently enough to keep them out of action. We learned after the war that, in spite of the bombing, German weapons production increased steadily up to September 1944. In the last few months of the war, bombing of oil refineries caused the German armies to run out of oil, but they never ran out of weapons. Putting together what I saw at Bomber Command with the testimony of Hastings’s witnesses, I conclude that the contribution of the bombing of cities to military victory was too small to provide any moral justification for the bombing.
Unfortunately, the official statements of the British government always claimed that the bombing was militarily effective and therefore morally justified. As a result of their ideological commitment to bombing as a war-winning strategy, the leaders of the government were deluding themselves and also deluding the British public. Hastings says that in the last phase of the war “the moral cost of killing German civilians in unprecedented numbers outweighed any possible strategic advantage.” I would make a stronger statement. I would say that quite apart from moral considerations, the military cost of killing German civilians outweighed any possible strategic advantage.
The strategic thinking of all the participants in World War II was dominated by their experiences in World War I. Memories of World War I were handed down from the parents to the children of that
generation. Paradoxically, the winners and losers of World War I derived opposite conclusions from their experiences. The winners, Britain and America and France, looked back on World War I as an unmitigated horror. Their strategies in World War II were driven by the imperative that the horrors of World War I must not be repeated. For Britain and America, the key to victory was to be strategic bombing. For France, the key was a defensive strategy based on the Maginot Line. But the losers, Germany and Russia, looked back on World War I as a heroic struggle which they could have won if they had had more competent and resolute political leadership. Their strategies in World War II were driven by the idea that they could fight World War I over again and this time do it right. The key to victory was a great army organized to carry out enormous offensive operations, like the German offensive that almost overran Paris and the Russian offensive that almost overran East Prussia in 1914, but this time with better training and better equipment so that there would be no “almost.” This strategy succeeded for the Germans in France in 1940 and for the Russians in East Prussia in 1945.
Hastings’s book describes how these different strategies partially succeeded and partially came to grief in the bloody finale of World War II. While the British and American armies were cautiously moving into Germany, the Germans and Russians were fighting World War I over again, launching large-scale offensives and counteroffensives, accepting huge losses on both sides, as the Red Army fought its way from the Vistula to the Elbe. Two huge Russian armies raced one another to be the first to march in triumph through Berlin. The price that this race cost in dead and wounded was willingly paid. Meanwhile, the Americans and British failed to defeat Germany with bombing, but succeeded in avoiding the catastrophic carnage of World War I.
One of the notorious examples of the tragic waste of human life in World War I was the death of Henry Moseley, a brilliant young
physicist who made a great discovery in 1913 and then died as a volunteer soldier at Gallipoli in 1915. The British government made a deliberate decision in World War II not to allow scientific talent to be wasted. As a result of this decision, I was given a safe job as a statistician at Bomber Command, while my contemporaries who flew in the bombers mostly died. I owe my survival directly to Henry Moseley and to the British strategy of minimizing the losses of scientists. If the authorities had not clung so stubbornly to their belief in the effectiveness of strategic bombing, they could have saved not only me but the others too.
After
Armageddon
was written, another book by a witness of the German tragedy was published in English,
The End
2
by Hans Nossack. Nossack was a famous German writer who was living in Hamburg during World War II. The city was destroyed in July 1943 by massive incendiary attacks, culminating in a firestorm similar to the one that destroyed Dresden in 1945. The destruction of Hamburg was the most successful of all the operations of the British Bomber Command. Nossack was taking a holiday in a village near Hamburg when it happened. After the firestorm, Nossack walked through the city and recorded what he saw. His book was written in November 1943 and published in German as part of a longer work with the title
Interview mit dem Tode
(
Interview with Death
) in 1948. The English version is elegantly translated by Joel Agee, and illustrated with photographs taken after the catastrophe in 1943 by Erich Andres. Agee has added a foreword describing the history of the book and the translation. The book is a work of art, distilling into sixty-three short pages the German experience of total destruction, just as John Hersey’s
Hiroshima
distilled the Japanese experience three years later. It is unfortunate that the publication of Agee’s translation was delayed by thirty years.
The End
was written only four months after the events that it describes, before the Allied invasion of France and long before the end of the war. It gives authentic testimony, untainted by knowledge of later events, of the effect of strategic bombing on a civilian population. It describes briefly the physical horrors of the cleanup after the bombing:
People said that the corpses, or whatever one wants to call the remains of dead people, were burned on the spot or destroyed in the cellars with flamethrowers. But actually, it was worse. The flies were so thick that the men couldn’t get into the cellars, they kept slipping on maggots the size of fingers, and the flames had to clear the way for them to reach those who had perished in flames.
Rats and flies were the lords of the city. Insolent and fat, the rats disported themselves on the streets.
But Nossack was not so much concerned with physical horrors as with the state of mind of the survivors. According to his testimony, the survivors mostly returned to live in the cellars of their ruined homes and started as soon as possible to resume their accustomed routines. They preferred to live in caves among friends rather than in houses among strangers. The struggle to survive kept them busy and gave them little time for grieving. Since they had lost everything, all they had left was each other. They shared what little they had, and worked together to bring the city back to life.
Concerning the question whether the bombing increased or decreased the loyalty of citizens to the government, Nossack has this to say:
It would be a mistake, however, to speak of latent unrest and rebellion at the time. Not only the enemies but also our own authorities miscalculated in this respect. Everything went on
very quietly and with a definite concern for order, and the State took its bearings from this order that had arisen out of the circumstances. Wherever the State sought to impose regulations of its own, people just got upset and angry.… Today the State credits itself with having exercised “restraint,” but that is ridiculous. Others say we were much too apathetic at the time to be capable of revolt. That is not true either. In those days everyone said what was on his mind, and no feeling was further from people than fear.
Nossack’s conclusion is that the bombing decreased the respect of citizens for the State but increased their loyalty to the community.
Concerning the question whether the bombing was criminal, Nossack says:
I have not heard a single person curse the enemies or blame them for the destruction. When the newspapers published epithets like “pirates of the air” and “criminal arsonists,” we had no ears for that. A much deeper insight forbade us to think of an enemy who was supposed to have caused all this; for us, he, too, was at most an instrument of unknowable forces that sought to annihilate us. I have not met even a single person who comforted himself with the thought of revenge. On the contrary, what was commonly said or thought was: Why should the others be destroyed as well?
Nossack expresses his own astonishment that people accepted their fate with stoic spirit, as if the destruction were not the work of human hands but of an impersonal destiny.
The End
gives us an intimate picture of Armageddon as it was experienced by an individual German. The German tradition in life and literature is intensely philosophical. More than other people,
Germans isolate themselves from reality by spinning cocoons of philosophy around unpleasant facts. Nossack describes himself walking through the ruins of Hamburg like a disembodied spirit, detached from the things and people that he is observing. He writes:
We walked through the world like dead men who no longer care about the petty miseries of the living.… If after hours of searching you met a person, it would only be someone else wandering in a dream through the eternal wasteland. We would pass each other with a shy look and speak even more softly than before.
Perhaps this habit of philosophical detachment helps to explain why the German armies fought so professionally to the bitter end in 1945, when every day that they prolonged the fighting only increased the suffering of their own people as well as the suffering of the others.
This review provoked an unusually heavy volume of letters in response, some approving and some disapproving. I am indebted to Martin Gaynes for correcting the most serious error in my account. I wrote that in the western theater of war, those prisoners who reached the prison camps were treated in a civilized fashion.
This was no longer true in the final months of the war. To set the record straight, here is an extract from Martin Gaynes’s letter:
In December 1944, thousands of American soldiers captured during the Battle of the Bulge were transported to Stalag IX-B, the largest German prisoner-of-war camp, near Frankfurt, Germany. A military order was issued that all Jewish soldiers identify themselves. After the Americans refused to comply, Nazi
guards selected the
GI
s they thought looked Jewish, had Jewish-sounding last names, or whom they classified as undesirables. Less than a third of the American soldiers selected were in fact Jewish. Packed into railway boxcars with no food, water, or toilets, they were transported further into the German countryside. Five days later they arrived at Berga, a satellite of the concentration camp at Buchenwald. The Americans were put to work alongside European concentration camp prisoners.… Many died of injuries, malnutrition, disease, and exhaustion. Several were fatally shot by guards for no apparent reason. Some went insane. By April 1945, as the Allies advanced, the
SS
ordered the evacuation of the camp. Surviving prisoners were marched through rain, snow and bitter cold on a 150-mile procession of death.… The nightmare finally ended on April 23, 1945, when advancing American units came upon and liberated the final surviving prisoners.
A
S
I remarked in my letter thanking Martin Gaynes for his correction of my mistake: “The fact that there was a major breach of the Geneva rules in the treatment of Jewish prisoners does not lessen the value of the rules for saving lives, either in World War II or today.”
1.
Max Hastings, Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944–1945 (Knopf, 2004)
.
2.
Hans Erich Nossack,
The End: Hamburg 1943
, translated from the German and with a foreword by Joel Agee, and with photographs by Erich Andres (University of Chicago Press, 2004).
History of Science and Scientists
TWO KINDS OF HISTORY
WE ARE DOUBLY
lucky. A thoughtful and sensitive book, Yuri Manin’s
Mathematics and Physics
, has been thoughtfully and sensitively translated.
1
Almost every one of its hundred small pages contains a sentence worth quoting. “The gyroscope that guides a rocket is an emissary from a six-dimensional symplectic world into our three-dimensional one; in its home world its behavior looks simple and natural.” “Even those who see stars ask ‘What is a star?,’ because to see merely with one’s eyes is still very little.” “The image of Plato’s cave seems to me the best metaphor for the structure of modern scientific knowledge; we actually see only the shadows.” “In a world of light there are neither points nor moments of time; beings woven from light would live nowhere and nowhen; only poetry and mathematics are capable of speaking meaningfully about such things.” “The screws and gears of the great machine of the world, when their behavior is understood, can be assembled and joined in a new order; thus one obtains a bow, a loom or an integrated circuit.” “Modern theoretical physics is a luxuriant, totally Rabelaisian, vigorous world of ideas, and a mathematician can find in it everything to satiate himself except the order to which he is accustomed.”
Besides these verbal gems, Manin’s book contains some equations and some technical exposition. His purpose was to make the thought processes of physics intelligible to mathematicians. He achieves this purpose by skillful selection of examples. Incidentally, by his style of writing and thinking, he makes the thought processes of a mathematician intelligible to physicists. He does not try to abolish or blur the distinction between mathematical and physical understanding. One of the many virtues of his book is that it leaves the central mystery, the miraculous effectiveness of mathematics as a tool for the understanding of nature, unexplained and unobscured.
