A World at Arms (113 page)

In actual fighting, Axis bombing beyond immediate ground support quickly became simply the dropping of bombs on cities, maybe hitting industrial targets but more commonly hitting residential areas. Italian bombing of Barcelona in the Spanish civil war, the German destruction of Guernica in that conflict, and Japanese bombing of Chinese cities largely followed this pattern. The German bombing of Polish cities, especially of Warsaw, was in reality at random, whatever the claims sometimes made. The surrender of Warsaw was brought about by doing in practice what in March of 1939 the Germans had threatened to do to Prague–a ruthless and indiscriminate bomb attack on the civilian population.
¹⁵⁷
The destruction of central Rotterdam by the German air force in May, 1940, was deliberately intended to accomplish the same purpose. In 1941 the Germans initiated their war with Yugoslavia with a Sunday terror raid on its capital. There is no evidence that the German raids on Paris were ever of a size to make a major impact. French pilots were busy at lunch on June 3, 1940, while some of the attackers were shot down by British fighters,
¹⁵⁸
but the main contribution of the German air force to the defeat of France had been in its tactical support operations. Whatever the nature of May and June 1940 air raids on France and England, the invasion of the Low Countries and the air attacks which accompanied those actions led the British government to drop the restrictions earlier placed on their bombers, a point discussed in detail in
Chapter 3
. The bombing of London, first in daylight and then at night, was met by small raids by British planes on Berlin and other German cities.

Both because they badly miscalculated the nature and productivity of
the British, American, and Soviet airplane industry, and because of the drain of fighting on several fronts, the German air force, which had entered the war in 1939 as the strongest on earth, was pushed into the defensive by the Allies.
¹⁵⁹
Although the Royal Air Force learned the hard way, perhaps one should say the very hard way, to provide tactical air support for the Allied ground forces fighting in North Africa, the only
offensive
role it could play was to bomb Germany and parts of German-controlled Europe.
¹⁶⁰
This was not only the sole way for the British to strike directly at the Germans, it was also the one major way in which Britain and for a long time the United States could directly assist the Soviet Union after Germany attacked that country in June 1941.

As explained in
Chapters 3
and 4, the British tried to direct a major portion of their bombing effort at German industry, especially the crucial oil industry. In the process they made a discovery which some realistic exercises would have revealed to them years before: bombers flying at night, to reduce vulnerability to fighters, and at high elevations, to reduce vulnerability to anti-aircraft fire, were unlikely to hit almost any target, even on a clear night, to say nothing of cloudy ones. The choice, fairly obvious by early 1942, was either to abandon most bombing altogether or to make German cities, which were large enough to hit, the targets. In this situation, the London government opted for the latter alternative. They entrusted this project to a newly appointed chief of Bomber Command, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris.

An energetic and driving officer, Harris had been in the Air Staff.
¹⁶¹
He knew that there were serious questions about the efficiency of the RAF’s Bomber Command operations, and he was determined to change the situation. He knew that in this he had the full, energetic and enthusiastic backing of Churchill. He proceeded to demonstrate the capacity of Bomber Command to locate and destroy urban areas, beginning with the Baltic port of Lubeck. He never made any pretence about his project to “de-house” the Germans; the latter were by this time calling their own raids over England, which were aimed especially at the most famous tourist sites, their “Baedeker raids” after the best known guide books of the time.
¹⁶²

The slow but steady escalation in the size of the British bomber force, eventually joined by American flights, brought more and more damage to German cities, in part because the German leadership did not shift its construction priorities to fighter aircraft, still emphasizing the attack in both East and West until the Hamburg raids of July 1943.
¹⁶³
The shift to emphasis on fighters, and the transfer of additional fighters from the Eastern Front, led to the October 1943 suspension of daylight raids
on Germany.
¹⁶⁴
By that time, however, the raids themselves had forced the Germans to disperse their aircraft factories, a process that cost them months of production and was, until the oil and transportation raids of 1944, itself the most important blow at German war industry.

The vast attacks on Berlin in the winter of 1943–44 threw the whole issue into relief.
¹⁶⁵
Harris was convinced that these area attacks could win the war and received Churchill’s support for them, although the Allied “Pointblank” bombing directive had posited the aircraft industry, not urban areas, as the priority target.
¹⁶⁶
The attacks on Berlin raised not only the question of whether or not the effort was successful–it most obviously did not cost Germany the war as Harris anticipated but whether the whole concept of area bombing was correct.

Some British church leaders in public and a few political leaders in private raised the question of the morality of aiming such vast military effort at civilians. Harris wanted the British government to tell the truth, that this was in reality what was being done and why, but the government preferred to prevaricate.
¹⁶⁷
It was a distortion which would come back to haunt them (and after the war many surviving fliers) and would be the excuse for not extending to Bomber Command the recognition after the war which had been so generously lavished on it during hostilities.

Even as the bombing went forward, several other aspects became increasingly important. The Germans steadily increased the anti-aircraft batteries on which they depended very heavily for defense. At their maximum in August 1944 there were 39,000 of them, served by over one million men.
¹⁶⁸
The Allied commitment of men, materials and other resources was obviously enormous as well. The attempt of the Americans to concentrate on industrial targets did not always work well in 1943, but at other times it did. Thus the August 17, 1943, attack on Regensburg severely damaged the German ME-262 jet plane construction facility.
¹⁶⁹
The Soviet Union certainly was greatly encouraged by the bomber offensive; as Stalin explained to the British Ambassador to Moscow on October 21, 1943, he would very much want to take part if the conditions at the front allowed it.
¹⁷⁰

The return of massive bombing in daylight and deep into Germany after the victory of the new Allied long-range fighters over the Luftwaffe in February-March 1944 altered the whole picture. Thereafter the strategic bombers first aided the invasion by destroying German communications, starting with France and Belgium and later moving on to German transportation targets. Both of these efforts were highly successful. The second major truly effective bombing campaign of 1944 was that of the Americans against the German petroleum industry. The
problem was that Harris was always against what he called “panacea targets,” and refused to shift from area bombing even at a time when the technological deficiencies which had originally led to its adoption had been very substantially ameliorated.

An indication of the way some in the RAF were thinking is the August 2, 1944, planning document “Operation Thunderclap: The Attack on German Civilian Morale,” which called for a concentrated effort to destroy central Berlin the way the Germans had in 1940 destroyed the center of Rotterdam. The intent was to destroy morale, force peace, and leave behind in the form of ruins and memory a post-war sense of the “consequences of universal aggression” among the Germans.
¹⁷¹
There can be little doubt that, although the details of this plan were not implemented, the concept was applied, and in many ways applied successfully.

The Allied sense of how the bombing was affecting Germany was very substantially assisted by their decyphering of radio messages. At first this was due to a great extent to their reading of Japanese reports, and on the conversations of Japanese diplomats with German officials about the impact of the bombing campaign.
¹⁷²
Information from the reading of German coded messages did not become important until later in the war but then turned to a flood.
¹⁷³
The strategic bombing itself so disrupted the transportation and communications systems first in Germany and then in Japan during the last half year of hostilities that messages which would normally have been sent by cable or wire, by courier or mail, simply had to be sent by radio. This meant that they could be intercepted and often read, and in this fashion strategic bombing as a by-product elicited information on its own effectiveness as well as many other subjects.

The reference to the impact of strategic bombing on Japan in the last months of the war moves the focus to the Pacific theater. There the major role was played by the Americans with a small effort based on China, followed, after the seizure of the Marianas in the summer of 1944, by increasing raids from bases there. In the last months of the war Allied naval air joined in the bombardment of targets in the Japanese home islands.

The major stages in this process, as well as the final portion involving atomic bombs, are discussed in
Chapter 16
. The point which needs to be made here is that after months of strategic bombing aimed at specific industrial targets, the Americans concluded that at such extreme range and with the violent jet stream over Japan, accuracy was impossible. Knowledge about and understanding of the jet stream over the globe, carefully analyzed by the Japanese in connection with their project of
sending balloons to the United States and Canada, was as yet quite rudimentary in American circles; in particular, they had no understanding beforehand of the interaction between the jet stream and the very high altitudes at which the new B-29 bombers were designed to fly. Under these circumstances, the Americans in February-March 1945 in the war against Japan made essentially the same decision the British had made three years earlier in Europe: rather than abandon bombing of distant targets altogether, they shifted to area bombardment of cities, burning them down one by one, beginning with Tokyo.

What did it all mean? On the one hand, the extraordinarily extreme predictions of the advocates of strategic bombing turned out to be erroneous. The massive reports of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey and the British official history of strategic bombing tend, on the whole, to underplay rather than to stress the impact of the strategic bombing offensives in Europe, although the American one assigns greater significance to its role in weakening the Japanese economy.
¹⁷⁴
The study of the influence of intelligence on the war from the British perspective stresses, correctly in my opinion, that a major role of the strategic bombing was its aid to the Allies in the race against any renewed turn of the war in Germany’s favor with new weapons after 1943, because of the great delays it imposed on their development and production.
¹⁷⁵
The morale effects were not those anticipated: the constant bombing eventually produced apathy and dependence, rather than revolt, but it certainly left behind a sense of the impact of war that Germany had not had after 1918. On the other hand, it must also be noted that in the Western countries overrun by the Germans in 1940, seeing the overflight of British bombers headed for Germany showed the people that the war was by no means over and that liberation, however distant, was at least a possibility.

The debate over the role of Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris is likely to continue.
¹⁷⁶
The critical point appears to me to be that the British had no alternative in 1942 but to adopt the procedure that Harris pushed vigorously for the rest of the war, even though by the spring of 1944 other alternatives were available, in part as a result of his efforts. The conclusion of a very careful analysis of the collapse of the German war economy with special emphasis on the truly decisive impact of bombing on the German transportation system is surely correct:

Looked at from the military perspective, it may be contended that strategic bombing can make a significant contribution to victory in war. But it is not a substitute for a balanced strategy encompassing every component of a nation’s military power. It is peculiarly reliant on accurate intelligence, sensibly interpreted. Above all, strategic bombing is not a cheap, easy or quick avenue to
success. It involves a major investment of national resources to build a force powerful enough to be effective. To be successful, strategic bombing requires simultaneous and repeated strikes against a small number of indispensable sectors of the enemy economy after air superiority has been won.
¹⁷⁷

World War II was fought not only with weapons but also with words. In the negative sense, all belligerents imposed some form of censorship both to prevent information of possible help to the enemy from becoming known and to help maintain a solid public opinion on the home front. In the process, the states which already had authoritarian regimes of one sort or another tightened their control of all means of communication; the democracies created new ministries or other institutional structures for that purpose. The measures adopted were, however, aimed not only at a consolidation of the home front and military cohesion by censorship; there was also the positive side, the attempt to provide reasons for the war and confidence in victory by newsreels–then the main visual format for the dissemination of images–by special feature films, and by news releases, posters, radio programs, and other mass media approaches.
¹⁷⁸