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Targeting the city: Debates and silences about the aerial bombing of World War II

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 April 2010

Charles S. Maier
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Abstract

The article goes back to the early discussions of the morality of city bombing which took place before and during World War II and attempts to analyze both the moral argumentation and its historical context from the 1940s until today. The development of the doctrine of “collateral damage” which recognized that attacking enemy factories was permissible even if it cost the lives and homes of civilians was soon widened beyond its original notion. After the war, the dropping of the atomic bombs became an issue in its own right, to be considered separately from the earlier recourse to conventional bombing — even when conventional bombing achieved equally destructive results. Twin inhibitions have reigned in the issue of what force against civilians was justified: the reluctance of German commentators to seem apologetic for the Third Reich, and the difficulty in the U.S. of seeming to cast any aspersions on those who fought “the good war.”

Type
Means of Warfare
Information
International Review of the Red Cross , Volume 87 , Issue 859: Means of warfare , September 2005 , pp. 429 - 444
Copyright
Copyright © International Committee of the Red Cross 2005

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References

1 Thucydides, The Peloponnesian Wars, Vol. XXI, p. 29.

2 Best, Geoffrey, Humanity in Warfare: The Modern History of the International Law of Armed Conflicts, Methuen, London, 1983.Google Scholar

3 Barton J. Bernstein has sorted out much of the argumentation in many essays. Of course, quantitative issues then intrude. How many lives would have had to be saved? The Stimson-Bundy claim was that the atomic bomb was believed to forestall an invasion of Honshu, planned for 1946, and which might have cost “a million lives.” The argument was refined, for the first invasion planned for the autumn of 1945 would probably have taken place in Kyushu, a smaller island, with a smaller estimated number of casualties. On the other hand, when those objecting to the bomb have suggested that no invasion was really necessary, defenders of the bomb's use suggest that a blockade of Japan would probably have cost more Japanese lives than did the bomb itself. See McGeorge Bundy's reflective weighing of the issues in Danger and Survival: Choices about the Bomb in the First Fifty Years, Random House, New York, 1988.

4 Best, op. cit. (note 2), pp. 190–200.

5 Besides Best, see Miinkler, Herfried (ed.), Der Partisan: Theorie, Strategic Gestalt, Westdeutscher Verlag, Opladen, 1990, for a series of essays on theories of revolutionary and partisan war.Google Scholar

6 Best, op. cit. (note 2), p. 274; Webster, Charles and Frankland, Noble, The Strategic Air Offensive against Germany, 1939–1945, 4 vols., Her Majesty's Stationery Office, London, 1961, Vol. IV, pp. 71–76.Google Scholar

7 Garrett, Stephen A., Ethics andAirpower in World WarII: The British Bombing of German Cities, St. Martin's, New York, 1993, pp. 142–144Google Scholar; Biddle, Tami Davis, Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare: The Evolution of British and American Ideas about Strategic Bombing, 1914–1945, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2002Google Scholar; also Walzer, Michael, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations, Basic Books, New York, 1977.Google Scholar

8 The various reports of the US Strategic Bombing Survey became available as from October 1945; see Galbraith, John K., A Life in Our Times: Memoirs, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1981Google Scholar; Overy, Richard, Why the Allies Won, Norton, New York, 1995, pp. 230–232.Google Scholar

9 Overy, op. cit. (note 8), pp. 103–04.

10 The death toll in Dresden quickly became a politicized estimate. For a while it was rounded off to 100,000, then totals of 135,000, gradually rising to a quarter million, were given credence by David Irving in The Destruction of Dresden (1963), who finally seemed to settle for a hundred thousand. It suited the Communist regime to accept such an approximate tally, but more careful estimates revised the number downward. At the entrance to the restored Zwinger, one of Dresden's architectural treasures, the East German plaque still stands with its take on the history of the Second World War: “destruction of the inner city of Dresden,” by Anglo-American air forces in February 1945, “liberation” of Dresden from the fascists by the armies of the Soviet Union in May 1945, and reconstruction of the Baroque masterpiece by the German workers’ and peasant State. For the first scholarly re-evaluation of the death toll see Gotz Bergander, Der Luftkrieg in Dresden (1977), who estimated it at 40,000, and for the most recent evaluation (between 25 and 40,000) see Taylor, Frederick, Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945 (Harper Collins, New York, 2004)Google Scholar with its discussion of how casualty figures became inflated, pp. 443–48. On Hamburg, see Martin, Caidin's graphic account, The Night Hamburg Died, Ballantine, New York, 1960.Google Scholar

11 Jörg Friedrich, Der Brand: Deutschland im Bombenkrieg 1940–1945, Propyläen Verlag, Munich, 2002, forthcoming shortly in English from Columbia University Press; W. G. Sebald, “Air War and Literature” (“Luftkrieg und Literatur”, 2001), now included in his On the Natural History of Destruction, transl. Anthea Bell, Random House, New York, 2003; Günter Grass, Im Krebsgang, Steidl, Göttingen, 2002.

12 Cited in: Rhodes, Richard, Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire, Random House, New York, 1999, p. 48.Google Scholar

13 See the excellent reviews submitted to the H-German network by Joerg Arnold, 3 November 2003, and Douglas Pfeifer, 4 November 2003, which appropriately address, I believe, the strengths and weaknesses of this work — Pfeiffer's with more emphasis on the military and political issues, Arnold's with greater emphasis on the moral and conceptual problems. Others have also indicated the deficiencies of the book as a scholarly source. See for instance Horst Boogs' summary list of errors in his contribution to Ein Volk von Opfern? Die neue Debatte um den Bombenkrieg 1940–45, Rowohlt, Berlin, 2003. Obviously many issues are contentious in this debate. The most parochial issues are those that concern historians as such. To what extent can the historian merely report or dissect the differing positions without engaging his own sense of moral judgment. Second, what sort of rhetoric is legitimate in an historical account? If a particular vocabulary becomes associated with what is agreed to be the most abominable atrocity (such as the antiseptic language used by the Nazis in carrying out the “final solution”) is it illegitimate to use that language for other situations? Is “tasteless” a category that makes sense for historical writing? Saul Friedlaender sought to take up this issue from the other side when he questioned Nazi kitsch – the deliberate effort to evoke the aesthetic dimensions of fascism and Nazism. See Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death, Harper & Row, New York, 1984. We know the phenomenon from films (Hans-Jurgen Syberberg's Hitler: Ein Film aus Deutschland, 1977, and Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter, 1974), novels (Michel Tournier, Le Roi des aulnes, 1970; US title, The Ogre), Friedrich's book suggests that the historian cannot rest content with a history of lived experience, no matter how important it may be to convey that experience. Television, cinema and the preoccupation of society with the testimony of victims have suggested to us that history is sterile without the evocation of experience, but history cannot be merely the excavation of experience — old pictures, sad songs, diary extracts, and the like. To rely on these is our version of a pathetic fallacy. It is appropriate and indeed, I think, often a duty to convey testimony. But doing justice to the witness is not the same as writing history. It may be the beginning or the end of historical reflection, but it is a different sort of exercise. There can be no history perhaps without memory, but neither can there be history that does not discipline memory.

14 Volker Hage, Zeugen der Zerstoerung: Die Literaten und der Luftkrieg, S. Fischer, Frankfurt, 2003. Such accounts include: Gerd Ledig, Vergeltung (1956), in English as Payback, translation by Shaun Whiteside, Granta, London, 2003 — review at H-German (see note 13 above), 5 November 2003, by Julia Torrie; and Hans Erich Nossak, Der Untergang (originally published in 1948, reissued by Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/M, 1976); also an extensive essay on Nossak by Scott Denham, likewise at H-German, 7 November 2003.

15 Klaus Maier and Horst Boog in Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt (ed.), Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg, Vol. 7, H. Boog et al., Das Deutsche Reich in der Defensive, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart, 2001; Olaf Groehler's Bombenkrieg gegen Deutschland, Akademie Verlag, Berlin, 1990, from the German viewpoint. From the Allied viewpoint, Charles Webster and Noble Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive against Germany, 1939–1945, 4 vols., Her Majesty's Stationery Office, London, 1961; Craven, Wesley Frank and Cate, James Lea, eds., The Army Air Forces in World War II, 7 vols., Chicago, 1951Google Scholar; also among others Richards, Denis, RAF Bomber Command in the Second World War, Penguin, London, 1994Google Scholar; and Hastings, Max, Bomber Command, Pan Books, London and Sydney, 1981.Google Scholar

16 In Kettenacker, Lothar (ed.), Ein Volk von Opfern: Die neue Debatte urn den Bombenkrieg 1940–45, Rowolt, Berlin, 2003, p. 122 (author's translation).Google Scholar

17 Friedrich, op. cit. (note 11), pp. 217–18 (authors translation).

18 See Nobile, Philip (ed.), Judgment at the Smithsonian: Smithsonian Script by the Curators at the National Air and Space Museum, Marlowe & Company, New York, 1995.Google Scholar The afterword by Barton J. Bernstein is a valuable summary of the debates since 1945.

19 Childers, Thomas, Wings of Morning: The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot down over Germany in World War II, Addison Wesley, Reading, MA, 1995Google Scholar; Ambrose, Stephen E., The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys who Flew the B-24s over Germany, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2001.Google Scholar

20 Geoffrey Shakespeare to Archibald Sinclair, cited in Hastings, op. cit. (note 15), p. 147