The End Is Always Near

by Dan Carlin

  On the surface this looks like a level of hypocrisy Genghis Khan could drive a genocide through.* It’s a difference in methods, not outcomes. But the architects of such catastrophes were not sadists—most thought (or told themselves) that they were saving lives, both friendly and enemy. Many of the Allied ground troops and their loved ones at home agreed with this position. There was scant pushback over ethical concerns while the conflict was raging and people were killing and dying on every front, in every military theater, every day.

  The late stages of the Second World War were the last time this planet has seen a case of Total War. Total War is to states what a no-holds-barred death match is to individuals. Ethical lines that might be respected in a limited war* get crossed with impunity in Total War. The stakes are so high that the lens through which everyone begins to view things is a simple one: life or death.

  When you think of the old gods of war—Ares in Greek mythology, Mars in Roman—you’ll note that they display elements of borderline madness. Combat creates a different reality and different rules, rules that might appear less rational in peacetime. Combat also exerts pressures on the human psyche, tapping into fight-or-flight response and various biochemical releases* that help humans survive dangerous situations. Such conditions and such pressures are not the most conducive to reflective thought. It is for this reason that distinctions are made between actions carried out in “hot blood” versus ones carried out in “cold blood.”

  But this aspect of individual warriorhood in a battlefield situation is a different beast from the insanity that sometimes operates at the decision-making level. The commanders—the Napoleons, Rommels, Caesars, or Grants—are not battle crazed. They make hard decisions, but they try hard not to make crazy ones. In fact, they often make choices that under the same circumstances we ourselves might make. In war, rational decisions are made for less than rational situations.

  By our current peacetime standards, the ethics of Total War might seem hard to justify and easy to condemn. But it’s extremely difficult to imagine what it was like to be alive during the last years of the Second World War. Decision makers were faced with often terrible choices. That war was the worst conflict in human history, and it caused suffering on an unimaginable scale all over the world.

  What extreme actions would you be willing to contemplate if you could potentially end that war at the very start? Had the British or the French been in possession of a single atomic bomb at that time, would you have been in favor of their dropping it on Berlin once Germany invaded Poland? Such a decision would have doomed about a million Germans to a fiery death, including a ton of women, children, and the elderly and infirm. It would also destroy a cultural center of historic and generational importance. But it might have ended the war on the first day. If it had, many more lives would have been saved than had been sacrificed to that one bomb. The numbers are staggering: thirty million souls lost on the eastern front alone; six million lost in the Holocaust. What is the right move?

  Nobody had the chance to make such a decision, because the bomb wasn’t successfully tested by anyone until 1945. When it was, though, the Second World War was in its worst year, and such a weapon might well have hastened its end. The man who made the decision to use it (and the only man who ever has) was President Truman, and he was new on the job when he made it. He had been Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vice president for only three months when FDR died suddenly, and it was only then that Truman even learned of the atomic bomb’s existence.* That’s one hell of a thing to lay at the feet of a new president.

  This is what he wrote in his diary about a meeting with Stalin and Churchill at Potsdam on July 25, 1945, just two months after taking office:

  We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world. It may be the fire destruction prophesied in the Euphrates Valley era, after Noah and his fabulous ark. Anyway, we “think” we have found the way to cause a disintegration of the atom. An experiment in the New Mexico desert was startling, to put it mildly. Thirteen pounds of the explosive caused a complete disintegration of a steel tower sixty feet high, created a crater six feet deep and twelve hundred feet in diameter, knocked over a steel tower a half mile away, and knocked men down ten thousand yards away.

  The explosion was visible for more than two hundred miles and audible for forty miles and more. This weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10. I have told the secretary of war, Mr. Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless, and fanatic, we, as the leader of the world for the common welfare, cannot drop this terrible bomb on the old capital or the new.

  He and I are in accord. The target will be a purely military one, and we will issue a warning statement asking the Japs to surrender and save lives. I’m sure they will not do that, but we’ve given them the chance. It is certainly a good thing for the world that Hitler’s crowd or Stalin’s did not discover this atomic bomb. It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can be made the most useful.

  The official line was indeed that both of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan were dropped on military targets and that the civilians who died were unavoidable collateral damage. How do you drop a bomb knowing it’s going to kill fifty thousand or a hundred thousand civilians and say that’s an acceptable level of collateral damage? From our modern vantage point, after generations of relative peace (and don’t forget it’s all relative), that would seem a very dubious moral call. But context is everything, and by 1945 the world had been enduring the bloody cost of Total War for six years. To a multitude of very intelligent, even empathetic people all over the world, this seemed like the right decision at the time. And a large part of the reason why is that it was little different from what was already being done.

  On the night of March 9–10, 1945, months before the atomic bombs were dropped, Tokyo was bombed with incendiary bombs by more than three hundred US aircraft. Anyone who has ever read accounts of this event (dubbed a “firebombing”) understands why an atomic bomb seemed little different from conventional bombing. It doesn’t seem possible that conditions could ever be any worse than on the ground after the Tokyo strike, so an atomic bomb was simply a more economical way to accomplish the same outcome. Tokyo was one of the most densely populated places in the world, so even though plenty of military assets in the city were targeted, more than a hundred thousand mostly noncombatants were burned to death. The heat was so intense that liquid glass rolled down the street.

  In his book Bombs, Cities, and Civilians, Conrad Crane writes:

  Thousands suffocated in shelters or parks. Panicked crowds crushed victims who had fallen in the streets as they surged towards waterways to escape the flames. Perhaps the most terrible incident came when one B-29 dropped seven tons of incendiaries on or around the crowded Kokotoi Bridge. Hundreds of people were turned into fiery torches and splashed into the river below in sizzling hisses. One writer described the falling bodies as resembling tent caterpillars that had been burned out of a tree.

  Tail gunners were sickened by the sight of hundreds of people burning to death in flaming napalm on the surface of the Sumida River. A doctor, who observed the carnage there, later said you couldn’t even tell if the objects floating by were arms and legs or pieces of burnt wood. B-29 crews fought super-heated updrafts that destroyed at least ten aircraft and wore oxygen masks to avoid vomiting from the stench of burning flesh.

  These sorts of bombings had been happening all over Japan. More than sixty Japanese cities were burned off the map by war’s end. These firebombing raids were so terrible that several people in high command positions of the US Army Air Forces said that the best thing the atomic bomb did was put an end to them.

  To answer the question of how people thought it was okay to use nuclear weapons on cities, we need to delve into why they thought bombing noncombatants with any sort of deadly munitions was also ethically suppor
table. To understand how the rules of warfare change—moving, basically, from shielding noncombatants in their homes to specifically targeting those homes for destruction—we need to see the historical progression of war from the air.

  When the First World War ended, the beginnings of the weapons systems that would factor heavily into the fighting of the next world war could be seen. Submarines, for example, were just starting to reveal their potential. Submarines were controversial weapons at the time, though, because of the practice of sinking merchant and commercial vessels with noncombatants on board. Deliberately targeting civilians was, if not unheard of, then heavily frowned upon by the ethical standards of the time. But nothing changed conventional military morality as much as the growing importance of airpower, which was just starting to come into its own in 1918.

  Humans have accrued thousands of years’ experience and knowledge in the use of land forces and equipment. From the Greeks and Romans to the Chinese and Ottomans, there are endless examples of new technology being introduced into the conduct of land warfare. We have a similarly long history in the fundamentals, physics, and tactics of naval warfare. But by the time the Second World War broke out, airpower was not even fifty years old.*

  The development of airpower was a tremendously destabilizing force to the more genteel laws of the “limited war” era in the 1800s, at least among European powers fighting other European powers. There were still massacres and other atrocities, but relatively speaking, the states had been fairly civilized with one another in war, with professional armies doing the fighting and the civilian populations generally treated well. When air elements, such as hot air balloons, first appeared, they were used for reconnaissance and the like, rather than conflict.

  But people feared airpower for its potential role as a weapon system in the future. That fear was a popular subject in science fiction at the time. Jules Verne’s novel Robur the Conqueror (also known as The Clipper of the Clouds), describes a giant gasbag of a ship armed with a gun that could fire down on the world. And H. G. Wells’s The War in the Air depicts a German zeppelin fleet flying across the Atlantic to bomb New York.

  In 1899, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia* called a meeting that would come to be known as the Hague Convention, the first of many to be held on the establishment of international law regarding armaments. There, representatives of more than two dozen countries took up the issue of airships, with the Russians proposing a ban on all bombing from the air. The American delegate counterproposed that the ban last only five years, since the science might improve to allow for precision bombing, which might prove humane insofar as it could shorten wars. This philosophy of airpower’s war-shortening potential would become one of the key arguments made by its proponents, but it’s also the loophole by which a sort of logical insanity is made possible: If airpower could, through the damage it inflicts, end a war the day or week it began, how much nastiness would it spare the combatants compared with a long war?

  The idea of deliberately killing lots of noncombatants to achieve this laudable goal was not what anyone had envisioned before the First World War; the genteel, and by modern standards even quaint, people would have recoiled at the concept. Instead, airpower’s proponents envisioned air elements attacking the enemy’s military installations and targets only. But determining where the line between military and civilian targets existed proved very difficult. Given the technology at the time, accurately hitting the target would also be close to impossible, making any distinction moot. This issue remained mostly theoretical until the First World War broke out in 1914.

  When that war did erupt, the populations of the major belligerents were terrified, because they’d been reading about these new air capabilities for years. In one publication, a French aviator explained that the coming war would be over in five minutes—which was good, in his mind—but he predicted that Paris and Berlin and other places would be wiped off the map in the process.

  Indeed, early in the war, there were some very small German attempts to bomb Paris via a little rickety plane with an open cockpit and a single person inside who dropped a bomb or two by hand, followed by leaflets that read, “Surrender.” A few people were killed on the ground in what can only be described as a terror bombing. (At least, that’s what you call it when the other side is doing it to you; it’s morale-targeted bombing if you’re doing it to someone.) The US president, Woodrow Wilson, issued a public rebuke of Germany for what amounted to a crime against humanity (by nineteenth-century standards).*

  The French would attempt to target military locations by air, sending in a couple of bombers to take out a bullet factory, for example. The Americans also ultimately embraced this precision-bombing idea even though there was nothing precise about any of it and hitting the right target proved to be a crapshoot.

  By 1915, the war had bogged down on the western front, and all sides were looking for ways to get past the stalemate.

  For a long time, the Germans had kept their zeppelin fleet under wraps rather than trying to use it, letting it serve as a deterrent. By 1915, however, they were attempting to find more aggressive ways to employ the technology. That year, the Germans sent the lighter-than-air fleet to Britain to bomb from the skies, H. G. Wells style, and they killed civilians. Given President Wilson’s reaction to the earlier minibombing in Paris, this was a monumental moment, and Germany’s opponents used it in their propaganda. Back in Germany, the commanders thought their bombing effort might actually end the war.*

  The reality of these giant gasbags filled with flammable hydrogen was that they were vulnerable, so once the British developed a way to attack the zeppelins, the German losses mounted, and the attacks trailed off. Nonetheless, the zeppelin attacks had been an unnerving harbinger of things to come.

  Later in the war, the Germans would build giant prop-driven bombers, some of them with wingspans almost as large as those of the World War II B-17 “Flying Fortress.” These Gotha bombers would fly in large numbers over Britain, releasing their bombs. They did surprisingly little damage, but people on the ground were extremely shaken. These attacks would provide some of the earliest evidence that, in contrast to the pro-bombing theories that suggested that civilians would petition their government to end a war because they couldn’t stand the aerial assault, such attacks actually strengthened the resolve of their victims.

  But bombing’s proponents had a legitimate excuse for why airpower wasn’t more decisive in the First World War—the technology* simply wasn’t there yet. Had early twentieth-century air forces been capable of inflicting late–Second World War levels of destruction, perhaps the story would have been different. If the early Gotha raids, for example, had sparked a firestorm that killed forty thousand Londoners in 1918, while torching a huge part of the historic city, it might have shocked people enough to have perhaps broken the stalemate. Instead, a case can be made that being early victims of strategic bombing in the First World War had a toughening effect on Britons and helped them weather the Second World War’s aerial storm when it came.

  Nonetheless, by the end of the First World War, the future importance—not to mention the potential frightfulness—of airpower was clear. Fascinating proposals were advanced after the war to put airpower solely in the hands of the international community for safekeeping via the League of Nations (the forefather of the United Nations). If one nation started causing trouble, the league would use the only air force in existence and bomb the troublemaker into swift submission, to enforce the will of the world community.

  The stalemate on the western front and the relentless daily mounting of the death toll seemed to reinforce an old military maxim that the worst of all evils is a prolonged war. Anything that might shorten a conflict will save lives. Proponents of airpower were convinced it would do just this.

  Given that most of global public opinion before the Second World War considered the deliberate bombing of civilians in cities to be a war crime, influential aerial thinkers like the Italian Giulio Douhet were
advocating that strategies that amounted to war crimes* be employed when the next war broke out. His motives were to prevent what he and many others considered to be the greater war crime—another long modern war like the First World War. Douhet was one of many aerial thinkers who considered it their job to prevent another long, meat grinder–like war like the one that had just ended. He said that airpower would decide a future war before the armies and navies of the combatants even had a chance to mobilize. He suggested that, when war broke out again, three kinds of bombs be dropped on the enemy’s cities: the first were to be high explosives, which would blow things up; the second, incendiary bombs, which would light on fire everything that had been shattered and scattered by the first bombs; and the third, gas weapons, which would make the area uninhabitable—even firemen wouldn’t be able to go in and put the fires out, so the city would burn down.

  Doing all this, Douhet wrote, would mean the home front, the factories, and the war-making capabilities of any enemy city would all be destroyed, but “the effect of such aerial offensives upon morale may well have more influence upon the conduct of the war than their material effects.”

  Consider the possible effect of Douhet’s ideas on the civilians of cities not yet struck but possibly subject to such bombing attacks. What civil or military authority could keep public order, maintain essential services, and continue industrial production under such a threat? And even if a semblance of order was maintained and some work done, would not the sight of a single enemy plane be enough to stampede the population into panic? In short, normal life would be impossible in this constant nightmare of imminent death and destruction.