The End Is Always Near

by Dan Carlin

  Douhet predicted that a country “subjected to this kind of merciless pounding from the air” could not help but experience a “complete breakdown of the social structure.” If only to stop “the horror and suffering, the people themselves, driven by the instinct of self-preservation, would rise up and demand an end to the war,” and they would do it quickly, “before their army and navy had time to mobilize at all.”

  In making the logical case for what his more genteel contemporaries might consider an insanity, Douhet wasn’t worried about morality or feasibility—he was concerned only about effectiveness, an effectiveness that would greatly shorten any war, which would be the most moral outcome possible.

  It was during the interwar period that air weapons were developed with the expectation that a future war would be fought with them. In countries that had been traumatized by the First World War, military thinking assumed the public would support the use of these weapons to avoid their being used against them first.

  American air theorists, on the other hand, were under the impression that American public opinion would not allow the development of an air arm designed to blow up women and children and cities. These theorists believed that American sensibilities would support only the idea of precision airpower, the kind that would target things and not people. As the American airpower expert Conrad Crane wrote, “Precision bombing doctrine, attacking factories instead of women and children, offered a way for the Air Corps to be decisive in war without appearing immoral.”

  The giant B-17 heavy bombers—destined to be one of the most well-known planes of the Second World War—first rolled off the production line in 1936. B-17s were designed to deliver strategic, high-level bombing, and a lot of them had been already built by the time the United States joined the conflict in 1941. And the highly touted Norden bombsight,* installed in the B-17, would supposedly allow precision bombing from thousands of feet up in the air. The Americans and the French led the way on this idea of targeting rail yards and docksides and factories while trying to avoid civilian casualties.

  In Britain, the air theorist James Spaight similarly felt that airpower was a necessary evil, because at the time it was believed that there was no defense against the bomber. The British therefore concluded that an “if you hit me, I’ll hit you” deterrent was the best guarantor of their cities’ safety, even though it would lead to what we now call mutually assured destruction.

  There is some logic to this idea. In the later stages of the First World War, the Germans stopped their heavy bombing campaign against Britain because British capabilities had advanced to the point where they would soon be able to do to German cities what the Germans were doing to the British. In the years after the war, the British continued to build a strategic air capability—not to incinerate enemy cities per se, but as a way to stop the enemy from doing it to them first.

  After the war, Spaight came up with an idea that’s since been used as a science fiction premise: he suggested that one could warn the enemy to evacuate a targeted city ahead of time.

  The historian Lee Kennett writes that Spaight considered the effect in “the City,” London’s historic financial district. “The day population of [the City’s] 675 acres was over four hundred thousand people; at night that figure dropped to fourteen thousand. If arrangements could be made to lodge those fourteen thousand elsewhere, the City would become an area in which enemy bombers could do enormous material damage, but at the same time spare human life.”

  While such theoretical discussions were going on, tensions around the world began to greatly increase. Fascism came to power in Italy, and then in Germany. This added to the global tension already in place because of the radical revolutionary Bolshevik state called the Soviet Union centered in the former Russia and the growing violence between the Japanese and Chinese. The Great Depression was also hitting across the globe. And the entity that was meant to ensure such pressures didn’t lead to another world war was failing dramatically.

  The earlier suggestion of relegating the control of military aircraft solely to the League of Nations had never been realistically considered, and the problems airpower posed plagued the league during the interwar years. Some of the great powers, for example, used airpower to keep down tribal natives in European colonies. It turns out that airpower was far more effective than troops on the ground for controlling people. The league chastised Fascist Italy for its air tactics in its war with Ethiopia, slapping the country with economic sanctions, but nothing ultimately changed. The Japanese virtually sneered at the League of Nations when it tried to address Japanese aggression in China. Even Britain and France weren’t keen on the league telling them what to do in their colonial territories. The United States—which had been a prime mover in creating the postwar organization—essentially abandoned it when the Senate neglected to ratify the treaty or join the league.

  Then, in 1936, there came an opportunity to test, employ, and perfect what might be called the beta version of Second World War airpower. In the Spanish Civil War, several future World War II belligerents began aiding one side or the other, with Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, for example, offering training, equipment, supplies, and even pilots to the Nationalists in their rebellion against the Republican government; while the Soviets, Mexicans, and French (in a clandestine way at least) gave aid to the Republicans.

  Germany would learn a lot about air warfare in Spain, especially from the bombing of the Basque city of Guernica, an incident immortalized in the Picasso painting of the same name. The Italians and the Germans claimed to have been after military targets, especially a bridge, but it was allegedly a market day, which meant the city would have been more crowded than usual. Here is how the historian David Clay Large describes the afternoon attack by the German Condor Legion commanded by Wolfram Freiherr von Richthofen:*

  At about 4:40 p.m., two nuns on the roof of La Merced Convent in Guernica rang a bell and shouted “Avion! Avion!” According to witnesses, within a few moments of that warning, a single plane appeared over the eastern end of town. The aircraft, a Heinkel 111, passed once over the city, then returned and dived in the direction of Renteria bridge.

  Though there was no flak—Guernica had no antiaircraft guns—the plane’s bombs landed not on the bridge but about 300 meters to the southwest in a plaza fronting the railroad station. One bomb tore up the Julian Hotel across the plaza. A volunteer fireman saw women and children blown high into the air and then raining down in “legs, arms, heads, and bits of pieces everywhere.”

  About twenty-five minutes later, three more Heinkel 111s appeared low in the sky. Their bombs, released at about 2,000 feet, hit a candy factory near the Renteria bridge, igniting cauldrons of sugar syrup and turning the factory into an inferno. Young female workers, some of them on fire, began stampeding from the building. The central marketplace, not far away, was also hit. Two bulls, sprayed with burning thermite, charged through the canvas-walled stalls, setting the entire market ablaze.

  Next, five pairs of Heinkel 51 fighters zoomed in very low over parts of the town not yet obscured by smoke. According to one witness, two of the planes “just flew back and forth at about one hundred feet, like flying sheep dogs rounding up people for the slaughter.” One plane zeroed in on a woman and her three small children, killing them all in a single burst. Another wiped out the town band.

  At about 6:00 p.m., the first bombers—Junkers 52s and Italian Savoys—neared the target. They came in groups of three, wave after wave, carrying among them almost 100,000 pounds of high explosives. These they dropped helter-skelter through the smoke and dust hanging over the town. One bomb hit a pelota fronton—a jai alai court; another blew up the Bank of Vizcaya; and still another demolished an orphanage. By the time the last of the bombers had headed back to their bases, roughly two-thirds of the buildings in Guernica were leveled or on fire.

  Pictures of dead babies appeared in the media around the world; the German and Italian governments were embarrassed. Whi
le the number of casualties was not that heavy—fewer than the number of people killed on 9/11, for example—the indiscriminate nature of the attacks prompted outrage.

  The governments might have been shamed, but the architects of the attack were elated. The German commander, von Richthofen, wrote in his diary, “Absolutely fabulous. City was completely closed off for at least 24 hours that would have guaranteed immediate conquest if troops would have attacked right away, but at least we had a complete technical success with our 250s and firebombs.”

  As nasty as the attack on Guernica was, it probably wouldn’t have been prohibited by any of the major militaries of the day. The historian Tami Davis Biddle has considered what some of the military manuals from just before the Second World War say on the matter. The British Royal Air Force (RAF) manual rules that it’s not only okay to go after public and private buildings, but it’s part of what you do to induce the enemy to surrender—which is a nice way of saying that you can pound them into submission. A German military manual specifically rules that it’s permissible to go after the morale of the enemy at its root . . . oh, and also strike military installations.

  The British aviator James Spaight pointed out that when it came to bombing, the rules of war had loopholes you could pilot a B-17 through. The number-one loophole was the question of military installations. Everyone agreed that it was permissible to use airpower to hit military targets. The problem was that the accuracy of the technology at the time didn’t allow aircraft to reliably hit military targets. British tests right before the Second World War showed that fewer than two-thirds of bombers placed their bombs within five miles of an intended target. With accuracy like that, allowing bombing in civilian areas in order to go after military targets was the same as saying it was legal to kill civilians.

  The air war didn’t break out the way many had imagined it would. When the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain announced on the radio that Britain was at war, air raid sirens went off in London, but the Luftwaffe didn’t come. Nonetheless, after the fall of France in June 1940, things looked grave; Britain’s very national survival was at stake.

  Once the Battle of Britain* began, the stakes were as high as could be imagined: a German invasion. But this could happen only if the Luftwaffe won control of the air. The British fleet could halt any channel crossing as long as its ships weren’t bombed to the bottom of the sea. And if the Germans crossed the channel and started splashing up on British beaches, Churchill planned on using poison gas. Is anybody going to cry “war crime” if the Nazis are landing fifty miles from your house?

  The early targets identified by the Germans for air attacks were radar installations and airfields; and, for a time, the Luftwaffe seemed to be gaining the upper hand. Then the “we don’t deliberately bomb cities” moral line was breached supposedly due to a tit-for-tat mix-up that had the Luftwaffe accidentally bombing London, followed by a British retaliatory raid on Berlin, followed by a full-bore deliberate assault on British cities by the Germans in response.*

  On September 4, 1940, Hitler, playing the victim, said in a speech, “I have tried to spare the British. They have mistaken my humanity for weakness and have replied by murdering German women and children. If they attack our cities, we will simply erase theirs.”

  The Luftwaffe’s foray into bombing British cities, especially the Blitz in London, marked the beginnings of strategic bombing in a way that would become horribly familiar—first in England, then in Germany, then in Japan. Places like Warsaw and Rotterdam had been bombed earlier in the war in single incidents, but the Blitz was not a strike, it was an ongoing ordeal that lasted for months.

  Generally, the bombers of the Second World War were of medium size, but some were huge. The US B-29 Superfortress, built in the final years of the war, was the size of a modern commercial airliner. Picture hundreds of them in the sky over your city, dropping bombs that would create an unholy inferno when they hit the ground. It’s a horrifying image.

  The author Hermann Knell, himself a survivor of World War II strategic bombing attacks, wrote about the German raids on the British capital during the Blitz in his book, To Destroy a City:

  From September 7 until November 13, London was bombarded every night. A total of 13,000 tons of high explosives and 12,000 incendiary canisters were dropped. Other cities were raided, too, and the most famous raid is the one on Coventry on 14 November 1940, when 450 bombers discharged 500 tons of high explosives and 880 incendiary canisters. Civilian losses were appalling, mainly because there were few adequate air raid shelters.

  The attacks failed both to stop the British raids over Germany and to squash morale. Indeed, the whole idea of using bombers to destroy civilian morale was flawed for several reasons. One may have been the bravery of the citizenry. Studies showed that, at first, victims just got angry at the enemy and hoped their own air force would strike back. When it got really nasty, and the people had been bombed to near oblivion, a resigned, just-trying-to-survive kind of depression crept in. What was avowedly not happening, though, were marches demanding an immediate end to the war.

  Morale bombing turned out not to work, but too many people had too much invested in it to change course. As writes Len Deighton, a former RAF member, when the RAF was confronted with evidence that the British population didn’t crack under the Blitz, what made its leadership think the Germans would do so? The RAF’s response was that British civilians were stronger than Germans.

  Air Marshal Arthur “Bomber” Harris—the man who would become known for leading Britain’s bombing campaign in Germany—said, “There are a lot of people who say that bombing can never win a war. Well, my answer to that is that it’s never been tried yet, and we shall see.” (Harris would go on to pay the Germans back exponentially for what they did to Britain.)

  Forty thousand British civilians were killed in strategic attacks during the war, a horrific number of people, but there are few accounts in the history books of the true nastiness of what those people went through—it’s difficult to find photos of British casualties, or even graphic descriptions of the carnage. The British focused their reports on how much damage to historic buildings was done but rarely talked about the people who were killed. Doing so, it was felt, wouldn’t be good for morale, and Churchill wouldn’t allow anything in newspapers or magazines that didn’t show Britain pluckily holding up under the German barrage.

  The Germans, on the other hand, would send a plane over to take pictures of the damage, then rush the pictures to headquarters, where air scientists and theorists and pilots would determine how well the raid had done.*

  The diabolical nature of strategic bombing—whether via atomic bombs or conventional bombs—reveals itself in the nitty-gritty details involved in the craft. Delayed-fuse bombs, for instance, which were dropped with timers so they didn’t go off until hours after they hit the ground, had two roles: first, to kill any rescuers; second, to tell people not to bother sending rescuers next time. And remember: this was all done, and justified, in the name of shortening the war by making it worse.

  The physicist Freeman Dyson, who worked for the RAF’s Bomber Command, said years after the war, “I felt sickened by what I knew. Many times, I decided I had a moral obligation to run out into the streets and tell the British people what stupidities were being done in their name. But I never had the courage to do it. I sat in my office until the end, carefully calculating how to murder most economically another hundred thousand people.”

  It takes time to get to a point of logical insanity. It doesn’t happen the moment war breaks out; it ratchets up over the course of time and events. No one wanted to be the first to drop bombs on cities from the air, but then the other side did it, so they responded. They said they’d go after only military targets, until they figured out they couldn’t fly bombers in daylight because they’d get massacred by air defenses and fighters, so they decided to bomb at night. The problem was that they already couldn’t hit their targets in daylight, so when
they decided to fly bombers at night, it was with the implicit acknowledgment that they were just randomly dropping bombs on cities.

  “In theory, they were still trying to bomb a list of targets much like the ones they failed to hit in daylight,” Len Deighton writes about the Germans’ change of strategy. “In practice, they did as the Royal Air Force Bomber Command was doing. They tried to find a big city center and set light to it.”

  In June 1941, the British officially said they were going to start targeting the morale and living arrangements of the enemy’s workers, and they were going to drop their bombs at night. (“Terror bombing” when the Germans did it, remember; “morale bombing” when the British did it.) For the British, this was one of precious few remaining methods they possessed at that time in the war to strike at Germany.

  The German author Jörg Friedrich called the fleet of the Combined Bombing Offensive “the most ominous weapon ever to have been aimed at humans.” (After the war, Air Marshal Harris, who oversaw the effort, firmly believed it had saved an entire generation of British soldiers.)

  The majority of the air leaders during the Second World War had fought in the First World War as pilots or soldiers, from the Luftwaffe’s Hermann Göring to Air Marshal Harris to US Army Air Force general Curtis LeMay, and to them anything was better than what they had experienced on the front lines twenty years earlier. Harris makes a point that the Royal Navy in the First World War allegedly starved eight hundred thousand mostly noncombatant Germans—all under the laws of war during the British naval blockade—and that this was considered morally acceptable because it was done to save the lives of soldiers fighting on the western front.*