The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945
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In most cases, however, protest against the authorities was muted or non-existent. In Germany and the Soviet Union there were possibly fatal consequences for sustained dissent. In Britain criticism and discussion was allowed up to a point, though censorship and control of information was widespread, and critics of Britain’s war effort during the Blitz were isolated and unpopular. Only in Italy was the capacity of the state to compel compliance and divert protest gradually eroded as the bombing intensified. In circumstances where the urban population was closely monitored for civil defence purposes and subject to a web of small rules and regulations that could not be violated without risk, there was little political space for those who wanted to use bombing to prompt social protest. Most regimes seem to have allowed a certain amount of open grumbling and resentment as a safety valve during and after a raid, a degree of latitude generally understood by the public, but no more than that. There was some opportunity for non-political protest through prolonged absenteeism from work, or refusal to return after evacuation, but the evidence suggests it was not widespread since workers generally needed to work to survive, or could be compelled to return to work. ‘Germany has two alternatives,’ claimed another bugged soldier in August 1944, ‘war and work for all, or peace and unemployment.’37 Rates of return to work in Britain during the Blitz suggested that work and pay were key considerations even in the face of further danger. What was disliked by the bombed populations was perceived inequality of sacrifice. Ruhr workers wished the bombers would go on to Berlin rather than penalize the wrong people; in Italy in 1943 the northern cities waited to hear news that Rome had at last been bombed; in London the unfortunate inhabitants of the dock areas hoped that bombs would fall on the favoured West End; in bombed and shelled Leningrad, the worst thing for the starving population to bear was the knowledge that the party elite were still eating well. None of these forms of social friction amounted to a serious challenge to war-willingness, which was sustained by fear of defeat and the demonization of the enemy. The post-war USSBS survey of German morale and the wartime Gallup polls in Britain each showed that bombing was low on the list of concerns, whereas fear of blockade, or invasion and occupation, or ultimate defeat, or national extinction played a much greater part.
The third component of bombing strategy was its use for specific political purposes other than trying to encourage the enemy population to revolt. There were many situations in which bombing was used to try to extract a political dividend or to fulfil a political pledge. The bombing of Bulgaria, with which this book opens, is an obvious instance. Bombing Romania in 1943–4 was also designed to try to win Romania away from the Axis alliance through the impact of air attack and its threat. Secret intelligence sources suggested that the bombing of Ploes¸ti in August 1943 had ‘an excellent psychological effect’. The airmen apparently waved to the population below during the raid, and those who were forced to parachute onto Romanian soil from damaged aircraft carried letters in Romanian explaining that they were Americans and not Russians, as well as sums of Balkan currency and packs of Camel cigarettes to hand out.38 Bombing was at its most significant as a political gambit in the earlier part of the war when the British government used the RAF as a means to win support among the occupied populations and from the United States by showing that Britain was capable of fighting back. Secret intelligence from French sources encouraged the RAF to attack targets in France working for the Germans principally for its political effects: ‘These bombardments thus have a fundamental importance for France in the future,’ wrote one sympathetic Frenchman in 1941, ‘for they will prove to the population at one and the same time that England is there, that she is strong and powerful and that she dominates the air.’39 In London it was supposed that bombing gave encouragement to the occupied peoples even if the direct economic effect of the attacks was at best very limited. ‘The Dutch at least (like the Norwegians),’ minuted the British Air Minister in summer 1940, ‘like our bombing them.’40
The most significant attempt to use bombing to serve political ends came with the many arguments between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union over the establishment of a ‘Second Front’ in Europe in 1942 and 1943. In the absence of a pledge to launch an offensive in northern France in 1942 and its uncertainty in 1943, Churchill used the bomber offensive instrumentally as a means to mitigate the effect on the Soviet leadership, and Stalin in particular, of the confused nature of Western strategy. At the famous meeting between Churchill and Stalin in Moscow on 12 August 1942, the prime minister first told Stalin that a second front on the northern French coast was not possible that year (the minutes indicate here that Stalin became glum, then glummer, and finally restless), but then indicated that bombing would continue with increasing severity. The course of the subsequent discussion is worth recording:
M. STALIN agreed that bombing was of tremendous importance … It was not only German industry that should be bombed, but the population too. This was the only way of breaking German morale.
THE PRIME MINISTER … As regards the civil population, we looked upon it as a military target. We sought no mercy and we would show no mercy.
M. STALIN said that was the only way.
THE PRIME MINISTER said we hoped to shatter twenty German cities as we had shattered Cologne, Lübeck, Düsseldorf, and so on. More and more aeroplanes and bigger and bigger bombs … If need be, as the war went on, we hoped to shatter almost every dwelling in almost every German city. (These words had a very stimulating effect upon the meeting, and thenceforward the atmosphere became progressively more cordial.)41
In this as in most other cases in which bombing was used to make a political point or to buy Allied collaboration, the actual effect is open to question. Bombing as a ‘Second Front’ did not satisfy Stalin, as is often suggested, since the following day he drafted a short note for Churchill in which he made it clear that the British failure to divert part of the German army to the west ‘inflicts a moral blow to the whole of Soviet public opinion, which calculates on the creation of a second front’.42 The effects of bombing on Bulgaria and Romania were simply overshadowed by the approaching Red Army, while the bombing of occupied Europe provoked growing resentment the longer it went on.
If the political, moral and economic impact of the bomber offensives produced ambiguous, though not negligible results, it is clear that they had significant effects, both direct and indirect, on military strategy and operations. The bomber offensives created battlefields in the European skies in which ground anti-air defences of increasing scientific sophistication combined with day-fighter and night-fighter screens to try to prevent the bombing from taking place. For the bomber force it was essential to create the conditions for air superiority without which the imposition of higher and higher loss rates made it difficult to sustain operations. These battles were carried on at great cost and continued over the whole period of the war. They constituted in their own right, irrespective of the ambition to damage the enemy’s economy and morale, a field of battle that absorbed a growing proportion of military resources and involved a major scientific, intelligence and productive effort. The bombing battlefield had not been fully anticipated before the war except by Douhet, who placed air superiority at the centre of his argument for air power, but it soon became a major military arena. The Battle of Britain and the subsequent Blitz were predicated on the need to win air superiority over southern Britain to make invasion possible, and then to suppress the revival of British air power and to compel Britain to maintain substantial air defence forces for the rest of the war. German bombing in the Soviet Union or Axis bombing against Malta also created battlefields between bombers and the guns, fighter aircraft, air warning systems and large numbers of uniformed men and women assigned to combat them. German failure in each of these theatres gave a strategic breathing space to the enemy, and highlighted the extent to which the balance between air defence and air offence was moving in the defenders’ favour.
The greatest battle, as Sp
eer called it, was the struggle for air superiority over Germany and German-occupied Europe. Neither the British nor the American air forces had anticipated how difficult this would be. The RAF had no effective counter-force strategy in place when bombing began and developed one piecemeal as losses to anti-aircraft fire and night-fighters threatened to terminate the offensive. The United States air forces built into their planning the idea that the German Air Force constituted an ‘intermediate target’, but found in the end that German air power, as it grew in size and effectiveness in 1943 and 1944, was the principal objective, whose defeat would not only pave the way for more effective bombing, but would have serious repercussions for German front-line operations, including defence against Operation Overlord. Achieving air superiority, wrote Spaatz to Doolittle in January 1944, was ‘the critical deciding factor in Germany’s defeat’.43 Although some of the bombing effort was devoted to hitting the German aircraft industry, it was not this that won air superiority but the introduction of the long-range fighter and the technical and tactical innovations that made it possible to suppress the German Air Force (and the V-weapons campaign) in ways that had not been achieved by German air forces in the Battle of Britain. Right up to the end of the war, a large proportion of the American air effort over Germany was devoted to maintaining the suppression of German air power by attacks on the whole air force infrastructure. The diversion of a large part of the German fighter force to the home front, the establishment of a dense web of ground anti-aircraft defences, and the recruitment of more than a million men, women and boys to man them distorted German strategy and starved the fronts in the Soviet Union, Italy and France of vital aircraft, both fighters and bombers. It was this form of military distortion that affected Britain’s capacity to act more forcefully between 1940 and 1942, as it later inhibited the German war effort between 1943 and 1945. Bombing cities or industries where there existed a cushion of spare capacity had much less effect than the battle for air supremacy and the large call that the bomber war had on the productive and scientific resources of both sides. This suggests that in the end, for all the exaggerated expectations of the new forms of total war, the fight between military forces still dictated the difference between victory and defeat as it had done in the Great War.
This was a paradoxical outcome. A war that was supposed to be waged from the air against the economies and social commitment of both sides, ended up as a major military campaign fought between rival air forces, much more like the tactical bombing campaigns in the field, though larger in scale and more prolonged. At times strategic forces were actually used for tactical purposes, to force a breakthrough for ground forces or to speed up a campaign, though often with very mixed results. The bombings of Warsaw, Minsk, Stalingrad and Cassino were as destructive as anything carried out by independent strategic forces against a distant target but were carried out in order to meet direct operational requirements at or near the fighting front. In these cases bombing proved every bit as blunt an instrument as it was when used to destroy an urban or industrial target, since it often produced exceptional levels of destruction without necessarily achieving the object. The obliteration of Brest and Lorient did not prevent German submarines from continuing to operate; the destruction of Caen held up Allied forces as they tried to navigate its debris-strewn streets; the bombing of Stalingrad created an ideal landscape for urban guerrilla warfare and arguably prevented the German Army from seizing the city in September 1942. The obliteration of Aachen, at General Bradley’s request, did not materially speed up the American advance into Germany. Following the deaths of American troops at the opening of Operation Cobra, Eisenhower told Bradley that he did not think that heavy bombers could be used in support of ground troops, which he regarded as ‘a job for the artillery’.44 In August 1944 Doolittle complained to Spaatz that the Eighth Bomber Force was simply an inapposite instrument for regular use in support of ground operations, ‘due to the complication of our equipment, the comparatively short combat life of the average crew member, and the fact that some of the concepts of tactical bombing are diametrically opposed to those of strategic bombing’. Doolittle highlighted the regular loss of American troops to friendly fire and suggested that fighters and fighter-bombers were much more useful adjuncts to the battlefield than heavy bombers.45 This was why the Soviet military leaders wanted a firm bomb line in eastern Europe in early 1945, to prevent American or British bombers hitting their own forces. The Soviet Air Force took the view throughout the war that high-quality battlefield aviation – light bombers, fighters and fighter-bombers – represented the most effective way air power could be exercised given the limitations of the prevailing technology, and it is difficult not to see this as a sensible strategic judgement.
None of the evident drawbacks to bombing during the war prevented the escalation of all the major offensives towards more indiscriminate levels of destruction. The issue of escalation is central to any judgement about the broader ethical implications of the bomber offensives.46 In each case it is possible to show that the circumstances of war, or the evolving technical capability of the force, or the pressure of political considerations, explains the reduction of whatever restraints existed on inflicting damage on civilians. But there was also a moral dimension to escalation. Each of the major bomber offensives violated established rules of engagement about not inflicting deliberate and disproportional damage on civilians and the civilian milieu. German bombing moved from trying to destroy the infrastructure of RAF Fighter Command to the V-2 rocket campaign four years later; British attacks against city targets where civilians would be killed were declared illegal in autumn 1939, but Bomber Command ended up obliterating Dresden in 1945; the American air forces were publicly committed to raids on precise targets but finally authorized unsighted bombing of cities through cloud and smoke. In each case crew were originally told to bring their bombs back if a military or industrial target was not clearly visible, but as standard practice this was soon abandoned in favour of allowing the pilot to find a secondary ‘target of opportunity’.
Escalation did not happen without a conscious realization that thresholds were being crossed. Hitler’s insistence that only he could order retaliatory ‘terror’ attacks indicates the German understanding about what constituted legitimate acts of war and what did not (although this scarcely inhibited him in the campaign in Russia against ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’). In the United States, the air force made anxious efforts to ensure that the public accepted the higher moral claim of precision bombing, and when the destruction of Dresden became news, Arnold and Spaatz immediately conspired to preserve the image.47 In Britain, where the RAF was the only major air force to target civilians deliberately, every effort was made to maintain the subterfuge that it was the Germans who inflicted terror, while the RAF hit only military targets, even to the extent of briefing crews before a raid in a language designed to disguise the real intention. This view became so embedded in RAF propaganda that officers later in the war came to accept that it must be true. After the first V-weapons attacks, the plans department in the Air Ministry suggested that since Germany had now deliberately adopted ‘terror tactics’ against civilians, it was time to retaliate in kind. The Director of Intelligence could see little point in ‘declaring our intention to be a savage one after our actions in the past have inevitably been extremely savage’. The response to this claim says much about the duplicity of the British position. ‘Whatever the Germans may say about our so-called “terror raids”,’ wrote Air Marshal Douglas Colyer, ‘we have so far held firmly to the fact that our attacks were directed against definite military objectives.’48 That it was possible to argue this case at all depended on defining military objective in such a way that it became in effect meaningless. By the end of the war the definition used by the United States air forces was simply ‘any objective the continued existence of which will materially contribute to the enemy’s ability to wage war’, which allowed very wide latitude in choosing targets where civilian deat
hs were unavoidable.49
It would be easy to condemn each air force for rapidly violating whatever sense it had that civilian targeting was not a legitimate act of war. The legal position is scarcely open to doubt: bombing deliberately carried out in conditions in which heavy civilian casualties and destruction of civilian property were bound to occur, violated every accepted norm in the conduct of modern warfare, whether it was done by German, British or American air forces.50 The legal issue was well understood at the time. In summer 1945 the victorious Allies at first intended to add the bombing of cities to the indictment they were drawing up for the major German war criminals. On the advice of the British Foreign Office this particular charge was quietly withdrawn since it was self-evident that German defence lawyers would have little difficulty in tarring Allied bombing with the same brush.51 The only German airman to be put on trial for bombing was Alexander Löhr, tried and executed by the Yugoslav authorities for his part in the bombing of Belgrade in 1941. Had bombing of civilians not been regarded as legally problematic, the major powers would not have agreed only four years later, in the new Geneva Convention of 1949, conditions ‘relative to the protection of civilian persons in time of war’, which allowed in the event of conflict for protective areas for children, mothers, the elderly, and any civilians not directly connected with the war effort; or in 1977 to have agreed to draw up additional protocols to give protection in international law more generally to civilians, civilian services and the civilian milieu, which could not be the deliberate objects of military attack or the victims of careless bombing and shelling of objectives in civilian areas.52