One of the first applications of this changed perception was Sherman’s march through Georgia, destroying harvests, stores, and infrastructure along the way. Sherman is often remembered for his statement “War is hell,” and this was not just an observation. His theory of war was that it should be made as close to hell as possible for one’s opponents so they would end it quicker. And the innovation that he introduced—which was observed from Europe as an act of barbarism and is so remembered in the South to this day—was to allow his troops to attack the city of Atlanta as a whole, destroying most of its stores and burning the city. He then moved from Atlanta to the sea, burning stores, fields, and logistic supplies as he went, partly to destroy the supplies of the armies opposing him, and partly—quite explicitly and openly—to punish and terrorize the population, to make them realize that they must pay a price for supporting this secession or in allowing their leadership to continue the war.
Despite this precursor to the era of total war—the large-scale military attack on the economy and social order of an opponent—this strategy was not really implemented in World War I, which by and large remained a traditional war of soldiers battling other soldiers. Most of the huge number of people who died directly from military operations in World War I were military. Between nine million and thirteen million soldiers died out of perhaps sixty-five million troops worldwide.
In the minds of a lot of soldiers and their generals, there was a potential in this experience for erosion of the moral significance of the distinction between combatants and noncombatants as a basis for restraint in warfare. Military men in World War I could see the deaths of soldiers on the fields of France and Belgium and elsewhere as very like massacres, even though these people were wearing uniforms.
On the first day of the Battle of the Somme, July 1, 1916, twenty thousand British soldiers died; another forty thousand were wounded or missing. Within a few months, there were over a million casualties on both sides in that campaign, which moved battle lines a few miles from time to time, one way or the other. The next year in the Passchendaele campaign, General Sir Douglas Haig sent men into fields in Flanders in an area where shelling had destroyed the dikes. The arrival of the rainy season turned the fields into bogs of mud several feet deep. Every shell hole became a pool of water; some craters were small lakes, deep enough to drown a man. It was a literally impassable barrier, bounded on both sides—a few hundred yards apart—by barbed-wire barricades covered by machine guns. And day after day, month after month, Haig, advised by a general staff that almost never visited conditions at the front from their headquarters in the rear, continued to send men through this mud into the wire and the machine guns, dying ten thousand at a time in a morning.
Airmen flew over that battlefield in various roles: reconnaissance, artillery spotting, sometimes dropping grenades. Almost inevitably, as they looked down at troops dying in the mud below them or huddled against artillery in fetid trench-lines that scarcely moved from one month to the next, the spectacle impelled them to think: there has to be a better way of fighting war than this.
For such airmen, and the designers and producers of large aircraft, the answer was plain: it was the airplane itself, planes of longer range and heavier bombload than were available before the Great War ended. Such aircraft would offer the possibility of moving over that barbed wire and even beyond the stalemated battle lines to attack the vulnerable civilian economy that supported the troops. This was the vision of so-called strategic bombing—overflying or bypassing battlefronts with long-range bombers to attack targets far in the rear of the engaged ground forces.
One of the earliest champions of this concept was an Italian general named Giulio Douhet, who was later briefly Mussolini’s first commissioner for air and a long-term associate of a manufacturer of bombing aircraft, Giovanni Caproni. Douhet laid down a number of principles that were called, quite appropriately, “doctrine,” since they came to be held among a body of military airmen with the tenacity and fervor of a religious faith. They were beliefs that were a requirement and badge of membership in what might well be described as a cult of airpower.
One of those principles was that the characteristics of the bomber gave an overwhelming advantage to the side that struck first in massive force. There were controversies as to what should be struck first, but Douhet’s emphasis was on bombing cities for what he called the “morale effect”—paralyzing the other side’s will, not simply its capability to carry on the war.
Douhet’s recommendations clearly breached the principles of just-war doctrine embodied in international law—specifically, the unconditional proscription against any deliberate killing of noncombatants. Nevertheless, among airmen like Douhet in Italy, Lord Trenchard in Britain, and General Billy Mitchell, the chief of American air operations in France, the idea of the “strategic” use of airpower pointed to a better way of waging war.
In the Continental powers, whose armed forces were dominated by the army, this was not the answer to avoiding the battlefield deadlock that ground war seemed to have become. Nazi Germany in its blitzkrieg attack on France showed the effective use of tanks and close support aircraft together as combined arms of a ground commander. But the theory that offered itself to some airmen was that airpower, if properly used, might win the war by itself, or at least prove a decisive element.
What Douhet envisioned (with the encouragement of Caproni, who sought to sell large aircraft to all the parties, including the United States) was a bomber that could carry a significant bombload—a ton or more of explosives—deep into the enemy territory and drop it on their capital and other major cities. The main notion of Douhet and others was that with a relatively small number of bombs measured in hundreds to thousands of tons, you could cause such panic as to totally disorganize the enemy’s centers, and cause enormous political pressure on the rulers to end a war. A somewhat larger tonnage, if necessary, would actually annihilate those cities.
The airmen who proposed such a strategy—regarded by nearly everyone else as unconscionable barbarism—had a compelling desire to have an independent air force, to get out from under the operational control of the army. Airmen felt infantry and artillery staffs didn’t understand the potentiality of airpower. They didn’t understand the machines, didn’t have the vision to see what could be done with long-range heavy bombers. Furthermore, the kind of bombers that these men wanted to fly and thought would be effective were extremely expensive. This meant that only quite rich nations could afford such a bombing force, and even in those nations, it would be competing for resources against other military services, with their tanks, artillery, and battleships. So from early on, the airmen had an obsession that they must have a separate air force, which would have its own bureaucratic base to fight for its proper share of the budget.
Secondly, to justify a separate service, they wanted higher levels of command and budget authority to share their own belief in the decisive, war-winning potential of their strategic mission independent from the conduct of battlefield combat. This gave them a strong incentive to believe and fervently propagate as an article of faith a doctrine that had not ever been tested and which had little evidence to support it: the belief that enough planes capable of carrying a heavy load of bombs over a long distance could effectively and quickly win a war. Douhet’s theories appealed to airmen in every country in the world, but in the end, only the political leadership in Britain and America endorsed the idea of building up a force for this purpose.
The word “strategic” as used here was introduced to refer to an independent role for the air force beyond what were described as battlefield targets. The latter role was called tactical bombing, and it was used in close association with the army. This new use of the word “strategic” is reflected in our reference to strategic nuclear weapons—for long-range delivery, generally heavier warheads—versus tactical or “battlefield” nuclear weapons of shorter range and relatively lower yields. Both usages come out of this airpower doctrine
: the strategy of aiming at the economy or the civil society of the enemy.
This strategy was conceived as being effective militarily in two distinct ways. Very early on, both Douhet and Trenchard, the “father of the Royal Air Force,” emphasized the idea of breaking civilian morale and will to support the war, though Trenchard also urged destroying the productive capability of the enemy. In the U.S. Air Force, before and during World War II, a different form of the doctrine took hold, which was that you would aim quite precisely at industrial targets that were civilian but which had a direct bearing on war-fighting capability—for example, aircraft factories.
The Americans believed that their Norden bombsight permitted them to bomb with extreme accuracy—what they called “pickle-barrel bombing,” from the conceit that you could land a bomb in a pickle barrel. In fact, they would practice in their training to hit not just a particular industrial complex but a particular corner of a particular building. They believed they could land these bombs on the average with what we would now call a circular error probability (CEP)—a miss distance—of less than a hundred yards. That meant they expected that half the bombs aimed at a particular point would land within a hundred yards of that point, half outside that circle. That was actually fairly far away for the relatively low-yield bombs of those days, dropped from planes at lower altitudes. A five-hundred-pound bomb at a distance of a hundred yards would not necessarily do any damage to what you were aiming at. But a CEP of a hundred yards meant that if enough bombs were dropped, a fair number of them would get closer than that.
They also drew on another premise of Douhet’s doctrine, which was that there was really no defense against bombers sent in sufficient numbers. As the British prime minister Stanley Baldwin said in 1932, “The bomber will always get through.” The Americans thought that the precision of the Norden bombsight would permit them to bomb from extremely high altitudes, above the effective levels of enemy defenses. In any case, they believed, only a small number of bombers had to get through to have a decisive effect on industry or civilian morale.
Of course civilians would be killed, even if they weren’t the designated targets. Some bombs would miss the targeted factories. And civilians who worked in those factories would die (though in industrial war, airpower advocates would deny them noncombatant status). But any attack aimed directly at civilian targets, whether to impede the economy or for the sake of undermining morale, would blatantly violate earlier principles of warfare.
However, the moral justification of any of this was clear in the minds of these strategists: Better to kill a few civilians and get the war over with quickly than to observe scrupulously and meticulously a distinction between civilians and military and thereby doom both countries to a repetition of World War I. In other words, it was their ethical conviction that this was the most humane, indeed the only moral way to carry on a modern war. Fewer people would be killed overall, on both sides, from this approach.
This justification was based on the assumption that the bombing would be effective quickly with relatively small numbers of bombs. And that belief depended on several other beliefs that British and American planners held:
that British and American bombers could sustain the loss rates from defenses flying in daylight;
that they could bomb accurately enough in daytime to destroy enemy bases and factories;
that they could find towns and industrial targets accurately at night, if necessary, and still destroy factories;
that, for the Americans, those B-17s flying in mass formations above antiaircraft fire had enough armament (they were called “Flying Fortresses”) to ward off enemy fighters and keep losses low in daytime, without needing long-range interceptors to defend them;
that, while dodging defenses in poor weather over the European continent, American bombardiers could achieve the pickle-barrel accuracy they demonstrated in straight runs over the Arizona desert without cloud cover;
that with attainable accuracy, American bombers could destroy critical bottlenecks and vulnerabilities in German industrial networks that would cripple war production;
that through the use of high explosives and incendiaries, British bombers flying at night could “de-house” a huge fraction of the German population, destroying German will to fight; and
that the morale of the German population (and later, the Japanese) was far more fragile under bombing than that of the Chinese, Spanish, or British had proved to be.
Each of these assumptions, every one of them—all articles of faith among strategic-bombing enthusiasts—was decisively disproven by experience in the first years of World War II. But the bombing continued, and greatly increased.
* * *
For the first couple of years of the war (the Americans didn’t come into the European theater until 1943), the British were bombing as the major part of their war effort. In fact, after their troops were forced off the continent at Dunkirk in 1940, it was the only offensive effort they could take. And making that effort, effective or not, was prompted by strong political motivations. They had to counter the general conviction in the world that Hitler was bound to win the war, especially after his early successes in Russia in 1941. In 1940–41 it was particularly important to the British to show their potential American allies that they were fully in the fight, that they were an ally worth supporting; likewise, after mid-1941, to show the Soviets that the British were taking and inflicting losses in fighting Germans, even if not comparable to those on the eastern front. Bomber Command offered itself as the only force that could deliver either message. After the United States was attacked at the end of 1941, it was still important to show that aid to Britain was as important to America as its own competing rearmament.
Lord Trenchard, who had managed to achieve independent status for the British air service in World War I (not achieved by USAAF until it became USAF in 1947), agreed with Douhet that strategic bombing should aim not only at enemy productive installations but at the morale of the civilian population. (The word he used for morale, incidentally, was “moral effect,” as in, “the moral effect is to physical effect as twenty to one.” This makes a peculiar impression on an American reader, since the “moral” objective it refers to involves the deliberate killing of civilians.) So the agreement that Britain made on September 2, 1939, the day after Roosevelt’s appeal, that they would not bomb civilian populations, was potentially quite a restriction on what Bomber Command was really preparing itself to do in terms of producing heavy bombers, such as the four-engine Lancaster that came into operation in early 1942.
Hitler had not bought into this doctrine of strategic bombing, nor had he ever prepared for it. Indeed, he had no four-engine bombers: the heavy bombers of the type that Britain and America had been designing since the 1930s. In Germany, France, Russia, and Italy, the predominant army officers and the political leadership looked at these doctrines and said, “Nonsense, civilians won’t collapse that easily. It’s too expensive; you won’t get much effect. The way to use airplanes is in close support of troops and tanks.”
From the point of view of the British and American air forces, this thinking was simply service bias, hidebound and anachronistic. But in retrospect it was right. In terms of cost and effectiveness, the air force tenets were simply wrong. In any case, only Britain and America had really prepared themselves in the way of designing heavy bombers for long-range heavy bombardment. And this was not a response to Hitler’s aggressions; it started well before Hitler came to power.
Hitler, for his part, really didn’t want to invite reciprocal attacks early on in the war, if ever. Nevertheless, in the first month of the war, his planes—short-range and medium-range bombers—attacked the heart of Warsaw, which his troops had surrounded. It was technically true that the legal prohibition over the last two hundred years of deliberately harming civilians had a practical exception, which was that cities under siege that did not surrender—cities that defended themselves—could be bombarded by artillery as a
n example to others and to make them surrender. Hitler apparently conceived of this air attack as part of a siege operation, though this time carried on from the air rather than by artillery. Thus, the Nazis defended it, perhaps sincerely, as not being in contradiction to their assurance to FDR at the start of the month. Nevertheless, for intimidating political effect to show his ruthlessness, the Germans publicized films of dive-bomber attacks on the center of Warsaw and on fleeing refugees on roads. (Hitler—or rather the German people—later paid heavily for this propaganda success.)
However, Hitler did not want to start “strategic” bombardment of cities outside the battle area. He understood the British were preparing for it. He understood that his cities were vulnerable, and he didn’t want German civilian morale and support to be tested by that kind of bombardment. The next year he actually signed an order in the battle for France—and later, prior to the Blitz, in the preparations for attacking Britain—that no attacks on cities should be made unless with his express permission.
Indeed for the first eight months of the war, both sides felt it was worthwhile to avoid starting a process of reprisals on cities. Even after the attack on Warsaw, and throughout the spring of 1940, the British high command was not ready to “take the gloves off.” That was the phrase the British used for the decision allowing Bomber Command to use its bombers the way Trenchard wanted—and the way his friend Winston Churchill (his superior as secretary of state for air and war in 1919, when Trenchard had been chief of the air staff) wanted.
The Doomsday Machine Page 29
