The Doomsday Machine

by Daniel Ellsberg

  As this happened, super-heated air would rise rapidly in a strong updraft, thus creating a low-pressure area, sucking in winds from the surrounding area. In effect, the fire would create its own draft, changing wind patterns. And the new oxygen coming in would feed this fire like bellows on a hearth, turning the entire city into a furnace. That was the theory. After many attempts, success finally came in Hamburg on the night of July 27, 1943, in Operation Gomorrah. It was proven that with this effect, temperatures could rise up to 1500 degrees Fahrenheit. Everyone died in the area within the circle of fire, fed by winds coming from all directions, at up to 150 miles per hour.

  Those in shelters died from asphyxiation, if not from heat. The calcium carbonate in cement decomposes and the silicate sand in concrete can melt at this temperature, causing buildings to collapse. Asphalt melted and firefighters were trapped; their equipment bogged down on the street, preventing them from moving. People fleeing the flames were stuck in the asphalt and became flaming torches. The radiant heat itself without the visible flame was so intense that it crossed fire-breaks and streets and spread the fire within this zone of death. About forty-four thousand civilians died in Hamburg.

  A German doctor who examined shelters after the attack reported:

  Bodies were frequently found156 lying in a thick, greasy black mass, which was without a doubt melted fat tissue.… All were shrunken so that clothes appeared to be too large. These bodies were Bombenbrandschrumpfleichen (“incendiary-bomb-shrunken bodies”).… Many basements contained only bits of ashes and in these cases the number of casualties could only be estimated.

  Just how deliberate these tactics were has been laid out by Freeman Dyson:

  I arrived at the headquarters of the Royal Air Force bomber command just in time for the big raids against Hamburg. On the night of July 24 [1943] we killed forty thousand people and lost only twelve bombers, by far the best we had ever done. For the first time in history we created a fire storm, which killed people even inside shelters. The casualties were about ten times as numerous as in a normal attack of the same size without a fire storm.

  Nobody understands to this day157 why or how fire storms begin. In every big raid we tried to raise a fire storm, but we succeeded only twice, once in Hamburg and once two years later in Dresden. Probably the thing happens only when the bombing releases a preexisting instability in the local meteorology.

  Elsewhere he says:

  The Dresden fire storm was the worst,158 but from our point of view it was only a fluke. We attacked Berlin sixteen times with the kind of force that attacked Dresden once. We were trying every time to raise a fire storm. There was nothing special about Dresden except that for once everything worked as we intended. It was like a hole-in-one in a game of golf. Unfortunately Dresden had little military significance and anyway the slaughter came too late to have any serious effect on the war.

  The RAF attacked Dresden with magnesium bombs the night of Ash Wednesday, February 13, 1945. U.S. bombers attacked with explosives and incendiaries in daylight the next morning, Valentine’s Day, and the day after, but used blind bombing through smoke and thick clouds.

  Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five is a surrealistic account of the Dresden attack,159 which he experienced as a prisoner of war in a slaughterhouse where the prisoners were kept at night. He came up in the morning to empty out shelters filled with dead people shrunk to the size of large gingerbread cookies—Bombenbrandschrumpfleichen—their bodies dehydrated from the heat of the firestorm, which again reached 1500 degrees Fahrenheit.

  Dresden, the seventh-largest city in Germany, had not previously been hit. It was a historic university town, and at that particular time it was filled with refugees who were fleeing the Russian armies coming into Germany. As a result, an unknown number of people were in Dresden, filling its public buildings and houses. It’s still not known accurately how many were killed in the raid. For a long time estimates ran as high as one hundred thousand or even half a million people. When I visited a diorama of the fire in Dresden in 2016, I was told that researchers now believed the early estimate by the police was correct, about 25,000. For propaganda, Goebbels had added a zero to that estimate, and the world’s shock was considerably affected by the estimate of 250,000. Actually, the body count was higher in a number of other German cities, starting with 40,000 to 50,000 in the firestorm in Hamburg.

  The much greater controversy that arose around the Dresden attack at the time (which has persisted) was partly due to the inflated impression of an unprecedented massacre, partly to the feeling that the war in Europe was now nearly over and this attack was unnecessary, but particularly to an Associated Press report on February 18, 1945, that paraphrased an RAF briefing officer to the effect that “Allied Air Chiefs” had made “the long-awaited decision to adopt deliberate160 terror bombing of German population centers as a ruthless expedient to hasten Hitler’s doom.”

  The phrase “terror bombing” in a supposedly official release (the briefing officer had not actually used those words, though confirming that “morale”—the official euphemism—had been among the targets) struck terror in the British and American high commands, especially their public affairs officers. They had carefully avoided use of that term to their home audiences, since it was the description long used by Nazi propaganda (in this case, apt) and by the few religious and parliamentary critics of “area bombing.” They denied any such intention as terrorizing, or that there had been any change in their tactics or targeting. (This latter denial of any change, of course, was accurate. On February 3, 1945, General Spaatz,161 Commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe, had sent 900 bombers on a blind radar-guided attack on Berlin, estimating that 25,000 civilians had died, though they failed to generate a firestorm.)

  On February 21, the day before Operation Clarion sent thousands of U.S. planes along with the RAF to bomb and strafe targets of opportunity across Germany, Austria, and Italy, including small cities like Heidelberg, Gottingen, and Baden-Baden, Spaatz told his generals: “Special care should be taken against giving any impression that this operation is aimed, repeat aimed, at civilian populations or intended to terrorize them.” The next day, Secretary of War Stimson told reporters, “Our policy never has been to inflict terror162 bombing on civilian populations.”

  The uproar provoked Prime Minister Churchill—who had endorsed the idea of “exterminating” attacks five years earlier and had backed Bomber Command tactics consistently ever since—to write a secret memorandum to his military staff on March 28, 1945, breaking ranks with Bomber Harris:

  It seems to me163 that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed.… The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing.… I feel the need for more precise concentration upon military objectives, such as oil and communications behind the immediate battle zone, rather than on mere acts of terror and wanton destruction, however impressive.

  Neither the Air Staff nor Harris took this defection by Churchill lying down. The next day, March 29, Harris responded to the Air Ministry:

  I … assume that the view under consideration164 is something like this: no doubt in the past we were justified in attacking German cities. But to do so was always repugnant and now that the Germans are beaten anyway we can properly abstain from proceeding with these attacks. This is a doctrine to which I could never subscribe. Attacks on cities like any other act of war are intolerable unless they are strategically justified. But they are strategically justified in so far as they tend to shorten the war and preserve the lives of Allied soldiers. To my mind we have absolutely no right to give them up unless it is certain that they will not have this effect. I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier.

  In face of such views and pressure from his chiefs of staff, Churchill withdrew his internal memo to the Air Staf
f and replaced it four days later with one reworded to omit any talk of “terror” or “wanton destruction.”

  * * *

  At the Casablanca Conference in 1943, attended by FDR and Winston Churchill, it had been agreed that the British would pursue night bombing while the Americans would focus on daylight precision bombing in a joint coordinated operation. Churchill tried hard at Casablanca to get the Americans to participate in the RAF night-bombing “area” attacks, but the Joint Chiefs of Staff refused. At the time, many American air officers regarded what their allies the British were doing as mass murder.

  Moreover, they continued to believe that with their Norden bombsight, their high-flying bombers were capable in daylight of doing what the British had tried and failed to do early in the war: hit and cripple specific, key German industrial targets. The British were skeptical of this, and after a long while, when the Americans eventually did their own photoreconnaissance, they discovered that the British had been right. The super-secret Norden bombsight (whose development had cost half as much as the Manhattan Project) required visual sighting of the target, impossible through clouds. In actual combat conditions, dodging flak and fighters, and with frequent cloud cover—none of which they had encountered in their bombing practice in Arizona—American bombardiers weren’t hitting165 what they were aiming at in their high-altitude “precision” bombing. Their actual bomb patterns on the ground and their effect on the civilian population of cities weren’t all that different from the British area bombing.

  Furthermore, the attempt to conduct raids in daylight, deep into Germany without a fighter plane escort, was causing enormous losses in the air. At Schweinfurt and Regensburg on August 17, 1943, 60 American bombers were lost out of 346 and more than 60 others so badly damaged they never flew again. They were losing unsustainable numbers of planes. A second raid to the ball-bearing works at Schweinfurt in October lost another 60 planes, 22 percent of the mission, after which such raids were suspended for four months.

  So the American air force resorted to night bombing too. And in due course they discovered what the British had already learned three or four years earlier: they couldn’t hit anything at night except large areas. By the spring of 1945, the American air force had not completely turned to area bombing, as the RAF had since 1942. But there was more and more “blind bombing” through clouds in bad weather, which scarcely pretended to be targeted on specific factories or even narrow sectors of cities.

  The technique of using American or British ingenuity to annihilate urban populations by fire had emerged from turning some specialized peacetime knowledge on its head. Fire insurance executives, who were experts in averting the spread of fires (to keep rates down), proved inventive in advising how to reverse that process. American economists like Walt Rostow and Carl Kaysen (later senior colleagues of mine in the government) came to London air headquarters as experts in how an economy worked, how it hung together and what its nodes of interdependence or bottlenecks were, and thus how it could be dismantled by bombing. This gradually merged with the unacknowledged quest of Bomber Command: how to destroy a society. Operations analysts turned to questions of what the mix should be of explosives and different sorts of incendiaries for the most efficient, cost-effective ways to burn German workers and their families alive.

  City burning, in other words, was becoming something of a science. The M-50 thermite incendiary used in Europe had excessive penetration. In Japan, it would often pass entirely through a structure and ignite in the earth beneath it. The most effective weapon for Japan was the M-69, a small incendiary bomb, many of which were dropped in a single casing. The casing was designed to release thirty-eight incendiary bombs made to fall in a random pattern. Delayed-action high-explosive bombs would also be included, exploding minutes to hours after landing, to deter and obstruct firefighters. People became conditioned to stay away from these little thermite or napalm bombs when they first landed and could still be smothered fairly easily with sand.

  * * *

  Enter Curtis E. LeMay into history. About the same time that Dresden was being hit by the Americans and British, Air Force Chief of Staff Hap Arnold and Vice Chief Lauris Norstad were reconsidering the bombing strategy in Japan. They suspected firebombing, as in Dresden, was the way to go, and they believed that LeMay was their man.

  This was not a new idea in the USAAF for Japan. Just the opposite. The effects of the Great Kanto earthquake and resulting fires in Tokyo and Yokohama in 1923 had attracted the attention of American airpower theorists as to what bombing could do in Japan. Just a year later, in 1924, having examined these effects, General Billy Mitchell reported that an American aerial offensive would be “decisive” because Japan’s cities were “congested” and built from “paper and wood or other inflammable structures.” In the 1930s, Mitchell said that “these towns … form the greatest aerial targets the world has ever seen.… Incendiary projectiles would burn the cities166 to the ground in short order.”

  Studies at the Tactical Air Warfare School in the thirties of possible air campaigns against Japan were different from prospective strategies of “precision bombing” in Europe. Japan was not then an enemy nation. But those studies were reflected when, on November 15, 1941—three weeks before Pearl Harbor—General George Marshall held an “off the record” briefing for seven senior journalists in Washington, including Robert Sherrod and Ernest K. Lindley. Their record of the briefing paraphrased Marshall as promising that if war with the Japanese did come, “we’ll fight mercilessly. Flying Fortresses [B-17s] will be dispatched immediately to set the paper cities of Japan on fire. There won’t be any hesitation about bombing civilians167—it will be all-out.”

  Historian John Dower recounts, “On November 19th, four days later, Marshall instructed his staff, again in graphic language, to investigate plans for ‘general incendiary attacks to burn up the wood and paper structures of the densely populated Japanese cities.’ ”

  Despite this long-term vision of producing the man-made equivalent of the 1923 earthquake and firestorm in Japan, by the time the XXI Bomber Command—based on the Marianas in October 1944—was at last in range of the paper-and-wood housing in Japan, it still pursued “precision attacks” against Japanese industrial targets, particularly the aircraft industry. Its commander, Brigadier General Haywood S. Hansell, was a major architect of the Air Force doctrine of daytime high-altitude precision bombing. Hansell opposed firebombing as morally repugnant and militarily unnecessary. But his replacement on the Air Staff in Washington, Major General Norstad, came to prefer massive destruction of Japanese cities by firebombing to precision bombing. On January 6, 1945, Norstad visited Hansell’s headquarters in Guam and abruptly relieved him of command, replacing him with LeMay.

  General LeMay was a very brave man physically. He was an outstanding commander who enforced strict discipline and earned great loyalty. Among other things, he initiated tactics of forcing the people flying under his European command to fly in tight formation with no evasive action in the face of flak. Anyone who dropped out and returned to base would be court-martialed. He himself would fly the lead plane (as he did in the costly Regensburg raid, when he lost 24 B-17s out of 146). Everybody following was to drop their bombs in a pattern when he dropped his. The idea was to fly straight through the flak without any evasive action and thereby do the job, destroy the target, without having to return and run the risks again. He became known, he said, as “Iron Pants” (elsewhere, “Iron Ass”) for his own willingness and ability to fly a straight course through heavy antiaircraft fire. Fewer repeat missions did become necessary, overall losses went down, and “no evasive action” became the rule168 in the whole Eighth Air Force.

  Soon after taking over XXI Bomber Command, LeMay discovered for himself, as his bosses had suspected earlier, that Hansell’s precision bombing of steelworks and bridges with B-29s, which LeMay continued for some weeks, was not working. He initiated trial runs with incendiaries, which his superiors had been calling for
, and got impressive fires started. Without being directly ordered to do so, he decided to go all out to burn Tokyo.

  As he prepared for a fire raid over Tokyo scheduled for the night of March 9–10, 1945, he wanted very much to fly the lead plane, but reluctantly he had to send his subordinate General Thomas Power in his place. LeMay couldn’t subject himself to possible capture because he knew, almost alone in his theater, of an upcoming operation with the military code name Firecracker—the dropping of atomic bombs, whatever they were. (In early July, four cities were taken off the list of cities scheduled for bombing, so as to provide undamaged targets that would allow a full demonstration of the lethality of the atom bombs.)

  His memoir, Mission with LeMay,169 was written with the novelist MacKinlay Kantor, apparently on the basis of endless tapes. The book runs to six hundred pages, all in the first person in LeMay’s voice in the form of a stream of consciousness. Nothing better illustrates how far we had come by 1945 from FDR’s denunciation of city-bombing as cruel, inhumane, barbaric, and savage, just six years earlier.

  LeMay speaks at some length on the tactical considerations that went into what made his reputation for “courage”—the most daring gamble by an American air commander during the war. He had concluded that the Japanese did not have as much antiaircraft capability at low altitude as the Germans had, so that by going in low, he could achieve a number of benefits and perhaps not lose a lot of planes. If he were wrong—if they turned out to have antiaircraft capabilities that had not yet been spotted—he was afraid he could lose a lot of planes and it would go down in history as LeMay’s great blunder.