The RAF Bombing Campaign in Germany: Ethical and Strategic Considerations
Karl F. Rahder
Master's Thesis, Committee on
International Relations, University of Chicago
November, 1988
2
Conscience is but a word that
cowards use, Devis'd at first to keep the
strong in awe.
our strong arms be our
conscience, swords our law.
3
Contents
Part I: The
Utilitarian Nature of
Bomber Command's Morale Campaign (p 5)
Part II: Misgivings, Public
and Private (p 31)
Part III: The Anglo-American
Offensive (p 46)
Conclusions (p 69) 
4
In the aftermath of the
Allied strategic bombing campaign against Germany, some 300,000 to 600,000
German civilians - mostly working-class people residing in the Reich's large,
urban centers - had been killed by Allied air forces. Some five to seven and one-half million
non-combatants had lost their homes in an assault on sometimes undefended
German cities which began on a small scale but
gained intensity and fury until, in the Winter of 1945, devastating
raids took place in the cities of Berlin and Dresden, killing more than sixty
thousand residents and refugees fleeing the Red Army in the east. In Germany's largest cities, some 40% of the dwellings were
destroyed or heavily damaged. In this four and a half year program of attacking
the morale of Germany's people, Britain's RAF had contributed by far the largest share and
paid a heavy price: some 55,000 aircrew were killed over Germany or German-occupied territory.1
This paper will examine the
evolution of the British morale bombing campaign
through an ethical perspective, including reference to the just war tradition. Ethical
arguments have been posited both for and against Bomber Command's decision to
bomb noncombatants, and no policy which results in even unintended collateral deaths
can be made without reference to the long just war tradition which has in part come to
define the warring state and its place in the moral world. Can the morale campaign be
ethically justified? If the RAF and the Air
Staff, which had nominal control over Bomber Command, developed a relationship between mass bombing of civilians and the
surrender of the German war machine and monitored the validity of this relationship, then
there may have been a legitimate rationale for breaking the long-standing ethical
injunctions against killing innocents. How did the British
formulate the relationship between mass bombing of urban workers, shopkeepers and other noncombatants, and surrender of the German state?
This is of vital importance, for the bombing of "innocents" has long
been considered a most 1United States Strategic
Bombing Survey (hereafter USSBS) Summary Report (European War), p 15; Lee Kennett, A History of Strategic Bombing (New York: 1982), p 122; Max Hastings,
Bomber Command: The Myths and Reality of the Strategic Bomber Offensive 1939-1945 (London: Michael
Joseph 1980), pp 1, 352
5
unmilitary endeavor, and the
way in which Bomber Command articulated its morale bombing policy will reveal
the extent to which strategic, doctrinal and ethical issues were explored
before the campaign commenced and during its execution. We will examine the
analyses which drove - or sometimes challenged - morale bombing in the
RAF.
If the bombing of cities such as Hamburg represented the "murderous lust of a sadistic
enemy...transcending all human experience" to some German residents, we
will want to understand how such a deliberate campaign was justified and
sought.
Indeed, were the ethical
issues actually addressed inside HM Government or was the utilitarian argument
window dressing for a policy without an ethical or even a rational strategic
basis? In order to answer this
question, we will want to determine the extent of misgivings over the morale
campaign within the military and in HM Government as well as the strategic and
ethical underpinnings of the campaign.
The article will explore how the few opponents of area bombing framed
their arguments and compare those arguments with the Bomber Command's
justification of its method and strategy.
Finally, we will examine
briefly the nature of American
differences with their British partners at Bomber Command as well as whether
ethical considerations played a role, internally or in the debate over bombing
strategy.
Chapter I: The Utilitarian Nature of Bomber
Command's Morale Campaign
Through the just war concept
or tradition, we have a foundation for our sense of
moral right in war and hence of the nature of moral outrage committed by states
in war,
especially "just war." For it
is not enough (and patently wrong) to argue that either all
war is morally proscribed or that states by definition are incapable of moral
choice in
war. Historical example very quickly
renders both notions untenable. The
simple and
6
evident fact that we can
still be shocked by actions of states at war implies that there is a deeply
rooted (if for most people unarticulated) notion of what states may do in war
as well as implicit permission that sovereign states may engage in war at all.
Just war criteria are usually
divided into two broad and often complementary categories: the criteria under
which states may engage in war and also the limitations states must abide by
when engaged in a just war (that is, after the first set of criteria has been
met). The former, when taken together,
are called the jus ad bellum and the latter limitations jus in bello. The jus ad
bellum consists of several ideas, most of which need not concern us in this
article.2 In the modern world, the just cause (defense of one's borders) has
become the paramount jus ad bellum criterion.3
The jus in bello criteria are two: that states must use means
approximating those
used against them (proportionality) and that non-combatant immunity shall be
maintained (discrimination). Ironically, while the
means of warfare have become more destructive and indiscriminate, the jus in bello criteria have lost none of their relevance
in modern thought.4 The RAF throughout the war maintained a somewhat utilitarian
argument 5 in defense of the violation of noncombatant immunity while denying in public that noncombatants were being killed indiscriminately. Privately, Bomber Command and its supporters inside the Government tended to admit in varying degrees to
targeting noncombatants. The jus in bello criterion of discrimination is the key to the ethical
examination of Bomber Command's strategy.
While British intentions vis a vis Germany before the war are outside the scope of this paper, we will assume (with the
weight of historical evidence on our side) that Britain was engaged in a just war. For Britain, the 2See Johnson, Can Modern War
Be Just, pp 18-29. Johnson adds a
seventh criterion in his unpublished essay, viz, that there be a reasonable
hope of success.
3 Can Modern War Be Just?, p
21
4 Johnson points out in his
essay that the jus in bello "have...risen in importance relative to the jus
ad bellum over time." Hardin adds
that "in contemporary concern, the doctrine of just war is almost
exclusively a matter of jus in bello after an unjust attack." See Hardin, p 185
5 On utilitarianism and the
action-based objections to consequentialist means, see Hardin and Ramsey, passim
7
jus ad bellum has been
satisfied. A purely just war argument
in favor of Bomber
Command’s methods cannot succeed, for we are left with the ethical problem of a
state
which has otherwise
satisfied the just
cause killing indiscriminately hundreds
of
thousands of civilians, most of whom had nothing to do with the munitions
factories
which the Government repeatedly claimed to be aiming for. The analysis and history are complex, for Bomber Command and the Air Staff posed several arguments, one for
public consumption (see Section II) and several internally. The latter were a jumbled
assortment of wishful thinking in the guise of strategic analysis and a
xenophobic set of untestable assumptions. In simple
terms, Bomber Command's argument, as well as that of many of its critics, was utilitarian: 'Our justification for the bombing of
residential areas is that this regrettable action will save Allied lives and shorten the
war.'
This argument (which justified nominally unjust means in the pursuit of a good end)
may be challenged on its own terms, as General Carl Spaatz did, or it may run against
objections along the lines that breaking the jus in bello criterion of noncombatant immunity is immoral in its own right and cannot be justified by any good end.
To restate the problem, we
will use a just war frarm-work to examine the ethics of British strategic
bombing campaign. The just war tradition
is always with us, forcing us to look at issues such as large-scale bombardment
of civilians not simply from a strategic perspective, but an ethical one as
well. I would argue that the following
hard-headed questions guide any command decision-making body when the question
of killing large numbers of civilians in wartime is posed:
1) Has the nation in
questioned examined the moral issue of killing civilians before embarking on a
campaign to do so?
2) Is it a matter of last
resort?
3) Has the state articulated a relationship
between mass bombing and surrender of its adversary?
4) Is the validity of this relationship being
monitored? (If killing non-combatants
is working - that is, compelling the adversary to surrender -
then the state would
nominally be permitted to
continue. If the strategy is not
working, then the state 8
would be compelled to seek
victory or survival without resort to breaking this injunction.)
Let us now turn to Britain’s situation between the wars...
Bomber Command's mission
evolved from a muddled pre-war set of doctrines
which were hastily formulated and often mutually exclusive. The RAF could not seem to make up its mind before the war what the role of Bomber Command was. Up until 1933, the RAF was the stepchild of British forces.
With rearmament beginning in 1933, based in part on an exaggerated picture of German strategic forces, Britain still had only a vague deterrence role for Bomber Command with no concomitant strategy.
By 1937, the RAF's bomber force was rated so weak that its bases could probably not draw
German bombers away from raiding British cities.
In June of 1938, more out of fear of the Luftwaffe than any ethical constraints, the PM told parliament that in the
event of war, the RAF would bomb only those German targets located away from cities. In the final days before war, Ludlow Hewitt (Bomber Command C-in-C) warned the Air Staff
that in the event of all-out attacks on Germany, Bomber Command would be wiped out in less than eight weeks.6
Britain sought in the early months of the war to maintain a
strictly precision-
oriented bombing policy.
This was
largely due to
fears based on
the pre-war
exaggerations of German strategic air power and what the Luftwaffe could do to London.
The "knockout blow"
literature of the
interwar period reflected
the widespread
expectation in Europe that aerial warfare would be directed against cities in
which the
residents would be bombed and even gassed.
Many of the apocalyptic pictures of a
knockout blow on London (launched from Germany or France) seem remarkably current, finding a place in modern thought on the effects of nuclear war. Among the principal contributors to the knockout blow concept were Lord Trenchard, Italian General
Guilio Douhet, James Spaight and Basil Liddell Hart.
Douhet died in 1930, and Lidell Hart
6See Messenger, p 25; SAO IV,
p 89; Quester, pp 82-89; Hastings, p 42 
9
would eventually turn away
from the concept of strategic bombardment of cities to articulate a tactical
role for air power in concert with ground forces. Trenchard would continue to exert a strong
philosophical influence advocating the effectiveness of morale bombing in the
RAF.7
In May of 1940 the
"phoney war" had ended with the German assaults on the Low
Countries and France. The only
significant "strategic" aerial bombardment so far was
carried out by the Luftwaffe on targets in countries which could not strike
back, such as Warsaw. Hitler
claimed that the situation in Warsaw (and later, Rotterdam) was purely tactical and the bombing had fallen within the parameters of the Hague Draft
Rules. This is plausible, since Hitler immediately acquiesced to Roosevelt's plea for all parties to pledge not to bomb cities indiscriminately.
Hitler further had given orders to his staff that France and Britain were not to be bombed. If Britain had given up on the
deterrent power of the RAF, it was still uppermost in Hitler's mind.8 The most
significant event in the early air war was the
bombing of Rotterdam, which seemed to confirm the widespread fears of the knockout blow. The figure of 30,000 people killed was generally accepted, 9 and it
seemed that the GAF had lost any inhibitions against killing civilians in large
scale terror attacks designed to intimidate, create panic and bring a
population to its knees.
Had Goering decided to resort
to the strategies of Trenchard and Douhet?
In fact,
the Rotterdam incident was an example of the breakdown in command
and control.
The commander on the ground, having encircled the city, called off the attack, but
not before a large contingent of aircraft went aloft.
Signal flares lighted by the German ground 7For a survey of the knockout
blow in interwar literature, see Kennett, chapter 3; Hastings, chapter 1;
Frankland, pp 16-40 and Uri
Bialer, Shadow of the Bomber: The Fear of Air Attack and British Politics,
1932-1939 (London, 1980)
8See George Quester,
Deterrence Before Hiroshima (New York: John Wiley, 1966), pp 106, 108 and passim
for Hitler's desire to retain a deterrence relationship with Britain.
9 Quester, p 110 and Kennett,
p 107-8, 112
10
forces to ward off the attack
went unheeded, and the city center was bombed with 980 civilians dying.10
Bomber Command's first
desultory experience with precision bombing was its attack on the German
seaplane base on the island of Sylt. Despite
claims by pilots of success, photo reconnaissance undertaken later indicated
that:
The operation does not
confirm that...the average crews of our bombers can identify targets at
night...nor does it prove that the average crew can bomb industrial targets at
night...11
Training of Bomber Command
crews was woeful during this period, and remained
inadequate during the first years of the war. (Harris would often decline to
bomb
precision targets on the
basis of his crews' inability to find them.)
In August of 1939,
40% of bomber crews could not find a target in a friendly city in daylight.12
Despite the poor accuracy of this first operation, HM Government still hoped to stick to
precision attacks. Its June memo to the Air
Ministry reflected the unarticulated prewar emphasis on precision:
the attack must be made...to
avoid undue loss of civilian life in the vicinity of the target13
These were the final days for
the precision target set, although the Air Ministry and
the Government would continue to claim to be hitting military and other precision
targets throughout the war (see Chapter 2).
Bomber Command crews still took pains to avoid hitting civilian targets such as hospitals in urban settings,14 but Churchill
looked to
10Quester, p 110
11Charles Messenger, 'Bomber'
Harris and the Strategic Bombing Offensive (NY, 1984), p 34-5 and SAO
12Messenger 29
13In Hastings 89
14Ibid, p 90
11
Britain's future strategy and found only "one way
through." On July 8, 1940, the Prime Minister wrote a memo to the Minister
of Aircraft production (Beaverbrook) advocating attacks upon the cities of
Germany as the only way to "overwhelm" the Nazis, whom he saw turning
"east" (read: the USSR) if British fighters were successful in
fending off German bombers in the months ahead. Churchill told Beaverbrook that he wanted
Bomber Command to deliver an:
absolutely devastating
exterminating attack by very heavy bombers upon the Nazi homeland. We must be able to overwhelm him by this
means, without which I do not see a way through.15
Here was the first
enunciation of a means/ends based rationale for the killing of
large numbers of civilians in enemy territory.
The memo indicated a deliberate policy of mass bombing, not a strategy which included collateral deaths which were not
directly intended. At this juncture, Bomber
Command still lacked the means by which this
mass bombing of Germany's heart could be carried out. A competent, four-engined bomber was still years away, and in the meantime Britain's only truly strategic military force would have to make do with two-engined bombers of limited range which Bomber Command would sometimes have to coax from other services. Importantly, the memo also implied no military involvement on the Continent, if at all possible. This was the major motivating influence in Churchill's strategic thinking prior to
Overlord. Only Bomber Command offered the possibility of at once making a major contribution
to Germany's defeat and avoiding another Somme
while doing so.
We will have occasion to
return to this aspect of Churchill's thinking later on.
On July 13, the Air Staff
issued a directive which specified oil and the aircraft
industry as the twin target sets. Sir Charles Portal, at this time C-in-C of
Bomber
Command and a Trenchard disciple, replied that the plan was too limited and
that such
15R.V. Jones, Most Secret War
(1978) p 183 in Messenger, p 39
12
precision targets would
likely not be hit. When bombs missed
their aiming points at oil plants which were far from urban areas, they would hit
nothing else of importance and do no damage, and the minimum amount of dislocation and disturbance will be caused by the operation as a whole.16
Widely dispersed attacks
would be more effective because of the collateral damage done to civil
populations in an area campaign:
It largely increases the
moral[e] effect of out operations by the alarm and disturbance created over the
wider area.17
Thus Portal began backing
into a morale strategy which would necessitate the killing of civilians as at
least a desirable side-effect. In July
1940, the German Air Force had begun attacks on coastal shipping (including
ports adjacent to major cities) in preparation for Operation Sea Lion. More than any other single event, the Battle
of Britain proved to be the catalyst for the eventual anti-morale bombing
campaign directed at the people of Germany.
Hitler's directive to the Luftwaffe was succinct: the aims of the
bombing campaign in Britain were to 1) destroy the RAF and the aircraft
industry, 2) destroy ports and food storage facilities and 3) attack
residential areas as reprisals for possible British raids against German
cities:
I reserve to myself the right
to decide on terror tactics as measures of reprisal.18
16Sir Charles Webster and
Noble Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany, 1939-1945
(hereafter SAO), Vol 1, p 150
17Hastings, p 101
18Quester p 114 fn 23
13
In mid August, the Luftwaffe
was doing grievous damage to Fighter Command
aerodromes as well as attacking the aircraft industry. Goering thought destruction of the RAF would "open decisive possibilities for victory without an
invasion"19 (much as the Allied morale bombing advocates would claim four years later). In late August, the Germans added industrial targets at night to their day attacks. Navigational errors caused ten or twelve German airplanes to bomb residential London accidentally on the
night of August 24. British reaction was swift,
with 81 aircraft making what was described as a precision attack on Berlin. Five more
Berlin raids were made in the next fortnight.
September 1940 was the most
significant month for Bomber Command's future, a
month in which the RAF slipped from its
oft-announced position of precision targets
only to a stance which would give its later actions doctrinal precedence. After
September 7, the GAF shifted its focus to London and away from Fighter Command aerodromes
in what were widely considered to be indiscriminate area attacks. Portal, on September 11, "proscribed" 20 German cities for revenge operations. "In view of the indiscriminate nature of the German attacks," wrote Portal, "every effort should be
made to bomb these."20
The Air Staff were
"dismayed" and "determined to resist" Portal's desire to
initiate
an area campaign which might bring havoc upon Britain's population centers.21 Further, both the Air Staff and the
Air Ministry still believed in the efficacy of precision targeting;
the early German bombing during the Battle of Britain was considered by the
Vice Chief of the Air Staff, Sir Richard Peirse, not to be deliberately terroristic, but
"sporadic and mainly harassing."22 On September 21, the Air Ministry issued a directive
to Bomber Command indicating the
sanction for bombing cities. This new target
set reflected the clash between those in the Ministry who favored precision attacks against a
variety of 19 For a useful chronological
discussion of the Battle of Britain, see Quester, pp113-22 20SAO I, p 153
21Hastings, p 102
22SAO I, p 152
14
military and industrial
targets and the Prime Minister and his allies, who favored punitive raids on Berlin. Oil was the main
priority, along with communications. The German aircraft industry and naval targets such as submarine pens and landing craft
were the secondary target set. In the final
paragraph, occasional morale attacks on Berlin were sanctioned which would cause "the greatest possible disturbance and
dislocation both to the industrial activities and to the civil population generally in the
area," although the directive noted that "there are no objectives in the Berlin area of
importance to our major plans."23
By October, Portal had moved
from C-in-C of Bomber Command to Chief of the
Air Staff. This represented the
confluence of views between the new Chief and Churchill,
who was increasingly pressing for morale attacks against Germany. Oil would remain the major target of Bomber Command from the autumn of 1940 until the following May,
although after October 30, the twin target set was clearly oil and morale. In poor weather, which was most of the time (especially in winter), Berlin and other cities on
Portal's "proscribed list" were to be attacked. Portal ordered the new Bomber
Command C-in C, Sir Richard Peirse, to attack the cities "with such regularity as you may
find practicable."
Bomber Command was further directed to raise fire-storms in the more important
German cities. Unlike analyses in the near
future which would link the psychological effects of the morale campaign to victory over the German state, the Air Staff were more
modest in their goals. The rationale for morale bombing
was simply "to affect the morale of the German people when they can no longer expect an early victory and are faced with the
near approach of winter and the certainty of a long war." This was straightforward enough:
Bomber Command would "demonstrate to the enemy the power and severity of
air
bombardment and the hardship and dislocation which will result from it."24
Britain had now committed itself (without
acknowledging this in public) to a morale campaign aimed
23Ibid, p 153; SAO IV, p 127
24SAO IV, pp 128-29
15
at the minds of the German
people. While the goals of this campaign
were still modest, this too would change.
Technological constraints
also played a role in Bomber Command's reluctance to
continue bombing precision targets.
Losses to German fighters in the Ruhr campaign and the ineffectual attacks against hardened U-Boat pens in France made the shift
to night and to area all the more palatable. But
in the directives from Portal and in the increasing pressure from Churchill, another - distinctly punitive - aspect of British
policy was surfacing. In the wake of the futile
Bomber Command attacks on military targets in France, Churchill added momentum towards large-scale morale
bombing by urging the Air Minister (Sinclair) to devote greater resources to a build-up of bomber
resources and a semi-area campaign in the Ruhr.
While the area campaign was
gaining in the Air Staff at this time, there was still no
overall rationale or strategy delineating what Britain hoped to achieve by bombing the
cities of Germany. The manner in
which this was attempted was unscientific, subjective,
and largely unchallenged - both on ethical and purely military grounds. The first internal attempt to rationalize morale bombing came from Sir Robert Vansittart, a
Foreign Office official who had access to a letter written by a "former German staff
officer" who strongly urged an "all-out attack on German morale."25 This was met
with great interest in the Air Staff, and the
following month the Chiefs of Staff examined the effects of bombing morale for
the first time. This brief and
inadequate "analysis" repeated the urgings of Lord Trenchard, who
advocated a widespread campaign aimed at German morale, which he considered
breakable, based on his personal observations in WWI. Thus the CoS declared in
its overview of Britain's strategic objectives that The evidence at our disposal
goes to show that the morale of the average German civilian will weaken quicker than that of a population such as our
own as
a consequence of
direct attack. The
Germans have been
25SAO I, p 169
16
undernourished and subjected
to a permanent strain equivalent to that of war conditions during almost the whole period of Hitler's regime and for this reason also will be liable to crack before a nation of greater stamina.26
This can be seen charitably
as a vaguely utilitarian argument: the "all out attack on German
morale" was justified by the good end achieved - the surrender of the
German state. However, the salient
issue of killing innocents was not mentioned, nor did the moral dimension come
into play at all. Indeed, there seemed
to be a phobia for discussing the ethical issues or putting forward a
compelling utilitarian justification for bombing noncombatants. The result, as we shall see, was an increasingly
savage, punitive campaign, carried out in an ethical and strategic vacuum.
In early 1941, Bomber Command
continued its attack on the twin target set of oil
and morale. Up to this time the area
campaign was having almost no effect.
In
December of 1940, the city of Mannheim experienced the RAF's first experiment
with an area attack on a large city. The purpose
of the raid was to light fires throughout the city, but the results of the attack by 92 aircraft were disappointing. Precision attacks were abandoned in late 1940 except for naval targets and oil. The naval attacks were doing little good; Bomber Command resisted the pleas of the Admiralty to aid in the
Battle of the Atlantic. Both now and later, under
Harris, Bomber Command would argue that it was far more efficient to attack manufacturing facilities inside Germany (and
to kill German industrial workers) than to raid "panaceas" such as submarine
pens in French ports. The durability of the submarine
pens at St. Nazaire and Lorient seemed to favor Bomber Command's approach. The constant
attacks upon the emplacements virtually razed these towns and killed many civilians.
The U-boat support facilities continued to
26SAO IV, p 190
17
operate, however. Admiral Doenitz said of the devastating but
militarily futile attacks,
"No dog or cat is left in these towns.
Nothing but the submarine shelters remain!"27
Bomber Command seemed almost
incapable of bombing any target, regardless of
size. Churchill criticized Bomber
Command for its utter inability to sink German cruisers in Brest, and the escape of Scharnhorst and Gneisenau up the English Channel
underscored its impotence during this
period. Indeed, until 1943, Bomber
Command
was only a potential strategic weapon, one which might save Allied lives and
bring
Germany to surrender without having to commit large British land armies to the
Continent. But the RAF's ability to
deliver knockout blows, in 1941, was still years
away.
By February 1941, Portal was
becoming disenchanted with the oil campaign.
By March, oil attacks had ceased
completely with the Air Staff concluding in April that oil was invulnerable. Portal now came to embrace "mass attacks
on industrial areas" as the most efficient means of crippling Germany's
war at sea.28
1941 saw two monographs on
the precision/area bombing dilemma that together proved to be the death-knell
of precision attacks for Bomber Command.
The first was a memo written by Lord Trenchard in May to the Chiefs of
Staff. In his report, Trenchard echoed
the earlier pseudo-scientific analyses of the German character and mixed this
with wild projections and assumptions of what a strategic bombing force was capable
of. His estimates began the British
notions that eventually Bomber Command would have a force of somewhere between
4,000 and 10,000 heavy bombers (perhaps as early as 1944) with which to defeat
Germany from the air.
Trenchard articulated what
for Bomber Command was "the great temptation, thanks
to the complete misjudgment of the German character and situation which reigned
in all
27C & C II, p 316
28SAO I, p 165
18
sections of the British
consciousness..."29 This temptation was the all-out attack on what was perceived to be Germany's weakest link: the morale of her citizens,
especially her urban work force. Trenchard articulated
finally (in a bureaucracy in which there seemed to be an inordinate fear of articulating what everyone wanted) the
"rationale" behind terror-bombing. The rationale depended
exclusively upon the putative superiority of the British character to that of Germany's people.
This analysis repeated "intelligence" from the Air Staff, Bomber Command, and the Ministry of Information regarding what
the German experience of strategic bombing was and what the ultimate result must
be:
When we have surveyed the
whole area of the struggle and the factors
involved, what is the outstanding fact?
It is the ingrained morale of the
British nation which is nowhere more strongly manifest than in its ability
to stand up to losses and its power to bear the whole strain of war and its
casualties.
History has proved that we
have always been able to stand our Casualties better than other Nations Strategically it must be sound to hammer the weak points of the
enemy.
When we talk of weak points we mean the spheres in which we are
relatively stronger than he is. Where
are those weak points to be found?
Certainly not in land fighting...Where then is Germany's weak point? It is
to be found in precisely the sphere in which I began this paper by stating
that we had a great strength. All the
evidence of the last war and of this
shows that the
German nation is
peculiarly susceptible to air
bombing...The ordinary people are...virtually imprisoned in their shelters
or within the bombed area, they remain passive and easy prey to hysteria
and panic without anything to mitigate the inevitable confusion and chaos.
There is no joking in the German shelters as in ours...
29John Terraine, The Right of
the Line, The Royal Air Force in the European War, 1939-1945 (London: Hodeder
and Stoughton 1985), p 263
This, then is their weak
point compared with ourselves, and it is at this weak point that we should
strike and strike again.30
Trenchard went on in this
extraordinary treatise to project that 70% losses could be incurred with a four
hundred plane reserve (he anticipated aircraft inventories to be strengthened
once America came into the war).
Even in such circumstances, the comparison between what the Royal
Navy and Bomber Command could do favored
the latter. When bombing ships at sea,
99% of bombs would miss the target, while in a city campaign, 99% would
hit. Morale, then, was the key.
Trenchard's views echoed
those of the Air Staff, which in 1941 with a modest force
of obsolescent aircraft deluded itself that Germany was already suffering from
the
incipient morale campaign. An Air Staff
report stated that the German people "cowered under an incessant rain of HE, and plotted rebellion against the hated Nazi
regime."31
Despite the lack of
sufficient resources, the Air Staff backed further into morale bombing with a
new target set announcement in July.
Transport and railways would form one leg of this new dyad (the Chiefs
of Staff still felt that oil was the best precision target, but acknowledged
Bomber Command's inability to interrupt Germany's oil supplies in any
meaningful way). The Air Staff estimated
a CEP of 1,000 yards in good moonlight for these raids. The other component of the new target set
was morale, although the word "morale" was not used. Since moonlight was required for any
precision at all, for 3/4 of each month it is possible to obtain
satisfactory results only by the 'Blitz' attack on large working class and
industrial areas in the towns.32
This wording made the area
bombing campaign seem to be one of default, although
the Air Staff and Bomber Command (along with a somewhat ambivalent PM) had
30SAO IV, App 10, pp 194-197
31In Terraine, p 266
32SAO I, p 172
concurred for some time that
morale was the most effective target.
The Air Staff plan was for an eventual force of 4,000 heavy bombers, but
Sinclair told Portal in June that this proposal was encountering "heavy
weather" with the ministers, who hesitated to sink as much as a third of
Britain's industry into a single arm of the military.33
Amidst growing
disillusionment over Bomber
Command accuracy, the
first
objective, scientific analysis was commissioned in 1941. In July, Lord Cherwell (the
Prime Minister's scientific adviser and a close friend of Churchill's),
commissioned an
exhaustive study of bombing effectiveness.
Lord Cherwell appointed D.M. Butt, of the War Cabinet Secretariate, to analyze 630 photos representing a total of 6,105
individual sorties. Of these missions, 2/3 of the
crews claimed to have reached the target.
The Butt Report found that in fact, of the above crews, only 1/3 came within five miles
of the aiming point. When attacking French
ports, 2/3 of the bombers had CEPs of five miles or better. In the Ruhr, only 10% had a
five mile CEP. In a new moon, only
1/15th of all sorties came within five miles of their targets. These figures applied only to aircraft claiming to have hit the target.34
Sir Richard Peirse and others
in Bomber Command were dubious over Butt's findings and methodology. Reluctantly, however, Portal agreed with
the overall conclusions and was challenged by Churchill to come up with
"proposals for action."35 The "action" proposed was
Portal's reminder to the PM of the damage which would be wrought upon Germany
once Bomber Command was armed with its 4,000 heavies. Germany would be
"forced to her knees" in six months, once the bombers had been
acquired.36 Bomber Command would destroy the foundations upon which the
[German] war machine rests - the economy which feeds it, the morale which sustains it...and the hopes of
33Ibid, p 177
34Ibid, pp 178-9; Kennett, p
129; Messenger, p 48; Hastings, p 117; Terraine, p 242 35SAO I, p 179; Winston
Churchill, The Second World War, Vol IV (1951), p 250 36Messenger, p 50
victory which inspire
it. Then only shall we be able to
return to the
continent and...impose our will upon the enemy...It is in bombing on a
scale undreamt of in the last war that we find the new weapon on which
we must principally depend for the destruction of German economic life
and morale.37
As in the Trenchard memo of a
few months prior, the bomber is seen not only as the agent which will smash
German morale, but also as the means by which Britain can avoid a massive,
destructive land war on the continent.
What was missing in this and most analyses was the logical progression
between demoralization of the populace (including whether it would in fact
happen) and victory over the German war machine. The vague hope was that a land army would be
merely a police force (this was articulated later during formulation of
Pointblank) or that the Allies could dictate terms to a weakened, demoralized
Germany. The second possibility
withered after Roosevelt's declaration of the "unconditional
surrender" policy at Casablanca.
In the wake of the Butt
Report's dismal findings, and anticipating a large strategic
bombing force, the Chiefs of Staff now drew up a list of forty three German
cities having populations of 100,000 or more. Among
them were Essen, Dusseldorf, Cologne and the Ruhr industrial area. The methodology
for Bomber Command was based on German damage to British cities during the Blitz.
The Air Staff made a study of bomb damage in both Britain and Germany, and determined that British cities had sustained more
damage than German ones in attacks of similar force.
The higher level of incendiary use by the Luftwaffe was cited as causing the disproportionate level of damage to English
cities.
The Air Staff then recommended to Bomber Command that incendiaries be used in a
greater proportion in attacks on German residential areas.38 Coventry was the
standard
model for British
calculations of damage to Germany. The
Air Ministry speculated that six Coventry-sized attacks would completely destroy a comparable German city,
based in
37CoS memo July 31, 1941 in
SAO I, p 181
38Ibid, p 252-3
part on industry and social
life in Coventry having taken thirty-five days to recover after the December
1940 raid.
Churchill was not so sure of
Portal's optimism. Despite his
pronouncement to
Beaverbrook the previous July that the heavy bomber was "the one sure
path" to victory, he now wrote his most perceptive observation on strategic bombing, a tome
reminiscent of his 1917 views in which he had found it "improbable that any
terrorization of the civil population which could be achieved by air attack would compel the Government of
a great nation to surrender."39 In what may have been a challenge to Portal,
Churchill threw cold water on the
notion that strategic bombing could "be a decisive factor" in the
defeat of Germany:
On the contrary, all that we
have learnt since the war shows that its effects, both physical and moral, are
greatly exaggerated. There is no doubt
that the British people have been stimulated and strengthened by the attack
made upon them so far...The most we can say is that it will be a heavy and I
trust a seriously increasing annoyance.40
Portal was momentarily
stunned by the PM's apparent disavowal of strategic
bombing, not to mention the support he had given to the 4,000 bomber plan. In a
carefully worded minute
which Sir Archibald
Sinclair praised as
"masterly" and
"audacious," Portal both reminded Churchill of his past support and
countered his arguments.
This was not simply an argument designed to retain operational viability, but
was
a reiteration of the morale bombing policy which Bomber Command had adopted
over
the previous year. Portal conceded that
light, harassing attacks might unite national will, but this could:
scarcely be said of attacks
on the Coventry model. Judging from our
own
experience, it is difficult to believe that any country could withstand
39Quoted in Hastings, pp 44-5
40Messenger, p 50
indefinitely the scale of
attack contemplated in the Air Staff plan...the consensus of informed opinion
is that German morale is much more vulnerable to bombing than our own.41
Churchill replied to Portal's
memo in early October, 1941. In the
memo, he continued his highly ambivalent views, on the one hand promising to
continue the expansion program for Bomber Command, but on the other, expressing
further caution regarding strategic bombing as a whole:
I deprecate, however, placing
unbounded confidence in this means of
attack, and still more expressing that confidence in terms of arithmetic. It
is the most potent method of impairing the enemy's morale we can use at
the present time.
Churchill also challenged the
loose, pseudo-psychological view that German morale was somehow weaker than its
British counterpart and that the decimation of an enemy's morale would perforce
lead to victory:
Even if all the towns of
Germany were rendered largely uninhabitable, it
does not follow that the military control would be weakened or even that
war industry could not be carried on...One has to do the best one can, but
he is an unwise man who thinks there is any certain method of winning
this war, or indeed any other war between equals in strength. The only
plan is to persevere.42
Portal was caught in a
vicious circle. In its present
circumstances, with 506
bombers available on a given day (none of these were Lancasters) and a very
poor record for accuracy and damage done to either German morale or the economy, Bomber Command was not likely to get its 4,000 bomber force. If quality and quantity
did not
41SAO I, p 183
42Ibid, pp 184-85
improve quickly, however,
Bomber Command would never be able to deliver the knockout blows on German
cities it was promising.
Peirse decided to demonstrate
Bomber Command's ability to make heavy morale
attacks by ordering a number of raids in early November. Among the cities attacked
were Mannheim and Berlin. The result
was heavy losses sustained by the bombers and little damage to the German cities.
From a 1940 loss rate of 3.2%,
Bomber Command was now suffering an unacceptable rate of 4.1%.43 Churchill called a halt to
offensive operations until the
following Spring.
The end of 1941 saw the
complete failure of not only precision bombing by the
RAF, but also of any convincing demonstration that Bomber Command could carry
out
larger-scale morale attacks, which was the only mission left to it, the only
mission it had chosen for itself. This failure was not
entirely Bomber Command's fault; it lacked the tools to do the job. But the job itself
was still ill-defined. Bomber Command
had come to area bombing not only out of operational necessity, but through a long,
circuitous process of justification and tortuous rationalization. The means of area bombing for the purpose of breaking civilian morale seemed obvious enough, even
self-justifying. Surely the end desired -- the defeat of Germany -- was also self-evident. But not only was the ostensibly utilitarian relationship between morale bombing and surrender not
examined,
but the exact nature of Germany's collapse had been all but blithely
ignored. The
momentous implications of seeking to attack noncombatants had not even entered
into
the discussion so far, nor would they.
Britain had been bombing morale and would
continue to do so on a greater and more terrible scale while hoping for the
best. It would at least become "an increasing annoyance."
What was meant by
"breaking civilian morale" was never clearly defined, except in
loose, self-deluded terms such as "final collapse," "general
dislocation" or "internal
disruption." By the end of 1941, in
response to criticism from the US Special Observer
43Messenger, p 51
Group, the British Joint
Planning Staff (JPS) attempted to define morale as an objective.
It did so in curious terms, stressing transport, living and industrial
facilities while
downplaying the terror-oriented aspects of area-bombing.44 Perhaps to appease
the
Americans, the definition was
now far from Trenchard's and James Spaight's emphasis on terror and the psychological effects of strategic bombing. This divergence would not last long.
U.S. criticism of British
strategic bombing plans as well as consultation had been
taking place almost since the beginning of the war. In mid 1941, an American general
summed up a meeting with Air Ministry and RAF personnel. The tone of the meeting
reflected future contentious debates between the Army Air Force (AAF) and
Bomber
Command:
I told [the junior Air
Minister] that I was no expert but so far as my
observations went, the British had no proof yet that their bombing had
been any more effective than the German bombing of England...I pointed
out that the Luftwaffe under the most favorable conditions had failed to
paralyze the British or reduce this country to impotence in over a year of
attack, at very short range, and when its energies were not engaged
elsewhere. So why, I asked, should the
RAF believe they could bring
down Germany at a greater range and with its targets very much more
dispersed than those in England and protected by very much better anti-
aircraft defenses now than the British had here last year? I built on
absolutely sure ground here because I have had a little time to study the
statistics on the damage done to Britain in the seven months between 1
June and 31 December 1940, and it is really surprisingly small...45
By the end of 1941, morale
amongst the highest echelons of Bomber Command and
in the ranks as well was low. Peirse
was being criticized for lack of leadership.
The
incipient morale campaign was getting nowhere and causing grievous losses for
air crews.
44SAO I, P 298
45Hastings, p 120
On December 7, the Air
Vice-Marshal (Bottomley) wrote that there was no "concrete
evidence" that morale bombing was having any psychological effect and the
"material
results obtained have been definitely disappointing."46 Something would
have to be
done.
Incredibly, at this critical
juncture no new analysis of strategy or rational utilitarian
study took place. Instead of
considering the ethical implications of what it was about to do or examine the implicit relationship between morale bombing and German
surrender, Britain now came to sanction its slowly evolving terror campaign in de jure
terms, if for internal consumption only. In February
Bomber Command received from Portal and the Air Staff the official approbation for a full-scale, deliberate terror
campaign. Even though urban dwellings had been the primary target set for more than a year, Directive
22 was significant for its stress on the morale campaign at the expense of other
targets. The restriction's of the last three months were lifted and Bomber Command was free to
bomb several specific cities until their "destruction has been achieved":
the primary objective of
your operations should now be focussed on the morale of the industrial
workers.47
Most significant was this
penciled notation from Portal to Bottomley:
Ref the new bombing
directive: I suppose it is clear that the aiming points are to be the built-up
areas, not,* for instance, the dockyards or aircraft factories where these are
mentioned in Appendix A.
This must be made quite clear
if it is not already understood.48
46SAO I, 256-57
47SAO IV, Appendix 8, p 144
* Underlining in original
48Memo Portal to Bottomley Feb 15, 1942 in SAO I, p 324 
Directive 22 made official
what had been taking place since Oct 1940, a month
before Coventry. In a series
of memos and gradual enunciation of policy, Bomber
Command and the Air Staff had finally come to adopt officially the bombing of
German cities. This official embrace still
lacked any thoughtful analysis of how the end of surrender might come about, but Bomber Command was now irrevocably committed to
the deliberate attack on civilian morale.
The morale campaign was the result of reluctance to articulate a comprehensive strategic policy for Bomber Command,
which had seemingly come around 180 degrees
from the early days of the war when Chamberlain promised no
indiscriminate bombing, when the moral opprobrium for such acts lay with the Germans at Rotterdam. The British, further, sought in the early days to sustain the deterrence relationship with Hitler, avoiding the knockout blow on London.
Only during the Battle of Britain, when the knockout blow failed to
materialize, did the
British go over gradually to the morale campaign. They would avoid the limitations suffered by the GAF by raining bombs down on German civilians on an unprecedented,
even unimaginable, scale. The result
would surely be panic, revolt, and victory.
In the meantime, it was the only means to keep Germany occupied and the Russians placated.
(The Soviets were never convinced that the bomber offensive represented Britain's
proportionate share in the war effort. Stalin received copies of Harris's
"Blue Book" of
bombed-out German cities, but he remained unimpressed beyond congratulations
later in the war over the destruction of large sections of Berlin. The air
offensive was a palliative until the British were finally compelled to open a second front.)49
Working class housing was the
ideal target set for several complementary reasons.
It was densely packed, usually close to the city center. In the older cities such as Lubeck and Dresden, much of
the construction was
wooden. Harris, improvising
from observations of the Blitz, dropped incendiaries in unprecedented numbers on
German working class neighborhoods and followed up with HE, which would keep
firefighters
49See R.J. Overy, The Air
War, 1939-1945 (Stein and Day, 1980), p 71 and Hastings, p 203
inside the shelters. Middle-
and upper-class areas were not as suitable since these dwellings were
more widely dispersed and often on the fringes of a city. Emphasis was laid increasingly on the state
of mind of the German worker.
In March 1942, Arthur Harris,
Bomber Command's new C-in-C, opened a series of
area attacks which would continue for the duration of the war. First Essen, and then
Lubeck were raided.
The attack on the latter was particularly violent. Harris could not attack German cities with impunity, at least not yet. Navigational difficulties and a lack of heavy bombers (by the Autumn of 1942 he would have only 100 Lancasters) meant that lightly defended coastal towns in the west were most susceptible to raids.
(Harris refused a request from the PM
in 1942 to attack Berlin. It was too
far, too heavily defended, and Gee - the new navigational device - was hampered by geographic limitations.50) Harris felt Lubeck would make a showcase target and provide a relatively risk-free way for his crews to "be well 'blooded,' as they say in
foxhunting..."51 The city was on the northern coast and
offered no real navigational challenges.
It was considered militarily unimportant and had few AA batteries. The most important criterion for Bomber Command was the construction of its central residential area. An old Hanseatic capital of historical
and artistic importance,
Lubeck's residential dwellings
were constructed mostly of wood, giving the city a highly combustible nature. Harris said that it was "built more like a fire-lighter than a human habitation."52
234 bombers released 300 tons of bombs (50% incendiaries).53 As Harris predicted, huge areas of the
town burned to the ground. 1475 homes were destroyed with another 2,000 badly
damaged.
312 people were killed.54 RAF losses were light, with only twelve
aircraft failing to
return. Lubeck's industrial and military value were limited, but
Harris felt that it was
"preferable to destroy an industrial town of moderate importance than fail
to destroy a
50Kennett, p 131
51Hastings, p 165
52Terraine, p 476
53Kennett, p 132
54Hastings, p 165 and SAO I,
p 392
large, industrial
city."55 As a result of the RAF
attacks in March, 3,052 people left the city, but most of these
returned soon after, as in other large area raids which "de-housed"
large numbers of people. Damage to Lubeck's industries was generally light, with all coming
back to near full production within a week and many other destroyed factories
switching to affiliates in other cities.
Later precision raids on Lubeck caused much heavier damage to factories and
utilities.56
Rostock was bombed shortly thereafter. Its circumstances were similar to those of
Lubeck's, and thousands of its residents fled the city in
the wake of the raid. The
situation, briefly, was close to mass panic, but this did not last long. The
Heinkel factory - - hit by a simultaneous
precision attack -- was back to full production in two days.57
Most affected were Goebbels
and Hitler, who were shocked at the news of the devastation. Goebbels wrote in his diary that
"community life in Rostock
is almost at an end." Ironically,
he adopted the same sort of nationalistic, pseudo-psychological analysis upon
which the RAF morale campaign was based.
The result of the Lubeck
attack could have been worse, Goebbels wrote, for northern Germans could take
the devastation. Those in the south might succumb to mass panic or
demoralization:
The English
claim they dropped
one thousand pound
bombs onto
Luebeck. The damage done there is indeed
enormous...It is horrible. One
can well imagine how such an awful bombardment affects the population.
Thank God, it is a case of North German population, which, on the whole,
is much tougher than the South German or the Southeast German
population.58
The German press was now
labelling the British raids Terrorangriffe, or "terror
attacks."59 Hitler was both angry at the GAF's AA forces and frightened
for what the
55Terraine, p 477
56USSBS, A Detailed Study of
the Effects of Area Bombing on Lubeck, pp 1-31 passim 57Terraine, p 480
58Louis Lochner, ed., The
Goebbels Diaries, 1942-1943 (Garden City: Doubleday 1948), p 160 59Kennett, p
144
future held. Again, he sought a deterrence relationship
with Britain through threatened reprisals. Indeed, up to this time, it
was still possible for both countries to turn away from urban bombing. Certain members of
Parliament proposed that a "gentlemen's agreement" could be put into effect which would preclude any further
intentional bombing of cities. Churchill and Eden,
now seeing that Britain's cities had little to fear from the tactically-oriented Luftwaffe, squelched this effort. In April, Hitler warned Churchill in a speech to the Reichstag that retribution would be soon in
coming. Attacks on munitions factories would be ineffectual and not have the symbolic value of
raids on English cultural centers similar in importance to the German cities which had
been torched. Perusing his Baedecker's guide
to English cities, Hitler decided to attack every town with a three-star rating.60 Thus the great cultural centers of Bath, Exeter,
Canterbury and York were bombed between April and June. 1637 civilians were killed and the British public were
"incensed."61 In a mirror
image of the RAF's attitude, Hitler told Goebbels that he would
repeat these raids night after night until the English were sick and tired of terror attacks. He shares my opinion absolutely that
cultural centers, bathing resorts, and civilian cities must be attacked now;
there the psychological effect is much stronger, and at the present moment
psychological effect is the most important thing...there is no other way of
bringing the English to their senses.
They belong to a class of human
beings with whom you can talk only after you have first knocked out their
teeth.62
60This may have been
apocryphal. See Kennett, p 132. Goebbels was furious over the label
"Baedecker raids" in his diary; see Lochner, pp 200-01
61Terraine, p 423.
62Lochner, p 190
Chapter II: Misgivings, Public and Private
The irrationality of Bomber
Command's morale campaign, which seemed more punitive than strictly
utilitarian, was rarely questioned inside the RAF. Beginning in 1942 and continuing for the
duration, members of parliament, writers, churchmen and a few general officers
(usually retired and none in Bomber Command) questioned in ethical terms what
was obviously to them a terror campaign.
As we shall see, the criticism took various forms. The dissembling
nature of Bomber Command's arguments - to the public and to the Air Staff -
made it vulnerable to those in Parliament who attacked its veracity and others
who questioned the means on ethical grounds.
The Spring of 1942 was
significant not only for Bomber Command's official policy,
but for Whitehall as well. On the 24th of March the debate over Bomber
Command's
proper mission became public. At first,
MP's questioned the investment of so many
resources into an arm of the military which was reaping so few results. A.V. Bull echoed the criticism made in 1941 by the American general when he pointed out that Britain's morale and production had withstood the Blitz.
He also questioned the logic of "bombing an enemy into submission."63 Bull spoke of a "disaster" which
was not simply the futility of such a policy,
but the waste of resources which could be spent on more productive projects.
This was not, of course, a
moral argument. Policy was being
questioned on the
grounds of efficacy, not the ethics of killing non-combatants. The debate took a more
ethically-oriented turn in May, when Richard Stokes asked about morale bombing
in the House of Commons. Despite frequent
government assurances to the press that Bomber Command was raiding only military targets in precision attacks, a few members
were becoming skeptical. The objections were
now moral as well as operational. Stokes
was becoming the most outspoken critic of Bomber Command's morale campaign. A WWI
63Messenger, p 64 
veteran, decorated with the
Military Cross and Croix de Guerre, he was a "constant thorn in the
Government's flesh" regarding the bombing of civilians.64
Sinclair, along with Clement
Atlee, was the chief government spokesman in the
House of Commons. Sinclair denied
repeatedly -- from 1942 to the end of the war -- that the RAF had instructions to attack anything but military targets and vital
factories, even though he knew that Bomber Command had been specifically ordered not to attack
these very targets.
The few MP's who questioned
bombing policy on moral or operational grounds were a tiny minority with little
influence. Stokes was often shouted
down in Commons by members who cheered Sinclair's baldly dishonest claims. Harris at least had the courage of his
convictions (and any MP who bothered to read Harris's statements on area
bombing can hardly have claimed ignorance).
He was exasperated with the government duplicity and repeatedly called
for public declarations.
The Times repeated the
government's duplicitous statements that the RAF were making only precision
attacks. When would Germany halt its propaganda regarding the alleged attacks on
civilians and admit the devastation wrought to its communications, docks, and
war matériel? The Times correspondent
assured his readers that at no time have the RAF deliberately attacked either
civilians or non-
military objectives. It would not be
worth the while of Bomber Command
to send valuable aircraft and highly skilled and equally valuable trained
men such long distances merely to knock down a few inoffensive houses.
65
The press in general repeated
Churchill's public argument which capitalized on the
somewhat skewed version of history in which Germany had initiated the city campaign at
64Hastings, p 192
65Quoted in Messenger, p 82
Coventry and London in 1940.
Churchill's rationale was one of just retribution for Germany's sins:
We ask no favor of the
enemy. We seek from them no
compunction. On
the contrary, if tonight the people of London were asked to cast their votes
whether a convention should be entered into to stop the bombing of all
cities, the overwhelming majority would cry, 'No, we will mete out to the
Germans the measure, and more than the measure, that they have meted
out to us.'66
In reality, Churchill's
assertion had an ironic twist that says much about the people
of London and the experience of noncombatants exposed to the
horror of indiscriminate bombing. In May of 1941, a Gallup poll was published which measured public sentiment for reprisal bombing in Britain. Some agreed
with Churchill's view that the Germans should receive the full measure of what they had supposedly dealt to Britain's cities. But significantly, those who cried most for revenge lived in Yorkshire, Cumberland, Westmoreland -- areas in the countryside, out of range of the German
Blitz. Some 75% of the people in these rural areas favored "reprisal" raids on German
cities. By contrast, those living in the hardest-hit areas, such as central London, were far less
eager to see German civilians suffer. Only 45% of
the citizens of central London favored such reprisal raids.67
If Stokes and his allies were
supporters of the war but critical of the means
employed, the handful of pacifists in the House had even less influence. One of these was Alfred Salter, a Labour MP from the working class district of Bermondsey, which
had suffered heavily in the Blitz. Ill and
barely able to speak, he made a classically deontic speech to an uncaring House. "All
this is founded," he said, "on the great and terrible
66Quoted in Quester, p 141
67Angus Calder, The People's
War (NY: Pantheon 1969), p 229; Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books 1977), p 256;
Irving L. Janis, Air War and Emotional Stress (Rand Report:
1955), p 127
fallacy that ends justify
means. They never do -- never,
never...Is there not pity in the whole world?
Are all our hearts hardened and coarsened by events?...Will not
somebody, for the love of God, for the sake of Christ, demand sanity and
peace?"68
Misgivings within the RAF command hierarchy seem to have been
virtually non-
existent. Several factors may in part
account for this. One was certainly the
overall
perception of German atrocities committed at Warsaw and Rotterdam. Although the
damage to Rotterdam was actually light, figures at the time gave the impression
that
Germany had "taken the gloves off."
The bombing of London (itself a reprisal for the
two-week bombing of Berlin) only added to the impression that Germany had
deliberately broken down its deterrence relationship with the UK. Britain's position was unique and for a time, desperate. Until mid-1941,
its strategic situation was bleak.
Fighter Command had just managed to persevere in the summer of '40. Britain stood isolated
until June of 1941, when Germany invaded the USSR.
Even then, the outcome was unclear until the entry of the Americans. In the early
years, "the bombers alone provided the means of victory."69 It is, nevertheless, odd that the moral implications of
killing civilians wholesale never entered the equation.
There is no evidence that general officers,
including the Air Marshals, had any ethical misgivings regarding BC's mission
or even
considered the question worth examination.
Bomber Command saw its
mission as "dehousing" as many German workers as
possible, although even this term begged a larger question. Portal answered the question of the fine difference between dehousing and killing noncombatants when he
estimated that with four to six thousand heavy bombers, Bomber Command could destroy six million homes, "de-house" 25 million Germans and kill 900,000
civilians by 1944.70 (Cherwell, it should be
noted, postulated that nothing demoralizes a person more than having his house destroyed. Harris also
clung to the curious argument that Bomber
68Angus Calder, p 494
69Ibid, p 229,
70Hastings, p 203
Command was not trying to
kill people, but simply demoralize them to the point where
they would no longer report for work. The result would be the impotence of German
industry.)
Bomber Command never really examined its target set, either
from a military or
ethical framework. Portal defeated plans for an "objective, scientific
analysis" of the
strategic air offensive "without recourse to argument," citing only
the delay it would cause and the inevitable scope of such a study.71 Such studies were in fact taking
place in the AAF throughout the war, but
the RAF muddled through, using an unarticulated version of Trenchardian
doctrine tied to operational limitations.
If there were no generals in
Bomber Command who had moral objections, at least two figures with some former
prominence objected heatedly and in unmistakably ethical terms to the morale
campaign. Major-General J.F.C. Fuller,
together with Basil LidellHart, had in the twenties been amongst the most
influential advocates of air power. Liddell Hart had warned of the coming of
the aerial "knockout blow" but had since modified his views. Both men had favored the use of tactical
air in concert with fast-moving ground
forces, a concept applied with great efficiency by the Wermacht.
Fuller and Lidell-Hart now
saw the morale-bombing campaign as not only an extravagant waste of resources
and a military misstep, but an immoral, destructive act that would come to
haunt Britain. In August 1943, Fuller
sent a letter to the London Evening Standard in which he deplored the morale
bombing campaign. "The worst
devastations of the Goths, Vandals, Huns, Seljuks, and Mongols pale into
insignificance when compared to the material and moral damage now
wrought..." he wrote. The Evening
Standard's editor, Michael Foot (later the Labour Party leader) wrote back to
Fuller that he "lacked the nerve" to publish the article.72
71Anthony Verrier, Bomber
Offensive (London: Pan Books, 1974), p 96 72Hastings, p 198
Liddell Hart wrote a private
"Reflection" in the summer of 1942, on the barbarism of city-bombing:
It will be ironical if the
defenders of civilization depend for victory upon the most barbaric, and
unskilled, way of winning a war that the modern world has seen...We are now
counting for victory on success in the way of degrading it to a new low level -
as represented by indiscriminate (night) bombing and indiscriminate
starvation...73
Whatever influence
Lidell-Hart and Fuller once had, they were now Cassandras,
like Stokes or Bishop Bell. George Bell,
the Bishop of Chichester, was probably the most celebrated opponent of the morale campaign.
Bell was a long-time and ardent foe of Nazism whose conscience could not abide the destruction of German cities. His credentials as a supporter of the war effort (and RAF crews) should never have
been in question, although he was attacked unfairly in the press for his views. As early as May 1941, he argued that morale bombing was "a degradation of the
spirit..."74 Bell was not a pacifist. Like Salter and Fuller, he
questioned the means employed on their own terms.
Bombing military targets had a self-evident justification which did not trammel
upon the Augustinian notions of what a state might do in war. The wholesale destruction of
German cities was another matter.
Writing in a church publication, the Chichester Dioce-san Gazette, Bell argued that Britain could not take the moral high ground
while the Government exulted over the killing of German non-combatants:
I see signs in some quarters
of giving way to the spirit which caused the
war...When a Minister of the Government speaks in exulting terms of a
ruthless and destructive bombing of the German people...or contemplate
the subjection of fifty German cities to the same terror as Hamburg (or
Coventry) has suffered...then we have real cause to grieve for a lowering
of the moral tone, and also to fear greatly for the future. It is our whole
73Brian Bond, Liddell Hart: A
Study of His Military Thought (London: Cassell & Co, 1977), p 145 74Calder,
p 492
claim that we are fighting
for a better world order, for freedom, for justice, for morality...75
Bell had some private support
from his colleagues, such as Lord Lang, the former
Primate. Another colleague, William
Temple, the Archbishop of Canterbury, refused to come to Bell's aid in calling for a statement from the Government on the
bombing
campaign in the House of Lords. Neither
would Temple support Bell's efforts to have the government make a declared distinction between Nazis and the German populace as
a whole. Such a distinction would have of
course made public justification or continuation of the morale campaign very difficult.
Temple took a subtly utilitarian view which fixed culpability for the war on all its participants. The best a Christian (who was also a Briton) could do was be "penitent" while participating in a necessary evil.76
Bell made his most
significant and impassioned speech before the House of Lords on February 9,
1944, moving that the government make public its bombing policy. The motion was actually a reasoned, informed
indictment of morale bombing.
I would humbly claim to be
one of the most convinced and consistent
Anti-Nazis in Great Britain. But I
desire to challenge the Government on
the policy which directs the bombing of enemy towns on the present scale,
especially with reference to civilians, non-combatants, and non-military
and non-industrial objectives...Few will deny that there is a distinction in
principle between attacks on military and industrial objectives and attacks
on objectives which do not posses that character...It is said that 74,000
persons have been killed [in Berlin] and that 3,000,000 are already
homeless. The policy is obliteration, openly
acknowledged. That is not a justifiable
act of war...[This will not stop] till, to use the language of the Chief of
Bomber Command with regard to Berlin, the heart of Nazi Germany ceases to
beat...
75Norman Longmate, The
Bombers: The RAF Offensive Against Germany 1939-1945 (London: 1983), p
374
76Calder, p 488 and see F. A.
Iremonger, William Temple (Oxford University Press: 1948), p 232
Bell then challenged one of
the pillars of Bomber Command's strategy.
If terror bombing was designed to
send a message to German civilians, then why punish the very people Britain
was trying to influence?
If we wish to shorten the
war...then let the Government speak a word of
hope and encouragement both to the tortured millions of Europe and to
those enemies of Hitler to whom in 1939 Mr. Churchill referred as
'millions who stand aloof from the seething mass of criminality and
corruption constituted by the Nazi Party machine.' Why is there this
blindness to the psychological side? Why
is there this inability to reckon
with the moral and spiritual facts? Why
is there this forgetfulness of the
ideals by which our cause is inspired?
How can the War Cabinet fail to
see that this progressive devastation of cities is threatening the roots of
civilization?
Viscount Cranbourne, speaking
for the Government, repeated Sinclair's assertions in the House of Commons that
the RAF has never indulged in pure terror raids, in what used to be known as
Baedeker raids of the kind which the Luftwaffe indulged in at one time on this
country.77
Press reaction to Bell's
speech was mixed -- the large dailies such as the Daily Telegraph and Daily
Mail were harshly critical or satirical.
A few of the smaller or more progressive papers -- the Spectator and the
New Statesman, for instance -- recognized Bell's sincerity and courage.78
The literature reflects no
deep-seated resistance by aircrew members to morale
bombing. Most shut out pangs of
conscience early or justified area bombing by
77Hansard Lords (Feb 9,
1944), cols 737-755
78Longmate, p 377
comparing their actions to
the German initiation of indiscriminate bombing at Warsaw and Rotterdam. Personal ethics paled in
importance with the realities of the air battle. There apparently was, however, an undercurrent of ethical resistance within the ranks
to morale bombing. Sometimes this took the form of
a sarcastic comment by an airman at briefing;
more often of private regret.79 Bell's speech in the House of Lords struck a
chord of
sympathy with many families
who had sons in Bomber Command, as well as aircrew
members who felt that the terror campaign was wrong. Many of the latter felt constrained from speaking out; Bell became their champion. In letters sent to the bishop, some RAF crew members thanked Bell for his speech.
Families and other clergymen sent supportive letters to Bell, telling him that there were "a not inconsiderable number
[of RAF aircrew]
who are torn and disturbed, and it is these men who will be grateful to
you."80
It is widely acknowledged
that Bell's outspokenness cost him the Archbishopric of
Canterbury after the death of William Temple, much as Churchill's disavowal of
the terror campaign cost Harris a peerage and Bomber Command mention in the Honours List
after the war.
In October 1942 the Assistant
Chief for Policy of the Air Staff issued a memo to commands throughout the RAF
which sought to measure the intrinsic value of civilians in occupied and enemy
territory. The October directive made
clear the rights civilians enjoyed (or forfeited) in the air war and drove a
wedge between the rights of civilians in occupied Allied countries and the
non-combatant residents of Germany:
1. The following rules govern
out bombardment policy in British, Allied or Neutral territory occupied by the
enemy:
Bombardment is to be confined
to military objectives, and must be subject to the following general
principles:
(1) The intentional
bombardment of civilian populations, as such, is forbidden.
79Martin Middlebrook, The
Battle of Hamburg: Allied Air Forces Against a German City in 1943, (New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1981), p 349
80Personal correspondence
with Stephen Lammers, Religion Department, Lafayette College
(2) It must be possible to identify the
objective.
(3) The attack must be made with reasonable care
to avoid undue
loss of civilian life in the vicinity of the target.
2. German, Italian and
Japanese territory:
Consequent upon the enemy's
adoption of a campaign of unrestricted air
warfare, the Cabinet have authorized a bombing policy which includes the
attack of enemy morale. The foregoing
rules do not, therefore, apply to
our conduct of
air warfare against
German, Italian and
Japanese
territory.81
No rationale, ethical or
military, was offered. The directive
simply codified the morale campaign while placing the responsibilities for its
inception on the enemy. If Germany had
begun unrestricted strategic bombing, its people forfeited their rights
normally protected under just war criteria and notions of the immunity of
civilians in war. Hitler had done much the same thing when he attacked English
cities during the Baedecker raids, although his arguments had no moral flavor
at all. His reluctance to kill English
civilians rested on fears of reprisals against Germany, not on a sense of the
intrinsic worth of the residents of London.
Some influential Britons went
further in their advocacy of the terror-bombing cam-
paign. Robert Vansittart, of the
Foreign Office, made broadcasts during the war
characterizing Germany as a violent pariah, the "butcher-bird" of
Europe. In his "Black
Record," Vansittart saw Germany as innately militaristic and thus all
Germans as guilty.
His identification of all German citizens with the Nazis was reminiscent of
Churchill's
refusal to differentiate "good" from "bad" Germans in
Parliament. Vansittart wrote that
81Hastings, p 191. Italics added.
the battle still rages round
the question: are we fighting the
Germans or the Nazis? One day
historians will rub their eyes, and wonder how such silly questions could be
discussed at the end of 1941.82
Vansittart's extreme views
were noted with irony in Germany, where excerpts from
the Black Record broadcasts were used on posters which lined the walls of the
subway
stations.83
Another advocate of morale
bombing was James Spaight, one of Britain's early
proponents of air power. Along with
Douhet and Trenchard, Spaight felt the most
efficient use of air power was strategic bombing directed against cities
(although his
writings in the interwar period are sometimes highly ambivalent and indicate a
good deal of ethical reflection). Spaight wrote on
the psychological effects of mass bombing.
His arguments and views were more sophisticated than Vansittart's; civilians were
fair game not because they were Germans, but because in modern war, practically all workers in urban centers contribute directly to the war effort. They are part of the "pre-fabricated battle":
Now, those areas have become
in the march of events battle-areas. It
is
idle to pretend that they are still the quiet, innocuous towns which they
were once. They are not. They are dangerous, lethal, menacing towns -
to
an enemy. Terrible things - in his eyes
- are done in them. Battle begins
in them. One must think today of battle
as being pre-fabricated...The clash
of arms is only the final stage of a process which has had its beginning
elsewhere and long before...The making of arms is war-making. It cannot
be called anything else. It is not
non-combatant work.84
82Lord Sir Robert Vansittart,
Black Record: Germans Past and Present (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1941),
p ix
83Calder, p 490; see also
Longmate, p 374
84J. M. Spaight, Bombing
Vindicated (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1944), p 78
Spaight held that industrial
workers and those involved in transport were warriors and could be attacked as
combatants:
The old
clear distinction between
soldiers and civilians
has been
obscured...The people who make and transport war material are, to the
opposing belligerent, active, dangerous enemies. He is as fully entitled to
try to put them out of action as if they were commissioned or enlisted soldiers.
They are in fact warriors. The fact
that they wear no uniform is
immaterial. They are in no proper sense
of the word non-combatants.85
Spaight made an important
point regarding the activities of industrial workers, and
his premise had always been a component of Bomber Command's strategy (although
the state of mind of the workers from the point of view of sheer terror became more
important to Bomber Command as the evidence mounted that the area attacks were not
affecting Germany's economy in a significant way).
In an industrialized, modern state which aggresses against its neighbors, workers who run the machine tools and railways
which manufacture and transport war matériel do contribute more directly to
aggressive war than at any time in the past. Modern
strategic war is more inclusive and more consensual than ever before. If factories and their
employees are legitimate targets during precision raids directed solely at those factories, Spaight would hold that they are equally
subject to attack in their homes.
But even Spaight deplored
terror for its own sake -- or said he did:
That is not to say that the
whole population of an enemy country is subject
to attack. Indiscriminate bombing is certainly not
justifiable...Unfortunately,
there are other victims whose connection with
hostilities is too remote to justify their being brought into the same
category and whom in any event it is neither the desire nor the interest of
an enemy to kill or mutilate. No
chivalrous airman wants to slaughter
grandmothers or babies. The tragedy is
that he may do so in trying to put
85Ibid, p 112
the others out of
action. It is an unintended, horrible,
pitiable incident of war, but to say that is not to condemn air bombardment.86
This last point was an appeal
to the doctrine of double effect, which spares agents
involved in necessary but regrettable collateral deaths when their cause is
just and other just war criteria are being met. One's
intention in such a case is not simply
to kill noncombatants wantonly, but rather to undertake allowable actions in war (e.g.
attacking only military or industrial targets), recognizing that unintended civilian
deaths are unavoidable.87 Even though Spaight had to be aware of the the psychological
argument as well as Directive 22, he insisted that the Government was being truthful
when it declared repeatedly in public that only factories and traditional military
targets (not residential districts) were
being bombed.
Bomber Command's methodology
-- if not its strategy -- was articulated most
succinctly in March 1942 by Churchill's scientific advisor, Lord Cherwell. In the now-famous "Cherwell minute," the former Professor Lindemann sought to
articulate Bomber Command's means, even if the ends were given short shrift. (The assumed end --
Germany's collapse -- was by
now an a priori part of the strategy of morale bombing.)
The Cherwell minute is reminiscent of Trenchard's essay ten months earlier, but
with a scientific gloss. The memo purported to
project British bomber production over the next year, expected tonnage of bombs carried and the effects on Germany's
fifty-eight largest cities:
The following seems a simple
method of estimating what we could do by bombing Germany:
Careful analysis of the
effects of raids on Birmingham, Hull and
elsewhere have shown that, on the average, 1 ton of bombs dropped on a
86Ibid, p 115
87See Hardin, pp 180-4 on
double effect
built-up area demolishes
20-40 dwellings and turns 100-200 people out of
house and home...In 1938 over 22 million Germans lived in 58 towns of
over 100,000 inhabitants, which, with modern equipment, should be easy
to find and hit. Our forecast output
of heavy bombers (including
Wellingtons) between now and
the middle of 1943 is about 10,000. If
even half the total load of 10,000 bombers were dropped on the built-up
areas of these 58 German towns the great majority of their inhabitants
(about one-third of the German population) would be turned out of house
and home.
Investigation seems to show
that having one's house demolished is
most damaging to morale. People seem to
mind it more than having their
friends or even relatives killed. At
Hull signs of strain were evident,
though only one-tenth of the houses were demolished. On the above
figures we should be able to do ten times as much harm to each of the 58
principal German towns. There seems
little doubt that this would break
the spirit of the people.
Our calculation assumes, of
course, that we really get one-half of our bombs into built-up areas. On the other hand, no account is taken of
the large promised American production (6,000 heavy bombers in the period in
question). Nor has regard been paid to
the inevitable damage to factories, communications etc. in these towns and the
damage by fire, probably accentuated by breakdown of public services.88
Lindemann's paper was
circulated not only amongst the War Cabinet, but to a circle
of scientists on the highest level as well.
It was here that the Cherwell minute came under close scrutiny and criticism. Many of
Cherwell's colleagues -- among them Sir Henry Tizard, P. M. S. Blackett, and Solly Zuckerman -- subjected the report's
conclusions to their own individual statistical analyses and found the report to be seriously
flawed.
Tizard found Cherwell's estimate of the number of houses destroyed five times
too high.
Blackett concluded they were six times too high.89 Further, Tizard doubted that
the
88Minute in SAO I, pp 331-32
89C.P. Snow, Science and
Government (Harvard University Press: 1961), p 49. Despite Snow's assertions,
Cherwell's figures may have been closer to the truth than those of the Tizard
group. The estimates of
navigational technology then
available or projected could deliver massive blows even to targets as large as
cities.
The debate between the
Tizard-Blackett group and Cherwell is one of the enduring intellectual myths of
the twentieth century. The principals
involved on the losing side have become wrapped in a cloak of virtue and the
statistical debate has come to symbolize any struggle between parochial
stupidity and moral rectitude. C.P. Snow
first brought the great debate into the open in his Godwin Lecture at Harvard
in 1960. His Science and Government
recounts the struggle between Tizard and Lindemann, two scientists of great
intellect who had known each other for decades and who possessed very different
characters. One is persuaded by the general
tone of the book that the debate over Cherwell's memo was on moral
grounds. It was not.
Not only is the rendering of
Lindemann's personality "unsympathetic" (as Walzer
put it), but a close reading reveals both inaccuracies and the real nature of
Tizard's
objections. In the most revealing
sentence of the book, Snow says that "...it was not
Lindemann's ruthlessness that worried us most, it was his calculations."90
Tizard's
differences with Lindemann
were based on personality and the statistical database, not on an
ethically-based rejection of terror-bombing.
Tizard communicated his misgivings to Cherwell, stressing the need for
greater resources being devoted to the Battle of the Atlantic. He felt also that Cherwell's projected figure
of 10,000 heavy bombers by mid1943 was
unrealistic. Seven thousand heavies
seemed to Tizard to be a more accurate estimate.91 Tizard concluded that the
short-term investment in heavy bombers was probably wasteful and that the
morale campaign would be effective only if carried out "on a much bigger
scale than [Cherwell envisaged]."92
houses destroyed vary. See the figures for areas of cities destroyed
according to the British Bombing Survey Unit and German authorities in
Messenger, p 232
90Snow, p 49
91Longmate, p 132. This figure was also, of course, utterly
fantastic. 92Hastings, pp 143-44 
The evidence indicates that
Tizard did not object to Cherwell's "de-housing" strategy on ethical
grounds. The Tizard group's figures
suggested simply that operational and production limitations would, for the
foreseeable future, impede the terror campaign. Tizard told Cherwell that
assuming Bomber Command could find the fifty- eight largest cities was
"much too optimistic." In a note penned to Sinclair, Tizard assured him
that he did not "disagree fundamentally with bombing policy."93
Chapter III: The Anglo-American Offensive
The Anglo-American aerial
partnership has often
been described as
both
complementary and beset by rancour, usually in the form of ethical differences
over the killing of non-combatants. In some
versions of the latter historical myth, the RAF
triumphs in the political, internecine struggle, resulting in a reluctant
American Eighth Air Force participating in
counter-population bombardment on a wide scale.94 What were the actual issues and how did
US generals articulate their differences with Bomber Command? Were the ethically-framed arguments
sincere? How deeply did they go? We will now explore the nature of the
competition between these two great strategic air forces and the events which
led to their cooperation in the wholesale destruction which took place in the
final few months of the war.
At the Combined Chiefs of
Staff meeting in June 1942, the British conferred with
their new allies to frame bombing policy and other matters. The British by now realized that they would receive almost none of the bombers they had hoped for from the Americans; the plan now was to formulate a strategy for employing the USAAF in
the
93SAO I, pp 333-35
94Johnson repeats this myth
in Can Modern War Be Just? It has been
told in many sources, usually American. 
area campaign. This proved to be an impossible task. The Americans were "fanatic" in
their faith in precision, daylight bombing, an attitude which deeply concerned Harris
and Churchill. The Americans seemed to
have no alternative in case day bombing failed. Portal was extremely
pessimistic; the Americans would not be able to penetrate beyond the Ruhr
without suffering staggering losses. If
daylight bombing failed after such a drawn-out experiment, the switch to night
would probably consume two critical years. The Americans "have hung their
hats on the day bomber policy," Air Vice-Marshal Slessor wrote, "and
are convinced they can do it."
Attempting to make them see reason would only make them
"obstinate."95
Despite the RAF's low opinion
of the B-17 (the British argued that the Lancaster
should be produced in large numbers in the US while Britain would manufacture a
corresponding number of Mustangs), the AAF made its first bombing run against
the
enemy over France in August 1942. This
and other early operations were against naval and military targets in occupied territory, usually within range of friendly
fighter escort.
Bomber crews exaggerated their fighter kills and for a time even the British
were
impressed.
Meanwhile, Portal still harbored
hopes that the Americans would join Bomber
Command in a massive area campaign.
Such a force could destroy six million German homes, leave 25 million homeless and kill 500,000 civilians, with one million
seriously injured.96 At the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, the British had
several strategic goals, primary among them being postponement of a cross-channel
invasion until 1944. This they achieved, agreeing to
participate instead in the North African invasion and operations in Italy and Sicily.
Strategic bombing would remain the centerpiece of Britain's war effort, and Harris had already decided to back his American
friends' wishes to engage in daylight bombing, even though
Churchill thought it was "doomed."
Harris
95SAO I, pp 355-59
96Hastings, p 203
told Churchill that Arnold
was "despondent" at the prospect of resources being taken from the
American strategic bombing campaign and diverted to the Far East and other
areas. Prudence called for supporting the AAF's autonomy, even though its
mission differed from the RAF's. The
Americans would, the Air Staff felt,
learn from their tactical mistakes and eventually embrace morale bombing
as the only viable strategy.
Casablanca seemed to place a
low priority on morale as an objective for bombing,
and was something of a victory for the American precision advocates. The directive
included five target sets which
suggested the possibility of attacking morale in a
somewhat secondary sense. The primary
target set listed the following in order of priority:
a) German submarine
construction yards.
b) The German aircraft
industry.
c) Transportation.
d) Oil plants.
e) Other targets in enemy war
industry.
The most important passage,
addressed to the strategic bombing forces of Britain
and the US, stated that "Your
primary object will be the progressive destruction and
dislocation of the German military, industrial and economic system, and the
undermining of the morale of the German people to a point where their capacity for armed
resistance is fatally weakened." Harris received
this on February 4, 1943. His plan was
now to exploit Bomber Command's autonomy and continue the morale campaign unfettered, even
though Bottomley had told him that Directive 22 was now superseded.97 Through sheer
deceit, Harris managed to keep intact
the spirit of Directive 22, which called for mass bombing of residential districts. In a letter to
the Air Ministry apprising it of the content of the Casablanca Directive and its effect on Bomber Command operations, Harris
altered the crucial paragraph. The
"dislocation" of the German industrial-military network and the
97Messenger, p 107
"undermining of the
morale of the German people" was changed by Harris to "the
progressive destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial and
economic system aimed at undermining the morale of the German people..." Harris also changed "your primary object" to "the primary object of Bomber
Command" which seemed to place an official sanction for a morale campaign solely within Harris's
purview.98 Harris was now free to "attack
pretty well any German industrial city of 100,000 or more."99
From Casablanca
came the Eaker
Plan which advocated
a combined,
complementary assault against six key German target sets and 76 specific
targets. Eaker felt that it was "better to cause a high degree of destruction in a few
really essential industries than to cause a small degree of destruction in many
industries."100 The Eaker Plan got underway in mid-1943
as Operation Pointblank. This was the
Combined Bomber Offensive at last.
Pointblank purported to guide
the bombing operations of the two strategic air
forces. American targets included
aircraft production, ball bearings, and petroleum.
Bomber Command would attack cities associated with the Pointblank industries
and
would devote operations against the specific targets only "as far as
practicable."101
Harris thus had a free hand to continue the RAF assault on German morale almost
unhindered. The "Combined
Offensive" was a public relations fiction as the two great
bombing forces went their separate ways.
Despite the intention of Pointblank to
concentrate attacks on the German heavy industry and aircraft production, the
British terror campaign was now fully underway.
Harris had the Lancasters he needed in growing numbers, and Bomber Command had the navigational tools and "spoofing"
devices to embark on raids of awesome dimensions, though still far short of the most
conservative estimates of Tizard, Cherwell or Trenchard.
98SAO II, pp 12-15. Italics
added.
99Harris, p 144
100Messenger, p 115
101Kennett, p 145
Hamburg was the first city
selected for bombing by the RAF under the auspices of
Pointblank. Famous as Europe's principal
seaport, Hamburg was also a regional center of maritime and military production. Harris
did not seek to attack particular factories or shipping yards (such as the yard which produced the Bismarck). His object as stated in the official order was to "destroy Hamburg."102 The operation, known
as "Gomorrah,"
would take several nights to
accomplish - Harris did not think the city could be devastated in a single attack. The first raid came
on the night of July 24. 791 planes - Lancasters,
Halifaxes, Stirlings and
Wellingtons - attacked the city with 1541 tons of explosives.103
1500 people were killed and only twelve aircraft were lost, due largely to
Window, the
foil-chaff the British were using for the first time. In the first "cooperative" effort
of
Pointblank, 68 B-17s bombed precision targets the following day and on the 26th
as well.
On the 27th, the RAF attacked again with slightly less tonnage, but more than 3
million individual incendiaries. The result was
a classic firestorm of stupendous dimensions,
killing some 42,600 people.104 Bomber Command staged two more large incendiary
raids on the city, but by now
they were bombing rubble and the follow-up raids did little additional
damage. The report of the Hamburg
Police President was not only a scientific account of the effects of the
attack, but an emotive, graphic description of the experience of a firestorm
for the inhabitants a large city:
Women, especially, hesitated
to risk flight from the apparently safe shelter
through the flames into the unknown...people waited in the shelters until
the heat and the obvious danger compelled some immediate action...In
many cases...they were
already unconscious or
dead from carbon
monoxide poisoning...The scenes of terror which took place in the
firestorm area are indescribable.
Children were torn away from their
parents' hands by the force of the hurricane and whirled into the fire.
102Messenger, pp 128-29
103USSBS, p 7 I
104Kennett, pp 147-8;
Messenger, pp 129-31
People who thought they had
escaped fell down, overcome by the devouring force of the heat and died in an instant...105
For the rest of 1943 and into
the Spring of '44, the RAF continued its city campaign, sowing great
destruction on the residential sectors of Germany's cities. German warrelated industry continued to
thrive (for those workers who lost their homes, returning to work was often
therapeutic) while the shops, service-sector and non-essential industries
suffered most.106 An agent's report from inside Berlin told of the wholesale
ruin, but also of the people's astonishment that the factories were
untouched.107
Early in October, the US 8th
Air Force made its most ambitious raids yet, attacking
Schweinfurt again in a series of four raids.
This was the infamous "Black Week" and in its aftermath the 8AF was brought to a standstill. For the next six months the
future of precision bombing was in doubt. In the
final raid, 291 B-17s left from Britain.
At
Aachen, their fighter escort turned back, at which point the Luftwaffe launched
a
defensive attack of unprecedented ferocity.
Losses were grievous, with 60 aircraft shot
down on the final raid, and 148 destroyed in toto during Black Week. Having lost air
superiority to the Luftwaffe, the 8th would make no more deep penetrations into
Germany for the rest of 1943.
Inevitably, the appalling
American losses at Schweinfurt fueled Harris's contention
that the AAF was involved in a pointless "panacea-mongering"
strategy. The Americans' lack of flexibility had meant there were never any other options to pursue, and
Harris now urged the 8th to join him in attacking Berlin on a huge scale. The allure of Berlin was irresistible to Harris and Churchill and its psychological importance was far
greater in their minds than to the German military of political apparatus. Harris told Churchill in November that 19 German cities had been "virtually destroyed" and
that the Ruhr was
105SAO IV, Appendix 30
106USSBS, A Detailed Study of
the Effects of Strategic Bombing on Darmstadt, p 8 and Albert Speer
interrogation in SAO IV, App 36
107Michael Sherry, The Rise
of American Air Power (New Haven: Yale, 1987), p 156
"largely out." The coup de grace for Germany's will to war
was the destruction of Berlin. "We can wreck Berlin from end to end,"
Harris told Churchill, "if the USAAF will come in on it. It will cost between 400-500 aircraft. It will cost Germany the war."108
Arnold declined to
participate. He (along with Portal) was concerned that
Pointblank objectives -
including the destruction of the German fighter industry and the subsequent gaining of air superiority in preparation for Overlord - were being
ignored.
Harris was by now obsessed with punitive attacks on German cities, and Berlin
in
particular. Since he could not rely on
American assistance, Harris made yet another
proposal which did not include the 8AF in his calculations. Bomber Command would
now destroy Germany's largest remaining cities with its Lancasters only. The projected loss of Lancasters would be roughly equal to their projected production
rate. Germany would be all but defeated by April 1, 1944.
Overlord would be unnecessary:
Allowing a loss rate of 5% to
sorties which is what we must expect
bearing in mind the type of target we shall be attacking...this would cost
171 Lancasters per month which compares with a planned new production
of 212 Lancasters per month. This allows us no margin whatso-
ever...From this it appears that the Lancaster force alone should be
sufficient but only just sufficient to produce in Germany by April 1st
1944, a state of devastation in which surrender is inevitable...109
Virtually the entire Air
Staff - Harris's nominal superiors - were exasperated with
Bomber Command's C-in-C. Bottomley
replied to Harris on December 23, challenging Harris's statistics and formally disavowing area bombing as a viable
strategy. If Bomber Command was limited by night bombing to attacking cities, it could at least
attack those smaller cities in which critical Pointblank industries were located. Schweinfurt was the most important of these. Either in
concert with the Americans or alone, Harris was "invited" and "directed" to attack the ball bearing
facilities at Schweinfurt:
108Harris to Churchill, Nov
3, 1943 in SAO II, p 48
109SAO II, p 56
...your efforts should be
co-ordinated with and complementary to those of
the Eighth Air Force. The aim of this
force is to concentrate primarily on
the destruction of the German fighter aircraft industry and the ball-bearing
industry. Success of this task is vital
to the successful conduct of the
combined bomber offensive; the neutralising of the German Fighter Force
is certainly a pre-requisite to the successful launching of 'Overlord'...I am
to emphasize the fact that your night bomber forces would make the
greatest contribution by completely destroying those vital centres which
can be reached by day only at heavy cost; examples are Schweinfurt,
Leipzig and centres of twin-engined fighter industry...
Albert Speer was
"astonished" by the RAF's "vast and pointless area bombing"
and
was amazed that the 8AF did not return once more to Schweinfurt to eliminate it
once and for all "at whatever the cost."110 The Germans learned from the
Schweinfurt raids that the Allies bombed in fits and
starts, rarely staying with one target set, even when they stumbled upon a critical component of Germany's war economy. Speer feared that the strategic air forces would realize the vulnerability of Germany's electrical
power grid, but the British had judged it to be too redundant and robust for destruction. When attacks began on synthetic oil (one of the few truly essential industries which could
not be spread out sufficiently), and it seemed that Germany's war machine was on the brink of
collapse, Speer reassured his staff that the 8th would soon tire of this target set. "We have a powerful ally in this matter," Speer said. "That is to say, the enemy has an air
force general staff as well."111
After Black Week, the ball
bearing industry was further decentralized and when Bomber Command finally
bombed Schweinfurt under pressure from Hap Arnold and the Air Staff,
little further damage was done.
110Hastings, p 259
111Ibid, p 260
For not the last time Portal
- now converted along with Bufton and Bottomley to the
precision campaign - considered sacking Harris, but decided that Bomber
Command's
prestige was too great for its leader to be fired publicly. If Harris's city campaign
amounted to insubordination, he could always plead operational, tactical or
meteorological limitations. And the PM's support (now
waning a bit on the eve of Overlord) for Harris and his personal interest in the morale campaign were further reminders of
Harris's unique position amongst the commanders. He
could not simply be gotten rid of without concurrence from Churchill, and there was no reason to believe that this would
be forthcoming.
Ignoring the Schweinfurt
directive and the pleadings from his friend Arnold, Harris
now embarked on the great operation against Berlin which was designed to
utterly destroy the German will to wage war. Instead,
the "Battle of Berlin"* became the greatest debacle in RAF history, savaging aircraft and crews, wasting finite resources and
creating for the Luftwaffe a decisive victory. If Harris
had few allies left at the Air Staff, Churchill was still keenly interested in creating a Hamburg-style firestorm in Berlin.112 The
"Battle" of Berlin lasted from mid
November 1943 through the following March, when Eisenhower took direct command of all bombing forces in preparation for Overlord. Magdeburg and other cities were also raided in a vast campaign in which over 5,000 sorties
were flown.
Tactically, the campaign stretched Bomber Command and its navigational
technology to their limits. Crews were exposed to
steady night fighter attacks (as Kennett said, German fighters were enjoying a "renaissance") all the way to the capital,
which was itself defended by heavy AA.113 456 aircraft were destroyed in the campaign - loss
rates
112Ibid, pp 295-9
* British historians and RAF
personnel have used the curious appellation "Battle" to describe the
large city raids. This stems from Trenchard and
Spaight's contention that German cities, heavily defended by flak and fighters, were redoubts which "attacked" the invading bomber
forces, ostensibly attempting only to destroy the machinery of war, not kill
civilians indiscriminately. Thus the
literature has come to describe
the "Battle of Hamburg" and the "Battle of Cologne,"
etc. Thankfully, no one has described
the events of Feb 13-15, 1945 as the "Battle of Dresden." See Spaight, Bombing Vindicated p 51.
113Kennett, p 154
hovered between 6 and 12 per
cent, far above what any air force could sustain.114 March was the final month of Pointblank and the Berlin campaign. Harris had substituted one for the other, attacking no target cities listed in the January Pointblank
directive from Bufton while attempting to savage the German capital.
Bufton was again writing in official dispatches that Harris was totally outside the control of the Air Staff and not
cooperating in overall Allied strategy: "This
state of affairs cannot be allowed to continue during the critical months ahead..."115
Around this time, Spaatz
realized the potential of staging raids on Germany's
synthetic oil industry. Concentrated in
27 centers of major importance, synthetic oil was a vulnerable target which - if interdicted - would cripple German fighter and
mechanized ground units. Spaatz also had the
long-range fighter which would decimate the German defenses and give the 8AF clear air supremacy over the continent: the
P-51. Lastly, the 15th Air Force, stationed in Italy, could hit oil targets outside the range of
the 8th.
"Speer's nightmare" had come true, and even though the AAF was
committed to Overlord until September, Spaatz's modest oil campaign reaped "dramatic"
results. In June, the AAF devoted 11.6% of its sorties to oil.
In July this rose to 17% and August saw 16.4%.
But oil production fell dramatically from 927,000 tons in March to 472,000 in
June. Av-gas fell from 180,000 tons in April to a paltry 10,000 tons in August. The Luftwaffe could barely get airborne.116
Portal attempted to rein
Harris in and cooperate with the Americans by correctly
observing that Germany was "on a knife edge" due to the oil
attacks. Further squandering of resources by bombing morale would "prolong the war by several months at
least." Sir Charles gently chided Harris over the "magnetism" of German cities
and wanted reassurance that Harris was devoting his full efforts to the target set he had
been assigned.
Harris continued the morale campaign, despite the growing alarm amongst his
superiors
114Messenger, p 229 and
Hastings, p 304
115Messenger, p 150
116Ibid, pp 318-19
56
that Bomber Command was
rescuing Germany's military from imminent defeat. Harris shot another memo to Portal in which he complained of
"too many cooks" deciding strategy and contended that despite the
"diversions" of Overlord, Bomber Command had managed to destroy two
and one-half cities per month. He then
repeated his contention that oil was yet another phantom:
...in the past M.E.W.
[Ministry of Economic Warfare] experts have never
failed to overstate
their case on
'panaceas', e.g. ball-bearings,
molybdenum, locomotives, etc...The oil plan has already displayed similar
symptoms...117
On December 22, Portal told
Harris only that he was "profoundly disappointed that
you still appear to feel that the oil plan is just another 'panacea.'" He stressed that the
overriding concern of the strategic bombing forces was "to put out and
keep out of action the 11 synthetic plants in Central Germany."118 Unfortunately, Sir Charles
stopped just short of ordering Harris to
implement the oil plan. By late
December, Harris was behaving like a petulant child, complaining defiantly to
Portal that "I have no faith in anything that MEW says." He contended that the Ministry was
"amateurish, ignorant, irresponsible and mendacious." Portal chastised Harris's policy of
foot-dragging and excuses by saying "I should have thought that at least
you could have tried harder to destroy Schweinfurt." Harris derided the oil plan as "a quick,
clever, easy and cheap way out" and declared that he had "no faith...whatever
in this present oil policy." He
suggested that the best solution would be for him to resign. Portal chose now to give in with his own
"easy way out." "I
willingly accept your assurance," he wrote,
117Ibid, p 84
118Ibid, p 86. Italics in original.
that you will continue to do
your utmost to ensure the successful execution
of the policy laid down. I am very sorry
that you do not believe in it but it
is no use my craving for what is evidently unattainable. We must wait
until after the end of the war before we can know for certain who was
right and I sincerely hope that until then you will continue in command of
the force which has done so much towards defeating the enemy and has
brought such credit and renown to yourself and to the Air Force.119
Perhaps any other officer
displaying such insubordination would have been sacked,
and indeed Portal, Bottomley and Bufton came close to doing it. Portal seems the most timorous of the three - knowing what he should do, but fearing the consequences
(Harris had such enmity for Bufton, "an officer considerably junior to
myself," that the latter was virtually powerless to influence, much less order Harris). As Chief of the Air Staff, Sir Charles alone was answerable to Sinclair and the PM - two staunch supporters of
area bombing and Harris. Sinclair further
was the major representative for the RAF's official line: that Bomber Command raided only factories, military installations and
other precision targets. Harris and Bomber
Command, partly because of the official campaign of duplicity (though Harris himself thought this hypocritical) benefitted
immensely from the precision-bombing argument offered to the public. To have fired Harris (if that was even possible) would have opened up the entire RAF strategy to public scrutiny
and debate, with the war not yet won.
Paradoxically, at this time
area bombing was once again gaining currency within
the RAF and even the AAF. Operation
Thunderclap - a psychological warfare plan - was incubated in the summer of 1944 by the British Chiefs of Staff to be
implemented at a point when German surrender was imminent.
Mass bombing of Berlin and other eastern German cities would convince the Nazis that a guerilla war carried on after
formal surrender would be futile. Terror
bombing of civilians would comprise the
largest
119Ibid, p 93
58
component of Thunderclap and
for the first time, surrender was not the assumed end result. The bombing would constitute a message on the
eve of surrender rather than bring about final victory on its own.
Response to the proposal in
July was lukewarm. Portal and the Air
Staff were
against diverting bombers back to the phantom of "morale" and the
Joint Intelligence
Subcommittee agreed, adding that attacks on Berlin were still costly. The Director of
Plans summed up the general feeling by saying that "the game is not worth
the candle."
Thunderclap would be held in reserve until such time that massive morale
bombing might make a difference by creating confusion in the east and aiding the Red
Army. A final blow to Berlin, delivered by both air forces, would utterly destroy
its administrative functions and the flood of refugees from the raids would hamper troop
movements, preventing a speedy eastward reinforcement of the German army.120
The Americans were at first
dubious. Generals Charles Cabell,
director of plans,
and Jimmy Doolittle, now commanding the 8th AF, both suspected that the British
were trying to drag the AAF into area bombing and implicate the Americans in any
ethical backlash at the end of the war. Spaatz
had always shown ambivalence regarding the moral issues, and he now argued against
Thunderclap in seemingly ethical terms although his arguments were usually pragmatic or political. Like Doolittle and Cabell, he feared that the RAF wanted the AAF "tarred with the morale bombing aftermath
which we feel will be terrific."121 As with the RAF, the AAF was fighting its own
constant battle with the other services (and
within the Army itself) for autonomy and resources. Spaatz knew how important the public perception was in the US of a precision-oriented, even "humane" strategic bombing force which would ultimately gain victory
and save Allied lives as well as the lives of German civilians. Spaatz also rejected the British argument
120Ibid, pp 98-103; Hastings,
p 346; Messenger, p 185
121Ronald Schaffer,
"American Military Ethics in World War II: The Bombing of German
Civilians,"
Journal of American History 67:2, Sept 1980, p 325
(hereafter Schaffer); and Ronald Schaffer, Wings of Judgment (NY: Oxford
University Press, 1985), pp 83-4 (hereafter Wings)
that morale bombing could
somehow diminish the German military in the field or compel the government to surrender. The
general and Eisenhower were wary of Thunderclap as well as British discussions concerning the use of gas against Germany in retaliation for V-1 and V-2 attacks. Eisenhower repeated
Spaatz's purely military reasoning when he said "I will not be a party to so-called retaliation or use of gas. Let's for God's sake keep our eye on the ball and use some sense."122 These sentiments would not last
long.By January, Thunderclap took
on the guise of an intensive tactical operation designed to support the Soviet drive in the east. Attacks on Berlin, Breslau and other cities would aid the Red Army by blocking German reinforcements while lowering
the morale of civilian refugees. For bombing
on this scale, the AAF would have to be brought in, and the Soviets would have to be consulted at Yalta. Churchill
wanted to offer the Soviets evidence of military support in the east, and Portal agreed that while
oil was still the major priority, "a severe blitz will not only cause confusion in the
evacuation from the East but will also hamper the movement of troops from the West."123 In
preparing for likely inquiries from the Soviet
delegation, the PM asked Sinclair what plans the RAF had for "basting the
Germans in their retreat from Breslau." Sir
Archibald responded with a cautious note stressing that the retreating German
army was a target suitable for tactical air forces, both Anglo-American and
Soviet. The best use for heavy bombers
continued to be Germany's vulnerable oil facilities. As a sop to Churchill, Sinclair added that
"opportunities" might arise for bombing Berlin as well as Leipzig, Dresden and
Chemnitz, which are not only the administrative centres controlling the military and civilian movements but are also the main communications centres through which the bulk of the traffic moves...The possibility of these attacks being delivered on the scale necessary to have a critical effect on the situation in Eastern Germany is now
under examination.
122Wings, p 79
123SAO III, p 101
Churchill was not pleased
with the Air Minister's careful tone; he was interested in
a large-scale, punitive raid on Germany's remaining urban centers without deference to the priority on oil. He wrote to Sir
Archibald a terse note whose meaning was unmistakable:
I did not ask you last night
about plans for harrying the German retreat from Breslau. On the contrary, I asked
whether Berlin, and no doubt other large cities in East Germany, should not now be considered especially attractive
targets. I am glad that this is 'under
examination'. Pray report to me
to-morrow what is going to be done.124
The message was quite clear
to the Air Staff; on the 28th Bottomley and Spaatz
issued a new target set which included oil as first priority but listed in
second position
Berlin, Leipzig, Dresden and "associated cities where heavy attack will
cause great
confusion in civilian evacuation from the East and hamper movement of
reinforcements from other fronts." Harris had official sanction once again for his
area campaign, and Spaatz would now join him in a final, furious series of raids which would kill
thousands of civilians.
Within the U.S. Army Air
Forces (and before it the Air Corps and Air Service),
analyses of the relationship between strategic bombing and victory had been
taking place since the interwar period, when the American doctrine of precision bombing
evolved at the Air Corps Tactical School (ACTS).
At first embracing the doctrines of Douhet and Trenchard, the Air Corps steadily moved towards a strategy of precision bombing
as more cost-effective and militarily efficacious.
Further, American analyses of terror bombing in Spain and China found that the effects on morale were not only
limited, but that bombing an enemy's civilian population centers often raised morale and unified national
will.125
124Ibid, pp 102-3; Messenger,
p 185; Hastings, p 398
125For a comprehensive survey
of American strategic doctrine in the interwar period, see Wings, chapter two
and Kennett, pp 86-88
US observer groups in Europe
came to similar conclusions after the start of WWII, and by 1942 Alexander
Seversky would conclude in a book for a mass readership that the British terror
campaign was wasteful in its vast and pointless destructiveness:
Another vital lesson, one
that has taken even air specialists by surprise, relates to the behavior of
civilian populations under air punishment.
It had been generally assumed that aerial bombardment would quickly
shatter morale, causing deep
civilian reactions, possibly
even nervous derangements on a
disastrous scale. The progress of this
war has tended to indicate that this expectation was unfounded...
These facts are significant
beyond their psychological interest.
They mean that haphazard destruction of cities - sheer blows at morale -
are costly and wasteful in relation to the tactical results
obtained...Unplanned vandalism from the air must give way, more and more, to
planned, predetermined destruction. More
than ever the principal objectives will be the
critical aggregates of
electric power, aviation
industries, dock facilities,
essential public utilities and the like.126
The United States Strategic
and Tactical Air Forces (USSTAF) had, however been
bombing "blind" through clouds employing H2X, a radar navigation
device which
afforded a CEP of only two miles in poor weather. Arnold had directed in November
1943 that when weather prohibited precision, radar bombing would be used
against GAF
targets, but as the Americans made deeper penetrations into Germany, this rule was
expanded to include cities with "associated" military or industrial
targets. Thus, the 8AF had been involved in a semi-area campaign by default with results often similar
to the RAF's morale campaign. In April and May
of 1944, the 8th bombed Berlin
in a series of area attacks designed to bring about German surrender on the eve of
Overlord.127
While continuing the
precision campaign, Spaatz kept his options open by directing
the Special Planning Committee in February 1944 to study the future German
target set
126Alexander Seversky,
Victory Through Air Power (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1942), p 145
127Hastings, p 384; Messenger, p 151; Wings, pp 67-8
after the destruction of the
Luftwaffe. In an analysis which far
surpassed in scope and
method any similar study by the British, the SPC finally rejected morale as a
suitable
target. Morale was already low in German
cities, the Committee found, and there was no evidence that the social disruption would result in public pressure to end the
war. In fact, the bombing was increasing Nazi controls over the population, and there were no
viable political channels in Germany outside the party to negotiate with or surrender to
the Allies.128
Immediately after the Normandy landings, Spaatz - after consultations with George
Marshall, Hap Arnold and Robert Lovett (Assistant Secretary of War for Air) -
had plans drawn up for psychological warfare. The
subsequent operation called for undefended "virgin" towns to be attacked on a single day all across Germany. Fighters
would join in strafing transport targets and villages.
This came to be known as "Clarion" and was the subject of heated, emotional and ethically-based debate within the AAF.129 The
chief opponent of Clarion and other
terror campaigns planned by USSTAF and the RAF was a colonel named Richard Hughes, a British expatriate who joined the US Army after moving to the United States in 1929.
Hughes served on the Air War Plans Division, and exercised great care in US target selection for the 8AF, feeling that while
German civilians must be "made to suffer," they should not be subjected to promiscuous
bombing and strafing. Hughes criticized Clarion and
a similar plan named "Shatter" - designed by a team led by Colonel Lowell P. Weicker, USAR - on largely military and pragmatic grounds, but he also stressed the moral aspect. Pragmatically, Hughes rejected the utilitarian connection between terror and German surrender. Morale was a "will of the wisp" and terror attacks would give the Nazi propaganda machine a valid
grievance. Finally, the United
States
"represented in world thought an urge toward decency and better treatment of man by man." Hughes's
views were shared by Generals Lawrence Kuter and
128Wings, p 71
129Kennett, pp 161-2; Wings,
pp 73-79
Charles Cabell and Secretary
Lovett, who feared that the "inhumanity of indiscriminate
bombing" would lead to political problems for the AAF in Congress and
general
disapproval amongst the American polity.
Weicker continued to stress the value of
morale bombing, citing the terroristic effect of V-weapon attacks on England. Morale
bombing was a way to demonstrate the costs of war directly to the German
people.
"These Air Forces are not over here just to play cricket. Our Number One responsibility is to get on with winning the war, to shorten it as much as we can, and by so
doing, save Allied lives." Spaatz decided for
the time being not to implement Weicker's plan, citing the diversion of resources and Lovett's views on the political/ethical backlash
at home.130
Thunderclap elicited a
strongly negative reaction from many US officers, both on
moral and political grounds. General
Cabell wrote that the British plan "gives full reign to the baser elements of our people" and that the AAF should resist being
sucked into "baby killing schemes."131 General Kuter, the assistant chief of staff for war
plans also based his objections along
utilitarian grounds. Since German civilians
had less influence on their government than in a democracy, morale bombing
could hardly be expected to bring about a revolt. Kuter also resented the large
burden to be carried by USSTAF in the British plan; the AAF would be required
to do "the majority of the dirty work" despite its commitment to
precision bombing. General Arnold,
however, kept an "open mind" and would soon have terror-related
proposals of his own.
The "War-Weary Bomber
Project" was an American plan supported by Arnold
which called for filling older B-17s with 20,000 lbs of H.E. and sending them
in the
general direction of a V-site or "fortified" German city. The crew would bail out some distance from the target, after having set the controls on automatic
pilot. Arnold noted that hundreds of such War-Weary aircraft set loose all over Germany would have a tremendous effect on civilian morale.
Spaatz was dubious regarding the practicability of
130Wings, p 77
131Ibid, p 83; Sherry,
p 260; David Irving, The Destruction of Dresden (London: William Kimber, 1963),
p 110
the plan, but agreed that
there was no reason why the planes should not be launched
against cities with
"associated"
military targets. The
War-Weary project never
materialized, largely because the British feared German retaliation against
London.132
Clarion was carried out with
"indifferent" results, despite the protests of Ira Eaker,
who told Spaatz in an "eyes only" letter that such a campaign
"would absolutely convince the Germans that we are the barbarians they say we are, for it would be
perfectly obvious to them that this is primarily a large scale attack on civilians as, in fact,
it of course will be." Eaker contended that Clarion
was a waste, especially since the oil campaign was "the one thing where we really have the Hun by the neck." The day might come when such an attack on morale would reap results, but for Germany, that day had not yet arrived. In tones which seem both ethical and political, Eaker argued strongly that
"we should never allow the history of this war to convict us of throwing the bomber at the man
in the street."133
Thunderclap got under way in
modified form in February, with the 8th Air Force making the first major raid,
the "precision" bombing of Berlin. Despite
Doolittle's objections that the Berlin mission would be costly and have no terror value
since its citizens had been bombed for years, Spaatz ordered the 8th to raid
the capital on the third of the month.
Twenty-five thousand civilians perished.134
Dresden was the ultimate result of Thunderclap, although the
raid on this city was
not unique in inception or technique.
The attack was similar in effect to raids on several of Germany's other old cities built with wooden, closely-spaced
habitations such as Hamburg and Lubeck. Dresden had
been on Harris's list of remaining targets for months, and the Spaatz/Bottomley directive gave it new importance. On February 4, the Soviets formally asked for attacks on German communications in the east and
specifically mentioned Berlin and Leipzig. The raid
itself has been amply documented in David
132Wings, pp 85-6
133Ibid, p 92
134C & C III, P 726;
Sherry, P 260; Wings, pp 96-7
Irving's book and elsewhere:
on the evening of the 13th, some 800 RAF bombers attacked the city, with 400
from 8AF on the following day, ostensibly attacking marshalling yards, which by
the 15th were obscured by smoke and clouds during the second AAF attack. An exact or even close figure for the number
of dead will never be known, although David Irving's original estimate of
135,000 is certainly incorrect. Citing
the most recent data from East German and Soviet sources, Irving wrote to the
Times in 1966 to revise his figures.
The official toll was listed as 18,375 dead and 35,000 missing (many of
these may have been refugees). The
"expected" total for fatalities was roughly 25,000, although some
historians today put the figure at closer to 35,000.135
Even though the attack on
Hamburg may have killed more civilians, and Bomber
Command had been trying, with limited success, to create just these conditions
for years, Dresden was different for several reasons.
Shortly after the raid, an RAF air commodore briefed the press, telling reporters, among other things, that the attack was
designed to cause destruction in areas where refugees were gathering in large numbers, and
to disrupt relief supplies. An AP reporter wrote a
dispatch which stated that "Allied Air Chiefs have made the long awaited decision to adopt deliberate terror bombing of German
population centers as a ruthless expedient to hastening Hitler's doom."136 Somehow,
the story cleared the British censor and was printed in papers all
over America and broadcast in Europe and elsewhere. The official denial appeared in Reuters the
next day, but the damage was done; both the AAF and RAF were caught in a public
relations crisis. Richard Stokes once again rose in the House of Commons to
protest area bombing. The disease and
destruction in the cities the Allies would soon be occupying might be
impossible to overcome, Stokes pointed out.
He further decried the government's policy of creating a "crescendo
of destruction."137
135Dudley Saward, Bomber
Harris, The Story of Sir Arthur Harris (Doubleday, 1985), pp 297-8
136Messenger, p 87; Wings, p 99
137See Hansard Commons, v.
408: March 6, 1945
In the midst of growing
public disenchantment over Britain's role in the air war,
Churchill now sought to distance himself from a policy of which he was perhaps
the chief architect. On the 28th of March, the
Prime Minister addressed the morale bombing campaign in terms which suggested that he found it ethically
objectionable. The memo to Portal and the Chief of Staff would seem, to a casual reader, to be a pragmatic
and ethically-based challenge to Britain's major strategic contribution to the war:
29 March 1945. Prime Minister to General Ismay (for Chiefs
of Staff Committee) and the Chief of the Air Staff
It seems to me 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.
Otherwise we shall come into control
of an utterly ruined land. We shall not,
for instance, be able to get housing
materials out of Germany for our own needs because some temporary
provision would have to be made for the Germans themselves. The
destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of
Allied bombing. I am of the opinion
that military objectives must
henceforward be more strictly studied in
our own interests rather than that
of the enemy.
The Foreign Secretary has
spoken to me on this subject, and 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.138
Portal and Bottomley were
taken aback by this disingenuous signal from Churchill,
who now seemed to be washing his hands of a very dirty business. Bottomley showed the message to Harris, who replied that the PM's conversion was "an
insult" to the Air
Ministry and Bomber Command. Harris
made an argument for the morale campaign in
138SAO III, p 112
fundamentally utilitarian
terms, while curiously denying that Britain had been engaged in a
deliberately-planned terror campaign:
We have never gone in for
terror bombing...I...assume that the view under
consideration 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 so preserve the lives of Allied
soldiers.
Now Harris's argument took a
curious twist. While the utilitarian
justification for
violating noncombatant immunity usually runs along the lines that one is
proscribed from doing X unless the positive effect Y ensues, the Chief of Bomber Command argued
that it was unethical for him not to do X unless it could be proved that Y would not
result. The option of undertaking other means (e.g. precision bombing) with Y in mind was
never a possibility:
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...139
The Air Marshals and the
Chiefs of Staff refused to accept Churchill's effort at
separating himself from Bomber Command's long-standing policy. The PM was told that he would have to withdraw the minute and submit a more satisfactory one. This was done, with Churchill substituting a new message a few days later of a somewhat
more moderate tone:
139In Longmate, pp 345-6
It seems to me that the
moment has come when the question of the so
called 'area bombing' of German cities should be reviewed from the point
of view of our own interests. If we come
into control of an entirely ruined
land, there will be a great shortage of accommodation for ourselves and
our Allies: and we shall be unable to get housing materials out of
Germany for our own needs because some temporary provision would
have to be made for the Germans themselves.
We must see to it that our
attacks do not do more harm to ourselves in the long run than they do to
the enemy's immediate war effort. Pray
let me have your views.140
As to the growing public
misgivings over what was apparently a terror-bombing policy after all (and the
Prime Minister's sudden change of heart), Harris attributed the feelings of
shock to a misplaced sentimentality:
The feeling, such as there
is, over Dresden could be easily explained by any psychiatrist. It is connected with German bands and
Dresden shepardesses. Actually Dresden
was a mass of munition works, an intact Government centre, and a key
transportation point to the east. It is
now none of these things.141
Conclusions
By the end of the war, Germany's "heart" had almost ceased to beat. General
Erhard Milch, using the same metaphor, said after the war that the Bomber
Command
morale campaign "inflicted
grievous and bloody injuries upon us but the Americans
stabbed us to the heart."142 With a smaller force than Lindemann or Tizard
had
projected, Bomber Command had
savaged so many cities by the Spring of 1945 that
planners were running out of targets.
But to what end had over 55,000 aircrew lost their lives, and what was gained by killing hundreds of thousands of German
civilians? As we
140SAO III, p 117
141Longmate, op. cit.
142Hastings, p 408 
have seen, the closest Bomber
Command or the Air Staff ever came to strategic analysis of the morale campaign was the series of memos by Trenchard, the Co's and
others which purported to gauge the state of mind (and fortitude) of the German people. Their character and tenacity under bombing was judged to be Germany's critical weakness, which
if exploited would surely lead, somehow,
to surrender of the Reich. Britain
chose a "strategy" which was never focused, flailing out at the softest
targets Bomber Command could find, which endured the bombing on an ever increasing scale. The workers, despite what Cherwell surmised, continued to man the factories which were for the most
part on the peripheries of the large cities.
The means by which victory
would take place - riots, revolt, decline in productivity
- were never examined under
close sociological or psychological scrutiny.
Only Lord
Cherwell's argument regarding the behavior of de-housed workers approached a
reasoned (if completely speculative - he had misinterpreted data from Zuckerman's
studies at Hull) argument for what Bomber Command could hope to achieve. Other than the Cherwell minute, there was no reasoned, utilitarian rationale for the area campaign and
the deliberate killing of Germany's urban residents. One can reasonably suggest that such a strategy can be justified as long as the results are not yet known and when
other options have been exhausted: an experiment in terror is acceptable when the other
criteria are met (just cause) and when the evidence indicates that the good end achieved will
outweigh the harm done. (We should also remember Walzer's injunction of the "supreme
emergency,"
although Britain's supreme emergency ended or at least became less severe when
the
Soviets entered the war.) Evidence
gathered throughout the war made it clear even to
MEW and the Air Staff that despite the routine terror attacks on German cities,
production continued to rise.143 By 1943 MEW estimates showed that Bomber Command claims
of 143 Terraine has shown the
following figures: for tank production, 760 per month in early 1943, 1229 per
month in Dec '43, and 1669 in July 1944; for aircraft, Germany produced 15,288
in 1942, 25,094 in 1943 and 39,275 in 1944.
The German economy, unlike in Britain, had remarkable slack and produced
"guns and butter" for much of the war. See also USSBS Over-all Report (European War)
and USSBS, The Effects of Strategic Bombing on German Morale: v 1
70 having seriously disrupted
German production were fiction. Bomber
Command had preferred "intelligence" from dubious sources since the
beginning of the Ruhr campaign that conformed to its own predilections.144
Bomber Command slipped
gradually but relentlessly toward a strategy of terror
bombing from almost the beginning of the war.
After France fell and when Germany
demonstrated its inability to deliver a knockout blow, Britain was free to
develop the
means to deliver her own. The lessons
of the GAF's failure - that bombing can weld
people together as well as inure them to further suffering - never found their
way into
British planning (even though Churchill had recognized this, both in 1917 and
in his
memo to Portal). The limitations of a
tactical air force employed in terror bombing did,
however, drive Churchill to devote 1/3 of Britain's industrial resources to the production of strategic bombers.
Britain did not adopt terror
bombing simply because it was the only activity which
she could engage in with any success - the Admiralty constantly pressed for
bombers to aid in the war against U-boats, and others in the military argued for diversion
of bombers to North Africa and other theatres. The
morale campaign was, however, the only strategic contribution Britain could make for several years, at least until the Americans
could be brought in. Even after the entry of the
US, the specter of a debacle on the continent against an enemy even Trenchard admitted was superior was always an implicit
(and sometimes explicit) theme in British strategic thinking. The result was that the area campaign became the real panacea.
Deluded by its own internal
assessments of German morale, Harris and Bomber
Command became driven by a loose, uncritical assumption that morale bombing
would
crush the German war machine by punishing the very people the Chiefs of Staff
and the Air Staff said they wanted to influence - its workers. This "strategy" was never admitted in public and never fully articulated internally. It was ultimately found wanting but was
144Overy, p 144; SAO III, pp
302-3; Verrier, pp 320-2
continued because Harris
could not (and after the Spring of 1944 would not) switch to daylight/precision
raids. The other factor militating against
participating in the oil campaign was Churchill's desire for a punitive
campaign against Germany as a whole. The morale campaign was thus a method
without a clearly defined goal - the means employed became an end. Beyond its vaguely Trenchardian means,
Bomber Command never really had a strategic view until the disavowal of area
bombing by the Air Staff in 1944 and the embrace of Spaatz's oil campaign.
If the strategy of Bomber
Command was hard to detect, the ethical restraints against
killing non-combatants never seemed to enter the equation at all - at least
within the RAF.
Publicly, Sinclair invoked the rule of double effect to stave off
"incorrigible" MP's, but the argument was insincere. Civilian deaths
were not collateral, they were the central tenet of Bomber Command's "strategy."
Even here, Bomber Command could not come to terms with the consequences of breaking the jus in bello criterion against the
slaughter of non-combatants. If they were not
"innocents," but modern combatants in the "pre-fabricated battle," then a strictly punitive campaign could possibly have been
justified, even in just war terms. The internal argument, as
far as it went, was however that the very people being bombed would revolt (recalling the panic in 1917-1918 London after a
modest series of attacks by Gotha bombers) and demand an end to the war.145 Panic and "internal collapse"
would surely follow area bombing and in turn would mean defeat of the Nazis.
If there is scant evidence of
ethical misgivings over the morale campaign within the
RAF, and no evidence for a systematic analysis of the psychological effects of
aerial
bombardment, the situation
within the AAF
was very different.
Schaffer has
demonstrated convincingly that the "ethical" objections to area
bombing by the RAF
within USSTAF were often veiled political and pragmatic arguments. Arnold and Spaatz are represented by the official AAF history as moral agents who made strategic
decisions
145Kennett, pp 24-6
on both deontological and
utilitarian grounds. The American air
chiefs were worried
about the post-war world and how morale bombing would affect relations with the
occupied Germans. They were also,
however, concerned with the domestic American
perception of air power and the AAF's morally "clean"
precision-bombing heritage.
Spaatz, Arnold, and even Kuter and Lovett were prepared to use terror when it
would
make a difference in the surrender of the German state towards the end of the
war.
This as a more authentically utilitarian argument than had been formulated by
Bomber
Command and was similar in effect to USSBS findings after the war that gradual
and steadily increasing bombing of towns and cities made almost no impact on morale of
civilians. In fact, morale tended to be slightly higher in those cities which were
categorized as "heavily bombed" (i.e. 30,000 tons on average) than in those receiving a more
moderate tonnage (6,000).146 Repeated bombings of the same city also resulted in diminishing
returns.
True shock occurred in cities which were unmolested for long periods and
suddenly
received large-scale, savage blows, especially at night. The result was not civilian riots or demands for German surrender, however. Lethargy, fear, other minor psychiatric
disorders and anxiety were far more common.
As the SBS pointed out, controls in a
police state leave few avenues for protest and policy change.147
While the AAF, in the
internal critiques of Thunderclap and Clarion, had reached
the conclusion that terror bombing was not likely to have the desired effects,
the RAF
chose to bomb in the dark, without critical examination of its first principle
or a coherent strategy for its Air Marshals. Throughout
the war, the dialectic of morale bombing and victory was never subjected to any scrutiny in a formal way within the Air
Staff or Bomber Command.
146See USSBS Summary Report
(European War), p 22; USSBS Over-all Report (European War), p 96 and USSBS The
Effects of Strategic Bombing on German Morale: v 1 passim. Unfortunately, the detailed effects of civilians under bombing are beyond the scope of this paper, apart
from the broad lessons which were apparent to MEW, the Air Staff and the AAF
during the war. See also Janis.
147USSBS Over-all Report, pp 96-9
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The following bibliography
contains both citations listed in the thesis and sources
which served as general
background. Primary sources dealing with
the evolution of the
RAF morale bombing campaign are virtually non-existent in the United
States. The
official history (SAO) contains many primary sources in the form of personal
letters,
directives and memos, as well as appendices including an interview with Albert
Speer.
Messenger cited material from the Public Records Office at Kew, and it is
possible that
the PRO files will produce major work in the future on the internal RAF
debates.
Schaffer's Wings of Judgment, while lacking an ethical or analytical framework,
is an
invaluable work on the divergence between stated policy and actions within the
AAF.
The United States Strategic Bombing Survey represents the largest body of
primary
source material on both the economic and psychological effects of mass
bombardment
from the air.
H.R. Allen, The Legacy of
Lord Trenchard (London: Cassell & Co, 1972)
Allen Andrews, The Air
Marshals: The Air War in Western Europe (NY: William Morrow, 1970)
Uri Bialer, Shadow of the Bomber:
The Fear of Air Attack and British Politics, 1932-
1939 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1980)
P.M.S. Blackett, Fear, War,
and the Bomb (NY: McGraw Hill, 1948)
Brian Bond, Liddell Hart: A
Study of His Military Thought (London: Cassell & Co,
1977)
Angus Calder, The People's
War (NY: Pantheon 1969)
Roland Chaput, Disarmament in
British Foreign Policy (London: George Allen &
Unwin)
Winston Churchill, The Second
World War, Vol IV (1951)
______________, Their Finest
Hour, (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1949)
Wesley Frank Craven and James
Lea Cate, eds. The Army Air Forces in World War II
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948-1958), Vol I, "Plans and Early
Operations"
C & C II, "Europe:
Torch to Pointblank"
C & C III, "Europe:
Argument to V-E Day"
Gordon Daniels, A Guide to
the Reports of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, (London: Royal Historical
Society, 1981)
Giulio Douhet, The Command of
the Air (Office of Air Force History, 1983)
Meryl Fialka, International
Law and Allied Bombing of Civilians During World War II
(Unpublished Master's Thesis, University of Chicago Political Science
Department,
1955)
Noble Frankland, The Bombing
Offensive Against Germany (London: Faber and Faber, 1965)
Haywood Hansell, Jr.,The
Strategic Air War Against Germany and Japan: A Memoir (Office of Air Force
History: 1986)
Russell Hardin,
"Deterrence and Moral Theory," Canadian Journal of Philosophy:
supplementary volume 12, pp 161-193
Arthur Harris, Bomber
Offensive, (London: Collings, 1947)
Max Hastings, Bomber Command:
The Myths and Reality of the Strategic Bomber Offensive 1939-1945 (London:
Michael Joseph 1980)
J. Bryan Hehir," Ethics
and Strategy: The Views of Selected Stratetgists" (Unpublished
Paper)
F. A. Iremonger, William
Temple (Oxford University Press: 1948)
David Irving, The Destruction
of Dresden (London: William Kimber,
1963)
Irving L. Janis, Air War and
Emotional Stress (Rand Report: 1955)
Brian Johnson and H. I.
Cozens, Bombers: The Weapon of Total War (London: Methuen, 1984)
James T. Johnson, Can Modern
War Be Just? (New Haven: Yale 1984)
______________, "Recent
Strategic Developments: A Critical Overview" (unpublished paper)
R.V. Jones, Most Secret War:
British Scientific Intelligence 1939-1945 (London: Hamish Hamilton ,1978)
Lee Kennett, A History of
Strategic Bombing (New York: 1982)
Basil Lidell Hart, The
Revolution in Warfare (London: Faber and Faber)
Louis Lochner, ed., The
Goebbels Diaries, 1942-1943 (Garden City: Doubleday, 1948)
Norman Longmate, The Bombers:
The RAF Offensive Against Germany 1939-1945 (London: Hutchinson, 1983)
Charles Messenger, 'Bomber'
Harris and the Strategic Bombing Offensive (NY: St Martin's, 1984)
Martin Middlebrook, The
Battle of Hamburg: Allied Air Forces Against a German City in 1943 (NY:
Scribner's, 1981)
R.J. Overy, The Air War,
1939-1945 (Stein and Day, 1980)
The Parliamentary Debates
(Hansard), House of Commons (HM Stationery Office) v
379
Hansard Commons*** Mar 31 and May 27, 1943 Hansard
Commons, v. 408
The Parliamentary Debates
(Hansard), House of Lords (HM Stationery Office) v. 130 Barry Powers, Strategy
Without Slide-Rule (London: Croom Helm, 1976)
George Quester, Deterrence
Before Hiroshima (New York: John Wiley, 1966)
Paul Ramsey, The Just War:
Force and Political Responsibility (New York: Scribner's
1968)
Hans Rumpf, The Bombing of
Germany (NY: Holdt, Rinehart & Winston, 1963)
Fritz Sallagar, The Road to
Total War: Escalation in World War II (Santa Monica: Rand Corporation Report,
1969)
Dudley Saward, Bomber Harris,
The Story of Sir Arthur Harris (Doubleday, 1985)
Ronald Schaffer,
"American Military Ethics in World War II: The Bombing of German
Civilians," Journal of American
History 67:2, Sept 1980
______________, Wings of
Judgement (NY: Oxford University Press, 1985)
Alexander Seversky, Victory
Through Air Power (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1942)
Michael Sherry, The Rise of
American Air Power (New Haven: Yale, 1987)
Malcolm Smith, British Air Strategy Between the Wars
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1984)
C.P. Snow, Science and
Government (Harvard University Press: 1961)
J. M. Spaight, Air Power and
the Cities (London: Longman's, Green & Co, 1930) ___________, Bombing
Vindicated (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1944)
Lord Tedder, With Prejudice (London: Cassell & Co, 1966)
John Terraine, The Right of
the Line, The Royal Air Force in the European War, 1939-
1945 (London: Hodeder and Stoughton 1985)
Lord Sir Robert Vansittart,
Black Record: Germans Past and Present (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1941)
Anthony Verrier, Bomber
Offensive (London: Pan Books, 1974)
United States Strategic
Bombing Survey, Air Force Rate of Operations (Military Analysis Division)
USSBS, Area Studies Division
Report (Area Studies Division: Jan, 1947)
USSBS, Bombing Accuracy,
USAAF Heavy and Medium Bombers in the ETO (Military Analysis Division: Nov,
1945)
USSBS, The Defeat of the
German Air Force (Military Analysis Division: Jan, 1947) USSBS, Description of
RAF Bombing (Military Analysis Division: Jan, 1947)
USSBS, A Detailed Study of the Effects of Area Bombing on Lubeck
USSBS, A Detailed Study of
the Effects of Strategic Bombing on Darmstadt
(Area Studies Division: Jan, 1947)
USSBS, A Detailed Study of
the Effects of Strategic Bombing on Hamburg (Area Studies Division: Jan, 1947)
USSBS, The Effects of
Strategic Bombing on German Morale: v 1, v 2, (Morale Division: May, 1947)
USSBS Over-all Report
(European War, September, 1945)
USSBS Summary Report
(European War, September, 1945)
Michael Walzer, Just and
Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books 1977)
D.C. Watt, "The Air
Force View of History," Quarterly Review, v 300
Sir Charles Webster and Noble
Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany, 1939-1945 , Vol 1, "Preparation"
SAO II, "Endeavor"
SAO III, "Victory"
SAO IV, Appendices
