The theory
of strategic heavy bombing was developed at the end of the First
World War. By the 1930s leaders of the the Luftwaffe
and the Royal Air Force believed that mass
long-range bombing raids had the potential to force the enemy to surrender.
However,
at the beginning of the Second World War all
air forces had a policy of attacking military targets only. This changed
in September 1940, when the Luftwaffe
began large-scale night raids on London,
Liverpool, Birmingham,
Plymouth, Bristol,
Glasgow, Southampton,
Coventry, Hull,
Portsmouth, Manchester,
Belfast, Sheffield,
Newcastle, Nottingham
and Cardiff. Night-time raids dramatically
reduced accuracy and it became impossible for pilots to concentrate
on bombing military targets.
The Royal
Air Force responded by carrying out night-raids on Germany.
Poorly trained for this kind of work, pilots lacked the navigational
aids for this task. By the end of 1941 the RAF had dropped 45,000
tons of bombs on Germany but these attacks failed to bring the end
of the war closer.
Charles
Portal of the British Air Staff argued for a change of policy.
He advocated that entire cities and towns should be bombed. Portal
claimed that this would quickly bring about the collapse of civilian
morale in Germany. When Air Marshall Arthur
Harris became head of RAF Bomber Command in February 1942, he
introduced a policy of area bombing (known
in Germany as terror bombing) where entire cities and towns were targeted.
Using incendiary
bombs to illuminate targets, the RAF concentrated on the heavy
industrial areas of the Ruhr. Harris also ordered massive attacks
on the small coastal cities of Lubeck and Rostock. Although a great
deal of damage was done these raids had little impact on the German
economy or civilian morale.
Massive air attacks on
Germany continued and in May 1942 Arthur Harris
ordered a 1,050 bomber raid on Cologne.
This involved the Royal
Air Force using every aircraft available and in two hours
over a third of the city was badly damaged.
The introduction of the
Avro Lancaster in the second-half of 1942
improved the effectiveness of strategic bombing. This new plane had
oboe, an improved navigational device based
on radar, and this increased bombing accuracy.
The use of pathfinders and the employment
of the Mosquito as a high-altitude photo-reconnaissance
aircraft also helped improve the success of these raids.
Arthur
Harris demanded that Winston Churchill
provided more resources for Bomber Command. Along with Charles
Portal he argued that if he had 6,000 bombers at his disposal
he would force the German government to surrender and there would
be no need for an Allied invasion of Europe.
In 1942
scientists in Britain developed an idea that they believed would confuse
Germany's radar system. Given the codename
of Window the strategy involved the Pathfinder
Force dropping strips of metallised paper
over the intended target. By early 1943 a series of tests had shown
Bomber Command that Window would be highly successful. However, the
British government feared that once the secret was out, the Germans
would use it to jam Britain's radar system. It was not until July
1943 that permission was finally given to use Window during the bombing
of Hamburg.
Window
was a great success and was employed by the RAF
for the rest of the war. The Germans were forced to change its strategy
in dealing with bombing raids. As Air Marshall Arthur
Harris later pointed out: "The Observer Corps now plotted
the main bomber stream and orders were broadcast to large numbers
of fighters with a running commentary giving the height, direction
and whereabouts of the bomber stream, and of the probable target for
which it was making or the actual target which it was attacking."
Throughout 1943 the Royal
Air Force bombed German cities at night while the United
States Army Air Force (USAAF) under Carl
Spaatz used its B-17 planes for its precision
daylight operations. In August 1943 repeated incendiary
attacks on Hamburg caused a firestorm
and 50,000 German civilians were killed. By the end of 1943 the Allied
air forces had dropped a total of 200,000 tons of bombs on Germany.
In early 1944 the USAAF
introduced the long-range Mustang P-51B
fighter. This new aircraft could escort bombers all the way to targets
deep inside Germany. It was an outstanding combat plane and inflicted
considerable damage on the Luftwaffe.
Despite objections from
Arthur Harris and Carl
Spaatz, the bombing campaign changed during the summer of 1944.
As part of Operation Overlord, the task
of the RAF and the USAAF
was to destroy German communications and supply lines in Europe. The
destruction of German oil production was also made a priority target
and by September, 1944, the Luftwaffe's fuel supply had been reduced
to 10,000 tons of octane out of a monthly requirement of 160,000 tons.
By the end of 1944 the
Allies had obtained complete air supremacy over Germany and could
destroy targets at will. On 3rd February, 1,000 bombers of the United
States Army Air Force killed an estimated 25,000 people in Berlin.
Arthur
Harris now devised Operation Thunderclap, an air raid that would
finally break the morale of the German people. To enable maximum impact
to take place Harris chose Dresden as
his target. This medieval city had not been attacked during the war
and was virtually undefended by anti-aircraft
guns. On 13th February 1945, 773 Avro Lancaster
bombers attacked Dresden. During the next two days the USAAF
sent 527 heavy bombers to follow up the RAF
attack. The resulting firestorm killed
around 135,000 people.
The United
States Army Air Force strategic bombing campaign against Japan
was also stepped up. The large number of Japanese buildings made of
wood made it easy for the bombers to create firestorms.
On the 9th and 10th March 1945, a raid on Tokyo devastated the city.
This was followed by attacks on other Japanese cities.
By the summer of 1945 the
USAAF was ready to mount its final strategic bombing campaign. On
6th August 1945, a B29 bomber dropped an
atom bomb on Hiroshima.
Japan continued to fight and a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki
three days later. On 10th August the Japanese surrendered. The Second
World War was over.
(1)
In his report Readiness For War, Edgar
Ludlow-Hewitt, head of Bomber Command, explained the problems
that RAF pilots would have to overcome during
bombing raids on the enemy (March,
1939)
The
mission may often be flying above cloud until close to its target,
when they will come down and must pick up the target with as little
delay as possible. The complicated and congested appearance of an
industrial area is notoriously most confusing to crews of aircraft,
and it is impossible to provide them with too much assistance in picking
out their particular objective from the tangled mass of detail.
(2)
The
Manchester Guardian (24th May, 1940)
Bombing attacks by the R.A.F. Have been extended from the German advance
guard in France to Leipzig, some 400 miles away across Germany. The
latest Air Ministry bulletins report successful bombing of troop concentrations,
military transport, on roads and railways, including an ammunition
train, the headquarters of a German armoured division, and a power
station.
A German ammunition train
was blown up, other trains were derailed and set on fire, tracks were
derailed and set on fire, tracks were demolished, and the enemy's
road and rail communications over a wide area were interrupted in
the course of extensive operations by the R.A.F. bomber command on
Wednesday night. Objectives attacked included railway junctions, marshalling
yards, troop convoys, and road and rail bridges in many parts of North-West
Germany and similar targets in the occupied territory of Belgium immediately
behind the battle area.
(3)
Winston Churchill, letter to Charles
Portal (29th August 1941)
The loss of seven Blenheims out of seventeen in the daylight attack
on merchant shipping and docks at Rotterdam is more severe. Such losses
seem disproportionate to an attack on merchant shipping not engaged
in vital supply work. The losses in our bombers have been very heavy
this month, and Bomber Command is not expanding as was hoped. While
I greatly admire the bravery of the pilots, I do not want them pressed
too hard.
(4)
William
Leahy, ambassador
to Vichy
government,
wrote about the British policy of
area bombing in his autobiography, I Was There (1950)
British propaganda was advertising the prospect of fatally injuring
Germany's morale by bombing attacks. This presupposed a lack of courage
on the part of the Germans not justified by either past German history
or their present performance, or by the reaction of Englishmen to
the destructive Blitz of England the preceding year.
British bombers made a
destructive raid on the Renault auto works in the northern suburbs
of Paris on the night of March 3, killing 500 and injuring 1,200,
mostly non-combatants. Violent anti-British feeling flared immediately
in both the occupied and unoccupied zones of France.
(5)
Joseph Goebbels described the bombing
of Berlin in his diary (4th April, 1942)
It is horrible. One can well imagine how such an awful bombardment
affects the population. We can't get away from the fact that the English
air raids have increased in scope and importance; if they can be continued
for weeks on these lines, they might conceivably have a demoralizing
effect on the population.
(6)
In his diary Joseph
Goebbels recorded how
Adolf Hitler had decided to increase the terror bombing attacks
on Britain (25th April, 1942)
He said 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 centres, health resorts and civilian resorts must be
attacked now. There is no other way of bringing the English to their
senses. They belong to a class of human beings with whom you can only
talk after you have first knocked out their teeth.
(7)
In the summer of 1942 the RAF began dropping leaflets on Nazi
Germany. Although the
leaflet was signed by Arthur Harris he
later claimed that he was not the person who had written it.
We in Britain know quite enough about air raids. For ten months your
Luftwaffe bombed us. First you bombed us by day. When we made this
impossible, they came by night. Then you had a big fleet of bombers.
Your airmen fought well. They bombed London for ninety-two nights
running. They made heavy raids on Coventry, Plymouth, Liverpool, and
other British cities. They did a lot of damage. Forty-three thousand
British men, women and children lost their lives; Many of our most
cherished historical buildings were destroyed.
You thought, and Goering
promised you, that you would be safe from bombs. And indeed, during
all that time we could only send over a small number of aircraft in
return. But now it is just the other way. Now you send only a few
aircraft against us. And we are bombing Germany heavily.
Why are we doing so? It
is not revenge-though we do not forget Warsaw, Belgrade, Rotterdam,
London, Plymouth and Coventry. We are bombing Germany, city by city,
and even more terribly, in order to make it impossible for you to
go on with the war. That is our object. We shall pursue it remorselessly.
City by city; Liibeck, Rostock, Cologne, Emden, Bremen; Wilhelmshaven,
Duisburg, Hamburg - and the list will grow longer and longer. Let
the Nazis drag you down to disaster with them if you will. That is
for you to decide.
In fine weather we bomb
you by night. Already 1000 bombers go to one town, like Cologne, and
destroy a third of it in an hour's bombing. We know; we have the photographs.
In cloudy weather we bomb your factories and shipyards by day. We
have done that as far away as Danzig. We are coming by day and by
night. No part of the Reich is safe.
I will speak frankly about
whether we bomb single military targets or whole cities. Obviously
we prefer to hit factories, shipyards, and railways. It damages Hitler's
war machine most. But those people who work in these plants live close
to them. Therefore, we hit your houses and you. We regret the necessity
for this. The workers of the Humboldt-Deutz, the Diesel-engine plant
in Cologne, for instance-some of whom were killed on the night of
May 30 last-must inevitably take the risk of war. Just as our merchant
seamen who man ships which the U-boats (equipped with Humboldt-Deutz
engines) would have tried to torpedo. Were not the aircraft workers,
their wives and children, at Coventry just as much 'civilians' as
the aircraft workers at Rostock and their families? But Hitler wanted
it that way.
It is true that your defences
inflict losses on our bombers. Your leaders try to comfort you by
'telling you that our losses are so heavy that we shall not be able
to go on bombing you very much longer. Whoever believes that will
be bitterly disappointed. I, who command the British bombers, will
tell you what our losses are. Less than 5 per cent of the bombers
which we send over Germany are lost. Such a percentage does very little
even to check the constant increase ensured by the ever-increasing
output of our own and the American factories.
America has only just entered
the fight in Europe. The squadrons, forerunners of a whole air fleet,
have arrived in England from the United States of America. Do you
realize what it will mean to you when they bomb Germany also? In one
American factory alone, the new Ford plant at Willow Run, Detroit,
they are already turning out one four-engined bomber able to carry
four tons of bombs to any part of the Reich every two hours. There
are scores of other such factories in the United States of America.
You cannot bomb those factories. Your
submarines cannot even try to prevent those Atlantic bombers from
getting here; for they fly across the Atlantic.
Soon we shall be coming
every night and every day, rain, blow or snow-we and the Americans.
I have just spent eight months in America, so I know exactly what
is coming. We are going to scourge the Third Reich from end to end,
if you make it necessary for us to do so. You cannot stop it, and
you know it.
You have no chance. You
could not defeat us in 1940, when we were almost unarmed and stood
alone. Your leaders were crazy to attack Russia as well as America
(but then your leaders are crazy; the whole world thinks so except
Italy).
How can you hope to win
now that we are getting even stronger, having both Russia and America
as allies, while you are getting more and more exhausted ?
Remember this: no matter
how far your armies march they can never get to England. They could
not get here when we were unarmed. Whatever their victories, you will
still have to settle the air war with us and America. You can never
win that. But we are doing so already now.
One final thing: it is
up to you to end the war and the bombing. You can overthrow the Nazis
and make peace. It is not true that we plan a peace of revenge. That
is a German propaganda lie. But we shall certainly make it impossible
for any German Government to start a total war again. And is not that
as necessary in your own interests as in ours?
(8)
On
3rd November, 1942, Charles Portal produced
a report on developing a strategy to defeat Nazi
Germany.
It is difficult to estimate the moral consequences of a
scale of bombardment which would far transcend anything within human
experience. But I have no doubt whatever that against a background
of growing casualties, increasing privations and dying hopes it would
be profound indeed.
I am convinced that an
Anglo-American bomber force based in the United Kingdom and building
up to a peak of 4,000-6,000 heavy bombers by 1944 would be capable
of reducing the German war potential well below the level at which
an Anglo-American invasion of the Continent would become practicable.
Indeed, I see every reason to hope that this result would be achieved
well before the combined force had built up to peak strength.
(9)
Arthur Harris, wrote about Window
in his autobiography, Bomber Command (1947)
The main objection to the use of "Window" (the strips of
metallised paper) which proved to be the most important and effective
of all the weapons used against enemy radar, continued to be the fear
of its effect on our own defences. It was hoped that our own radar
would be developed to the point where the strips of paper would not
cause any very serious interference, but even so, defensive radar
might never be quite so effective after its introduction as before.
When I continually pressed for the introduction of this weapon, other
objections were also made. It appeared that we were short of suitable
plant for the manufacture of the strips in quantity, and that it would
be very difficult to get priority for the supply of aluminum needed.
There can be little doubt that if we had been able and allowed to
use this weapon in the first months of 1943 we should have saved hundreds
of aircraft and thousands of lives and would have much increased the
accuracy of our bombing.
There was every reason
to believe that if the authorities would only allow us to drop strips
of metallised paper during our attacks we should hopelessly confuse
the enemy's radar on which he relied for the control of his night
fighters and the accuracy of his gunfire. Early in 1943 there had
already been developed a suitable form of this weapon for jamming
the enemy's ground control stations, radar-sighted guns, and airborne
radar for interception. And we had already worked out the quantity
of strips of paper that would be required, the rate at which it should
be dropped, and the areas over which it should be released. It cannot
be said that there was ever an occasion when we did not need to use
this weapon, but we needed it as much as ever before at the end of
July, 1943, and it was just at that time that the Air Ministry after
I had urged the use of this weapon at repeated intervals for many
months, decided that it was now possible to accept the risk of the
enemy using the same weapon against our own defences. The strips of
paper-they were given the code name "Window" - were dropped
for the first time on the night of July 24th-25th. The target was
Hamburg, beyond Oboe range.
(10)
In Italy in 1943 Bernard
Montgomery commented on the importance
of air support during modern battles.
I believe that the first and great principle of war is
that you must first win your air battle before you fight your land
and sea battle. If you examine the conduct of the campaign from Alamein
through Tunisia, Sicily and Italy you will find I have never fought
a land battle until the air battle has been won. We never had to bother
about the enemy air, because we won the air battle first.
The second great principle
is that Army plus Air has to be so knitted that the two together from
one entity. If you do that, the resultant military effort will be
so great that nothing will be able to stand against it.
The third principle is
that the Air Force command. I hold that it is quite wrong for the
soldier to want to exercise command over the air striking forces.
The handling of an Air Force is a life-study, and therefore the air
part must be kept under Air Force command.
The Desert Air Force and
the Eighth Army are one. We do not understand the meaning of "army
cooperation". When you are one entity you cannot cooperate. If
you knit together the power of the Army on the land and the power
of the Air in the sky, then nothing will stand against you and you
will never lose a battle.
(11)
Arthur Coningham had doubts about the
use of strategic bombing during the
Allied invasion of Europe in 1944.
The bombing of friendly towns during the campaign, and the insistence
by the Army Commanders that it was a military necessity caused me
more personal worry and sorrow than I can say. My resistance, apart
from humanitarian grounds, was due to a conviction, since confirmed
that in most cases we were harming Allies and ourselves eventually
more than the enemy. I thought, also, of the good name of our forces,
and particularly of the Air Force. It is a sad fact that the Air Forces
will get practically all blame for destruction which, in almost every
case, was due to Army demands. On many occasions, owing to the organization
of command, I was over-ruled and then came the "blotting"
by strategic bombers who, on their experience with German targets,
tended to over hit. Ample factual evidence will now be forthcoming,
and I hope that, in future, it will not be thought that the sight
and sound of bombers, and their uplift effect on morale, is proportional
to the damage they do to the enemy.
(12)
Arthur Harris, wrote about the decision
to concentrate on Operation Overlord rather
than the bombing of German cities in his autobiography, Bomber
Command (1947)
Tactical bombing of the German lines of communication was very far
from being our sole commitment. Within a few days of the landing in
Normandy we were called upon to take part in a long campaign against
German synthetic oil plants in Germany and, as soon as the first flying
bombs were launched, to give very high priority to the new flying
bomb launching sites and supply depots in the Pas de Calais. Besides
this there was an even more urgent call to destroy the enemy's large
fleet of E-boats and other
light naval craft in the Channel which the Navy thought an extremely
serious threat to the invading army's sea communications.
(13)
Winston Churchill, memorandum to Air
Marshall Arthur Harris (28th March 1945)
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, should be reviewed. Otherwise
we shall come into control of an utterly ruined land. We shall not,
for instance, be able to get housing material out of Germany for our
own needs because some temporary provision would have to be made for
the Germans themselves. 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.
(14)
Arthur Harris, Bomber Offensive
(1947)
In spite of all that happened
at Hamburg, bombing proved a comparatively humane method. For one
thing, it saved the flower of the youth of this country and of our
allies from being mown down by the military in the field, as it was
in Flanders in the war of 1914-1918.
(15)
Noble Frankland, speech on the morality of area
bombing at the Royal United Service Institution (13th December
1961)
The great immorality open to us in 1940 and 1941 was to lose the war
against Hitler's Germany. To have abandoned the only means of direct
attack which we had at our disposal would have been a long step in
that direction.
(16)
Studs
Terkel interviewed John
Kenneth Galbraith about his experiences during the Second
World War for his book, The Good War (1985)
There had been two broad
strategies. The British bombed at night and went for the central cities,
because that was all they could find. Naturally, working-class areas
were the most damaged. The middle classes lived on the outskirts and
were hardly touched. This was true of most cities, ours and theirs.
In general, poor people lived in the center and the affluent lived
on the edges. It was the East End of London that was hardest hit by
the Luftwaffe. Or a working-class city
like Coventry. The same thing went for German cities.
American strategy involved
daylight raids. We aimed for the plants themselves. The problem was
targeting. In a large number of cases, we couldn't hit them. There
was a saying in 1945: We made a major onslaught on German agriculture.
I don't want to exaggerate.
Some of the big plants were hit. One in central Germany, which produced
synthetic fuels, was hit repeatedly. The attacks on the German oil
supply had a considerable effect on the mobility of their ground forces.
They were only successful because it was an enormous plant covering
acres and acres. And we hit it repeatedly. The Germans had some hundreds
of thousands of people at work repairing that plant all the time.
We concluded that, on the
whole, the Japanese industry did not have the same recovery capacity
as the German. When the Japanese war plants were hit, they were more
likely to stay out of production. You have to remember that from 1941
to 1945, Japan was a very small country with an equally small industrial
base. It was stretched very tight and had little of the resilience
of the German economy.
Yet the fire bombing of
Japanese cities was not a decisive factor in the war. The war in Asia
was won by the hard, slow progress up from the south and across the
Pacific.
All of war is cruel and
unnecessary, but the bombings made this one especially so. The destruction
of Dresden was unforgivable. It was done very late in the war, as
part of a military dynamic which was
out of control and had no relationship to any military needs.
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