from WHEN MEN LOST
FAITH IN REASON: Reflections on War and Society in the Twentieth Century
By H. P. Willmott
Strategic Bombing
The protection of ground and naval forces from significant
attack from the air, the wrecking of German lines of communication into
Normandy before the landing, and the harassment of enemy formations either
making their way forward or on the battlefield were the main contributions made
by air power to Allied success in northwest Europe in 1944. Without these
contributions, whatever success the Allies commanded would have been much more
dearly bought, and, indeed, it is doubtful if without command of the skies the
invasion of France could have been attempted. This was all very different from
the bailiwick of air power in 1918, though in terms of definition of missions,
roles, doctrine, organization, and tactics air power had not really changed
very much in the intervening years. Certainly air forces had established
themselves as equal in importance to the other two services, even if
recognition and status was denied in many countries. But the real point about
air power and northwest Europe in 1944 lies in the line of analysis that
suggests that long-range fire and air strikes against reserves (have been) only
one part of an overall scheme of combat operations in the past, the argument
being that in the 1991 campaign these were the primary means of achieving the
war’s aims the trend away from close combat is clear. 10 It is not too much to argue that in the
Normandy campaign air power demonstrated an ability that can be recognized in
any consideration of the 1991 campaign, albeit at shorter range and to less
effect than was the case in 1991. Moreover, in 1944 air power shared with
artillery the responsibility and credit for the breaking of German offensive
and defensive power: fire was not the monopoly of air power, and effective fire
most certainly was not the preserve of air forces. But the wider point is
clear. At the battle of the Somme in 1916 losses between the offense and
defense were roughly equal, but at Normandy in 1944 the German defense incurred
twice the losses of the Allies: the critical point was that the imbalance of
losses reflected Allied material preponderance and ability to strike from the
air.
But if air power was critical in the victories that were won
on the ground and in the overall balance of losses saved lives, air power was
to be dependent upon the ground forces in one area of operations. The clearing
of France and most of Belgium had the effect of turning part of the German air
defense system, and it brought to continental bases fighters and strike
aircraft that could support the heavy bomber offensive against the German
homeland. This offensive, after the distraction of the Normandy commitment
throughout the summer, was resumed in full earnestness after September, and its
scale is illustrated by the fact that between 1 January and 26 April 1945 the
Eighth U.S. Air Force flew 55 thousand-bomber raids. Between 19 February and 4
March 1945 it flew nothing other than thousand-bomber raids, while RAF Bomber
Command, with operations on 81 days and 100 nights, on average put 495 heavy
bombers into the air in any 24-hour period.
The obvious question, which provoked bitter argument in the
two decades after the end of the war, was what the strategic bombing offensive
achieved. Extreme positions can be discounted, but in seeking to attempt to
answer this question one is confronted by one very awkward fact of life. It is
well known that German war production reached its peak in August September
1944. What is less well known is that
the peak of German distribution of war material was in October 1943. Given the fact that it was in that same month
that U.S. heavy bombers met defeat over Schweinfurt and RAF Bomber Command had
registered precious little real damage by that time, it is clear that the
German distribution system was in decline even before the strategic bombing campaign
began to inflict telling, cumulative damage on the German industrial,
transportation, and social infrastructures. Much the same was true of the
campaign against the Japanese home islands. The U.S. strategic bombing campaign
began in June 1944 from airfields in southern China, but it was not until
November 1944 that it started on any scale, and before March 1945 it was
singularly ineffective. It was only after March 1945, when B-29 Superfortresses
began to become available in significant numbers and the Americans adopted
low-level area bombing, that this effort began to register telling results. Yet
for the most part this effort was directed against redundant, surplus
industrial capacity, because factories were already in end-run production.
Moreover, the one alternative to an offensive designed to
destroy the enemy’s capacity to make war the enemy’s willingness to make war also
obstinately fails to provide evidence of the effectiveness of the strategic
bombing offensive. Neither Germany nor Japan showed any inclination to consider
ending the war because of bombing, and in neither country was there any real
sign of a collapse of civilian morale as a result of the Allied air offensive,
though perhaps the wonder of this was not that it did not occur but that
certain people had ever considered it possible in the first place. The totality
of war, the knowledge that the issue at stake was national survival, and the
conformity imposed upon German and Japanese societies on account of their
political systems precluded the fragmentation of morale.
In an obvious sense, therefore, it is possible to portray
the effect of the strategic bombing campaigns primarily in negative terms. The
strategic bombing offensive clearly prevented German war production being
greater than what it was: German industry functioned at about 1012% below
theoretical production potential because of Allied bombing. The strategic
bombing offensive also imposed additional costs on production, and most
definitely it warped the pattern of German war production by forcing
concentration upon fighters at the expense of strike aircraft, and upon
antiaircraft guns and communications equipment for air defense at the expense
of vehicles, guns, and radios for field formations. But in another negative
aspect the contribution of the strategic bomber offensive to Allied victory was
immense, if impossible to quantify. The
effect of this offensive in stripping fronts of fighter defense and ensuring
that Allied armies operated under conditions of overwhelming air supremacy is
widely acknowledged, but how long the war would have lasted and what cost would
have been exacted had there not been a bombing campaign that by 1945 had
reduced Germany to a transportation wilderness is debatable. What is remarkable
about the defeat of Germany is how quickly it was achieved once the initiative
had been wrested from its grasp. In August 1943 the Western Allies had yet to
set foot on the continental mainland and German forces were still in the
eastern Ukraine. In less than 21 months Germany had been destroyed. One wonders
how long this process would have taken if the Allies not had to hand air power
that razed the German communications system.
No consideration of strategic bombing in the Second World
War can ignore the obvious finale: the use of atomic weapons against Hiroshima
and Nagasaki. T. S. Eliot was correct:
the world ended with a whimper, or thousands of whimpers, as unknown numbers
died of cancer, leukemia, or as a result of radiation sickness. The use of
atomic weapons against Japan remains a controversial matter one that still can
command intense passion, as the 1995 Smithsonian controversy demonstrated. It
is an issue that lends itself to simplification and certainty, with all the
intolerance thereby implied. Understandably and rightly, Allied troops who were
to have mounted the invasion of the Japanese home islands entertain no doubts
about the use of atomic weapons against Japan.
But these people apart, the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August
1945 prompt two observations and two questions. The first observation is
simple. The use of atomic weapons undoubtedly sits uneasily alongside American
claims upon morality as the basis of policy. Indeed, the strategic bombing
offensives against Germany and Japan stained the morality of Anglo-American
claims. But morality exists only in choice, and certainly in the period between
June 1940 and late 1944 there was no choice, and hence there could be no
immorality in the bombing campaigns directed against Germany and Japan. One
does not need to subscribe to the Cromwellian dictum necessity knows no law to
recognize that with no other means to take the war to the Axis powers, the
strategic air offensives were wholly justified.
The Allies had no capacity and certainly no moral right to
deny themselves the only means whereby they might force the enemy to conform to
their will. If nothing else, to have done so would have represented a base
betrayal of all those who lived under Axis occupation. But by 1945, when other
means of taking the war to the enemy existed, the strategic bombing offensives
become more difficult to justify other than under the terms of the obvious
institutional escape clause. The means had been developed and could not remain
unused, given the costs and the losses that had been sustained in the process,
but that hardly represents just cause. Thus if the attack on Hamburg in July
August 1943 presents no moral qualms, the attacks of 1945on Dresden in
February, Dortmund and Tokyo in March, and some 60 Japanese cities thereafter
cannot be divorced from basic questions of morality.
10.
Major General I. N. Vorob’yev, Tactics of the Long-Range
Battle, Vioennaya Mys’l, October 1992.
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