Second Part of my Review of 'the Bombing War' by Richard Overy
Yesterday I promised more details from Richard Overy’s ‘the Bombing War’, especially evidence that the military effectiveness of the British bombing campaign is overstated. But before that I’d like to remind readers of one or two previous postings here on this subject in general.
From February 2010, this on Anthony Grayling’s ‘Among the Dead Cities’:
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2010/02/among-the-dead-cities.html
Scroll down here and you will find some thoughts on Max Hastings’s ‘Bomber Command’
and this on the memorial to the brave men of Bomber Command
And this on technical rather than moral objections to the bombing
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/01/a-secret-drama-at-the-heart-of-power.html
Now back to Richard Overy:
I won’t give a lot of detail, but will point out here that careful readers of the book will find that a neglected theme of this controversy is the constant and rather nervous desire of the RAF, and of Bomber Command, to justify their actual existence, and to advance the claims of air power as an independent force, rather than (as both Army and the Navy have always wanted and still want) as an adjunct to the Army and Navy, aiding them in their purposes. The bombing of cities as independent targets, unconnected with any ground operations, is a direct outgrowth of this highly questionable view of military science.
As one might expect, a significant part of the drive for the killing of Germans did come from Josef Stalin, our noble ally against Hitler, and (like Hitler) a man to whom the killing of innocent people was never a problem. Though it seems (p.394) that Stalin was not to blame for the attacks on Dresden.
Let us proceed to pages 296 and 297, where Churchill has gone to visit Stalin, who is very annoyed that the British and Americans have abandoned a plan for an invasion of Western Europe originally set for 1942, and is more or less insulting. Churchill says there will be bombing instead, lots of it.
‘Stalin took over the argument himself and said that homes as well as factories must be destroyed’ .
Soon afterwards, Churchill (p.297) was pressed by Harris for a commitment to a bombing offensive. Churchill responded that he was committed to bombing, partly because it would look bad to stop such a major part of Britain’s war effort, but he did not expect it to have decisive results in 1943 or bring the war to an end. It was, Churchill said ‘ better than doing nothing’.
But better for whom? This is basically war by public relations, with actions judged by their political and morale effect, rather than their military result. Can one kill innocents for the sake of appearances? It seems a moral stretch to me.
Leo Amery, a war cabinet member, was not taken with Harris’s urgings for a full-scale bombing attack (p.297). Quoting a scientist at the Air Warfare branch who said the RAF could not hit enough German industry to do decisive damage, Amery wrote: ‘’I am aware that this view of night bombing is shared by very large number of thoughtful people’.
One answer to the claim that the bomber offensive forced Germany to divert resources from the Russian front is that a more effective bomber offensive against military targets would have done the same. Another is that the bombing campaign also forced Britain to divert scarce and costly resources – trained men, metals, explosive, engine manufacturing capacity, from the build-up of its D-Day army, and of course from the Battle of the Atlantic, the U-boat war which Churchill later confessed was the only part of the conflict that had truly worried him.
Was it a sensible sue of resources.
On pp 298-299 we find that in 1942 the RAF dropped 37,192 tons of bombs on Germany. Most missed their targets completely. The raids cost 2,716 bombers lost on missions or in accidents. During 1942, the RAF also killed 4,900 Germans, two for each bomber lost (Bomber Command itself lost 14,000 dead from September 1939 to September 1942).
On p.303 Overy notes that the Casablanca Conference of January 1943, at which the USA and Britain hammered out their European strategy, did not really view the bomber offensive as central to victory. He writes :’ Bombing survived as an option not because it was central to the strategic outlook of the western allies, but because it was secondary’.
On p.310 we learn that the RAF’s Charles Portal was predicting that his force could kill 900,000 Germans in 18 months, seriously injury 1,000,000, destroy six million homes and ‘de-house’ 25 million people (so much for deaths being unintended collateral damage. Overy also points out that American fliers were puzzled as to what the RAF;s actual strategic aim was in pursuing this policy.
On p.322, we learn that Arthur Harris admitted that his bomber offensive only started seriously in March 1943. This is important because so many people like to claim that the bombing ‘saved Britain from invasion’, or ‘won the war’ or was ‘the only way we could strike back’. Yet the invasion had been cancelled I September 1940. Russia and the USA had joined the war in 1941(making German eventual defeat inevitable) but for nearly three years after Dunkirk, this ‘sole weapon’ had barely begun to be used.
What is more, the decisive battle of Stalingrad, after which the victory of the USSR over Germany was pretty much assured, had ended with a Soviet victory in February 1943, Von Paulus and his armies had been marched off to prison camps before Harris’s offensive even got under way.
Claims are often made that the firestorm in Hamburg, if replicated, could have destroyed German morale. Hitler’s favourite, Albert Speer is said to have held this opinion. The damage was indeed appalling. But in fact (pp.337-338) Hamburg recovered as a functioning city and port with remarkable speed.
On pp 343 there are some striking figures about RAF losses 4,026 aircraft lost, 2,823 of them in combat (the constant attrition of experienced crews meant rapid training and many more flying accidents than would have befallen well-trained crews) .
As Overy writes .’Although both forces [British and American] advertised their success in diverting ever-increasing numbers of German fighters to the defence of the Reich, this was in some sense a Pyrrhic victory, since the bomber forces were now subject to escalating and possibly insupportable levels of loss and damage’.
Harris (p.344) was livid when researchers said his attacks had only reduced German economic potential by 9%in 1943. He was sure he had done far more damage. But after the war 9% turned out to be an over-estimate.
Again, the human cost of the war to our own side was appalling. During 1943, Bomber Command lost 15,678 killed or captured, and the US 8th Air Force lost 9,497.
The idea that the bombing might create some sort of revolution against Hitler was often touted. But expert analyses pointed out that Nazi Germany offered no avenue for protest, and the Allied insistence on unconditional surrender( an unexamined policy which may well have prolonged the war for a year or more) rather ruled out a more compliant government coming to office and suing for peace.
This is not the place for a long debate on the American daylight bombing, under increasingly heavy and effective long-range fighter escort – though there is no doubt that experience shows that , had the allies made a determined attack on German oil production and refinery capacity, they would have done far more damage to the war effort than by any other means. Overy concedes that many of the American raids were in effect area bombing since they could not achieve the accuracy for pinpoint bombing, contrasts the Americans’ decision to take the war to the Luftwaffe itself (which in the end destroyed German air power) with the RAF’s persistence, to the end, in bombing urban targets.
In April 1944 (p.368) Overy details a costly and ineffective RAF raids against Berlin (too far away , too spread-out and too well-defended to allow concentrated attack easily) , and Nuremberg. Even Harris conceded that German night defences were so effective that they might create conditions in which loss rates ’could not in the end be sustained’.
Overy writes ‘Between November 1943 and march 1944, Bomber Command lost 1,128 aircraft for little evident strategic gain’.
On p.381 there is an interesting discussion of possible retaliatory gas attacks, and of how they were contemplated by Churchill .
But they were not used. They would only have been used, I am sure, in retaliation against such attacks by Germany. But by then there would have been few scruples. In a very telling paragraph, Overy writes(p.382)
'The RAF staff thought that incendiary and high-explosive raids were more strategically efficient [than gas or germ warfare], in that they destroyed property and equipment and not just people, but in any of these cases – blown apart, burnt alive or asphyxiated - *deliberate damage to civilian populations was now taken for granted*(my emphasis). This paved the way for the possibility of using atomic weapons n German targets in 1945 if the war had dragged on late into the year.’
Overy recounts how on 28th March 1945 (p.396) Churchill referred to area bombing in a memo as ‘mere acts of terror and wanton destruction’ , urging that attacks turn instead to oil and transport. Harris paid no mind, and horrible things were down to several German cities in the last weeks of war.
The two major bombing powers, the USA and Britain, both conducted surveys of the effects of bombing after the war. These are described on pp398-409. Captured Germans tended to agree that bombing of transport links and oil facilities had been crucial, bombing of cities comparatively unimportant I hampering the Nazi war effort (p.400( It is hard to see why they should have dissembled about this).
The American survey itself (p.401) said that city attacks cost only about 2.7% of German economic potential. The whole combined offensive cost a total of 17% of German economic potential by 1944, mostly due to US bombing of selected targets. (p.401). the British report largely concurred, except that it was in some way even more modest in its claims for area bombing’s effects, especially in the key year of 1844. (pp 401-402). Transport and oil remained the most important targets whoever was looking at it.
As Overy writes (p.402) : Given the uniformity of opinion on both the German and Allied sides, the one based on experience, the other on extensive research, it is surprising that the effects of bombing have occasioned so much debate ever since. The proximate causes – defeating the German Air Force and emasculating oil supply and transport - are unlikely to be undermined by further research’.
He quotes a senior RAF officer Norman Bottomley (Portal’s former deputy during the war) as saying the effect of area bombing was ‘great but never critical’.
Of course it had an impact(pp 404-405). Industrial workers died, many hours f work were lost, and most crucially huge numbers of fighter aircraft were diverted from Italy and Russia. Overy writes: ‘This situation left German armies denuded of air protection at a critical juncture’(p.407). Though I repeat here that attacks on actual targets , as opposed to night-raids on crowded cities, would have achieved the same effect, and that the attacks were themselves a diversion of Allied strength from other fronts and aspects of the war which might have been more urgent and more productive of victory) .
But he also quotes J.K.Galbraith’ as saying the man-hours, aircraft and bombs ‘had cost the American economy far more in output than they had cost Germany’. This again suggests that the same resources, used elsewhere, might have achieved just as much if not more effect on Germany, without the severe moral problems of bombing cities.
Overy is not much concerned with the moral aspect of the controversy. He ends his chapter on the offensive within a sort of shrug. Governments liked bombing because it squandered fewer lives than ground offensives, because they believed it was good for propaganda and morale, because it made maximum use of new technology.
To some extent the continued popularity bombing was then, and is now, an effect of universal suffrage democracy, whose wars, as we know, are crueller than those of Kings. To question it (as I well know) leads swiftly to a questioning of the whole myth of the war, and an unwelcome examination of how we came to be waging a war in Europe against one of the greatest land powers in human history, yet had no army in Europe with which to fight it. The day has not yet come when this conundrum can be calmly discussed in this country, even though the whole episode began 75 years ago, and finished 69 years ago.
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