The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition

by Richard Rhodes

The slide from precision bombing attacks on industry to general attacks on cities followed less from political decisions than from inadequate technology. Bomber Command had attempted long-distance daylight precision bombing early in the war but had been unable to defend its aircraft against German fighters and flak so far from home. It therefore switched to night bombing, which reduced losses but severely impaired accuracy. If it was logical to bomb factories and other strategic targets to reduce the enemy’s ability to wage war, it began to seem equally logical to bomb the blocks of workers’ housing that surrounded those targets; the workers, after all, made the factories run. Sir Arthur Harris, who became chief of Bomber Command in early 1942, notes in his war memoirs of this transitional period in the summer of 1941 that “the targets chosen were in congested industrial areas and were carefully picked so that bombs which overshot or undershot the actual railway centers under attack [in this instance] should fall on these areas, thereby affecting morale. This programme amounted to a halfway stage between area and precision bombing.”1818 “Morale” is here and elsewhere in the literature of air power a euphemism for the bombing of civilians. Another sign of halfway status at this stage was permission to dump bombs before exiting Germany if crews had missed their targets. Churchill says he authorized a study of bombing accuracy at Frederick Lindemann’s suggestion which discove...