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“I walked blindly in the rain without cap or raincoat for a long time because a man does not cry in front of other men.”
War is a series of catastrophes that results in a victory. GEORGES CLEMENCEAU
The Maquis were a relatively new force in the Resistance. (Maquis is the Corsican name for the local scrub brush that resistance groups on that island used for cover in their eighteenth-century democratic revolution.)
“It may sound corny,” he later explained his decision, “but what’s wrong with wanting to fight for your country. Why are people so reluctant to use the word patriotism?”
But the Eighth Air Force had already done its indispensable duty. In the five-month battle for the air supremacy that made the invasion possible, the American Air Forces in Europe lost over 2,600 heavy bombers and 980 fighter planes and suffered 18,400 casualties, including 10,000 combat deaths, over half as many men as the Eighth lost in all of 1942 and 1943. These airmen deserve an equal place in the national memory with the approximately 6,000 American soldiers killed, wounded, or missing in action in the amphibious and airborne assault on D-Day.
The Kingdom of Heaven runs on righteousness, but the Kingdom of Earth runs on oil. ERNEST BEVIN, CHURCHILL’S MINISTER OF LABOUR AND NATIONAL SERVICE
“It was complete chaos,” a German soldier recalled. “That’s when I thought, ‘This is the end of the world.’ ”
Flak was a grossly inefficient defensive measure. On average, it took 8,500 rounds from the newest version of the 88mm gun to down a single bomber. Yet it was a devastatingly effective psychological weapon, designed to unnerve the aircrews and impair bombing accuracy.
I wanted wings until I got the God damned things. Now, I don’t want them anymore. They taught me how to fly and sent me here to die. I’ve had my bellyful of war. ARMY AIR CORPS SONG
American Air Force publicists lauded the surgical precision of the raids, boasted about killing the enemy’s industry with a thousand clean cuts, but the German economy was bludgeoned to death by the blunt instrument of saturation bombing.
It was always with us—that fence—And we were on the wrong side of it. EUGENE E. HALMOS, PRISONER OF WAR, EIGHTH AIR FORCE
But the barracks of the Luft camps, like the compartments of the bombers, were surprisingly harmonious places. Men of vastly different backgrounds buried their differences as well as their prejudices, “bending to the will of better judgment,” as one airman put it.
Here was an opportunity to use bombing to hasten the Soviet advance and bring the war to a speedy end. But Gen. Frederick Anderson and other advocates of hard war insisted that the bombing would have to be cataclysmic, for the enemy had shown he had plenty of powder left in his arsenal. War industries would have to be smashed, but so would civilian morale. The Eighth Air Force had reached a moral divide—and was about to cross it.
We have not yet killed enough. We must make this War so fatal and horrible that a Century will pass before new demagogues and traitors will dare to resort to violence and war to achieve their ends. GEN. WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN, AUGUST 20, 1863
What kind of behavior is morally justifiable to bring down a repugnant regime that refuses to surrender, even in the face of certain defeat? Hitler’s insane orders to fight to the finish would subject Germany to a veritable rain of ruin in the last months of the war.
It has been argued that the March 1945 Tokyo raid was a historic turning point in American military policy, the abandonment of long-standing restraint against the indiscriminate killing of noncombatants.
It “[is] contrary to our national ideals to wage war against civilians,” declared Maj. Gen. Laurence Kuter, now Hap Arnold’s assistant chief for plans and combat operations.
“There is no doubt in my mind that the RAF wants very much to have the U.S. Air Forces tarred with the morale bombing aftermath which we feel will be terrific,” he wrote Arnold.
The Germans had started the First World War, yet not a single ground battle had been fought on their home soil. “It is of the utmost importance that every person in Germany should realize that this time [unlike World War I] Germany is a defeated nation,” Roosevelt told Secretary of War Stimson. “The fact that they are a defeated nation, collectively and individually, must be so impressed upon them that they will hesitate to start any new war. . . .
“Too many people here and in England hold to the view that the German people as a whole are not responsible for what has taken place—that only a few Nazi leaders are responsible. That unfortunately is not based on fact. The German people as a whole must have it driven home to them that the whole nation has been engaged in a lawless conspiracy against the decencies of modern civilization.”
“If I’m going to be killed,” a London woman commented sardonically, “I would like to have the excitement of knowing it’s going to happen.”
“We will, in what may be one of our last and best remembered operations regardless of its effectiveness, violate the basic American principle of precision bombing of targets of strictly military significance for which our tactics were designed and our crews trained and indoctrinated.”
More than 900 Fortresses and over half as many escort fighters were dispatched to the target, the largest force ever sent against a single city. (That same morning, the Eighth’s 2nd Air Division dispatched over 400 Liberators to the Magdeburg synthetic oil plant, where better weather was predicted.) The Berlin-bound air train was 300 miles long; by the time the forward elements nosed into Germany there were still bombers over the North Sea.
“Did Germany believe that she would never have to pay for the atrocities that her leap into barbarism seemed to allow?”
“I don’t rejoice in the 35,000 Germans killed there. Incidentally, I doubt that there were many Jews in that number; the good burghers of Dresden had just recently shipped the last of them off to Auschwitz.” That is almost right. Victor Klemperer, a professor at the city’s Technical University, was one of only 198 registered Jews in Dresden when the first Lancasters came plowing through the cloudless February sky. The rest had either escaped, committed suicide, or been sent to Auschwitz and other murder mills.
This inexcusable, out-of-control bombing of early 1945 should stand as a warning to nations that launch wars of naked aggression. When the people who are the targets of their malice are forced to fight for their very survival, they will, if they are strong enough, fight with unhinged fury, with the aim of completely crushing the enemy (unlike World War I, this war would end with a surrender, not a peace treaty).
“It was the ordinary men and women and their children who had to pay the bill.” But millions of these “ordinary” Germans—and General Rumpf himself—had backed Hitler’s sinister purposes, and in doing so they put themselves, their cities, and their children at terrible risk.
“The majority of Germans today know, or so at least it is to be hoped, that we actually provoked the annihilation of the cities in which we once lived.”
“We must not get soft. War must be destructive and to a certain extent inhumane and ruthless.”
Once the Anglo-American air forces reached full strength—a total of 28,000 combat aircraft—they were democracy’s terrible swift sword.2
The cost in lives lost was appalling. The Eighth Air Force, the largest aerial striking force in the war, sustained between 26,000 and 28,000 fatalities, roughly one-tenth of the Americans killed in World War II. Taking the lower number, this was 12.3 percent of the 210,000 Eighth Air Force crewmen who flew in combat. Of all branches of the American armed forces, only submarine crews in the Pacific had a higher fatality rate: almost 23 percent. In addition, an estimated 28,000 Eighth Air Force crewmembers were shot out of the sky and became prisoners of war. If they and the estimated 18,000
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In the last months of the war, an already defeated enemy insanely fought on, as historian Richard Bessel argued, because “all Nazism had to offer was war and destruction, war without end or an end through war.”
Approximately 1.5 million people, more than one-half of them women, were killed by bombs in World War II, as opposed to roughly 3,000 in World War I, a 500-fold increase in civilian mortality.
The Nazis did not think of themselves as savages, and that made them irredeemable. But as Orwell wrote: “If we see ourselves as the savages we are, some improvement is possible, or at least thinkable.”
Our commanders have a better idea how to beat the enemy: by destroying his industries, not his cities, and by trying to do this as accurately as possible. Yes, we miss a lot, can’t be helped, but in warfare or anything else, intent surely matters.’
Spaatz then told Doolittle that if he wanted to get his Eighth Air Force in combat with the Japanese he had better organize an operation for the next day, for the war would soon be over. Doolittle had been assigned 720 B-29s and many of them were war-ready, but he stood them down. “If the war’s over,” he told Spaatz, “I will not risk one airplane nor a single bomber crew member just to be able to say the 8th Air Force had operated against the Japanese in the Pacific.” After Europe, his boys had nothing to prove.
“Seeing these strutting conquerors after they were sentenced—powerless, pathetic, and preparing for the hangman—was the closure I needed. Justice had overtaken evil. My war was over.”
