Strategic bombing has a claim to be the quintessential field of modern military history.
It has been the subject of a vast range of technical, political, historical, moral and philosophical commentary.
It’s a subject no historian of modern Germany can avoid.
In writing Wages of Destruction I had to grapple with it:
as one of the defining questions hanging over German rearmament in the 1930s,
because of its impact on the German home front from 1942,
as a key strand in the mythology of Albert Speer (he claimed to have overcome the effects of Allied bombing),
and because so many of the most influential sources that we rely on to write the history of the Third Reich were generated by the highly self-critical after-the-battle analyses conducted by the Americans and Brits (including such future luminaries as J.K. Galbraith and “Nicky” Kaldor).
There is a common view of the bombing campaign that is highly skeptical as to its military impact. On that basis it poses a series of agonizing moral and ethical questions about the campaigns waged against Germany and Japan in World War II.
I don’t share this skeptical view of the military efficacy of bombing and Wages offered a sustained counter narrative: The crucial thing to realize is quite how immense the undertaking of strategic bombing is. It is arguably the basis of the modern military-industrial complex. It was a far bigger technological and material challenge than any of the antagonists originally realized. As a a result of resource limitations and decisions taken in the 1930s, the Germans never came close to building a war-winning air weapon. For me this is one of the fundamental reasons for thinking of Germany as incapable of mounting a truly comprehensive challenge to the global order in the mid-century – along with their insuperable naval inferiority. In a multidimensional global power system, Germany remained a one-dimensional military power. By 1943, first the British and then the Americans were on the point of developing a true air weapon. It cost a huge amount. It required major technological breakthroughs and it could not be done without extended and costly trial and error. Furthermore, as always in military affairs, the results depend on how the weapon was applied. It is not just materiel and doctrine, but specific sequences of actions that matter. In 1943, when the RAF began sustained bombing of the heavy industrial region of the Ruhr, it had an immediate effect and panicked the Speer administration. The internal German records from this period leave no doubt about this. But after the devastating raids on Hamburg in the last week of July 1943, the RAF switched to attacking Berlin. This was a disastrous error of military judgement. Then, in early 1944 the air weapon was concentrated on tactical and operational preparation for D-Day. From the summer of 1944, when the RAF and USAAF finally switched their full force back to Germany the effects were devastating and more or less immediate.
This reinterpretation has a variety of far-reaching implications. The prevalent critical view strikes me as a fascinating case of early, mid-century techno-skepticism. It should be seen in context of nuclear Angst, critiques of the military-industrial complex and what Mary Kaldor would call the “baroque arsenal”. It is also inflected by persistent and recurring worries about Anglo-American “military culture”. For Liddell Hart by 1944 the Allies were no longer soldiers but “iron mongers”.
Taking a different view of bombing’s efficacy also changes the terms of the moral and political debate about bombing. I didn’t fully explore those questions in Wages. I’m not going to attempt to do so here. Suffice to say that having made what I feel to be a persuasive case for the efficacy of the air weapon and its even greater potential, I feel differently about its use in winning the war against Nazi Germany. Indeed, being convinced that it worked and could have been even more devastating, I find myself powerfully drawn towards the rhetoric and passion of the “terrible swift sword” and “avenging angel” narratives. Since I am not able to properly account for this emotional-intellectual impulse and especially because I am in so many other respects so closely and personally identified with Germany, its target, I have found myself perplexed and tongue tied. I couldn’t bring myself to engage in the debate around Jörg Friedrichs, Der Brand (2002) (translated as The Fire, 2006).
One of the ways in which I have tried to escape this emotional and intellectual impasse is to think about air war in terms of a distinctive mode of war-fighting adopted by liberal democracies (that peculiar twentieth-century political formation). This helps me to rationalize my historical analysis and the strange spell of personal and emotional entanglement that the subject matter exercises over me. Obviously, there are plenty of sources of intellectual inspiration for this, from David Edgerton‘s brilliant writing on British military modernism to Carl Schmitt.
I’m still thinking about and developing this notion of a liberal-democratic mode of war. One of the places where I first reached for the category was in a review of Richard Overy’s book on the bombing war. Tooze Book Review Richard Overy ‘The Bombers and the Bombed’ WSJ Feb 2014
In the small world of Anglo-German history Richard Overy and I go back a long way. He has always been a courteous and helpful colleague, which is something for which I am truly appreciative. He was especially supportive when I was starting out. I am all the more grateful to him, because there is no disguising the fact that we disagree fundamentally about the history of Nazi Germany and about many features of the history of World War II as well.
Richard’s book on the air war is important and anyone interested in the subject or in World War II in Europe should read it. It really is an essential contribution. But this review attempts to articulate some of the ways in which I would tell the story differently.
Tooze Book Review Richard Overy ‘The Bombers and the Bombed’ WSJ Feb 2014
Thomas Hippler
Adam, what did you make of Mearsheimer‘s argument against the effectiveness of strategic bombing in Tragedy?
On the liberal-democratic mode of war: Why did liberal democracies resort to large scale terror bombing? Did their insular position offshore compel them? Was there any other way for them to project power against Germany after the Fall of France and before Germany was weak enough for an amphibious landing? Whereas the offshore powers forged a giant machine to bomb German cities, the polar powers on the continent, caught as they were in the greatest land war in history, had little choice but to focus on the army—complete with flying artillery, of course. So far so good. The big question is why the terror bombing of German cities continued after German defeat was certain? Did domestic political and institutional factors in the offshore powers propel the bombing after the military rationale had evaporated? This is where I think your notion of the liberal-democratic mode of war is a very promising strategy to pursue.
Hi Anusar Farooqui on the offshore point, I would caution against seeing geopolitical logic and fully fledged liberal democratic exceptionalism as distinct. Both Brits and Americans conceived of navalism as a distinctly liberal mode of power. They were fortunate in their geographical position but that is no logical problem for an exceptionalist … of course you are fortunate. That is the whole point. You are fortunate in geography as in so many other ways (race, religion etc). You are immensely pleased to have been born English, American etc. Likewise I absolutely dont draw the line at the technical efficacy of bombing. It clearly has a punitive element that is integral to any just war conception. You see the same disciplinary logic played out with regard to the blockade in 1918/19 and there is also a continuity in deterrence logic. Nicholas Mulder is on to this. Furthermore with regard to the bombing at the end of the war, this has a manifest punitive logic. You are not just wreaking vengeance on the perpetrators, who are still firing rockets at you by the way, but you are also allowing your population at home to appreciate the fact that justice is being done. The question once it is clear that the Germans have lost, is not why you should go on killing them, but why they go on resisting in the face of inevitable defeat. If they go on resisting in the face of evident defeat they are clearly mad dogs – criminal or ideological fanatics – that must be put down by any means necessary with minimal cost to yourself and maximum cost to them. Why should anyone from our side pay the price to overcome not just their evil but their stubborn evil? If you can bomb to devastating effect from summer of 1944 with minimum risk, of course you bomb. Overkill has a liberal logic at odds with a logic of technical efficiency or military “art”, which is why it is so offensive to folks like Liddell Hart.
Hi Adam Tooze. I am quite sympathetic to your idea that there was an revenge, or even autotelic, motivation for Allied terror bombing. Although I would suggest that it was a combination of the bureaucratic momentum of the bombing supply chain and political will; in the sense that principals in the US and the UK, Churchill above all, largely let the area bombings escalate instead of demanding escalation from their bomber commands. Part of the logic of escalation was clearly an increasingly desperate effort to prove the effectiveness of strategic bombing. For the central premise of the strategic air power doctrine—that modern societies and economies are so vulnerable to aerial bombardment that sufficient punishment from the air can undermine the enemy’s will to fight—proved unfounded. To forestall this result, Allied bomber commands moved steadily towards more and more indiscriminate bombing. I’m definitely willing to rejig the weights I assign to these explanatory variables for Allied decision-making. But I would contest the claim that standalone airpower is an effective strategic weapon. The evidence from the past 100 years is pretty unambiguous: Used in combination with skilled ground forces (ie, as flying artillery), air power makes a potent offensive weapon. On its own, however, it is incapable of forcing the enemy—even an adversary that is not a great power—to capitulate.
That being said, the accuracy and lethality of firepower delivered from the air has increased dramatically with precision-strike; thus reducing, although not eliminating, reliance on ground-force skill. Whether it has finally made strategic bombing viable is an open question. Even if that is the case, it is only relevant to highly asymmetric war scenarios, eg, a US assault on a ”rogue state”. Between great powers, of course, nuclear-armed ballistic missiles replaced long-range bombers long ago.
Hi Adam Tooze. I am quite sympathetic to your idea that there was a revenge (perhaps even autotelic) motive for Allied terror bombing. Although I would suggest that it was a combination of the bureaucratic momentum of the bombing supply chain and political will; in the sense that principals in the US and the UK, Churchill above all, largely let the area bombings escalate instead of demanding escalation from their bomber commands. Part of the logic of escalation was clearly an increasingly desperate effort to prove the effectiveness of strategic bombing. For the central premise of the strategic air power doctrine—that modern societies and economies are so vulnerable to aerial bombardment that sufficient punishment from the air can undermine the enemy’s will to fight—proved unfounded. To forestall this result, Allied bomber commands moved steadily towards more and more indiscriminate bombing. I’m definitely willing to rejig the weights I assign to these explanatory variables for Allied decision-making. But I would contest the claim that standalone airpower is an effective strategic weapon. The evidence from the past 100 years is pretty unambiguous: Used in combination with skilled ground forces (ie, as flying artillery), air power makes a potent offensive weapon. On its own, however, it is incapable of forcing the enemy—even an adversary that is not a great power—to capitulate.
That being said, the accuracy and lethality of firepower delivered from the air has increased dramatically with precision-strike; thus reducing, although not eliminating, reliance on ground-force skill. Whether it has finally made strategic bombing viable is an open question. Even if that is the case, it is only relevant to highly asymmetric war scenarios, eg, a US assault on a ”rogue state”. Between great powers, of course, nuclear-armed ballistic missiles replaced long-range bombers long ago.
re:‘against seeing geopolitical logic and fully fledged liberal democratic exceptionalism as distinct’
I see your point. Note, however, that the causal vector is unidirectional. The offshore position was obviously not due to their being market democracies. But the self-congratulation (more generally, the ideology of exceptionalism) of both mother and daughter had, as you suggest, a lot to do with their offshore position in which both had grown up, so to speak. What I want to suggest is that the concrete reality of the offshore position informed Allied war strategy through a causal channel separate from ‘geostrategic position —> exceptionalism —> area bombing’.
In particular, as long as Germany remained a great power and occupied western Europe, they had no other way to bring the war to Germany. An amphibious landing being, of course, out of the question. (Which reminds of the MG42 at Omaha Beach that you mentioned in your lecture. Strikingly, the Allies enjoyed absolute air supremacy over the entire operational theater on that brutal day. Yet none of the warplanes overhead managed to take out that machine-gun.)
A slack constraint does not a causal arrow make, of course. My point is that the constraint was tight all the way until the Russians won the Second World War and the only first-order question remaining was who would conquer Europe. FDR waited wisely. For Churchill, this meant that long-range bombing was the only game in town when it came to bringing the war to Germany.
But the fire-bombing of German and Japanese cities in 1945 was a case of international autotelic violence. If the ICJ were neutral between Anglo-Americans and Africans and were it to use the standards it has used against war criminals in Africa, it would hold the fire-bombing of Dresden alone as a major war crime. The legal case is not hard to pursue. But I sympathize with your German identity-emotional turmoil predicament. It is difficult for Germans to talk about Allied war crimes.
I am struggling with your notion that ‘overkill’/’maximum cost to them’ is ‘liberal’. Surely wanton slaughter without military value is not consistent with liberalism? The escalatory logic of the terror bombings is to be found in the struggles of the bomber commands along with factors working through political will above. Are you suggesting a ‘liberal logic’ that has to do with political constraints and incentives on US and UK leadership, ie, Churchill and FDR? Did they rally domestic audiences by promising annihilation of German and Japanese cities? Did such a (domestic political) liberal logic really drive the escalation? Or was it closer to the action as I am suggesting? Did the airmen not make an independent contribution to the rapidity of escalation in area bombing?
More generally, How do we understand the actions of the airmen and the political will in the offshore liberal market democracies? Was indiscriminate aerial punishment promised explicitly? You are surely not suggesting that it was inherent in Anglo-American exceptionalism/triumphalism? I am curious about where you are taking this. Also, looking forward to Nicholas Mulder’s take.
I had never seen the casualty number of 350.000 before. Last time I checked with my local right-wing sources, 350.000 were killed in Dresden in one night alone! 😉 In all seriousness, I would have assumed the number was much higher. And those aren’t only civilians, either!
I had never seen the casualty number of 350.000 before. Last time I checked with my local right-wing sources, 350.000 were killed in Dresden in one night alone… In all seriousness, I would have assumed the number was much higher. And those aren’t only civilians, either!
Well written.
Britain’s alliance with France failed twice because France lacked an offensive doctrine. America’s commitment to Europe too was an open question.
Either Britain had to simply give up on Europe or else it had to show it had an offensive doctrine. The age of subsidies to Continental proxies was long gone. What offensive doctrine- other than strategic bombing- could the Allies have espoused? It was already clear that helping the Resistance meant helping Reds. With hindsight, we know that Germany would be divided and permanently occupied. But this was by no means a forgone conclusion at the time.
The advantage of building up a military industrial culture committed to strategic bombing of both munitions factories and centres of political power is that it creates a credible threat point capable of deterring the opportunistic build up of countervailing measures. It overcomes doubts regarding a maritime power’s ability to sustain an offensive doctrine.
I suppose, even the ability to carry out tactical bombing- as the Israelis do- creates a credible threat point. It may be that ‘less is more’ and that once a dictator has been deterred he should be allowed to carry on revelling in his own swinishmess lest worse befall.
It appears to me that this RAND Corp, O.R/ game theory based habitus peculiar to the military industry complex- which we satirise in the figure of Dr. Strangelove- gave America the advantage during the Cuban crisis and later on when it cancelled out Moscow’s anti ballistic measures by developing MIRVs which meant that attack could always baffle defence. It is noteworthy that the Soviets, and now the Russians, completely changed their strategic thinking in response.
For me, the question is ‘what sort of offensive doctrine can underpin the geopolitical commitments of essentially mercantile & maritime powers?’ Sanctions and embargoes may backfire. Dropping bombs won’t work if the enemy can resupply across an ‘off limits’ border. Boots on the ground will be withdrawn sooner or later. At one time we may have thought that ‘soft power’ could remedy the situation. Sadly, with Trump in the White House, such power is entirely flaccid if not liquefying into pus.
https://www.amazon.com/History-Bombing-Sven-Lindqvist/dp/1565848160/