Tokyo, Japan (March 1945): General Curtis LeMay spoke of how Japanese civilians had to be “scorched and boiled and baked” if America was to win the war, and he meant what he said. Here, charred victims of the Tokyo firebombing of March 9-10, 1945 lie clustered around an automobile in the street. In this raid, almost 300 B-29s dropped incendiary bombs (containing napalm) as well as phosphorus bombs. They utterly destroyed almost 16 square miles of Tokyo and the city’s productive capacity was badly damaged. Some 100,000 civilians were killed, making this raid at least as destructive (if not more so) than the atomic bombings of either Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
Reading
Please read Mawdsley, pp. 273-281 and Bess, pp. 88-110.
The Background of Strategic Bombing
As Mawdsley points out, the British and the Americans had thought very seriously about strategic bombing well before the war. Both countries had built large four-engined bombers in the late 1930s and produced a number of theories about how to use them. Airmen, of course, wanted greater autonomy for their branch of the services, and they obtained an interested audience among politicians who were eager to avoid a massive continental commitment. Such a force also seemed to play to Britain and America’s strengths–producing large numbers of technologically sophisticated weaponry. Finally, Britain hoped that a large strategic bombing force would serve as a deterrent against the Germans should they consider bombing British cities.
The war, of course, started before the British could actually produce large numbers of heavy bombers. It was the Germans who first attempted strategic bombing on a large scale–against Britain. As Harris’ accounts points out, the German effort revealed some of the difficulties associated with strategic bombing. Although the German bombing of British cities failed to achieve the desired results, they did lead to one important development: it made the British less squeamish about the morality of strategic bombing, especially when it came time to engage in “area bombing.” Still, as Harris’ autobiography makes clear, RAF’s Bomber Command had a long way to go before it figured out how to actually bomb Germany in the most effective manner. Some critics of Britain’s strategic bombing campaign would say that Harris and Bomber Command (eventually joined by America’s Eighth Air Force) never really learned how to bomb Germany in the most effective manner. And that leads us to criticisms of the Allies’ strategic bombing campaign.
England (ca. 1944): This photograph of a British aircrew looking over an Avro Lancaster gives you a sense of the size of these planes. The Lancaster was RAF Bomber Command’s main heavy bomber. Whereas the premier American heavy bomber, the B-17, was more rugged (it could absorb much more punishment) and better armed, the Lancaster had a much greater payload and a longer range. The Lancaster’s payload varied according to the target, but it typically ran to about 12,000 lbs (although modified Lancasters could carry the 22,000 lb “Grand Slam”). B-17s typically carried a load of about 6,000 lbs. When considered in proportion to its population and industrial capacity, Britain’s strategic bombing campaign in Europe was impressive. In terms of sorties flown, tons of bombs dropped, personnel lost in action, and number of bombers available, the RAF’s effort was pretty much equivalent to that of the United States in Europe.
Strategic Criticisms
Criticisms under this heading are related. First, strategic bombing was not the best use of Allied resources. In other words, all the effort that went into building, crewing, and supporting an expensive and technologically demanding bombing force could have been better directed elsewhere. Resources employed in this area were not devoted toward building more tanks or artillery pieces. Supporters of strategic bombing have argued that this campaign was the equivalent of opening another front against Germany in an area where that country was particularly vulnerable. German aircraft, 88 mm guns (which were designed as anti-aircraft weapons but could also serve as very effective anti-tank artillery), and manpower that could have been sent elsewhere were tied up defending the Third Reich. As Mawdsley shows in the table on page 340, in May 1944, more than half of the Luftwaffe’s fighter strength was stationed in Germany trying to ward off British Lancasters and American B-17s.
The second strategic criticism is that the RAF’s Bomber Command and the Eighth Air Force chose their targets poorly: the focus on the area bombing of cities was a waste of time. It proved very difficult to destroy a factory’s productive capacity (especially its machine tools) without repeated raids. Moreover, area bombing did not appear to demoralize the German public to such an extent that it could bring the war to an end. Critics often argue that bombing would have been more effective if it had been directed against targets such as Germany’s electrical grid or its synthetic oil plants.
Moral Criticisms
Mawdsley points out that even during the war, some people (e.g. the Bishop of Chichester in England) thought strategic bombing was immoral. Bess covers this question in a chapter which is really quite good, so I’ll let you discover what his arguments are.
Strategic Bombing against Japan
Bess will have more to say about this campaign, but we can make several comparisons between the American bombing of Japan and the Anglo-American bombing of Germany. Both Germany and Japan suffered about the same number of civilian casualties–around 600,000 dead. However, the campaign against Germany lasted much longer. British strategic bombing only became serious in the spring of 1942. The campaign lasted until the very end of the war for a total of three years. Although the United States attempted to bomb Japan from Chinese bases in the summer of 1944, this effort proved unsuccessful. The Americans started launching B-29s from the Mariana Islands in November 1944, but these raids did not really yield results until February 1945 with the beginning of fire-bombing. The great bulk of successful raids, then, were conducted between February and August 1945–just six months. In other words, the same number of Japanese civilians as Germans died during the war–but in a much shorter time span. The destruction the United States inflicted on Japanese cities was also far more widespread than anything that happened in Germany. Part of the reason had to do with the flammability of Japanese cities, but part of it also had to do with the inadequacy of Japanese air defenses.
What often gets lost in the discussion of the strategic bombing of Japan is that one of the most effective parts of that campaign had to do with the mining of coastal waters. Coastal shipping was especially important to the Japanese as a means of transporting goods and resources from one part of the country to the other, and this campaign badly disrupted the Japanese economy.
Potential Quiz Questions
1) According to the textbook, why did the RAF’s Bomber Command switch from “economic warfare” to “area bombing”?
2) What important hurdles did the British and Americans have to clear before they could deliver a substantial tonnage of bombs on German cities?
3) What were the main criticisms of the Allied strategic bombing campaign?
4) In what ways did the Allied strategic bombing campaign take a toll on the German war effort?
5) While discussing strategic bombing, Bess asks, “How much collateral damage is morally justifiable?” What answer does he provide to that question?
6) According to Bess, what is the “moral bottom line” when it comes to strategic bombing?
Canvas Discussion
On the Canvas discussion board, we will discuss the question below. Remember that participation is mandatory.
At the end of Chapter 6: Bombing Civilian Populations: A Case of Moral Slippage, Bess concludes: “There can be no excuse, in the end, for the practices of large-scale area bombing and firebombing of cities; these were atrocities, pure and simple.” What is the crux of his argument, and do you agree with him? Why or why not?
Refer to the reading, and please be as precise as possible in your answers.
Feel free to interact and collaborate as you respond. Ask each other questions on the board. Synthesize other people’s responses. Work together to come up with solid answers. And feel free to make more than one contribution.
History 386: World War II 