"
"At least this is the conclusion of the Transportauon Division of
Even in the successful offensive against the oil industry there was a generally poor selection of "ground-zeros"'" within the plants selected for attack.
"At least this is the conclusion of the Transportauon Division of
Even in the successful offensive against the oil industry there was a generally poor selection of "ground-zeros"'" within the plants selected for attack.
brodie-strategic-bombing-in-ww2
We must remember also that some of our attacks, like that on the German V-weapon program, had important defensive results.
Nevertheless, the fact remains that the ultimate destruc- tion of the German armies was practically assured from the time of the successful Allied break-out west of St. Lo late in July 1944, at which time the tangible battlefield results of our strategic bombing, apart from its important contribu- tion to suppressing enemy air activities, added up to very little. By the time those results were making themselves felt seriously, the Battle of the Bulge was a thing of the past and
the Allied armies were well into Germany.
If prior to mid-1943 we had put into our strategic air force
some of the resources used in building up a great army and invasion armada, as some argued we should have done, we would no doubt have got our strategic bombing results faster. However, that is not the same as saying that the war would have ended sooner. The fact is that we did put into strategic bombing a colossal effort. We were also committed to an invasion of France, and there were at the time few grounds for calling that a bad commitment. At the time we made the relevant decisions, our government feared, probably wrongly, that if we limited ourselves to an air and naval effort the
Russians would make a separate peace. If, as is more likely, the Russians had gone on fighting, and if our bombing had guaranteed the success of Soviet ground forces, it would have been their armies and not ours that would have "liberated" western Europe, and that might very well have been there now.
The strategic bombing of Germany during World War I1 was almost totally a new experiment, in which much had to be learned the hard way. We steadily tried to reach out after greater capabilities,especiallyin carrying capacity,depth of penetration, and accuracy of bombing; and we sought, partly and inescapably through trial and error, to find good
target systems. In both respects we can now see many critical and perhaps unnecessary errors which delayed our success. The U. S. A. A. F. paid dearly for the prewar conviction, inherited from Douhet, that fighter escort was unnecessary for bombers like the B-17, unhappily called the "Flying
Fortress. " The disastrous second Schweinfurt raid of October 10, 1943, in which the attacking squadrons lost 30 per cent of their aircraft, indicated that deep daylight penetrations into Germany had to await the availability of large numbers of long-range fighters. Starting in early 1944, the P-51s played a major part in destroying the German Air Force. Similarly, the British paid heavily for their early conviction that night bombing could be precise enough for specific industrial tar-
gets. When that was disproved, they adopted in 1942 Chief of Bomber Command Sir Arthur Harris' compensating con- viction that area bombing was the most promising method of aerial attack anyway, since the search for specific target systems was only a futile search for "panacea targets. " Sir Arthur, incidentally, had not lost that conviction even when
? ORIGINS OF AIR STRATEGY
STRATEGIC BOMBING IN WORLD WAR 11
he wrote his memoirs after the war's end; nor had some of the senior officers who had served under him. '
The basic strategy for the Combined Bomber Offensive was laid down in the Casablanca Conference of January 1943, where the relevant directive stated the primary objec- tive of the strategic air offensive: "the progressive destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial, and eco- nomic system, and the undermining of the morale of the German people to a point where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened. " The directive went on to name five primary target systems in the following order: ( I ) sub- marine construction yards, ( 2 ) the aircraft industry, (3) transportation, (4) the oil industry, (5) generalized targets in the enemy war industry. In the absence of specific instruc- tions to the contrary, air force commanders retained the
authority to alter the order of priority for individual raids according to their own judgment.
On June 10, 1943, a new and much more pointed directive from the Combined Chiefs of Staff set down the "Point- blank" target system, and created the so-called "Jockey" Committee as an advisory body on targets; this Committee carried out its function until it merged with the Combined Strategic Targets Committee in September 1944. Under "Pointblank," German fighter plane production and existing strength were made unequivocally top-priority targets for the American bomber forces. The governing considerations were: (a) air dominance had to be established in the face of in- creasing German fighter strength, which threatened the con-
See Marshal of the R. A. F. Sir Arthur Harris, Bomber Offensive,Col- lins, London, 1947, especially pp. 75, 220-234. Sir Arthur's Senior Air Staff Officer (or Chief of Staff), now Air Marshal Sir Robert Saundb~,has espoused the same views in his numerous articles in British professional journals.
tinuance of the bomber offensive; (b) destruction of the German Air Force would provide the best short-term stra- tegic-bombing contribution to the planned invasion of the Continent; and (c) the immediately preceding months, with their brilliant victories at sea, had brought the submarine menace under control and had shown, moreover, that the destruction of submarine yards and bases along with the other desired target systems was simply beyond the capabil- ities of existing bomber forces. The June 1943 directive thus recognized the need for adjusting to limited capabilities by
ordering concentration on a single specifically-designated target system. All other systems were made secondary, and individual force commanders were given minimum dis- cretion with regard to choice among systems to be attacked.
In principle, the selection of the German Air Force as a target system, and especially of its fighter contingent, was right. It placed first things first according to common sense as well as to the well-known Douhet dictum that command of the air must be won before it can be exploited. However, the offensive against the German aircraft industry, which reached its greatest intensity in the period February-April 1944, was a failure. Attacks upon airframe plants simply induced the
Germans to disperse their facilities, which proved relatively easy to do since the tools mainly used were fairly mobile. The temporary loss of production resulting from such move- ment of equipment was about all that could be chalked up to the credit of the attacks.
The fact remains that front-line German fighter air strength increased sharply during the Allied offensiveagainst it. No doubt the increase was less than it would have been but for our bombing. The Aircraft Division of the U. S. S. B. S. estimated that some 18,000 aircraft of all types were denied
? ORIGINS OF AIR STRATEGY
STRATEGIC BOMBING IN WORLD WAR I1
the German Air Force in the period between July 1943 and December 1944. ~That figure, based on the disparity between planned and actual production, is ventured against an al- leged total production for the same period of 53,000 air- craft-a quite improbable figure. The economists who pre- pared the over-all economic-effectsreport of u. s. S. B. S. were more cautious, offering the opinion that "it is possible that production would have been 15-20per cent higher in the ab- sence of bombing. "'
In short, the attack on airframe production paid dividends -any diminution of enemy strength is a dividend-but they were not in the category of "decisive. " They did not bear out what had been promised for a concentrated offensiveby air forces of the size we were operating in early 1944. Moreover, we do not know how effectively the German Air Force could have used those "lost" aircraft, in view of shortages in fuel and pilots. The moment we started our attacks upon oil production in May 1944, the Germans began to find them- selves with more planes than they could fly. Their aircraft production began to lag only in the fall of 1944, after the aircraft industry had ceased to be a primary target for the Combined Bomber Offensive. And, as we have noted, the
major losses of German aircraft, together with trained pilots, occurred as a result of air battles which our bombing forays forced upon them and of our attacks on enemy airfields.
Possibly it was our method of attacking the aircraft target manufacturing rather than the choice of the system itself that was wrong. Hermann Goring and Albert Speer argued after their capture that aircraft-engine production would
U. S. S. B. S. , Airrraft Division Industry Report (Item #4 for European War), p. 6.
u. s:s. B. s. , Effects on German War Economy, p. 12.
have made a better target system than airframes, because the engines were made in a much smaller number of fac- tories. But others pointed out that engine-manufacturing plants were of much lower physical vulnerability than air- frame factories, especially to the light bombs (maximum 500 lbs. ) we were then using. @
The marked and immediate success achieved against the oil-producing industry seemed to indicate that the enemy air force was far more vulnerable through denial of liquid fuel than through direct attack upon it. The great fuel-pro- ducing plants could not be dispersed, their essential produc- ing facilities were quite vulnerable to blast and incendiary damage, and they were difficult to conceal. Yet only about
I per cent of the half-million tons of bombs dropped on Ger- many before May 1944 had been aimed at the oil industry. This omission resulted from the belief that the major fuel- producing plants lay beyond our range capabilities, from our consistent overestimation of the reserves of fuel which the Germans had in storage, and from our anxiety to get quick results. The total weight of bombs ultimately aimed at oil-
production facilities and storage depots was about 240,000 tons, or about half the total tonoage that had been dropped on Germany proper prior to May 1944.
Our failure to make a direct and comprehensive attack on the German chemical industry, including the synthetic-rub- ber plants, was also a serious error. The fact that that industry collapsed as a wholly unexpected result of our attack on oil reveals how vulnerable it was. Had we elevated it to the status of a target system in itself, we could have demolished
it much earlier in the war than we did and with only a small percentage of the bombs ultimately aimed at oil. The German
U. S. S. B. S. , Aircraft Division Report, pp. 53f.
? ORIGINS OF AIR STRATEGY
STRATEGIC BOMBING IN WORLD WAR I1
General Heinrici told our U. S. S. B. S. interrogators that if Allied effort had been concentrated on ammonia plants, Germany could have been knocked out of the war a full year
Bombing accuracy was greatly improved later on, espe- cially during the summer of 1944. Nevertheless, the limita- tions described above could be accepted, and a campaign carried out despite them, only if the attacker expected sub- stantial results from area bombing. Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris of Bomber Command did expect such results, because, despite his utter disdain for what we now call "psychological warfare," he shared Douhet's faith in the critical vulnerability of civilian morale. We shall consider the effects of bombing on civilian morale in a separate section, though it should already be obvious that whatever morale decline took place was of limited effect upon the over-all strategic situation. There was immense destruction and damage wrought on the buildings in German cities, and it is really surprising that the
war industries gathered in those cities should have suffered so little impairment or loss of production.
The tonnages expended on city bombing were enormous. Prior to our oil offensive,53 per cent of the bombs dropped on Germany were aimed at area targets, and only 13 per cent at specific industries. Even during the oil offensive, over 27 per cent of the million-and-a-half tons dropped were aimed at cities and only 22 per cent at specific industries, the latter including the 16 per cent assigned to oil targets.
What were the results? The Report of the Area Studies Division of the U. S. S. B. S. opens with the following para- graph:
The major cities of Germany present a spectacle of destruction so appalling as to suggest a complete breakdown of all aspects of
War), pp. jf. This kind of inaccuracy, incidentally, is one reason why electric power stations, which Speer and others considered an extraor- dinarily choice target system, were not in fact targeted. The vulnerable portions of electric power stations generally take up a very small area.
earlier. ''
That may not be so, but it is an interesting opinion.
The Failure o f City Bombing in Germany
The bombing of cities turned out to be a great waste of effort. T o be sure, cities were easier to find and hit than were particular industrial plants, and the kind of weather encoun- tered over Germany often left no choice. Also we must re- member the special limitations imposed on the R. A. F. by the fact that it was built and equipped as a night-bombing force :
Prior to the development of long-range fighters and the discovery and improvement of non-visual bombing aids and techniques, the R A F could not undertake daylight bombing without prohibitive losses, nor could it achieve sufficient accuracy in night bombing to attack other than very large targets. Even with the earlier forms of radar, an attack on a target smaller than a city area of at least roo,ooo population was not economical.
For example, using "GEE," the first radar navigational aid (which became available in March 1gq2), Bomber Command of the RAF, in attacks on towns in the Ruhr, could drop approximately 50 per cent of its bombs within five miles of the aiming point and 10 per cent within two miles. This meant that only 5 to 10 per cent of the tonnage dispatched could be dropped on a town the size of Essen and only two to three per cent on the Krupp works within Essen. Thus, economy required that attacks be aimed at the city center, ensuring that the maximum tonnage of bombs would fall somewhere on the target. "
loU. S. S. B. S. , Powder, Explosives . . . (Item #III for European War:
Oil Division; Ministerial Report No. I ) , p. 4; see also Oil Division Final
Report, PP. 40-73.
l1U. S. S. B. S. ,Area Studies Division Report (Item #31 for European
? ORIGINS OF AIR STRATEGY
STRATEGIC BOMBING IN WORLD WAR I1
urban activity. On the first impression it would appear that the area attacks which laid waste these cities must have substantially eliminated the industrial capacity of Germany. Yet this was not the case. The attacks did not so reduce German war production as to have a decisive effect on the outcome of the war.
The reasons for this indecisive effect were several, and we can only mention a few. One was the fact that in most German cities the industrial areas were on the perimeter, and area attacks on previously unbombed cities were always aimed at the centers. Even with the considerable improvement in nonvisual bombing aids between 1943 and 1944, it was prac- tically impossible to concentrate bombing attacks upon the industrial portions of built-up areas. Where industrial plants were hit, the nonessential as well as the essential were affected. The halting of the former only helped to speed the flow of labor and other resources to the latter. Such essential services as electricity, gas, and water were disrupted by heavy attacks, but in most cases they were readily restored. The cutting of the Ruhr gas lines in 1944 shut down important plants in Diisseldorf, Essen, Krefeld, and Berlin and contributed to the collapse of German steel production, but that was an excep- tional occurrence. It must be remembered too that the same bombing which inevitably reduced some of the supply of essential utilities also reduced some of the demand.
Another important fact about city bombing is that the dam- age was done primarily to buildings rather than to the ma- chines or machine-tools which some of those buildings housed. Not more than an estimated 6 to 7 per cent of all machine tools in Germany were damaged or destroyed by air attack, and not all of those had to be replaced. "In 1944, the year of the heaviest bombing, it is estimated that it was necessary to devote only 10 to 12 per cent of machine tool
production to the repair of machine tools damaged as a result of air attack. "" If the buildings which housed machines im- portant to war production were too severely damaged, the machines often could be moved to other locations. Otherwise the structures were roughly patched up and the workers pre- vailed upon to continue.
We should not assume that the damage done to over-all production was trivial. An area raid could drive production
in a city down by as much as 55 per cent in the month im- mediately following the attack. But recovery was rapid; most ,
cities were back to 80 per cent of normal within three months, and had recovered com~letelywithin six to eleven months. Naturally the recovery was most rapid in the most essential industries. No doubt the "cushion" in consumer goods was being eroded away. No doubt, too, indirect effects, as ex- pressed in absenteeism of workers, were growing steadily more serious.
Certainly the terrible shock given to the entire German state by the series of extremely heavy attacks directed at Ham- burg at the end of July and the beginning of August 1943 suggests what might have happened if attacks of comparable intensity could have been directed also against a substantial
number of other German cities at about the same time and in rapid succession. There is clearly no basis at all for assum- ingthat conclusions about German urban bombing in World
War II would apply to war in the atomic age. A different re- sult, as we shall see, obtained even in the same war in the case of Japan. But the fact remains that "the over-all index of German munitions production increased steadily from
IOO in January 1942 to 322 in July 1944,"'~a period that in- cluded a tremendous amount of general city bombing.
U. S. S. B. S. , Area Studies Division Report, p. 22. 18Ibid. , p. 19.
123
? ORIGINS OF AIR STRATEGY
STRATEGIC BOMBING IN WORLD WAR I1
The bombing of German cities cost the Germans much in production and more in the diversion of military resources to defense; but we must nevertheless state that no critical shortages in war commodities of any kind are traceable to it. To cause inconvenience and unhappiness to the enemy is a reasonable military aim in war, but in view of the promises made by Douhet and his followers, and in view also of the great military resources invested in it, the urban-area bomb- ing of World War I1 must be set down unequivocally as a failure.
Trial and Error in Bombing Tactics
For World War I1 types of bombs it was necessary not only to pick the right target systems but also to find the right facilities within those systems and the right target centers within those facilities. In our attack upon railroad transpor- tation, for example, a large proportion of the bombing was directed against freight-car marshalling yards, and usually we aimed at the center of the yards in order to hit the great- est amount of trackage. As a result, such bombing usually left some fairly intact stump yards near the entrance to the original yards, which the Germans could use for high-prior- ity traffic while proceeding with repairs. The entrance, or throat, of the yard would have been a far better target center, but was rarely so designated. Moreover, the Germans not only had a large surplus capacity in yards, but some of the impor-
tant traffic, including troop movements, tended to use com- plete trains which did not require the use of marshalling yards at all. By far the most effective way of interdicting rail- road transportation, at least with the H. E. (high explosive) bombs of World War 11, proved to be by way of line cuts at bridges, underpasses, viaducts, tunnels, and the like.
"
"At least this is the conclusion of the Transportauon Division of
Even in the successful offensive against the oil industry there was a generally poor selection of "ground-zeros"'" within the plants selected for attack. Although accuracy. in general was far below the "pickle-barrel" precision adver- tised before the war, vulnerable areas when chosen consist- ently as the bull's-eye were invariably destroyed. In only a small minority of the cases, however, were the most critical and vulnerable sections of the plant so chosen.
Also, the bombs used were usually too light for the job. The U. S. A. A. F. 's attacks were "based on the observation that it is easier to hit an elephant with a shotgun than with a rifle. " The average weight per unit of the bombs we dropped on oil and chemical targets was 388 pounds, but it was the heavy bombs of two to four thousand pounds each, used toward the very end of the war, which were alone able to do
really permanent damage to heavy industrial installations. The British, incidentally, were considerably more advanced than we in this respect, the average weight of the bombs dropped by the R. A. F. during our oil oflensive being some- thing like 660 pounds. A considerable improvement in effec-
U. S. S. B. S. The British Bombing Survey Unit credited much greater effec- tiveness to the bombing of marshalling yards, but, as we have noted, the Survey was directed by persons who had been deeply involved in the operational decisions.
l5 This awkward term is forced upon me by shifts in terminology since World War 11. What for bombing would correspond to the "bull's-eye" in pistol or rifle target shooting used to be called the "aiming point," which is the sense in which the latter term is used through most of the U. S. S. B. S. However, with the development of bombing sights that per- mitted offset bombing, the "aiming point" might well be miles from the center of the target (making it rather like the offset "aiming point" used in archery target shooting). The atomic bomb has encouraged the habit of using the term "ground zero" to indicate the point on the surface im-
mediately under the center of burst, and "designated ground zero," often abbreviated D. G. Z. , is therefore comparable to "bull's-eye. " In short, it is the point aimed at, not the "aiming pointWl
? ORIGINS OF AIR STRATEGY
STRATEGIC BOMBING IN WORLD WAR I1
tiveness could also have been obtained through cutting down the proportion of bombs in both forces which failed to explode.
One does not have to think in terms of perfect planning, perfect intelligence, or perfect anything else to admit that better planning and testing before the war and more flex- ibility of doctrine would have brought vastly better results than were achieved. The bombs aimed at what proved to be the right targets, the destruction of which caused the collapse of the German economy, comprised only a minute percentage of the total tonnage dropped on Germany and German- occupied territory.
In this brief r h m t of the strategic bombing of Germany, we have not been concerned with whether the campaign was worth its con. If we were trying to appraise the total payoff of the campaign, we should have to sum up the direct and also all the indirect results which we can find, including the great effort which the Germans put into active military and non-military defenses against our bombing. We should espe- cially have to take into full account the fact that, from Dun- kirk to the time of the invasion of Italy, there was no way other than bombing by which the British and ourselves could strike at Germany in Europe. The question whether strategic bombing on the scale applied represented the optimum use of the resources expended in it is essentially unanswerable; but there is a strong prima-facie case for its having been a good use of those resources.
The questions to which we have addressed ourselves are, first, whether the campaign produced decisive results, and, 1 secondly, whether such results could have been achieved , earlier with a better use of the resources actually available. I The answer to the first question is a qualified "yes," and to
the second a clear aflirmative. But that such a campaign could have been decisive even in the absence of ground oper- erations-with all the freeing of resources for the air battle that such a situation would have implied for both sides-must be regarded as neither proved nor provable. Assertions to the contrary, on either side of the argument, can be only decla- rations of faith.
The Strategic Bombing of Japan
Any appraisal of results of the strategic bombing of Japan must start from consideration of the military conditions prevailing at the time the campaign really got under way, which was quite late in the war. The raids that began in the fall of 1943 by B-29's based in China, and supplied entirely by air transport over the "hump" from India, were on much
too small a scale to have strategic significance. The U. S. S. B. S. report suggests that with their limited sortie rate, those forces would have been more effectively used in the campaign against Japanese shipping. The inauguration of the strategic air offensive against Japan is reasonably dated not earlier than November 1944. Toward the end of that month bomber at- tacks were initiated from recently won Saipar,, and later from Tinian and Guam.
However, the intensive air attack on the Japanese that marked the latter stages of the war began only in March 1915, at which time some radically new tactics worked out in General Curtis LeMay's headquarters were introduced. These tactics involved "maximum effort" low-level attacks at night, with great compression of force in space and time. The in- tensity of attacks increased gradually, until an attack oc-
curred on the southwest portion of Tokyo on May 23, 1945 in which 520 bombers dropped 3,646 tons of incendiary bombs
? ORIGINSOF AIR STRATEGY
STRATEGIC BOMBING IN WORLD WAR I1
on an area of about eleven square miles. For two hours dur- ing that attack the bombs were dropping at an average rate of ~,ooopounds per second. ''
The plight of the Japanese Empire at the time this cam- paign began is summarized by a single sentence from the U. S. S. B. S. report: "By March 1945, prior to heavy direct air attack on the Japanese home islands, the Japanese air forces had been reduced to Kamikaze forces, her fleet had been sunk or immobilized, her merchant marine decimated, large por- tions of her ground forces isolated, and the strangulation of her economy well begun. ""
At that time, moreover, the Japanese had already lost the Philippines and Iwo Jima, and were suffering the investment of Okinawa. They were sending no further supplies to their ground forces outside the home islands, and they were con- centrating solely on defense against invasion. How long they would have continued to endure even in the absence of a concentrated strategic-bombing campaign is questionable, because the blockade resulting from destruction of the J a p anese merchant marine had, among other things, brought the national diet to below subsistence levels. The situation was thoroughly understood by many Japanese military leaders. Some of the senior naval officershad been secretly working since the previous September, that is, since before the Battle for Leyte Gulf, to take the country out of the war. ''
So long as the American goal was unconditional surrender,
'$1 am indebted for this information, and for much more that I have not been able to include, to my colleague Dr. Alexander W. Boldyreff.
I TU. S. S. B. S. , Summary Report (Pacific War), p. g.
U. S. S. B. S. ,lapan's Struggle to End the War, p. 4. See also Robert J. C.
Butow, lapan's Decision to Surrender, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1954, which effectively supersedes the U. S. S. B. S. document and which pro- vides an excellent and fascinating narrative of relevant events.
and especially so long as we were eager to achieve it as quickly as possible, there seemed at the time to be no ques- tion that some kind of direct assault on the Japanese home islands was necessary. A full-scale invasion was accordingly being projected for the following November. It is unequivo- cally to the credit of the strategic-bombing offensive that it secured all the objectives of the planned invasion before the latter could be mounted. It did so at immeasurably less cost in American lives, and no doubt also in Japanese lives, than might otherwise have been the case. Nothing can diminish or gainsay the value and importance of this accomplishment, which had no parallel in Europe. By the same token, it is both unreasonable and ungracious to the other services-as well as to the tactical air forces which conducted four years of marvelously successful and effective operations over land and water-to equate that accomplishment with the winning of the war.
The strategic air offensive against Japan was remarkably different from that against Germany in character as well as result. It was much more concentrated in time, and had the benefit of the more advanced technology then available. Japan was more urbanized than Germany, its cities were more vulnerable to fire, and its active defenses at the time of the campaign were of a low order of effectiveness, being al- most confined to antiaircraft guns. " Thus, more was accom- plished with fewer bombs. Only 160,800 tons of bombs were dropped on the home islands of Japan, compared with
1,360,000 tons dropped within the borders of Germany. Sixty- six Japanese cities received 104,000 tons of bombs (mostly incendiaries) as compared with 542,554 tons dropped on
Of which, however, there were some 500 heavy guns (88 rnrn. or larger) in the Tokyo area alone.
? ORIGINS OF AIR STRATEGY
STRATEGIC BOMBING IN WORLD WAR I1
sixty-one German cities. Also, a disproportionately large part of the Japanese tonnage was dropped on a very few large cities. Of the sixty-six Japanese cities attacked, only six were struck before the last three months of the war. " Yet some 40 per cent of the built-up areas of those sixty-six cities was destroyed.
In Japan, unlike Germany, the urban-area bombing seems to have contributed more to achieving the desired results than did the precision bombing of specific industries. This was due not alone to the fact that there was less opportunity for recuperation among Japanese cities than there had been in Germany, but more importantly to the fact that in Japan economic objectives counted for less than psychological ones. The precision bombing was, as in Germany, much more ef- fective per bomb in reducing Japanese war production, and immeasurably more discriminating about the kind of pro- duction reduced, than was the urban-area bombing. But Japan had already lost the battle of production; her economy
had already proved grossly inadequate to the political and strategic ambitions of her leaders; her losses in a merchant fleet that had been inadequate from the start had already caused, through denial of raw materials, a sharp contraction in production. Greater contractions would have followed inevitably, even without bombing. " It must be added that her overwhelming military defeats, by practically wiping out her navy and isolating most of her army, had greatly re-
20 U. S. S. B. S. , Eflects of Air Attack on Iapanese Urban Economy, Sum- mary Report, pp. ivf.
21The U. S. S. B. S. estimated that by August 1945,"even without direct air attack on her cities and industries, the over-all level of Japanese war production would have declined below the peak levels of 1944 by 40 to 50 per cent solely as a result of the interdiction of overseas imports. " (Sum- mary Report [Pacific W a r ] , p. 15. )
duced the demands which the military forces were making upon the economy.
Japan was already defeated. It was necessary only to make her government develop a clear consensus on that fact, and then openly concede it. The U. S. A. A. F. may not have cor- rectly appreciated the situation, but it acted as if it had. What was wanted was not a discriminating pruning out of this or that kind of military production, but simply the maximum of direct military pressure upon the population and the govern- ment. The awful terror of the great fire raids on the cities,
culminating in the two atomic attacks, copiously provided that pressure.
The Attack on German Morale
It is difficult to tell just what proportion of the bombs dropped on Germany in World War I1 was deliberately aimed at German morale, but it was unquestionably very large. A good deal of the area bombing of cities was so directed, especially by the R. A. F. Although Sir Arthur Har- ris in his Bomber Offensive speaks sarcastically of "psycho- logical" objectives as among the "panaceas" thrust upon him by uncomprehending but meddling civilians, it is abundantly clear from the whole text of his memoirs that the "German will to resist" was precisely what he was most interested in
attacking. Douhet too, as we have seen, had considered it the most important target after the enemy air force.
The huge share of Allied bombs spent in the attack on German morale failed to achieve any important end results. Bombing did indeed seriously depress the morale of German civilians. The oft-expressed view that the bombing of cities 1, ,P stiffens the will of the populace to resist finds no support -
in experience. But in Germany the depressed morale had no
? ORIGINS OF AIR STRATEGY
STRATEGIC BOMBING IN WORLD WAR I1
critical effects-at least until the very last months of the war, when all was lost anyway-on either the political struc- ture or the capability of the German war economy to support the troops in the field.
The reason that this was so is to be found largely in a distinction, which the German Internal Security Service consistently emphasized throughout the latter part of the war, between Stimmung (attitude or feeling) and Haltung (behavior). It was one of the important discoveries of the war that the influence of the former upon the latter was much less immediate and direct than had been generally supposed. Some degree of influence there was bound to be, but from the Allied point of view it was disappointingly small.
The attack upon Stimmung or attitude was remarkably successful, but this success did not have much meaning for the things that counted. Depressed morale, plus the problem of copingwith the physical deprivationsresulting from bomb ing, significantly increased absenteeism of industrial workers beyond the normal. It also significantly lowered the produc- tivity of those who reported for work. In combination, these effects-and notice that morale was depressed by defeats in the ground battles as well as by air raids-resulted in a loss of output of at least 25 per cent during the last year of the war. That looked serious enough to those responsible for keeping the war machine going. But as for stopping or vitally impairing the functioning of that machine, the effects were spread too broadly across all industries, were at best marginal, and therefore counted as nothing compared to the knocking out of a single essential industry such as oil production or transportation.
From at least the beginning of 1944 the average German had become disillusioned with the Nazi leadership, increas-
ingly frightened by the war's toll and its potential threat to himself and his family, and persuaded with growing cer- tainty that all would end in defeat. Yet he stuck to his job and his machine for as long as it was physically possible to do so, and in so doing kept a disastrous war going to its ulti- mate ruinous conclusion. Why did he do so? The answer is to be found in need combined with habit, in coercion, and in propaganda-in descending order of importance-all add- ing up to the plain circumstance that the German worker had no real alternative open to him.
The effect of habit is in part reflected in the fact that un- authorized absenteeism was much more marked among women than among men, especially in those occupations in which female labor was strictly a wartime phenomenon. T h e man kept to his job largely because that was what he had always done, in calm and in crisis, and because he and his family needed his wages in order to eat.
The coercion of the government extended to all sorts of restrictions about changing or leaving one's job without per- mission, and applied with special vengeance to overt expres-
sion of feeling-let alone action-against the regime. More telling was the fact that over the years the regime had suc- ceeded in eradicating practically all organized political op- position, so that no means existed for giving direction to and translating into action the feelings of disaffection which un- doubtedly developed. There could be no peace party in Ger- ' many (outside the army, where the dissident group was liquidated after the abortive putsch of July 1944) simply be- cause there could be no party outside the control of the Nazi leadership.
This absence of organized opposition is the feature of totalitarian countries that must give pause to those who would ,
? ORIGINS OF AIR STRATEGY
STRATEGIC BOMBING IN WORLD WAR I1
count heavily on defeating them by psychological means. In that connection, a critical difference between wartime Germany on the one hand and Italy and Japan on the other was that the latter two countries, though quasi-totalitarian, had in their monarchiai systems a latent means of crystalliz- ing an effective and legal opposition to the war party. Those countries surrendered before hostile troops had effectively invaded their main territories, while Germany did not sur- render until Hitler was dead and the eastern and western fronts had merged in the center of the Reich.
Although habit and coercion worked exclusively for the benefit of the German government, propaganda was the one means by which the Allied governments could hope to com- pete with the Nazis in giving guidance to the German work- man and soldier. The Allied bombing helped induce Ger- mans to listen to enemy radio broadcasts, partly because its success gave the lie to so many Nazi claims, and also because German stations had to go off the air to avoid serving as beacons. The invading aircraft themselves dropped millions of leaflets. Allied propaganda during the last year or more of the war concentrated on the hopelessness of the German military position, something which the huge formations of British and American bombers ranging freely over Germany effectively drove home. That was all right so far as it went, but it left a hiatus into which Goebbels and Company promptly moved.
The great propaganda achievement of Goebbels, in which he was aided and abetted by Allied word and actions, was to exploit sheer desperation as a means of keeping the Ger- mans fighting. There was no "will to win" because, espe- cially after the collapse of the hopes based on "secret weapons," there could be no expectation of winning. What
took the place of a will to win was an apathy about politics combined with a driving fear of what defeat would bring. One of the grimmer aphorisms then current in Germany was "Geniess den Krieg; der Friede wird schrec~lichsein" (En- joy the war; the peace will be terrible). The number of Al- lied casualties in the last year of the war testifies to the e? - fectiveness of this combination of negative incentives.
One lesson the bombing attack on morale brought home was that a people accustomed to responding to authority- and all peoples are, in modestly varying degrees-will con- tinue to respond even under very great physical stress. As physical conditions approach chaos, the population becomes more dependent upon authority, because of greater need for guidance and succor combined with the absence of alterna- tive. Besides, the person of independent mind who forms his own opinions on the evidence of his senses and the fruits of his logic is an ideal form of human being which, like other ideal forms, rarely exists in nature. Even most intellectuals- always a small minority in a population-tend in their think- ing merely to follow more refined fads. Moreover, it takes a very profound revolution of the mind and spirit to accept those cues for behavior provided by the acknowledged enemy as against those offered by one's own leaders.
Granting that it is behavior rather than morale that most interests both attacker and defender, there are nevertheless a few features about the response of German morale to Al- lied bombs which are especially interesting in view of the new weapons that have appeared since World War 11.
One surprising finding of the U. S. S. B. S. was that the most heavily-bombed cities did not necessarily show lower morale than those less severely hit.
Nevertheless, the fact remains that the ultimate destruc- tion of the German armies was practically assured from the time of the successful Allied break-out west of St. Lo late in July 1944, at which time the tangible battlefield results of our strategic bombing, apart from its important contribu- tion to suppressing enemy air activities, added up to very little. By the time those results were making themselves felt seriously, the Battle of the Bulge was a thing of the past and
the Allied armies were well into Germany.
If prior to mid-1943 we had put into our strategic air force
some of the resources used in building up a great army and invasion armada, as some argued we should have done, we would no doubt have got our strategic bombing results faster. However, that is not the same as saying that the war would have ended sooner. The fact is that we did put into strategic bombing a colossal effort. We were also committed to an invasion of France, and there were at the time few grounds for calling that a bad commitment. At the time we made the relevant decisions, our government feared, probably wrongly, that if we limited ourselves to an air and naval effort the
Russians would make a separate peace. If, as is more likely, the Russians had gone on fighting, and if our bombing had guaranteed the success of Soviet ground forces, it would have been their armies and not ours that would have "liberated" western Europe, and that might very well have been there now.
The strategic bombing of Germany during World War I1 was almost totally a new experiment, in which much had to be learned the hard way. We steadily tried to reach out after greater capabilities,especiallyin carrying capacity,depth of penetration, and accuracy of bombing; and we sought, partly and inescapably through trial and error, to find good
target systems. In both respects we can now see many critical and perhaps unnecessary errors which delayed our success. The U. S. A. A. F. paid dearly for the prewar conviction, inherited from Douhet, that fighter escort was unnecessary for bombers like the B-17, unhappily called the "Flying
Fortress. " The disastrous second Schweinfurt raid of October 10, 1943, in which the attacking squadrons lost 30 per cent of their aircraft, indicated that deep daylight penetrations into Germany had to await the availability of large numbers of long-range fighters. Starting in early 1944, the P-51s played a major part in destroying the German Air Force. Similarly, the British paid heavily for their early conviction that night bombing could be precise enough for specific industrial tar-
gets. When that was disproved, they adopted in 1942 Chief of Bomber Command Sir Arthur Harris' compensating con- viction that area bombing was the most promising method of aerial attack anyway, since the search for specific target systems was only a futile search for "panacea targets. " Sir Arthur, incidentally, had not lost that conviction even when
? ORIGINS OF AIR STRATEGY
STRATEGIC BOMBING IN WORLD WAR 11
he wrote his memoirs after the war's end; nor had some of the senior officers who had served under him. '
The basic strategy for the Combined Bomber Offensive was laid down in the Casablanca Conference of January 1943, where the relevant directive stated the primary objec- tive of the strategic air offensive: "the progressive destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial, and eco- nomic system, and the undermining of the morale of the German people to a point where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened. " The directive went on to name five primary target systems in the following order: ( I ) sub- marine construction yards, ( 2 ) the aircraft industry, (3) transportation, (4) the oil industry, (5) generalized targets in the enemy war industry. In the absence of specific instruc- tions to the contrary, air force commanders retained the
authority to alter the order of priority for individual raids according to their own judgment.
On June 10, 1943, a new and much more pointed directive from the Combined Chiefs of Staff set down the "Point- blank" target system, and created the so-called "Jockey" Committee as an advisory body on targets; this Committee carried out its function until it merged with the Combined Strategic Targets Committee in September 1944. Under "Pointblank," German fighter plane production and existing strength were made unequivocally top-priority targets for the American bomber forces. The governing considerations were: (a) air dominance had to be established in the face of in- creasing German fighter strength, which threatened the con-
See Marshal of the R. A. F. Sir Arthur Harris, Bomber Offensive,Col- lins, London, 1947, especially pp. 75, 220-234. Sir Arthur's Senior Air Staff Officer (or Chief of Staff), now Air Marshal Sir Robert Saundb~,has espoused the same views in his numerous articles in British professional journals.
tinuance of the bomber offensive; (b) destruction of the German Air Force would provide the best short-term stra- tegic-bombing contribution to the planned invasion of the Continent; and (c) the immediately preceding months, with their brilliant victories at sea, had brought the submarine menace under control and had shown, moreover, that the destruction of submarine yards and bases along with the other desired target systems was simply beyond the capabil- ities of existing bomber forces. The June 1943 directive thus recognized the need for adjusting to limited capabilities by
ordering concentration on a single specifically-designated target system. All other systems were made secondary, and individual force commanders were given minimum dis- cretion with regard to choice among systems to be attacked.
In principle, the selection of the German Air Force as a target system, and especially of its fighter contingent, was right. It placed first things first according to common sense as well as to the well-known Douhet dictum that command of the air must be won before it can be exploited. However, the offensive against the German aircraft industry, which reached its greatest intensity in the period February-April 1944, was a failure. Attacks upon airframe plants simply induced the
Germans to disperse their facilities, which proved relatively easy to do since the tools mainly used were fairly mobile. The temporary loss of production resulting from such move- ment of equipment was about all that could be chalked up to the credit of the attacks.
The fact remains that front-line German fighter air strength increased sharply during the Allied offensiveagainst it. No doubt the increase was less than it would have been but for our bombing. The Aircraft Division of the U. S. S. B. S. estimated that some 18,000 aircraft of all types were denied
? ORIGINS OF AIR STRATEGY
STRATEGIC BOMBING IN WORLD WAR I1
the German Air Force in the period between July 1943 and December 1944. ~That figure, based on the disparity between planned and actual production, is ventured against an al- leged total production for the same period of 53,000 air- craft-a quite improbable figure. The economists who pre- pared the over-all economic-effectsreport of u. s. S. B. S. were more cautious, offering the opinion that "it is possible that production would have been 15-20per cent higher in the ab- sence of bombing. "'
In short, the attack on airframe production paid dividends -any diminution of enemy strength is a dividend-but they were not in the category of "decisive. " They did not bear out what had been promised for a concentrated offensiveby air forces of the size we were operating in early 1944. Moreover, we do not know how effectively the German Air Force could have used those "lost" aircraft, in view of shortages in fuel and pilots. The moment we started our attacks upon oil production in May 1944, the Germans began to find them- selves with more planes than they could fly. Their aircraft production began to lag only in the fall of 1944, after the aircraft industry had ceased to be a primary target for the Combined Bomber Offensive. And, as we have noted, the
major losses of German aircraft, together with trained pilots, occurred as a result of air battles which our bombing forays forced upon them and of our attacks on enemy airfields.
Possibly it was our method of attacking the aircraft target manufacturing rather than the choice of the system itself that was wrong. Hermann Goring and Albert Speer argued after their capture that aircraft-engine production would
U. S. S. B. S. , Airrraft Division Industry Report (Item #4 for European War), p. 6.
u. s:s. B. s. , Effects on German War Economy, p. 12.
have made a better target system than airframes, because the engines were made in a much smaller number of fac- tories. But others pointed out that engine-manufacturing plants were of much lower physical vulnerability than air- frame factories, especially to the light bombs (maximum 500 lbs. ) we were then using. @
The marked and immediate success achieved against the oil-producing industry seemed to indicate that the enemy air force was far more vulnerable through denial of liquid fuel than through direct attack upon it. The great fuel-pro- ducing plants could not be dispersed, their essential produc- ing facilities were quite vulnerable to blast and incendiary damage, and they were difficult to conceal. Yet only about
I per cent of the half-million tons of bombs dropped on Ger- many before May 1944 had been aimed at the oil industry. This omission resulted from the belief that the major fuel- producing plants lay beyond our range capabilities, from our consistent overestimation of the reserves of fuel which the Germans had in storage, and from our anxiety to get quick results. The total weight of bombs ultimately aimed at oil-
production facilities and storage depots was about 240,000 tons, or about half the total tonoage that had been dropped on Germany proper prior to May 1944.
Our failure to make a direct and comprehensive attack on the German chemical industry, including the synthetic-rub- ber plants, was also a serious error. The fact that that industry collapsed as a wholly unexpected result of our attack on oil reveals how vulnerable it was. Had we elevated it to the status of a target system in itself, we could have demolished
it much earlier in the war than we did and with only a small percentage of the bombs ultimately aimed at oil. The German
U. S. S. B. S. , Aircraft Division Report, pp. 53f.
? ORIGINS OF AIR STRATEGY
STRATEGIC BOMBING IN WORLD WAR I1
General Heinrici told our U. S. S. B. S. interrogators that if Allied effort had been concentrated on ammonia plants, Germany could have been knocked out of the war a full year
Bombing accuracy was greatly improved later on, espe- cially during the summer of 1944. Nevertheless, the limita- tions described above could be accepted, and a campaign carried out despite them, only if the attacker expected sub- stantial results from area bombing. Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris of Bomber Command did expect such results, because, despite his utter disdain for what we now call "psychological warfare," he shared Douhet's faith in the critical vulnerability of civilian morale. We shall consider the effects of bombing on civilian morale in a separate section, though it should already be obvious that whatever morale decline took place was of limited effect upon the over-all strategic situation. There was immense destruction and damage wrought on the buildings in German cities, and it is really surprising that the
war industries gathered in those cities should have suffered so little impairment or loss of production.
The tonnages expended on city bombing were enormous. Prior to our oil offensive,53 per cent of the bombs dropped on Germany were aimed at area targets, and only 13 per cent at specific industries. Even during the oil offensive, over 27 per cent of the million-and-a-half tons dropped were aimed at cities and only 22 per cent at specific industries, the latter including the 16 per cent assigned to oil targets.
What were the results? The Report of the Area Studies Division of the U. S. S. B. S. opens with the following para- graph:
The major cities of Germany present a spectacle of destruction so appalling as to suggest a complete breakdown of all aspects of
War), pp. jf. This kind of inaccuracy, incidentally, is one reason why electric power stations, which Speer and others considered an extraor- dinarily choice target system, were not in fact targeted. The vulnerable portions of electric power stations generally take up a very small area.
earlier. ''
That may not be so, but it is an interesting opinion.
The Failure o f City Bombing in Germany
The bombing of cities turned out to be a great waste of effort. T o be sure, cities were easier to find and hit than were particular industrial plants, and the kind of weather encoun- tered over Germany often left no choice. Also we must re- member the special limitations imposed on the R. A. F. by the fact that it was built and equipped as a night-bombing force :
Prior to the development of long-range fighters and the discovery and improvement of non-visual bombing aids and techniques, the R A F could not undertake daylight bombing without prohibitive losses, nor could it achieve sufficient accuracy in night bombing to attack other than very large targets. Even with the earlier forms of radar, an attack on a target smaller than a city area of at least roo,ooo population was not economical.
For example, using "GEE," the first radar navigational aid (which became available in March 1gq2), Bomber Command of the RAF, in attacks on towns in the Ruhr, could drop approximately 50 per cent of its bombs within five miles of the aiming point and 10 per cent within two miles. This meant that only 5 to 10 per cent of the tonnage dispatched could be dropped on a town the size of Essen and only two to three per cent on the Krupp works within Essen. Thus, economy required that attacks be aimed at the city center, ensuring that the maximum tonnage of bombs would fall somewhere on the target. "
loU. S. S. B. S. , Powder, Explosives . . . (Item #III for European War:
Oil Division; Ministerial Report No. I ) , p. 4; see also Oil Division Final
Report, PP. 40-73.
l1U. S. S. B. S. ,Area Studies Division Report (Item #31 for European
? ORIGINS OF AIR STRATEGY
STRATEGIC BOMBING IN WORLD WAR I1
urban activity. On the first impression it would appear that the area attacks which laid waste these cities must have substantially eliminated the industrial capacity of Germany. Yet this was not the case. The attacks did not so reduce German war production as to have a decisive effect on the outcome of the war.
The reasons for this indecisive effect were several, and we can only mention a few. One was the fact that in most German cities the industrial areas were on the perimeter, and area attacks on previously unbombed cities were always aimed at the centers. Even with the considerable improvement in nonvisual bombing aids between 1943 and 1944, it was prac- tically impossible to concentrate bombing attacks upon the industrial portions of built-up areas. Where industrial plants were hit, the nonessential as well as the essential were affected. The halting of the former only helped to speed the flow of labor and other resources to the latter. Such essential services as electricity, gas, and water were disrupted by heavy attacks, but in most cases they were readily restored. The cutting of the Ruhr gas lines in 1944 shut down important plants in Diisseldorf, Essen, Krefeld, and Berlin and contributed to the collapse of German steel production, but that was an excep- tional occurrence. It must be remembered too that the same bombing which inevitably reduced some of the supply of essential utilities also reduced some of the demand.
Another important fact about city bombing is that the dam- age was done primarily to buildings rather than to the ma- chines or machine-tools which some of those buildings housed. Not more than an estimated 6 to 7 per cent of all machine tools in Germany were damaged or destroyed by air attack, and not all of those had to be replaced. "In 1944, the year of the heaviest bombing, it is estimated that it was necessary to devote only 10 to 12 per cent of machine tool
production to the repair of machine tools damaged as a result of air attack. "" If the buildings which housed machines im- portant to war production were too severely damaged, the machines often could be moved to other locations. Otherwise the structures were roughly patched up and the workers pre- vailed upon to continue.
We should not assume that the damage done to over-all production was trivial. An area raid could drive production
in a city down by as much as 55 per cent in the month im- mediately following the attack. But recovery was rapid; most ,
cities were back to 80 per cent of normal within three months, and had recovered com~letelywithin six to eleven months. Naturally the recovery was most rapid in the most essential industries. No doubt the "cushion" in consumer goods was being eroded away. No doubt, too, indirect effects, as ex- pressed in absenteeism of workers, were growing steadily more serious.
Certainly the terrible shock given to the entire German state by the series of extremely heavy attacks directed at Ham- burg at the end of July and the beginning of August 1943 suggests what might have happened if attacks of comparable intensity could have been directed also against a substantial
number of other German cities at about the same time and in rapid succession. There is clearly no basis at all for assum- ingthat conclusions about German urban bombing in World
War II would apply to war in the atomic age. A different re- sult, as we shall see, obtained even in the same war in the case of Japan. But the fact remains that "the over-all index of German munitions production increased steadily from
IOO in January 1942 to 322 in July 1944,"'~a period that in- cluded a tremendous amount of general city bombing.
U. S. S. B. S. , Area Studies Division Report, p. 22. 18Ibid. , p. 19.
123
? ORIGINS OF AIR STRATEGY
STRATEGIC BOMBING IN WORLD WAR I1
The bombing of German cities cost the Germans much in production and more in the diversion of military resources to defense; but we must nevertheless state that no critical shortages in war commodities of any kind are traceable to it. To cause inconvenience and unhappiness to the enemy is a reasonable military aim in war, but in view of the promises made by Douhet and his followers, and in view also of the great military resources invested in it, the urban-area bomb- ing of World War I1 must be set down unequivocally as a failure.
Trial and Error in Bombing Tactics
For World War I1 types of bombs it was necessary not only to pick the right target systems but also to find the right facilities within those systems and the right target centers within those facilities. In our attack upon railroad transpor- tation, for example, a large proportion of the bombing was directed against freight-car marshalling yards, and usually we aimed at the center of the yards in order to hit the great- est amount of trackage. As a result, such bombing usually left some fairly intact stump yards near the entrance to the original yards, which the Germans could use for high-prior- ity traffic while proceeding with repairs. The entrance, or throat, of the yard would have been a far better target center, but was rarely so designated. Moreover, the Germans not only had a large surplus capacity in yards, but some of the impor-
tant traffic, including troop movements, tended to use com- plete trains which did not require the use of marshalling yards at all. By far the most effective way of interdicting rail- road transportation, at least with the H. E. (high explosive) bombs of World War 11, proved to be by way of line cuts at bridges, underpasses, viaducts, tunnels, and the like.
"
"At least this is the conclusion of the Transportauon Division of
Even in the successful offensive against the oil industry there was a generally poor selection of "ground-zeros"'" within the plants selected for attack. Although accuracy. in general was far below the "pickle-barrel" precision adver- tised before the war, vulnerable areas when chosen consist- ently as the bull's-eye were invariably destroyed. In only a small minority of the cases, however, were the most critical and vulnerable sections of the plant so chosen.
Also, the bombs used were usually too light for the job. The U. S. A. A. F. 's attacks were "based on the observation that it is easier to hit an elephant with a shotgun than with a rifle. " The average weight per unit of the bombs we dropped on oil and chemical targets was 388 pounds, but it was the heavy bombs of two to four thousand pounds each, used toward the very end of the war, which were alone able to do
really permanent damage to heavy industrial installations. The British, incidentally, were considerably more advanced than we in this respect, the average weight of the bombs dropped by the R. A. F. during our oil oflensive being some- thing like 660 pounds. A considerable improvement in effec-
U. S. S. B. S. The British Bombing Survey Unit credited much greater effec- tiveness to the bombing of marshalling yards, but, as we have noted, the Survey was directed by persons who had been deeply involved in the operational decisions.
l5 This awkward term is forced upon me by shifts in terminology since World War 11. What for bombing would correspond to the "bull's-eye" in pistol or rifle target shooting used to be called the "aiming point," which is the sense in which the latter term is used through most of the U. S. S. B. S. However, with the development of bombing sights that per- mitted offset bombing, the "aiming point" might well be miles from the center of the target (making it rather like the offset "aiming point" used in archery target shooting). The atomic bomb has encouraged the habit of using the term "ground zero" to indicate the point on the surface im-
mediately under the center of burst, and "designated ground zero," often abbreviated D. G. Z. , is therefore comparable to "bull's-eye. " In short, it is the point aimed at, not the "aiming pointWl
? ORIGINS OF AIR STRATEGY
STRATEGIC BOMBING IN WORLD WAR I1
tiveness could also have been obtained through cutting down the proportion of bombs in both forces which failed to explode.
One does not have to think in terms of perfect planning, perfect intelligence, or perfect anything else to admit that better planning and testing before the war and more flex- ibility of doctrine would have brought vastly better results than were achieved. The bombs aimed at what proved to be the right targets, the destruction of which caused the collapse of the German economy, comprised only a minute percentage of the total tonnage dropped on Germany and German- occupied territory.
In this brief r h m t of the strategic bombing of Germany, we have not been concerned with whether the campaign was worth its con. If we were trying to appraise the total payoff of the campaign, we should have to sum up the direct and also all the indirect results which we can find, including the great effort which the Germans put into active military and non-military defenses against our bombing. We should espe- cially have to take into full account the fact that, from Dun- kirk to the time of the invasion of Italy, there was no way other than bombing by which the British and ourselves could strike at Germany in Europe. The question whether strategic bombing on the scale applied represented the optimum use of the resources expended in it is essentially unanswerable; but there is a strong prima-facie case for its having been a good use of those resources.
The questions to which we have addressed ourselves are, first, whether the campaign produced decisive results, and, 1 secondly, whether such results could have been achieved , earlier with a better use of the resources actually available. I The answer to the first question is a qualified "yes," and to
the second a clear aflirmative. But that such a campaign could have been decisive even in the absence of ground oper- erations-with all the freeing of resources for the air battle that such a situation would have implied for both sides-must be regarded as neither proved nor provable. Assertions to the contrary, on either side of the argument, can be only decla- rations of faith.
The Strategic Bombing of Japan
Any appraisal of results of the strategic bombing of Japan must start from consideration of the military conditions prevailing at the time the campaign really got under way, which was quite late in the war. The raids that began in the fall of 1943 by B-29's based in China, and supplied entirely by air transport over the "hump" from India, were on much
too small a scale to have strategic significance. The U. S. S. B. S. report suggests that with their limited sortie rate, those forces would have been more effectively used in the campaign against Japanese shipping. The inauguration of the strategic air offensive against Japan is reasonably dated not earlier than November 1944. Toward the end of that month bomber at- tacks were initiated from recently won Saipar,, and later from Tinian and Guam.
However, the intensive air attack on the Japanese that marked the latter stages of the war began only in March 1915, at which time some radically new tactics worked out in General Curtis LeMay's headquarters were introduced. These tactics involved "maximum effort" low-level attacks at night, with great compression of force in space and time. The in- tensity of attacks increased gradually, until an attack oc-
curred on the southwest portion of Tokyo on May 23, 1945 in which 520 bombers dropped 3,646 tons of incendiary bombs
? ORIGINSOF AIR STRATEGY
STRATEGIC BOMBING IN WORLD WAR I1
on an area of about eleven square miles. For two hours dur- ing that attack the bombs were dropping at an average rate of ~,ooopounds per second. ''
The plight of the Japanese Empire at the time this cam- paign began is summarized by a single sentence from the U. S. S. B. S. report: "By March 1945, prior to heavy direct air attack on the Japanese home islands, the Japanese air forces had been reduced to Kamikaze forces, her fleet had been sunk or immobilized, her merchant marine decimated, large por- tions of her ground forces isolated, and the strangulation of her economy well begun. ""
At that time, moreover, the Japanese had already lost the Philippines and Iwo Jima, and were suffering the investment of Okinawa. They were sending no further supplies to their ground forces outside the home islands, and they were con- centrating solely on defense against invasion. How long they would have continued to endure even in the absence of a concentrated strategic-bombing campaign is questionable, because the blockade resulting from destruction of the J a p anese merchant marine had, among other things, brought the national diet to below subsistence levels. The situation was thoroughly understood by many Japanese military leaders. Some of the senior naval officershad been secretly working since the previous September, that is, since before the Battle for Leyte Gulf, to take the country out of the war. ''
So long as the American goal was unconditional surrender,
'$1 am indebted for this information, and for much more that I have not been able to include, to my colleague Dr. Alexander W. Boldyreff.
I TU. S. S. B. S. , Summary Report (Pacific War), p. g.
U. S. S. B. S. ,lapan's Struggle to End the War, p. 4. See also Robert J. C.
Butow, lapan's Decision to Surrender, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1954, which effectively supersedes the U. S. S. B. S. document and which pro- vides an excellent and fascinating narrative of relevant events.
and especially so long as we were eager to achieve it as quickly as possible, there seemed at the time to be no ques- tion that some kind of direct assault on the Japanese home islands was necessary. A full-scale invasion was accordingly being projected for the following November. It is unequivo- cally to the credit of the strategic-bombing offensive that it secured all the objectives of the planned invasion before the latter could be mounted. It did so at immeasurably less cost in American lives, and no doubt also in Japanese lives, than might otherwise have been the case. Nothing can diminish or gainsay the value and importance of this accomplishment, which had no parallel in Europe. By the same token, it is both unreasonable and ungracious to the other services-as well as to the tactical air forces which conducted four years of marvelously successful and effective operations over land and water-to equate that accomplishment with the winning of the war.
The strategic air offensive against Japan was remarkably different from that against Germany in character as well as result. It was much more concentrated in time, and had the benefit of the more advanced technology then available. Japan was more urbanized than Germany, its cities were more vulnerable to fire, and its active defenses at the time of the campaign were of a low order of effectiveness, being al- most confined to antiaircraft guns. " Thus, more was accom- plished with fewer bombs. Only 160,800 tons of bombs were dropped on the home islands of Japan, compared with
1,360,000 tons dropped within the borders of Germany. Sixty- six Japanese cities received 104,000 tons of bombs (mostly incendiaries) as compared with 542,554 tons dropped on
Of which, however, there were some 500 heavy guns (88 rnrn. or larger) in the Tokyo area alone.
? ORIGINS OF AIR STRATEGY
STRATEGIC BOMBING IN WORLD WAR I1
sixty-one German cities. Also, a disproportionately large part of the Japanese tonnage was dropped on a very few large cities. Of the sixty-six Japanese cities attacked, only six were struck before the last three months of the war. " Yet some 40 per cent of the built-up areas of those sixty-six cities was destroyed.
In Japan, unlike Germany, the urban-area bombing seems to have contributed more to achieving the desired results than did the precision bombing of specific industries. This was due not alone to the fact that there was less opportunity for recuperation among Japanese cities than there had been in Germany, but more importantly to the fact that in Japan economic objectives counted for less than psychological ones. The precision bombing was, as in Germany, much more ef- fective per bomb in reducing Japanese war production, and immeasurably more discriminating about the kind of pro- duction reduced, than was the urban-area bombing. But Japan had already lost the battle of production; her economy
had already proved grossly inadequate to the political and strategic ambitions of her leaders; her losses in a merchant fleet that had been inadequate from the start had already caused, through denial of raw materials, a sharp contraction in production. Greater contractions would have followed inevitably, even without bombing. " It must be added that her overwhelming military defeats, by practically wiping out her navy and isolating most of her army, had greatly re-
20 U. S. S. B. S. , Eflects of Air Attack on Iapanese Urban Economy, Sum- mary Report, pp. ivf.
21The U. S. S. B. S. estimated that by August 1945,"even without direct air attack on her cities and industries, the over-all level of Japanese war production would have declined below the peak levels of 1944 by 40 to 50 per cent solely as a result of the interdiction of overseas imports. " (Sum- mary Report [Pacific W a r ] , p. 15. )
duced the demands which the military forces were making upon the economy.
Japan was already defeated. It was necessary only to make her government develop a clear consensus on that fact, and then openly concede it. The U. S. A. A. F. may not have cor- rectly appreciated the situation, but it acted as if it had. What was wanted was not a discriminating pruning out of this or that kind of military production, but simply the maximum of direct military pressure upon the population and the govern- ment. The awful terror of the great fire raids on the cities,
culminating in the two atomic attacks, copiously provided that pressure.
The Attack on German Morale
It is difficult to tell just what proportion of the bombs dropped on Germany in World War I1 was deliberately aimed at German morale, but it was unquestionably very large. A good deal of the area bombing of cities was so directed, especially by the R. A. F. Although Sir Arthur Har- ris in his Bomber Offensive speaks sarcastically of "psycho- logical" objectives as among the "panaceas" thrust upon him by uncomprehending but meddling civilians, it is abundantly clear from the whole text of his memoirs that the "German will to resist" was precisely what he was most interested in
attacking. Douhet too, as we have seen, had considered it the most important target after the enemy air force.
The huge share of Allied bombs spent in the attack on German morale failed to achieve any important end results. Bombing did indeed seriously depress the morale of German civilians. The oft-expressed view that the bombing of cities 1, ,P stiffens the will of the populace to resist finds no support -
in experience. But in Germany the depressed morale had no
? ORIGINS OF AIR STRATEGY
STRATEGIC BOMBING IN WORLD WAR I1
critical effects-at least until the very last months of the war, when all was lost anyway-on either the political struc- ture or the capability of the German war economy to support the troops in the field.
The reason that this was so is to be found largely in a distinction, which the German Internal Security Service consistently emphasized throughout the latter part of the war, between Stimmung (attitude or feeling) and Haltung (behavior). It was one of the important discoveries of the war that the influence of the former upon the latter was much less immediate and direct than had been generally supposed. Some degree of influence there was bound to be, but from the Allied point of view it was disappointingly small.
The attack upon Stimmung or attitude was remarkably successful, but this success did not have much meaning for the things that counted. Depressed morale, plus the problem of copingwith the physical deprivationsresulting from bomb ing, significantly increased absenteeism of industrial workers beyond the normal. It also significantly lowered the produc- tivity of those who reported for work. In combination, these effects-and notice that morale was depressed by defeats in the ground battles as well as by air raids-resulted in a loss of output of at least 25 per cent during the last year of the war. That looked serious enough to those responsible for keeping the war machine going. But as for stopping or vitally impairing the functioning of that machine, the effects were spread too broadly across all industries, were at best marginal, and therefore counted as nothing compared to the knocking out of a single essential industry such as oil production or transportation.
From at least the beginning of 1944 the average German had become disillusioned with the Nazi leadership, increas-
ingly frightened by the war's toll and its potential threat to himself and his family, and persuaded with growing cer- tainty that all would end in defeat. Yet he stuck to his job and his machine for as long as it was physically possible to do so, and in so doing kept a disastrous war going to its ulti- mate ruinous conclusion. Why did he do so? The answer is to be found in need combined with habit, in coercion, and in propaganda-in descending order of importance-all add- ing up to the plain circumstance that the German worker had no real alternative open to him.
The effect of habit is in part reflected in the fact that un- authorized absenteeism was much more marked among women than among men, especially in those occupations in which female labor was strictly a wartime phenomenon. T h e man kept to his job largely because that was what he had always done, in calm and in crisis, and because he and his family needed his wages in order to eat.
The coercion of the government extended to all sorts of restrictions about changing or leaving one's job without per- mission, and applied with special vengeance to overt expres-
sion of feeling-let alone action-against the regime. More telling was the fact that over the years the regime had suc- ceeded in eradicating practically all organized political op- position, so that no means existed for giving direction to and translating into action the feelings of disaffection which un- doubtedly developed. There could be no peace party in Ger- ' many (outside the army, where the dissident group was liquidated after the abortive putsch of July 1944) simply be- cause there could be no party outside the control of the Nazi leadership.
This absence of organized opposition is the feature of totalitarian countries that must give pause to those who would ,
? ORIGINS OF AIR STRATEGY
STRATEGIC BOMBING IN WORLD WAR I1
count heavily on defeating them by psychological means. In that connection, a critical difference between wartime Germany on the one hand and Italy and Japan on the other was that the latter two countries, though quasi-totalitarian, had in their monarchiai systems a latent means of crystalliz- ing an effective and legal opposition to the war party. Those countries surrendered before hostile troops had effectively invaded their main territories, while Germany did not sur- render until Hitler was dead and the eastern and western fronts had merged in the center of the Reich.
Although habit and coercion worked exclusively for the benefit of the German government, propaganda was the one means by which the Allied governments could hope to com- pete with the Nazis in giving guidance to the German work- man and soldier. The Allied bombing helped induce Ger- mans to listen to enemy radio broadcasts, partly because its success gave the lie to so many Nazi claims, and also because German stations had to go off the air to avoid serving as beacons. The invading aircraft themselves dropped millions of leaflets. Allied propaganda during the last year or more of the war concentrated on the hopelessness of the German military position, something which the huge formations of British and American bombers ranging freely over Germany effectively drove home. That was all right so far as it went, but it left a hiatus into which Goebbels and Company promptly moved.
The great propaganda achievement of Goebbels, in which he was aided and abetted by Allied word and actions, was to exploit sheer desperation as a means of keeping the Ger- mans fighting. There was no "will to win" because, espe- cially after the collapse of the hopes based on "secret weapons," there could be no expectation of winning. What
took the place of a will to win was an apathy about politics combined with a driving fear of what defeat would bring. One of the grimmer aphorisms then current in Germany was "Geniess den Krieg; der Friede wird schrec~lichsein" (En- joy the war; the peace will be terrible). The number of Al- lied casualties in the last year of the war testifies to the e? - fectiveness of this combination of negative incentives.
One lesson the bombing attack on morale brought home was that a people accustomed to responding to authority- and all peoples are, in modestly varying degrees-will con- tinue to respond even under very great physical stress. As physical conditions approach chaos, the population becomes more dependent upon authority, because of greater need for guidance and succor combined with the absence of alterna- tive. Besides, the person of independent mind who forms his own opinions on the evidence of his senses and the fruits of his logic is an ideal form of human being which, like other ideal forms, rarely exists in nature. Even most intellectuals- always a small minority in a population-tend in their think- ing merely to follow more refined fads. Moreover, it takes a very profound revolution of the mind and spirit to accept those cues for behavior provided by the acknowledged enemy as against those offered by one's own leaders.
Granting that it is behavior rather than morale that most interests both attacker and defender, there are nevertheless a few features about the response of German morale to Al- lied bombs which are especially interesting in view of the new weapons that have appeared since World War 11.
One surprising finding of the U. S. S. B. S. was that the most heavily-bombed cities did not necessarily show lower morale than those less severely hit.
