All Intensive Purposes

In his review in the NYRB of Max Hastings's Armageddon, which prompted my posts yesterday on the Geneva Convention, Freeman Dyson -- who served in the RAF's Bomber Command during WWII -- has this to say about the bombing of Germany:

There is overwhelming evidence that the bombing of cities strengthened rather than weakened the determination of the Germans to fight the war to the bitter end. The notion that bombing would cause a breakdown of civilian morale turned out to be a fantasy. After a devastating attack on a factory, the Germans were able to repair the machinery and resume full production in an average time of six weeks. We could not hope to attack the important factories frequently enough to keep them out of action. We learned after the war that, in spite of the bombing, German weapons production increased steadily up to September 1944. In the last few months of the war, bombing of oil refineries caused the German armies to run out of oil, but they never ran out of weapons. Putting together what I saw at Bomber Command with the testimony of Hastings's witnesses, I conclude that the contribution of the bombing of cities to military victory was too small to provide any moral justification for the bombing.

Unfortunately, the offical statements of the British government always claimed that bombing was militarily effective and therefore morally justified. As a result of their ideological commitment to bombing as a war-winning strategy, the leaders of the government were deluding themselves and also deluding the British public. Hastings says that in the last phase of the war "the moral cost of killing German civilians in unprecedented numbers outweighed any possible strategic advantage." I would make a stronger statement. I would say that quite apart from moral considerations, the military cost of killing German civilians outweighed any possible strategic advantage.

One very minor quibble: I thought that sustained efforts to bomb oil refineries were abandoned as too costly, and would have attributed the Allies' success at stopping the production of oil to the Soviet Union's advance into Rumania.

The claims made by the proponents of strategic bombing often don't hold up. There is a popular perception that our use of air power in Iraq was devastating, but I suspect that has more to do with the repeated airing of a few very impressive video clips from precision-guided munitions than with their results. "Shock and awe" sounded good in those first few days of the most recent war, but mostly because we wanted to believe that the Iraqis would stop fighting. Here we are, two years later.