This is being written as the assault by Russia on Ukraine is in its third week. This is an event that has forced us to think back to the era of World War II. That conflagration is famous for unleashing the weapons of war on civilian populations in ways that would have been unthinkable in previous centuries. Russia is being condemned for breaking assumed norms for avoiding casualties with indiscriminate bombing of civilian locations. Terms like “genocide” and “war crimes” are being bandied about. Civilians being killed in wartime seems no longer an inevitability; rather, such an occurrence is greeted with the condemnation usually reserved for acts of terrorism.
In World War II, all the major players—Germany, Japan, US, USSR, and Great Britain—used force indiscriminately, and often purposely used the killing of civilians as part of their war strategy. Such a strategic goal was controversial at the time, raising serious moral issues. Have these moral considerations become more dominant over time? The current Russian invasion and its comparison to the earlier conflict invites a reconsideration of the morality issues involved. The killing of civilians by dropping dumb bombs on them was controversial in the previous war and it is controversial in the current one.
In his book, The Bomber Mafia, Malcolm Gladwell provides an interesting and revealing look back at the issues raised in World War II with the availability of fast, long-range, and high-altitude bombers. As the capability of bombers began to grow between the two world wars. A group of US pilots began dreaming of being able to use this developing capability to make the next war shorter and less deadly. They were driven by the assumption that precision bombing could be used to eliminate an enemy’s warfighting capabilities while avoiding attacks that harmed civilians. Gladwell would refer to these dreamers as “The Bomber Mafia.” To perform such precision bombing it would be necessary to fly a direct path at high altitude to avoid antiaircraft fire, and fly during daylight hours to identify the desired target. To actually hit a target under those conditions with what we would now call a “dumb” bomb, an accurate way to hit the target must be developed. Their hope was placed in the Norden bombsight, named after its inventor, Carl Norden.
“The most expensive single undertaking of the Second World War was the B-29 bomber, the Superfortress. The second most expensive was the Manhattan Project, the massive, unprecedented effort to invent and build the world’s first atomic bomb. But the third most expensive project of the war? Not a bomb, not a plane, not a tank, not a gun, not a ship. It was the Norden bombsight, the fifty-five-pound analog computer conceived inside the exacting imagination of Carl L. Norden. And why spend so much on a bombsight? Because the Norden represented a dream—one of the most powerful dreams in the history of warfare: if we could drop bombs into pickle barrels from thirty thousand feet, we wouldn’t need armies anymore. We wouldn’t need to leave young men dead on battlefields or lay waste to entire cities. We would reinvent war. Make it precise and quick and almost bloodless. Almost.”
“Its official name was the Mark XV. It was dubbed ‘the football’ by the airmen who used it. It weighed fifty-five pounds. It sat on a kind of platform—a packing box stabilized by a gyroscope—that kept it level at all times, even as the plane was bouncing around. The bombsight was essentially an analogue computer, a compact, finely machined contraption composed of mirrors, a telescope, ball bearings, levels, and dials. From a moving plane, the bombardier peered through the telescope at the target and made a fantastically complicated series of adjustments. Norden created sixty-four algorithms that he believed addressed every question of the bombing problem, including: How much do the speed and direction of the wind affect the trajectory of a bomb? How much does the air temperature affect it? Or the speed of the aircraft? To be properly trained on the Norden took six months.”
“The Army bought thousands of Norden bombsights. Before every mission, the bombardier, with an armed escort, would retrieve his device from a vault. He would carry it out to the plane in a metal box. In the event of a crash landing, the bombardier was instructed to destroy the bombsight immediately, lest it fall into enemy hands.”
Other nations approached war with different dreams. The British believed in what was referred to as “area bombing.”
“Area bombing is not done in daylight, because if you are not bombing at anything specific, why do you need to see anything? And it was specifically aimed at civilians. It said: you should hit residential neighborhoods, and keep coming night after night, in wave after wave, until your enemy’s cities are reduced to rubble. Then the will of the enemy is going to sink so low that it will just give up. When the British wanted a better euphemism for what they were doing, they called it ‘morale bombing’—bombing with the intent to destroy the homes and cities of your enemy and reduce your enemy’s population to a state of despair.”
Hitler believed in area bombing and unleashed it on the British at the start of the war.
“Hitler believed that if the Nazis bombed the working-class neighborhoods of East London, they would break the will of the British population. And because the British believed the same theory, they were terrified that the Blitz would cost them the war.”
The British were incorrect in their assumptions, yet they chose to maintain them.
“Once they tallied up the damage, the British determined that more than forty-three thousand people had been killed and tens of thousands injured. More than a million buildings were damaged or destroyed. And it didn’t work. Not on London or Londoners. It did not crack their morale. And despite that lesson, just two years later, the Royal Air force was proposing to do the exact same thing to the Germans.”
This concept of area bombing raised serious moral questions. Those in favor had to conclude that killing little children playing with toys, killing nurses and doctors working in hospitals, killing those too old to fight back, all contributed to diminishing the fighting capability of the enemy. They were all part of the enemy war effort. That would be a moral leap too far for those in charge of US bombing strategy.
The US bombers would continue to focus on precision bombing in the European theater in spite of disappointing results. The most important and revealing episode involved the attack on the ball-bearing plants at Schweinfurt. This was to be a classic demonstration of benefits derived from precision bombing. Ball bearings were critical components of armaments and Schweinfurt was the dominant provider for the Nazi war machine. Eliminating it as a source would seriously limit war production.
Two massive attacks on the Schweinfurt plants would be executed. In the first, eighty bombs would hit the vast production facilities. That may seem like a lot, but it was eighty bombs out of a total of about two thousand. It was difficult to describe that as precision bombing. The net effect on the German war effort was too small to be noticed. The second raid would be a bit more accurate, but still yielded little benefit. Meanwhile, the losses in planes and manpower from those vulnerable daylight raids was enormous and unsustainable.
“And how many planes did the Eighth Air Force lose in that second raid? Sixty outright; seventeen damaged so badly that they had to be mothballed; 650 airmen killed or captured. Nearly a quarter of the crews on that mission did not come home.”
This episode would be memorialized a few years after the war in the film Twelve O’Clock High.
The Schweinfurt missions were viewed as a waste of resources. Ironically, feedback from the German side would come after the war.
“In his memoir, Hitler’s minister of armaments and war production, Albert Speer, provides a detailed account of the Schweinfurt missions and what he calls ‘the enemy’s error.’ He notes: ‘The attacks on the ball-bearing industry ceased abruptly. Thus, the Allies threw away success when it was already in their hands. Had they continued the attacks…with the same energy, we would have quickly been at our last gasp’.”
The US would again face the moral decision of precision bombing or area bombing when the ability to attack the Japan’s homeland became available. In the fall of 1944, the three Marianas islands of Saipan, Tinian, and Guam had been captured and provided places to build landing strips close enough to Japan that the new B-29s could reach it and drop bombs. Responsibility for that campaign went to Haywood Hansell, a member of the Bomber Mafia dedicated to the notion of precision bombing as the way to end the war.
The first target would be the Nakajima Aircraft Company which was the main producer of combat aircraft. Performing high-altitude precision bombing of Japan encountered difficulties, some of which were totally unexpected. Such a mission required clear skies to identify a target. Weather in Japan would provide those conditions only about one week out of a month. The more severe problem, the totally unexpected one, was the discovery of the jet stream which at that time of the year flowed directly over Japan.
“And in the winter of 1944 and early spring of 1945, this narrow, hurricane-force band of air was directly over Japan. That made it impossible for Hansell’s pilots to do any of the precision bombing they had planned to do. If they flew across it, the plane would get blown sideways. If they flew into it, they’d be fighting to stay aloft and would be easy targets for the Japanese. And if they flew with it, they’d be racing too fast to take proper aim.”
Hansell would make several attempts to take out the Nakajima plants with little success. His superiors were getting impatient and began demanding a change in tactics. Japan was recognized as an ideal target for area bombing. Its residential structures were mostly paper and wood inviting attacks with incendiary weapons. And napalm was now available.
“At one point, in late December, the second in command of the entire Army Air Forces, Lauris Norstad, gave Hansell a direct order: launch a napalm attack on the Japanese city of Nagoya as soon as possible…Hansell did a trial run and burned down a paltry three acres of the city.”
Hansell was just not willing for or capable of a mission that would kill up to a hundred thousand people. He would have to be replaced by someone who had demonstrated he would do whatever was necessary to get the job done. That man was Curtis Lemay.
Getting the job done avoided the weather issues by flying below the cloud cover. That low an approach was only feasible at night. Precision bombing was now out of the question; for area bombing the ideal weapon for mass destruction was napalm. Casualties from such attacks would be beyond what had been observed in the European theater. How could those be justified?
“So how would Lemay have justified the firebombing he intended to inflict upon Japan? Well, he would have said that it was the responsibility of a military leader to make wars as short as possible. That it was the duration of war, not the techniques of war, that caused suffering. If you cared about the lives of your men—and the pain inflicted on your enemy—then you ought to wage as relentless and decisive and devastating a war as you could. Because if being relentless, decisive, and devastating turned a two-year war into a one-year war, wasn’t that the most desirable outcome?”
The first firebombing of Tokyo took place on the night of March 9, 1945. The planes would come in at about 5,000 feet.
“The full attack lasted almost three hours; 1,665 tons of napalm were dropped. Lemay’s planners had worked out in advance that this many firebombs, dropped in such tight proximity, would create a firestorm—a conflagration of such intensity that it would create and sustain its own wind system. They were correct. Everything burned for sixteen square miles.”
It was estimated that as many as a hundred thousand people died that night. The historian Conrad Crane would include this gruesome note:
“They’re about five thousand feet, they are pretty low…They are low enough that the smell of burning flesh permeates the aircraft…They actually have to fumigate the aircraft when they land back in the Marianas, because the smell of burning flesh remains within the aircraft.”
Lemay and his bombers would continue to firebomb other cities, sixty-seven in all until Japan finally surrendered. That would come a few days after the nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
“Lemay always said that the atomic bombs were superfluous. The real work had already been done.”
It is easy to view the combined firebombing and nuclear bombing of Japan as an unmitigated tragedy for humanity; something that should never have happened and should never happen again. Certainly, most Japanese felt the same way, but, surprisingly, some thought that forcing their country to surrender and avoiding the planned invasion was beneficial to the Japanese people. Some, astonishingly, issued thanks to Lemay for his actions in bringing the war to an early end. Surrendering when they did and avoiding invasion spared the nation from millions of lives lost in those battles and kept the Soviets from claiming parts of its land. The historian Crane also provided this perspective.:
“The other thing that would have happened is that there would have been millions of Japanese who would have starved to death in the winter. Because what happens is that by surrendering in August, that gives MacArthur time to come in with his occupation forces and actually feed Japan…I mean, that’s one of MacArthur’s main successes: bringing in a massive amount of food to avoid starvation in the winter of 1945.”
Gladwell provides this note.
“Curtis Lemay’s approach brought everyone—Americans and Japanese—back to peace and prosperity as quickly as possible. In 1964, the Japanese government awarded Lemay the highest award their country could give a foreigner, the First-Class Order of Merit of the Grand Cordon of the Rising Sun, in appreciation for his help in rebuilding the Japanese Air Force. ‘Bygones are bygones’ the Premier of Japan said at the time, dismissing the objections of his colleagues in the Japanese parliament.”
Defining what is moral behavior in time of war can be difficult if not impossible. It certainly was so in the Second World War. Gladwell sets up Hansell and Lemay as competing proponents of differing moralities. While Lemay’s approach successfully brings the war to a quick conclusion—with benefits perhaps to both sides—Gladwell’s hero seems to be Hansell. He finishes with these comments.
“There is a set of moral problems that can be resolved only with the application of conscience and will. Those are the hardest kinds of problems. But there are other problems that can be resolved with the application of human ingenuity. The genius of the Bomber Mafia was to understand that distinction—and to say, We don’t have to slaughter the innocent, burn them beyond recognition, in pursuit of our military goals. We can do better. And they were right.”
Hansell and his like didn’t have the tools at their disposal to effectively fight the war they wished to fight, but the direction which military technology has followed seems to have been in the direction they desired. GPS systems and guided munitions are the standard today. Gladwell claims our modern weapons could be used to kill an individual in a room on the top floor of a house while leaving the rest of the structure unharmed. The military seems to have accepted the Bomber Mafia philosophy, justifying this conclusion.
“Curtis Lemay won the battle. Haywood Hansell won the war.”
Yes, the precision strike mentality is alive and well. But could it have defeated enemies like Germany and Japan who were determined to go on fighting as long as they were able? There was a time when an army could demonstrate sufficient power to convince an enemy to sue for peace, surrender something to the victor, and then go on living. Such a time seems to no longer exist.
When one strives for unconditional surrender there is some truth in the claim by the area bombers that all the enemy are part of the war effort. If the war ends when no individual is left to contest with the superior force, the war goes on until there is no one left with a gun to shoot back. In this situation precision weapons are much less effective. Modern weaponry can efficiently inflict severe damage on military and civilian assets. This sets a threshold of pain that a potential enemy must be willing to accept before going to war, but it does not guarantee that this enemy will admit to being defeated. The US military views Russia, China, and Iran as potential adversaries. The capability to inflict extensive damage on each nation exists, but the ability to defeat any nation that does not wish to be defeated does not.
If there is a morality in war today, it is associated with having so much power that the level of pain one can deliver to an adversary is too great to be endured. If any potential adversary has similar pain to inflict, then there is nothing to be gained from warfare. That is essentially the mutual assured destruction standoff that stabilized the nuclear postures of the US and the USSR. Russia has maintained the dominant military power in Europe. NATO countries, allied with the US, collectively have countered that power—at least up to now. Russia has decided to invade a non-NATO country, Ukraine. This intention has been hinted at for at least a decade. The moral thing for NATO to have done would have been to incorporate Ukraine as either a member or as a country that was under its protection. The members have not had the courage to do that, allowing mighty Russia to attack lonely Ukraine—and to wonder what else Russia has in mind
The Russians face a situation similar to what the Allies faced
with Germany and Japan. Precision bombing
of warfare infrastructure will not get the adversary to surrender. Intense and widespread death and destruction
might. What is NATO’s moral role in this
struggle? Is it content to let Ukraine
live or die fighting NATO’s battles?
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