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Directory:American Journals and the Strategic Bombing of Germany (view source)
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===Outcomes of the campaigns===
===Outcomes of the campaigns===
After about three years in Europe, American strategic air forces had developed into a gigantic operational group. At its maximum in August 1944, the U.S. Army Air Forces had over 619,000 combat personnel. These men dropped 1,461,864 tons of
After about three years in Europe, American strategic air forces had developed into a gigantic operational group. At its maximum in August 1944, the U.S. Army Air Forces had over 619,000 combat personnel. These men dropped 1,461,864 tons of bombs on Germany.<ref>Saundby, "The Uses", p. 225.</ref> Together with RAF Bomber Command's substantial efforts, 3,600,000 German dwelling units (20% of the total) were destroyed or heavily damaged. The homeless totaled between seven and eight million. Estimates suggest that 780,000 were wounded in bombing attacks and that 305,000 civilians were killed.<ref>"Air Victory in Europe," excerpt from the '''Summary Report (European War)''' by the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, September 30, 1945. (From Eugene M. Emme, ed., The Impact of Air Power (Princeton, N J: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1959), p. 269.)</ref> These are minimum figures, though. It has been proposed that more than 600,000 people in Germany were killed by "terror bombing".<ref>Ken Brown, "The Last Just War: How Just Was It?", '''The Progressive''', August 1982, p. 19.</ref> The accompanying graphic, derived from United States Strategic Bombing Survey statistics, helps to illustrate the enormous increase in the American air infrastructure.
bombs on Germany.<ref>Saundby, "The Uses", p. 225.</ref> Together with RAF Bomber Command's substantial efforts, 3,600,000 German dwelling units (20% of the total) were destroyed or heavily damaged. The homeless totaled between seven and eight million. Estimates suggest that 780,000 were wounded in bombing attacks and that 305,000 civilians were killed.<ref>"Air Victory in Europe," excerpt from the '''Summary Report (European War)''' by the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, September 30, 1945. (From Eugene M. Emme, ed., The Impact of Air Power (Princeton, N J: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1959), p. 269.)</ref> These are minimum figures, though. It has been proposed that more than 600,000 people in Germany were killed by "terror bombing".<ref>Ken Brown, "The Last Just War: How Just Was It?", '''The Progressive''', August 1982, p. 19.</ref> The accompanying graphic, derived from United States Strategic Bombing Survey statistics, helps to illustrate the enormous increase in the American air infrastructure.
<center>[[File:Kohs_-_Strategic_Bombing_statistics.jpg|550px]]</center>
<center>[[File:Kohs_-_Strategic_Bombing_statistics.jpg|550px]]</center>
Douhet, like so many other military theorists, understandably wished to avoid another war like the Great War. The senseless, bloody battles over a few hundred yards of "no man's land" nearly erased an entire generation from Europe's demography. Another trench-war stalemate was to be avoided at all costs. The solution seemed to be air power. There was a deep public fascination with the airplane, and it seemed a valiant, even humane, way to fight a war. Douhet's strategy, though, was primarily disregarded by military leaders and decision makers as too expensive and too risky. Wars had been fought with cannons and ships for so long that generals and admirals were unwilling to scrap these tried and true methods for an unproved one. General Billy Mitchell was the chief Douhetan advocate in America, and his voice ran into very stiff opposition and doubt. The idea that immense air strikes against enemy production centers could quickly win a war would have to wait until wartime to be implemented. The problem was that, in practice, the air raids were increased only gradually, not unleashed ''en masse'' at the dawn of war. Douhet's primary argument (sudden onslaught) was ignored in the hopes of building up bomber forces during the conflict.
Douhet, like so many other military theorists, understandably wished to avoid another war like the Great War. The senseless, bloody battles over a few hundred yards of "no man's land" nearly erased an entire generation from Europe's demography. Another trench-war stalemate was to be avoided at all costs. The solution seemed to be air power. There was a deep public fascination with the airplane, and it seemed a valiant, even humane, way to fight a war. Douhet's strategy, though, was primarily disregarded by military leaders and decision makers as too expensive and too risky. Wars had been fought with cannons and ships for so long that generals and admirals were unwilling to scrap these tried and true methods for an unproved one. General Billy Mitchell was the chief Douhetan advocate in America, and his voice ran into very stiff opposition and doubt. The idea that immense air strikes against enemy production centers could quickly win a war would have to wait until wartime to be implemented. The problem was that, in practice, the air raids were increased only gradually, not unleashed ''en masse'' at the dawn of war. Douhet's primary argument (sudden onslaught) was ignored in the hopes of building up bomber forces during the conflict.
This was an extravagant hope on which to pin so much trust. The steadily growing bomber forces failed to meet these overblown expectations. The simple fact was that American bomber units invested enormous effort to hit prescribed targets but then failed to follow up and hit them again to put them fully out of commission. Meanwhile, the British method of area bombing cities began to appear more attractive, albeit no more successful. Terror bombing of civilians produced not a breakdown but a stiffening of enemy resolve. The bomber proved to be an expensive way to kill people. On average, it took about three tons of bombs to kill one German.<ref>Kennett, '''History''', p. 182.</ref> The question "Was the bombing of civilians cost efficient?" is not the one that should be being asked, though.<ref>Michael Sherry, "The Slide To Total Air War", '''New Republic''', 16 December 1981, p. 24. Note: Sherry frames a similar reasoning. He states, "...the usual questions we ask -- Was precision bombing more effective than area bombing? Was tactical bombing more useful than strategic? -- simply miss the point. We need to understand not why they failed to choose this or that alternative, but why they largely failed to weigh alternatives at all."</ref> The real question is whether this type of bombing was a legitimate means of fighting a war.
The killing of the innocent is unarguably wrong, yet the killing of an enemy directly involved in a war effort is sometimes justifiable.<ref>Jeffrie G. Murphy, "The Killing of the Innocent", in '''War, Morality, and the Military Profession''', ed. Malham M. Wakin (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1986), pp. 341-64.</ref> This often unclear and imprecise line somewhere between ethical killing and unethical killing is the root of all argumentative objection to American strategic bombing. One would certainly balk at the thought of soldiers storming through a residential district, shooting everyone in sight, women and children. But notice that in warfare:
<blockquote>''...war morality is not going to complain if the bombs dropped on a <nowiki>[munitions]</nowiki> plant destroy the plant and kill its workers inside -- or even outside while they are coming to or going from work. War morality would begin to complain if the attack on the workers were carried out in their homes... The problem with attacking workers in their homes is that that is where those not participating in the war (e.g., the children and old folks) also live.''<ref>N. Fotion and G. Elfstrom, '''Military Ethics: Guidelines for Peace and War''', (Boston: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1986), pp. 197-98.</ref></blockquote>
The Eighth Air Force would never admit that it was intentionally setting out to destroy homes, but the inaccuracy of the bombsight, the inclemency of the weather, and the broadening of the list of "acceptable" targets all served to make innocents into victims. Circumstances alone were not to blame for the haphazard bombing of civilians. The U.S. Army Air Force leaders'
<blockquote>''<nowiki>'</nowiki>Official policy against indiscriminate bombing was so badly interpreted and so frequently breached as to become almost meaningless. ...In the end, both the policy and the apparent ethical support for it among AAF leaders turn out to be myths; while they contain elements of truth, they are substantially false or misleading.'<ref>Ronald Schaffer, "American Military Ethics in World War II: The Bombing of German Civilians", '''Journal of American History''', LXVII, no. 2 (Sept. 1980), p. 319, as quoted in Kennett, '''History''', p. 186.<nowiki>'</nowiki>''</ref></blockquote>
Although the American bomber forces sought to distinguish between theirs and the British method, by the end of 1944 and early 1945, the distinction had all but disappeared.
The escalation from pure precision bombing to indiscriminate area bombing was almost inevitable. Due to the increasing dissatisfaction with the perceived lack of tangible and material results, precision bombing gave way to the bombing of civilians, which offered the alternative, if not nebulous, reward of disruption of
enemy morale. At least with area bombing failure would be less appreciable.
In the new age of total war, the importance of enemy morale was heavily stressed by military theorists. Thus, it was felt that the collapse of German civilian morale might likewise bring about the collapse of the Nazi power structure. The fact that the British people and government did not falter during the Blitz was ignored.
The fact that Nazi totalitarianism left little room for public interference in state and military matters was ignored. Morale simply seemed to be the last available "target", and it seemed imprudent not to try it.
In this slippery decline toward ruthless warmaking on civilians, no major political leaders or high-ranking military commanders paused to question seriously and oppose the direction in which bombing was headed. This is not to say that all sociopolitical figures and subordinate officers remained silent, but where it counted
in the higher circles, little was said. "The moralists were certainly in the minority in those days."<ref>Solly Zuckerman, "Bombs and Morals", '''New Republic''', 17 November 1986, p. 39.</ref>
An interesting and quite valid interpretation of the wartime arguments over ethics suggests an overriding "unselfconsciousness" among the strategists, politicians, and military leaders.
<blockquote>''Secure in their sense of having a job to do, no one appears to have questioned the relation between the carrying out of that job and the moral and political world-order in which the job was created.''<blockquote><ref>Barrie Paskins and Michael Dockrill, '''The Ethics of War''', (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1979), p. 246.</ref>
Both this lack of general reflection and the sense that bombing was a job or even a duty are further emphasized in that operational
<blockquote>''...orders were usually little more than a statement of the objectives that had to be achieved, and of the means that would be provided to this end. From then on it was the business of the military.''<ref>Zuckerman, "Bombs and Morals", p. 42.</ref>
We know the means (strategic bombing, in all its forms), but what were the ends? "For the American forces, killing was sometimes an end in itself... It was connected in American minds to victory, however casually they measured it..."<ref>Sherry, "The Slide To Total Air War", p. 25.</ref> Yet as brutal and cold as the militarists were, they almost had to be. And although they were not without blame, the significant portion of culpability need not rest on the generals' shoulders. Nor should the responsibility lie with the bomber crews themselves. At thirty thousand feet, the human effects of the raid are all but lost. This has been called an "ethics of altitude."
Where then lies the blame? Who should have been questioning the bombing practice? According to some ethicists, the job of criticism belongs to the community of scholars.<ref>Paskins and Dockrill, '''Ethics of War''', p. 48.</ref> This is reasonable, but the academic community is in many ways a cloistered and insulated one. The age of total war immersed the general population in the fighting effort. Therefore, the relatively small segment of informed students of war could not be expected to educate the masses. That is a task better associated with the mass information media. I have chosen magazines as a focus of scrutiny because they reached the people, the people who fought the total war with their hands, their minds, and their sons and daughters. The lives of all those killed in the bombing campaign deserve the respect of this examination. A woman who lived through the
==References==
==References==
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