Terror bombing had its own justification. It was supposed to "dehouse" workers
and thereby disrupt war production. If the German did not have a house, he would
not go to work. It was also thought he might riot, and bring his government down.
Germans did neither. Bombing did make tens of thousands of people homeless, but
people found places to live and arms production continued to increase until the
last year of the war.
Bombing started to make a difference in mid-1944, when bombers began to do
substantial damage to Germany's factories that made motor fuel from coal. A
shortage of fuel kept the Luftwaffe on the ground and ended the panzer
advance in the Battle of the Bulge. But by then the war was almost over.
Most of the bombing of Japan was in 1945, and was even more clearly
terror-bombing, especially the use of incendiaries against Japan's wood-and-paper
houses. That certainly had an effect on Japan's willingness to fight, Ross
writes, but the human cost was terrible.
In the far larger air war over Germany, Ross writes, bombing was a matter of
grinding down the enemy's supply of planes and pilots — particularly pilots
— by having more to waste. "At a fundamental level, the air war from 1939 to
1945 . . . could be compared to the daily butchery in the trenches of France
between 1914 and 1918."
Of the 405,000 American soldiers killed in World War II, one-fifth were
airmen.
It has its message, but this book is linear and matter-of-fact. It is divided
into such chapters as The Airplanes, The Bombs, The Bombsights, The Aircrews, The
Defenses and The Five Cities. The five cities are Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo,
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the description of what was done to them is so brutal
as to be almost unreadable.
Thank goodness bombing is more accurate today, even though our
precision-guided munitions do not always work and when they do, they do not
always spare the innocent. In the first Gulf War they were used to target sewage
treatment and water purification plants. Their destruction had no military value
in a 100-hour war but created political pressure, and spread intestinal disease,
for years ahead.
"For a country that does not actively seek to expand its territories, but
rather to achieve global hegemony, strategic air power is the nearly perfect
weapon," Ross writes. Here is how it began.
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