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Strategic Bombing by the United States in World War II: The
Myths and the Facts, by Stewart Halsey Ross. McFarland & Co., 2002,
244 pages.
U.S. Terror Tactics in
WWII by Bruce Ramsey
It is an enduring image of World War II: brave American
flyers wobbling back to England in their shot-up B-17s. We think of old movies
such as "Command Decision," in which airmen faced daunting odds to do such
strategically crucial things as flattening the German ball-bearing works at
Schweinfurt.
| | Bruce
Ramsey is a journalist in Seattle. |
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Brave they were; midway through the war, the odds of an American being shot
down in a 25-mission tour of duty were greater than half.
What was exaggerated, writes Stewart Halsey Ross, was the strategic value of
bombing. Not because stopping all ball-bearing production in Germany wouldn't
have had strategic value — it would have — but because the bombing
didn't stop it. The Schweinfurt raid of 1943 damaged about 10 percent of the
ball-bearing machinery there at a cost of 60 airplanes and 599 men.
The four-engined American bombers of World War II were, in fact, mainly
weapons of terror. That is not why the first of them was designed. But Ross, who
spent two years analyzing bomb-accuracy tests for the U.S. Army Ordinance Corps,
argues that that is what they were mainly good for. The Army Air Force generals
couldn't say that publicly, but they knew it, acted on it, and got used to
it.
The theory sold to the public was that the war could be won quickly from the
air by stopping the flow of things like ball bearings. When the B-17 was
developed, it was fitted with the Norden bombsight, a much-ballyhooed military
secret. (Actually, the Germans stole it in 1938 and didn't think much of it.) In
the American desert, where the Norden was tested, it worked. But it required the
ground to be visible, the plane to come in at 15,000 feet or lower and fly dead
level for the last 10 minutes under the control of the bombardier. Over cloudy
Europe, airmen could most often not see the ground; and flying dead level at
15,000 feet was a good way to get shot down.
It was easier to fly at 20,000 feet and unload over a city. The British, who
began bombing earlier, quickly switched to night flying, which amounted
essentially to pattern bombing. The Americans proudly bombed by day, pretending
to be more precise about it, but that the precision, Ross argues, was mostly for
show. |
| The four-engined
American bombers of World War II were, in fact, mainly weapons of terror. The
Army Air Force generals couldn't say that publicly, but they knew it, acted on
it, and got used to it. |
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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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