Why We Bombed

Tucker Carlson’s favorite historian inveighed against a necessary and correct tactic.

Y ou might have heard that Tucker Carlson had a Nazi-sympathizing podcaster on his show the other day.

The friendly — indeed, admiring — interview has engendered a lot of commentary, but I’d like to delve into one thing in particular: the podcaster Darryl Cooper’s harsh condemnation of the Allied bombing campaign in World War II.

Although Cooper is very understanding of how it is (through unfortunate happenstance, apparently) that the Nazis came to wage a war of annihilation in the East, he’s full of moral indignation about the bombing of German cities.

Cooper calls it “rank terrorism,” and “the greatest scale of terrorist attacks you’ve ever seen in world history.” In addition, Winston Churchill’s launching a bombing campaign while waiting for help either via the Soviet Union or the United States was “a craven, ugly way to fight a war.”

Throughout this part of the discussion, Carlson repeatedly asked very earnestly what Churchill was trying to accomplish, as if this were some mystery to be unlocked by a random podcaster.

Cooper’s view is that Churchill sought to deny Hitler his rightful victory after the Nazi conquest of France, and because “all he had were bombers,” he did it via the bombing campaign that Cooper finds so objectionable.

Well, yeah. What else was Churchill supposed to do?

If Cooper has stupefyingly clownish views, it’s still worth dwelling on this matter because the critique of the Allied bombing campaign isn’t just an obsession of right-wing revisionists (David Irving wrote a book on Dresden); mainstream critics focus on it, as well.

(I rely on a number of historians in what follows but particularly the brilliant Andrew Roberts and his book The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War.)

First of all, it should be noted — although it doesn’t justify anything they did — that the Allies weren’t the first or only ones to bomb cities.

The Nazis bombed Warsaw and Rotterdam, with great effect, as part of their blitzkrieg campaigns.

After the Nazis hit and burned the British city of Coventry in November 1940, flattening or damaging half of the homes, they came up with the neologism coventrieren to denote the destruction of a city.

In April 1941, they launched Operation Punishment to avenge an anti-Nazi coup in Yugoslavia. They hit central Belgrade, which “had no apparent military objective,” as this account from RFE/RL notes. “The air raid,” it continues, “destroyed much of the center of the capital, killed thousands of people, and wiped out much of the published cultural heritage of Serbia when the National Library burned to the ground.”

The Battle of Britain, needless to say, was a campaign to subdue England from the air. If the Nazis had succeeded in destroying the Royal Air Force, they would have launched an invasion to conquer England. It didn’t work, but not for lack of trying. After the British launched small-scale raids on Berlin, Hitler switched tactics from targeting British air facilities and planes to directly hitting London in the Blitz.

We have no word from Cooper about whether he considers the Blitz to have been honorable, but it diverted the Nazis from what should have been the main effort — continuing to target the Royal Air Force — and was ineffectual because the Nazis lacked the quantity and quality of bombers necessary to pull it off.

This gets to Cooper’s point of Churchill’s having only bombers. It’s not true because Churchill also had fighters — the gloriously effective Spitfires foremost among them — and a huge navy. This constellation of forces wasn’t a cowardly tack but a sensible strategic choice for a relatively small island nation.

As it happens, Hitler couldn’t bring Britain to heel because he didn’t have the air or naval forces for the job. Thus, he lost both the Battle of Britain and the Battle of the Atlantic — and ultimately the war.

Cooper’s suggestion that ground battle is less craven and more manly than other forms of conflict is absurd. Atrocities aside, was the war in the East edifying? Were Stalingrad and Kursk anything other than complete horrors?

Given the choice, any rational person would rather fight World War II on the British and U.S. model that emphasizes air and sea power and out-produces our enemies to dust rather than the German or Soviet model of largely grinding it out on the ground in tremendously destructive and costly campaigns of attrition. (The German Blitzkrieg victories at the outset and initial, although illusory, successes in Barbarossa were exceptions.)

All that said, it’s difficult to exaggerate the scale of the Allied air campaign. Bomber Command dropped nearly a million tons of bombs. We devastated dozens and dozens of German cities.

What was the alternative?

Early on, the British could have told their own people and the Americans, Sorry, we are just going to sit tight for now. We have no means to hit Nazi Germany that meet our exacting moral standards, so we will wait until something comes up.

This would have been intolerable as long as Britain didn’t opt for Cooper’s preference of capitulating to Hitler. (Also, of course, the Soviets wouldn’t have been appreciative if, unable and unwilling to launch a premature invasion of France, we refused even to bomb Nazi Germany.)

When it was discovered through hard experience that daylight raids were too costly, the British switched to nighttime raids in short order. These weren’t particularly accurate and turned into efforts to take out industrial centers and their environs in “area bombing.” The idea was to collapse German morale and to disrupt and deny housing to the workforce that the Nazis depended on for their war production.

When the U.S. joined the war, we focused on daylight raids to try to target specific war-related industries. As Andrew Roberts points out, though, since such facilities were located in heavily populated areas and bombing lacked accuracy, the distinction between precision and area bombing was blurry. He quotes a U.S. Air Force officer who observed after the war, “The RAF carried out precision attacks on area targets, while the USAAF carried out area attacks on precision targets.”

Throughout the war, we engaged in operations both to take out specific German industries — for instance, fighter production in the run-up to D-Day — and to target population centers to try to collapse German morale, or, as the head of the RAF, Bomber Harris, put it, disrupt “civilized community life throughout Germany.”

As noted above, Dresden has long been particularly controversial. In February 1945, hundreds of Allied bombers hit the city in waves. They created a massive, hurricane-like firestorm that incinerated all in its path. It suffocated people by consuming all the oxygen, reached into underground tunnels, and boiled alive people who sought safety in an enormous water tank. In all, 13 square miles of the city were leveled, and roughly 20,000 died, disproportionately women, children, and the elderly.

It was all the worse because Nazi authorities neglected basic safety measures such as shelters and functioning sirens.

There is no minimizing the horror. Yet, in the judgment of Frederick Taylor, the top authority on the raid, the city constituted “by the standards of the time a legitimate military target.”

The Russians wanted us to disrupt German troop movements and pushed at Yalta for us to hit Dresden.

Roberts writes, “As a nodal point for communications, with its railway marshaling yards, and conglomeration of war industries — its pre-war industry based on porcelain, typewriters and cameras had been converted into an extensive network of armaments workshops, particularly in the vital optics, electronics and communications fields — the city was always going to be in danger once long-range penetration by bombers with good fighter escort was possible.”

Bomber Harris put it with his usual lack of delicacy: “Dresden was a mass of munition works, an intact government center and a key transportation center. It is now none of those things.”

The upshot is that, overall, the campaign from the air worked. As Williamson Murray writes, “Military historians have attempted to minimize the contribution the air war made to the defeat of Nazi Germany. In actuality, it played one of the most important roles in the eventual defeat of the Germans and the Japanese.”

Cathal Nolan, in his compelling book The Allure of Battle, similarly concludes: “By 1945 the bombers would destroy Germany’s transportation systems and demolish most vital war industries, especially oil supply and refining, and effectively end fighter production. Then Allied and Soviet tactical airpower pinned the last German armies to the ground, forbidding movement and paralyzing local and operation reactions. Neither Germany nor Japan could by the end of their respective wars move military supplies, complete production or deploy weapons and divisions as they wanted, even inside their homelands.”

The Nazis were forced to divert fighters to the home front rather than deploy them in support of their operations on the Eastern front. Roberts points out that 70 percent of all German fighter aircraft were deployed in the West as of the spring of 1943. The same was true of antiaircraft guns, including the fearsome 88 mm. Manpower was diverted, too, to aerial defense.

We never stopped German arms production, but its upward trajectory was checked in the spring of 1943.

The British assault on the Ruhr in the spring of that year made itself felt. As Williamson Murray notes, coal and steel production dropped significantly in the aftermath. In the second half of 1943, American targeting of German aircraft-production facilities had a similar effect. According to Murray, the number of new and reconditioned Fw 190s and Bf 109s hit 1,263 in July and dropped to 687 in December.

Murray notes, too, how German arms production became tilted toward producing the aircraft and antiaircraft systems necessary to try to counter the bombing campaign, as well as V1 and V2 rockets to hit back at Britain; collectively, these efforts constituted about 60 percent of the war economy.

To return to Cooper’s point that this was all “craven”: Prior to establishing air superiority, the Allies took enormous losses in the air and could only prosecute the campaign thanks to the sacrificial bravery of countless airmen. Roughly 44 percent of Bomber Command’s aircrew was killed during the course of the war.

The logic of total war meant that every piece of Nazi matériel that we didn’t destroy from the air, or stop from being produced in the first place, would have to be taken out by some other bloody means of combat. And every day that the conflict was extended meant more unspeakable cruelty and suffering for all involved, from Allied servicemen to German civilians and obviously, not least, the Jews who hadn’t yet been murdered in the Nazi genocide.

The impulse to bring the war to as hasty a conclusion as possible, with B-17s and Lancasters making their contribution, was obviously the correct one.

There are certainly fair criticisms of the bombing campaign, and reasonable people can differ on whether and how it should have been calibrated. But the root-and-branch rejection of it that Darryl Cooper represents probably implicates a much more fundamental question — whose side are you on?