The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (32 page)

The destruction Spender saw was also visible in over seventy German cities at war’s end. It was the result of the massive Allied bombing campaign against Germany that began in 1940 and increased steadily, slowly, un- til by the end of 1944 it had become a gigantic force of unequaled power, and for Germans, unequaled terror. The “strategic” bombing of Germany (distinguished from “tactical” bombing in support of soldiers in bat- tle) is a dimension of the war that has generated a long, controversial history. It conjures up a gallery of ghastly images: burnt corpses being gathered up in wagons; shriveled, carbonized bodies stacked ten feet high; blackened churches, shattered homes. The slaughter

of half a million German civilians, and the means by which it was delivered, from the sky, thousands of feet above the battlefield, has tarnished the record of the Allied war effort ever since. Randall Jarrell, the Ameri- can poet who flew in these missions, captured some- thing of the grotesque indifference of bombing with these lines:

In bombers named for girls, we burned The cities we had learned about in school.

…

They said “Here are the maps”; We burned the cities.

Yet during the war, many intelligent people accepted the massive bombing of Germany’s cities, and the large numbers of civilian deaths such bombing caused, as es- sential to defeating Hitler and winning the war. Why?

At first, the British bombed Germany because it was the only way they could do Hitler any harm at all. Hav- ing swept the Poles, Dutch, Belgians, French, and Brit- ish land armies aside in 1939–40 like tin soldiers, the powerful Wehrmacht and its allies commanded all of central and western Europe. From July 10, 1940, until October, Hitler threw his air force at the British, hop- ing to wrest control of the skies over the English Chan- nel from the Royal Air Force (RAF), and so opening the way to his planned invasion of Britain. The pilots of the RAF managed to hold off the Luftwaffe in the Battle of

Britain, and Prime Minister Churchill paid these young men a great tribute in the House of Commons when he said, on August 20, 1940, “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” But Churchill, not wishing to appear as if Britain was con- demned to remain on the defensive, continued: “we must never forget,” he said, “that night after night, month after month, our bomber squadrons travel far into Germany, find their targets in the darkness by the highest navigational skill, aim their attacks, often un- der the heaviest fire, often with serious loss, with de- liberate careful discrimination, and inflict shattering blows upon the whole of the technical and war-making structure of Nazi power.” Such bombing, Churchill told the House, would soon “attain dimensions hitherto un- dreamed of,” and would offer Britain a certain road to victory. Germany’s war power, Churchill prophesied, would soon be “shattered and pulverized.”
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This was pure bravado: in 1940, British bombers had not the power, range, or technology to reach far into Germany, nor could they find their targets at night. On August 25, 1940, at the height of the Battle of Britain, the RAF sent bombers to hit Berlin. Perhaps fifty aircraft got to the German capital, and found the city covered by thick cloud. Unable to find their target, they dropped their bombs anyway and missed badly, with most bombs fall- ing well outside the city limits and doing little damage.

But the raids infuriated Hitler, who now ordered large- scale terror raids on London. From September 1940 until May 1941, the Germans killed over 40,000 Brit- ish civilians in attacks on British industrial and port cities; up to 1944, they killed another 10,000 or more; and then Hitler’s V-1 and V-2 attacks from 1944 until March 1945 killed another 9,000 people. In this envi- ronment of aerial assault on civilians and on economic targets, it seemed to the British government not only reasonable and justifiable but a vital military necessity to develop the RAF into a force capable of delivering massive, punishing blows to the industrial heartland of Germany.

The man who designed the strategic bombing campaign of Germany’s cities was Sir Arthur Harris, the com- mander in chief of the RAF Bomber Command. Though by no means the sole proponent of strategic bombing— he had the strong support throughout the war of Win- ston Churchill—”Bomber” Harris did more than any single individual to push the idea of sustained, mas- sive air raids against German cities as a tool to win the war. When he took over Bomber Command in February 1942, his force of bombers was small, and it was inca- pable of doing much damage to Germany. The RAF had to resort to bombing at night, without fighter escorts, using darkness to hide in; this made specific targets

still more difficult to identify. Rather than aim at spe- cific factories, damage to which could in any case be re- paired rapidly, Harris proposed something far simpler, and far more lethal: the area bombing of all Germany’s cities that possessed any war-related industries. “ The policy of destroying industrial cities,” Harris later wrote, “and the factories in them, was not merely the only possible one for Bomber Command at that time; it was also the best way of destroying Germany’s capac- ity to produce war materiel.” Harris believed that by saturating Germany’s industrial cities with devastating bombardment, he could create a kind of domino effect: bombing cities would destroy railways, roads, bridges, electric power plants, and any industrial facilities in- side the cities, and kill large numbers of people who might work on behalf of the German war economy. The effect, over time, would be to erode the capacity of the German economy to get arms, fuel, and supplies to the front. Harris argued that limiting bombing to factories within a given city could not achieve this sort of knock- out blow: the city as a whole had to be destroyed.
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The U.S. Army Air Forces (USAAF), which reached suf- ficient strength to play a major role in the bombing campaign only by the end of 1943, never fully accepted Harris’s emphasis on area bombing as opposed to pre- cision bombing. The Americans chose to try their hand

at daytime attacks on specific targets such as subma- rine bases, aircraft and ball-bearing factories, and lat- er, oil refineries. At first they faced the same problems the RAF had experienced, and American bombers were shot down in high numbers. But the Americans devel- oped a new tactic: the creation of a fleet of long-range fighter escorts that could accompany the large bomb- ers on their runs across Germany and engage and de- stroy the Luftwaffe at the same time. The destruction of the Luftwaffe in the air gradually opened the way to- ward total Allied mastery of the sky, just at the moment when the bombing fleets had grown to massive and threatening size. Although the Americans continued

to try to hit precision targets, they also grew increas- ingly willing to bomb cities in much the same manner as their British counterparts: indiscriminately. In the spring and summer of 1944, the Allied air forces con- centrated their efforts on France, in preparation for the Normandy assault. But after the breakthrough across France and Belgium in September 1944, they reverted to hitting targets inside Germany. In the eight months between September 1944 and April 1945, the Eighth

U.S. Air Force and the RAF dropped 729,000 tons of bombs on Germany—more than they had achieved in all the previous months of the war combined. In March 1945 alone, the two air forces dropped 133,000 tons of bombs on Germany, the largest total for any month of the war, and about 10 percent of the entire tonnage dropped on Germany during the war.
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What were the results of this massive bombing? We have a great deal of information to answer this ques- tion, because hard on the heels of the first Allied units into Germany came teams of investigators from the United States Strategic Bombing Survey. This group of over one thousand military and civilian experts un- dertook to examine the impact of the bombing cam- paign on both Germany and Japan. In Germany, they gained access to many records from German official ministries, and were able to draw up 212 remarkably

detailed reports on the effect of bombing on all aspects of German war industries, transportation, commu- nications, armaments production, as well as civilian morale and civil defense efforts. The summary report, which was released to the public on October 30, 1945, claimed that Allied aircraft dropped 2.7 million tons of bombs on Germany; destroyed 3.6 million dwellings; and killed at least 305,000 German civilians. (That was a minimum figure, and the number of German dead was surely higher; even the survey’s own documents suggested the number of dead was closer to half a mil- lion.) Allied bombing wounded 800,000 people and left 7.5 million people homeless. It forced the evacua- tion of five million people from stricken regions, and deprived twenty million people of utilities for some period of time. The report noted that the huge attacks the RAF and USAAF mounted after June 1944 were es- pecially damaging both to the German economy and to civilian morale. “Allied air power was decisive in the war in Western Europe,” the report concluded. Not only did it make the invasion of Europe in 1944 pos- sible, but it “brought the economy which sustained the enemy’s armed forces to virtual collapse.” The Al- lied bombing campaign “brought home to the German people the full impact of modern war with all its horror and suffering.”
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The words “horror and suffering” were appropriate. Although there has long been a debate about the ac- tual economic effects of the bombing, there can be little doubt that the human effects were appalling. In their efforts to determine precisely how many people the bombing killed, the survey team did extensive re- search in German medical and civil defense records. These revealed that Allied bombing had killed in a va- riety of gruesome ways. Civilians were buried beneath rubble, dismembered or mortally wounded by bomb fragments, or burned to death by incendiary bombs filled with napalm or phosphorous. Germany had de- veloped a sophisticated and extensive system of air raid shelters for civilians, and these served to protect many people from death. But in the case of a firestorm, as in Hamburg, or simply extensive incendiary bomb- ing, carbon monoxide poisoning killed thousands of people both inside air raid shelters and even outdoors. In addition to deadly gases, the heat from fire killed civilians in shelters, basements, and brick buildings. Others died from choking on inhaled dust, heart at- tacks, internal hemorrhages, and skull fractures. In Hamburg, at least 40,000 people died after repeated Allied air strikes on July 24–29 and August 2, 1943, triggered a roaring, cataclysmic fire that contempo- raries called a “fire typhoon.” Temperatures in the city reached 800 degrees Celsius (1,472 degrees Fahren-

heit). German documents revealed that thousands of people had been trapped inside air raid shelters and had been roasted alive; civil defense workers found whole families inside shelters whose bodies were “dry, shrunken, resembling mummies.”
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Similar scenes had played out across Germany between the spring of 1942 and the end of the war; the single most notorious at- tack came on Dresden, an eastern German city of lim- ited strategic importance. On February 13 and 14, 1945, Allied aircraft struck the city with high explosives, in- cendiary bombs, and flares, triggering a firestorm that devastated the city and killed at least 25,000 people, perhaps twice that number.
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The first American and British press accounts from the occupied Rhineland reveal that even to those report- ers who had covered the war in Europe, the bombed cities of Germany were a ghastly revelation. Cologne, Germany’s fourth-largest city and the capital of the Rhineland, fell to the Allies on March 6, with American tanks of the 3rd Armored Division of General Collins’s VII Corps driving into the center of the town and right up to the twisted wreck of the Hohenzollern bridge over the still-uncrossable Rhine. Press reports spoke of “the utter destruction” of the city, its “twisted, rusty rails, battered trucks, and deep piles of rubble from which dust and smoke were still rising.” This city had