In the ashes of an inferno, a lingering debate
In ``Among the Dead Cities: The History and Moral Legacy of the WWII Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan" (Walker, $25.95), A. C. Grayling investigates the Allied bombing of civilians -- termed ``area bombing" -- and asks whether it was legal, moral, or necessary. He coolly yet compassionately examines arguments on both sides before delivering judg ment on a bombing campaign that killed some 800,000 civilians.
A professor of philosophy at the University of London, Grayling is the author of numerous literary, historical, and philosophical works. He spoke from his home in London.
Q: When and why did area bombing become Allied strategy?
A: In February 1942, a directive to British Bomber Command ordered that henceforth the primary target would be the morale of the enemy population. Before then, government policy had been to avoid targeting civilians because that would be a war crime. One impulse for the change was the fact that Bomber Command's efforts had until then been costly and ineffective. By 1942 Stalin was also pressing the Western Allies to invade Europe. So as a kind of sop, Churchill said that Britain would try to distract Germany with a mass bombing campaign.
Q: Did area bombing fulfill the stated aims?
A: Not at all. As the Blitz on London and other British cities had shown, bombing strengthens morale, not destroys it. However many million tons of bombs you dropped on Germany -- 1.8 million tons altogether during the war -- those conventional means would never break civilian morale. But at the end of the war atom bombs did, which is a different matter altogether.
Q: Did this strategy prolong the war?
A: Both economists and military strategists argue that if the [Royal Air Force] effort had been directed (as the [US Army Air Force's] had been) at industrial targets -- oil, coal, transport links -- the war might have been a year, perhaps two years, shorter. Others say that if instead of producing bombers, Britain had developed long-range aircraft to patrol the Atlantic, this would also have shortened the war.
Q: Why was the US bombing strategy in Japan so different from its strategy in Europe?
A: There was deep anger at Pearl Harbor and at the horrors American forces witnessed as they liberated territory, at great cost, approaching the Japanese mainland. There was also racism. The Japanese were regarded as an alien race with no respect for human life; kamikaze attacks proved this. They were viewed as mad fanatics to be exterminated, so the civilian bombing was viewed more as pest control or exterminating lice . An unsung hero of the time is [Secretary of War] Henry Stimson, who committed suicide many years later. He did everything in his power to persuade Truman to drop the atom bomb on an unpopulated island, and when he finally failed he returned to his office and crossed the city of Kyoto off the target list, because Kyoto was the Dresden -- perhaps much more than the Dresden -- of Japan.
Q: Why did you concentrate on Hamburg?
A: Dresden and Hiroshima have become such iconic examples that people forget the firebombing of Hamburg in 1943, but it was the first truly major area bombing attack. Between 35,000 and 45,000 people were killed in a single night. And the element of surprise meant that the victims were largely undefended. The scenes were horrific. Women, children, the elderly, noncombatants, innocents in the technical sense of not being engaged in hostile activity against the enemy.
At the time, leaders of the vigorous anti-area bombing campaign in Britain pointed out that Hamburg had been a center of political opposition to Nazism. It was a terrible irony that it should have been selected for the first mass murder bombing raid.
Q: Was area bombing a crime by Nuremberg standards?
A: It was, and many Allied leaders knew it. Even before the war ended they were anxious about the final reckoning. In March 1944, Churchill wrote to the RAF commander saying, ``The terror bombing of Germany has got to stop. It's gone too far." Less than two weeks later the first of the concentration camps was liberated and worldwide outrage at this atrocity muffled the bombing debate. Nobody could assert an equivalency between Allied area bombing and the Holocaust. The Holocaust is an Everest, and Allied area bombing is a foothill, but the fact that it is doesn't make it right and shouldn't stop us from looking at our past and examining how we behave now.
Only in 1977 was a protocol added to the Fourth Geneva Convention deliberately outlawing attacks on civilians. Britain has signed that declaration, the US has not. The fact that it took so long for deliberate bombing of civilians to be outlawed is a measure of the anxiety that the Western Allies felt about retrospectively admitting to war crimes.
Q: What effect did this have on the European vs. the American psyche?
A: As I talk to you I look out the window at a little park that used to be a row of houses destroyed during the Blitz. My neighbor was injured in that raid. I'm constantly reminded of the experiences people had that changed their attitude to the nature of war. In the US, the 9/11 attacks were terrible crimes, attempting as they did to kill as many innocents as possible. If you think that those attacks were evil, and they were, then you've got to ask what's the difference between that and dropping thousands of tons of incendiary bombs in 1943 or the atomic bombs on Japan.
Q: Does the accuracy of modern bombing eliminate these concerns?
A: In practice, of course not. What strikes us now is what has happened in Lebanon. If you examine that case as it might be presented to an international tribunal, then the following facts are pertinent. The rockets fired into Israel were not fired at military or industrial targets but at civilians. The attacks launched from Israel into Lebanon, which were directed not only at suspected Hezbollah targets but at infrastructure, were massive. Therefore, even though Israeli forces leafleted civilian areas so that they could not be held legally accountable for indiscriminate attacks on civilians, the question of proportionality remains.
Q: Why does Allied bombing matter now?
A: I get tremendously moving letters from veterans of Bomber Command who say ``For 50 years I've lived with my conscience. In my dreams I still see the burning cities below. It's wonderful that someone has come out with this." Others say ``You swine, you weren't even born then." I reply, as I do in the book, that I'm filled with admiration for the courage of those who flew by night over Germany, but that doesn't alter the moral case one must investigate.
My book is not intended to give any sort of comfort to neo-Nazis or the far right in Germany or to say anything other than the war that we, the Allies, fought was a just war. Our greatest crime would have been to lose. It is therefore even more important for us to ask whether everything we did was right.
Anna Mundow, a freelance journalist living in Central Massachusetts, is a correspondent for the Irish Times. She can be reached via e-mail at ama1668@hotmail.com.
(Correction: In an interview in the Aug. 27 Books section, historian A. C. Grayling incorrectly described the death of former Secretary of War Henry Lewis Stimson in 1950 as a suicide. Stimson's official cause of death was natural causes.)
