The Ethics of Firebombing
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Air bombardment had a checkered past by 1939…
It wasn’t new to WWII, if that’s what you’re thinking. It had its beginnings in the Italo-Turkish War of 1911-1912, when small Italian aircraft dropped grenades and small artillery shells on Ottoman positions. But that was the heavier-than-air debut: they tried bombing from balloons in several conflicts, including the Franco-Prussian War, the first conflict where aircraft of any kind were actively sought for military uses (my Round Table buddies know the Union’s balloons in the Civil War were unsolicited). In WWI, organized bombing campaigns were small, as were the airplanes…except for the zeppelins. Dropping payloads from the air was a risky business, and in WWI, it was worse than inaccurate; it was downright scattershot. Still, some saw the value of such nearly random attacks, and some saw they were the wave of the future.
The mud and futility of the trenches drove warriors aloft.
Postwar visionaries like Guilio Douhet and William L. Mitchell were certain that fleets of bombers darkening the skies over enemy cities within hours of war breaking out would drive the population to overthrow their overlords and seek peace. British “air policing” campaigns in Iraq and elsewhere in the 1920s enhanced this attractive vision of future warfare. Tribesmen behind on their taxes were bombed until they complied…and it worked.
Hard to believe people on horseback complied with the wishes of people in airplanes…
But not everyone was very certain that this kind of bombing was a good idea. The Hague, for one, imposed strict rules regarding aerial bombardment. FDR, in 1933, suggested banning aerial bombing altogether, a suggestion that went nowhere. Not everyone was concerned about aerial bombing in part because not everyone had experienced it first-hand. And not every air theorist agreed that horizontal bombing (as opposed to dive bombing) was all that scary. The Germans and Italians, when they rearmed in the 1920s and ‘30s, paid very little attention to it, though they built light bombers. The Japanese and Soviets, technically and financially behind everyone else, could ill afford to do much more than they did. Offered Sperry/Norden bombsights in the ‘30s, they all declined.
While tactical air power flourished…
Horizontal bombardment of fixed targets could be strategic by the lights of the thinkers of the day; attacking troops and vehicles on the surface—and other airplanes—was tactical. Sure, bombing troops with dive bombers, or dropping torpedoes against ships made sense. But bombing anything else with a horizontal bomber…not so much. Let’s face it: even Billy Mitchell used glide-bombing techniques—shallow dive-bombing—against Ostfriesland when he sank her.
Horizontal bombers were bigger than other airplanes.
From the outset, they were “self-protecting,” in that they carried flexible machine guns to ward off enemy fighters. They had longer range and a greater capacity for bombs even if they couldn’t hit the broadside of four square football fields from 10,000 feet. The Americans and British, the biggest practitioners of horizontal bombing, compensated for their lack of accuracy with volume while they still tried to get more accurate with the Sperry/Norden bombsights and flight control systems. And they still missed.
Then came Guernica.
During the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), the Germans and Italians tried out their new equipment, notably their airplanes. Since the outset of hostilities, the German Legion Kondor and the Italian Aviazione Legionaria had done some small-scale bombing and strafing for Franco’s Fascists, primarily interested in air superiority. The Basque town of Guernica was a major communications hub behind Republican lines in the defense of Bilbao, a key city in northern Spain. To destroy a bridge across the Oka River, German and Italian aircraft attacked Guernica on 26 April 1937, eventually dropping a then-shocking 24 tons of bombs, destroying much of the town, jamming the roads with rubble and wreckage, and ending resistance in the sector. The destruction was widespread, but incendiary bombs were few…but started huge fires.
The bridge—the intended target—still stood.
The casualty count is still in dispute, from hundreds to thousands, depending on the source. But it was the strafing of those trying to escape, and the fires caused by the 1% of the bomb loads that caused the most controversy. The Germans admitted that their bombing wasn’t accurate enough to pinpoint the bridge, so they just hit everything. Inaccuracy of the method bolstered their reasoning. Critics cried “war crime!” Proponents muttered, “legitimate targeting method as long as we have trouble hitting actual targets.”
This became the “moral” justification for horizontal bombardment that couldn’t hit targets.
While the Americans and British decried the result of the Guernica attack, they also understood the reasoning, and carried that reasoning with them into their bombing campaigns of WWII. Even with their bombsights, they couldn’t hit anything reliably, consistently, and in even moderately poor conditions except with many airplanes dropping many bombs in the same area. When war came in the Pacific and the Americans started bombing Japan in 1944…that monster raised its head again.
The Fire Blitz: Burning Down Japan
There’s always been a fear, a panic even, about fire. It’s a natural phenomenon over which we have so little control, really. It keeps us warm to the point of being turned to ash…
The Fire Blitz: Burning Down Japan is about an expensive and somewhat unreliable airplane, a hard-to-hit target, and a few people who used that cantankerous plane to solve the problem of hitting that vital target. Due to hit the shelves 9 March.
Coming Up…
The Insurance Industry In Wartime
The Fire Blitz: Burning Down Japan
And Finally…
On 24 February:
1582: Pope Gregory announces the Papacy will implement his calender in all Hapsburg lands in October. The new calender fixed Easter for the first time as the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox in the northern hemisphere, and added the concept of “leap years” to keep the calender from getting too skewed again. Saudi Arabia was the latest country to adopt it, in 2016.
1917: Great Britain officially informed the US of a telegram sent from Arthur Zimmerman in the German Foreign Office to the German Ambassador to Mexico on 17 January. It suggested an alliance between Germany and Mexico if the US joined the French/British Entente because of Germany’s unrestricted submarine warfare. Once the text became public, the uproar helped Wilson to persuade Congress to go to war with Germany. Mexico had no interest in such an alliance.