World War II/On the Allied Bomber War in WWII
On the Allied Bomber War in WWII
by Tim Starr
Germany
Given WWII-level aerial bombardment technology, saturation firebombing of cities was the only truly effective way to target enemy war production and transport. High-altitude bombing was so inaccurate that Allied bomber waves were lucky to hit the right city in the right country; the Swiss city of Schaffhausen was accidentally bombed by the Allies, among over a dozen other Swiss cities also accidentally bombed, despite Swiss neutrality.
The only way to get any accurate aerial bombing of enemy targets in WWII was low-altitude bombing, which put the bombers in range of enemy anti-aircraft artillery and fighter planes. The casualty rates for the bomber crews were so high at first that the British abandoned daytime raids entirely, switching over to nighttime raids that were even more inaccurate, but at least had lower casualty rates. These raids were still ineffective unless they were done at a big enough scale, with enough bombers flying in close formation, guided by radio waves, with the lead bombers dropping incendiary bombs to start fires, thus marking the targets for the rest of the bomber wave.
Even so, the destruction from the bombing alone turned out to be pretty easy for the Germans to repair. Firebombing was more effective, starting fires that were harder to put out and destroyed more of the enemy’s fixed capital assets (factories, houses, apartment buildings, etc.).
It wasn’t until the US entered the bomber war in Europe that daytime raids were resumed. The US could only do that because we had the Norden bombsight, which remained so classified that it was never shared with the British. From then on, the British took the night shift raids, and the Americans took the day shift. On the day shift, we tried to be more discriminate in our bombing, but the casualty rates remained high until we developed escort fighters capable of flying the entire round-trip to Germany and back, mainly the P-51 Mustang after it got paired w/ the Merlin engines made by Rolls-Royce. They did not start getting effectively deployed until 1944, 5 years after the war in Europe had begun.
So, by 1944, all the elements of effective bomber raids finally came together: Large-scale firebombing of enemy cities that were centers of war production and transport, with long-range fighter escorts to intercept enemy fighter defenses, at high enough altitude to be above enemy anti-aircraft artillery, with day and night bombing continued round-the-clock in shifts between RAF Bomber Command and the US Army Air Corp’s 8th Air Force. Even still, weather conditions often made for sub-optimal results.
Things all finally came together for the firebombing of Dresden, which was the “perfect firestorm.” The size of the bomber waves was big enough, the fighter escorts were effective enough, navigation was good enough to hit the right city, weather conditions allowed for the incendiaries to take full effect, and the raid could be sustained long enough to pretty much lay waste to the city.
Goebbels then took the official city casualty estimate of about 25,000 dead and greatly exaggerated it in his official propaganda condemning the raid. This was never corrected by the Soviets who occupied East Germany, including Dresden, who found it convenient to demonize the Western Allies for the “barbarity” of the firebombing of Dresden, despite the fact that Stalin had insisted upon it at the time to relieve pressure upon the Red Army’s advance into Germany. Goebbels’ propaganda was later picked up and amplified by the English “historian” David Irving, who took the official casualty estimates and added an extra zero to them. Irving went on to become a full-blown Holocaust Denier, as proven in English court when he lost a libel case he brought against someone who called him on it.
Lest anyone claim that the war was “almost over” by the time Dresden was bombed in February of 1945, Wernher von Braun told my grandfather that, by the time the war ended in May, Germany was within months of getting “a new superweapon” that would’ve enabled Germany to win the war. This was when my grandfather drove von Braun to the coast after the war to get picked up by one of our subs to be brought back to America to come work for us. After Hiroshima, my grandfather understood what Von Braun had been talking about. The less Germany was bombed, the longer the war would’ve run, and the more time the SS would’ve had to finish its atomic bomb, which was to be delivered by the rockets of Von Braun’s SS rocketry division.
Japan
The main difference between the Allied air campaign in Europe and the one against Japan is that Japan’s air defenses were much less intact by the time General Curtis Lemay took charge of it. He thus switched to far more accurate low-altitude bombing, which destroyed Tokyo with a casualty count higher than both the two later atomic bombs combined and no noticeable effect upon Japan’s willingness to surrender. Nor was there any offer by Japan to surrender after Hiroshima, while hundreds of thousands of civilians per month died at Japanese hands in the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, since Hirohito doubted that America had more than one such bomb. Preparations continued for total mobilization of the entire Japanese people and Army to resist a US ground invasion of Japan. The American casualty estimates of about 1.5 million lives lost in such an invasion were just for the southernmost of the Japanese Home Islands, and would have been even higher than that if Japanese resistance had continued throughout northern Japan as well. If the casualty rates had been similar to that of the Okinawa campaign, the total number of American casualties for all of WWII would have been several times higher than it was. There was a batch of about 500K Purple Hearts made by the US military for the ground invasion in anticipation of the initial casualty count, and every single Purple Heart awarded by the US since then has come out of that batch, with plenty left over.
Meanwhile, the Japanese were executing Allied prisoners in their camps. Japan wasn’t signatory to the Geneva Convention, thus had not treated their prisoners well, and was terrified of war crimes trials, so they were killing the prisoners to prevent them from testifying about the torture, execution, malnutrition, disease, etc., that they had suffered. I had a Dutch-Indonesian babysitter as a child who had survived a Japanese prison camp there; one of her daughters was murdered by a Japanese doctor who gave her a lethal injection. In one Japanese prison camp on Palawan, the US soldiers were herded at gunpoint into trenches that had been soaked in gasoline, which was ignited once they were in it, burning nearly all of them alive except for the few that managed to escape and live to tell the tale. This was on top of the other Japanese war crimes, such as the great sword-sharpness testing contest they held in Nanking in 1937, in which about 700K Chinese were massacred, the biological warfare experiments they conducted upon live human subjects, their official policies of cannibalism when their normal food supplies ran out in the South Pacific, their mass enslavement of Korean and Filipina women into prostitution to service their occupation troops, etc.
It is tragic that the way to end the war the fastest, with the least human cost all around, was to nuke Japan twice, and continue conventional bombing raids even afterwards until Japan surrendered. Nevertheless, that was the best option available, and Truman deserves kudos for making the right decision. It’s also good that Japan has been rehabilitated since then, and become a great positive contributor to human civilization instead of one of its destroyers.
