Welcome. In this video we'll be examining the history of the strategic bombing campaign against Germany in the Second World War. Allied planners put significant hope in the idea that strategic bombing would play an effective role against the German war machine as Germany enjoyed significant territorial buffer zones insulated against attacks. Strategic bombing, simply put, is the sustained aerial attack on structures such as railways, port facilities, civilian housing, even cities and industrial centers in enemy territory.
Strategic bombing is a military strategy which is separate from military concepts like close air support of ground troops or air supremacy. In the words of one officer, strategic bombing was an allied attempt to, quote, Bomb the Germans into submission. Let's start with our guiding questions for this lecture. First, what were the goals of strategic bombing and was it effective? Was bombing a second front in the war or did it squander resources?
And finally, what ethical issues arose with strategic bombing? The potential of strategic bombing was noted as early as the First World War. Strategic bombing began from bombs dropped by rigid airships, like the Zeppelin attack on Poland in 1914 depicted on this slide. Germany had a fleet of 125 Zeppelins in the First World War, but it lost over half of them, and with a 40% attrition rate of Zeppelin crews, this was the deadliest occupation for German military personnel in the war. World War I also saw the emergence of airplanes specifically designed as heavy bombers.
While bomber accuracy was wildly erratic in the First World War, nonetheless some raids were quite deadly. Enthusiasm grew in the interwar years, though no nation prioritized strategic bombing until after the war broke up. American General Billy Mitchell supported the concept, but he was kind of an outlier.
More importantly, the U.S. Air Force did not emerge as a separate branch of the American military until after the war, so aerial warfare proponents lacked political clout. Italian General Giulio Duet wrote an influential 1921 book on strategic bombing in which he argued that bombing raids would paralyze industry, crush civilian morale, and make resistance impossible.
In Germany, General Walter Walter was an early proponent of strategic bombing, but his death in 1936 mostly ended German enthusiasm for strategic bombing. and the Germans focused their energies toward tactical air support and blitzkrieg operations. This put Germany at a disadvantage later in the war as its heavy bomber limitations reduced Germany's ability to carry out strategic bombing. Great Britain was the nation most embracing the concept of strategic bombing as the Second World War opened. This was in part due to the efforts of General Hugh Trenchard, but it also owed something to the fact that in 1918 Britain established the Royal Air Force, or RAF for short, as a separate branch of the British military.
However, the British lacked a sufficient budget to begin to build the massive bombers necessary when war broke out. Let's turn to a saying that epitomizes interwar thinking regarding strategic bombing. The bomber will always get through. The quote comes from a speech by British political leader Stanley Baldwin, who served three terms as prime minister in the interwar decades. though he was just a cabinet member in 1932 when this quote was recorded.
Baldwin believed that the future of warfare was aerial in nature, particularly heavy bombers obliterating major cities. Baldwin did not advocate total disarmament, but he thought that great armaments inevitably lead to war. And he came to believe that strategic bombing was a way that Britain could engage in unilateral disarmament.
by investing more in heavy bombers and less on more traditional forms of warfare. He said, I think it is well also for the man in the street to realize there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through. The only defense is on offense, which means you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy. if you want to save yourselves.
Allied strategic bombing efforts against Germany had a number of goals. Allies wanted to inflict massive damage on the German military and industrial targets. Another goal was to de-house German industrial workers by destroying residences, especially apartment buildings, and civilian deaths were viewed as acceptable.
Allies believed strategic bombing would weaken the morale of German civilians, thus destroying the German army. destabilizing the government. Finally, Allied planners thought the campaign would open a second front against Germany at a time when there was no other way of directly attacking Germany.
Two main approaches to strategic bombing emerged among the Allies against Germany. The first was known as nighttime area bombing. The British preferred this option, especially because they lacked fighters that could escort the bombers for the long distances to and from Germany.
Night bombing reduced the loss of British aircraft and air crews, but it also was much less effective. A 1941 British report noted that only 22% of bomber crews got within 5 miles of their targets. Against heavily defended targets, the proportion fell to only 7%.
Gradually, British bombing missions improved in accuracy. The introduction of airborne radar helped. as did increasing the numbers of aircraft and air crews, which forced the Germans to defend wider areas. One of the most important new tactics was the formation of what was known as the Pathfinder Force.
This was veteran crews who flew ahead of the main bombing force and marked aiming points with pyrotechnics to improve accuracy. The Americans worked from a doctrine based on the use of unescorted, heavily armed bombers that flew in tight formation at high altitude. The bombers were equipped with as many as 13 light machine guns to defend against enemy fighters.
American bombers would attack specific targets in daylight, especially targets whose destruction might cause the German economy to collapse. One historian argued that the Americans had proposed a surgical rather than a sledgehammer method. Yet while their bombing was more accurate, the American approach led to Higher losses of aircraft and air crews.
And precision should be noted was measured by the Americans in thousands of feet. And for the British, an even wider metric was used in terms of miles. The first few years of the strategic bombing campaign against Germany resulted in very disappointing outcomes. Let's take a look at the reasons for this. First, strategic bombing proponents made the assumption that bombers would get through with acceptable losses.
but this proved to be an incorrect assumption. Fighter aircraft had greatly improved in performance and had regained superiority over the bombers. Formations of unescorted Allied bombers were sitting ducks for German fighters, which inflicted a deadly toll on Allied bombers they encountered. Pictured on this side is the German Focke-Wulf Fw 190, a versatile aircraft that was one of the most feared machines the Luftwaffe had in its arsenal for most of the war.
The 190 could be used as a day fighter, as a fighter-bomber, as a ground attack aircraft, and even as a night fighter. Until the introduction of the American P-51 Mustang as a bomber escort in 1944, the 190 and its counterpart, the Messerschmitt 109, were especially deadly foes. Second, the introduction of radar shifted the advantage to the defender by limiting the amount of airspace that bombers could...
fly undetected. Third, targets proved to be much more difficult to destroy than planners assumed. Although factories could be hit and damaged, they could not be hit often enough or badly enough to be permanently knocked out of action. In addition, rapid and effective German repair capabilities and facility relocation efforts reduced the effects of Allied bombing.
Next, civilian morale proved to be much more difficult to affect than was expected. Another issue was a lack of accurate intelligence. Air crews struggled not only in identifying targets, but also in assessing how much damage they had inflicted.
Targets written off as destroyed sometimes got right back into action. Finally, we can look at factors like poor weather, inexperienced air crews, and unexpectedly stiff enemy resistance as factors in reducing bombing accuracy. In 1942 the Allies had developed a new tactic popularly known as firebombing.
The four-pound incendiary bomb pictured here was the standard light incendiary bomb used by a RAF bomber command in very large numbers. It was the main weapon for the British de-housing strategy. If a fire catches, it can spread, destroying adjacent buildings that might have been unaffected by a high-explosive bomb. This is a more effective use of a bomber's payload, or as one wisecracking military official put it, more bang for the buck. This particular bomb depicted here had a hollow body made from a lightweight alloy that was filled with thermite incendiary pellets.
It could burn for up to 10 minutes. The slide on this screen shows the complete incendiary bomb at the top, a dud in the middle with the tail section missing, and the incinerated remnants of an incendiary that had been deployed. You can see that the magnesium-aluminum alloy used in the production of the incendiary device mostly burned in the fire. Later in the war, the British developed an even more powerful 30-pound incendiary device.
Allied bombers attacked the German industrial center of Hamburg in 1943, depicted on this first slide. Four major raids were carried out over 10 days, one of which created a devastating firestorm that killed at least 45,000 people. The Lions textbook we use in class puts the number killed at 60,000 people. Two-thirds of the remaining population fled the city after the raids. I'm going to quote Lions for a moment here.
A one and a half mile wide column of superheated air rose 8,000 feet into the sky, sucking in the air from the surrounding area and suffocating thousands of people. The intense heat turned air raid shelters into ovens and literally baked alive thousands of persons who had taken refuge in them. Temperatures rose to over 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit and winds reached nearly 300 miles per hour. But of all the forms of death that citizens of Hamburg suffered, the most horrific fate awaited several hundred people who died after being spattered by burning phosphorus.
Phosphorus clings to any surface it touches, including human flesh, and it continues to burn as long as it is exposed to oxygen. Even when smothered by sand or water, it flares into flame again when air returns. Many victims threw themselves into a nearby river.
where they had to choose between dying in agony from flaming phosphorus or by drowning. One of the most famous and most controversial incendiary attacks was on the German city of Dresden in 1945. The city, located about 100 miles south of Berlin, had not been targeted by major bombing campaigns before this attack. Primarily, it is a major cultural center, though admittedly there were some factories that contributed to the war effort. and it had important rail and road connections. The bombing and resulting firestorm destroyed over two and a half square miles of the city center and as many as 25,000 civilians were killed.
Kurt Vonnegut's 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five used his experiences as a prisoner of war at a camp near Dresden during the bombing as a basis for the book. Vonnegut said at one point the allied POWs were put to work burying the dead, but there were so many corpses that eventually the Germans used flamethrowers to reduce the rest of the corpses to ash. This aerial photograph shows the destruction of the city center of Dresden, which was about 90% destroyed from the bombing and subsequent firestorm.
In terms of effects of strategic bombing, 61 German cities with a combined population of 25 million inhabitants were attacked by the German army. by the Allies between 1939 and 1945. 3.6 million homes or apartments were destroyed, about 20% of the total in Germany, and 7.5 million people were made homeless by these raids. Estimates of the number of German civilians killed as a result of the raids ranged from 400,000 to 600,000 people, and the high estimates on the number of wounded suggest that up to a million people were killed. German civilians were wounded as a result of the bombings. Berlin was 70% destroyed by bombing and Dresden was 75% destroyed.
Despite intense bombing though, German war production increased every year until 1944. German civilian morale, while it seems to have been reduced, does not seem to have been affected enough to lead to widespread unrest against the Nazi government. and anger at the Allies for targeting German civilians may have actually had an opposite effect on morale. By 1944, a shift in strategy occurred and strategic targets were attacked, including railheads, rail lines, bridges, and petroleum refineries. The destruction of such targets effectively paralyzed Germany. To illustrate this point, in 1945, Germany had mined millions of tons of coal, but had no way of transporting it for useful purposes.
When the war ended, as another example, the Allies found hundreds of King Tiger tanks at a Munich rail yard, ready to be taken to the front, but the Germans had no way of delivering them. The volume of ordnance... dropped on Germany far exceeded that that was dropped on Britain during the war. Allies dropped 1.4 million tons of bombs on Germany versus approximately 74,000 tons dropped on Britain by the Germans. That's 19 times as much ordnance fell on Germany than on Britain.
67,000 British civilians were killed during the Second World War, perhaps only 10 to 15 percent as many as were killed in Germany as a result of strategic bombing. Thus, if strategic bombing against Germany is being assessed as a proportional response for the Battle of Britain, then there was far greater death and destruction rained upon Germany than on Britain. There are other ethical considerations to address when weighing the Allied strategic bombing campaign against Germany.
The first question is deceptively simple. Should civilians be considered as enemy combatants? For example, should a factory worker making electrical wire that could ultimately be used to wire a fighter airplane be considered just as much a part of the military enterprise as an infantry soldier? Should that same factory worker's spouse and children be considered enemy combatants or valid targets if the worker's apartment building is being targeted? What about the vast destruction of cities in all?
The Allied bombing campaign devastated over 600 acres in each of 27 German cities. That 600-acre figure is the approximate area that the Germans destroyed in London during World War II. Berlin and Hamburg lost more than 6,000 acres each. Cologne and Dusseldorf, about 2,000 acres apiece.
And 10 other cities lost more than 1,000 acres each. To give you some perspective, a foot... field is like 1.3 acres.
So Cologne and Dusseldorf losing the equivalent of about 180 football fields of built architecture. What about so-called collateral damage or targets unintentionally hit while attacking a military target? Is this permissible if the aim was to take out a valid military target? Finally we can consider a few questions that are a bit more theoretical in nature.
First, is the damage done to an enemy via strategic bombing less than would have occurred if more traditional military options had been used, such as an invasion force? The second involves what has been described as a supreme emergency argument. Is a particular threat so grave that if the enemy won, the costs would be massively greater?
This is along the lines of the arguments used to support the invasion and... bombing of Iraq in 2003 when American leaders claimed that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. And with that, this brings to a close our look at strategic bombing of Germany by the Allies in the Second World War. Keep these questions in the back of your head when we return to the ethics of strategic bombing against Japan later in the course.