Both events caused a furore at the time, not only because they represented a younger generation questioning the deeds of their grandparents, but because they highlighted some of the deep moral questions with which neither side has yet been able to come to terms. The Germans, to their credit, at least recognize that this is a subject they cannot avoid – they even have a specific word for it: Vergangenheitsbewältigung(‘the process of coming to terms with the past’). Britain and America, however, seem much less prepared. They do their best to look back on the war in terms of black and white, good and evil, right and wrong – I am speaking not only of the veterans, but also of those who turn out to protest against the bomber war. When either group is confronted by the more ambiguous realities of bombing, few seem quite sure how to react.
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The moral questions that surround the Allied bomber offensive are much deeper, and much more disturbing, than most people realize. During the course of my research for this book I have been asked repeatedly whether I thought the bombing of cities like Hamburg was justified. I have struggled to find an answer to this question, because it opens up so many difficult issues. Certainly it cannot be taken lightly: after all, if ‘war’s glorious art’ is murder on a mass scale, then bombing is one of its most efficient weapons.
To begin with, I have very little problem with the factthat Hamburg was bombed. The city was a huge centre of industry, providing U-boats, aircraft, oil, chemicals and all kinds of other materials that were essential for the German war effort. It was imperative that the Western Allies did everything in their power to disrupt those industries, both for their own sake and for the sake of the Russians, who were dying in their millions on the Eastern Front. Britain and America lived in constant fear that the USSR would one day give up their titanic struggle by coming to some arrangement with Hitler. Bombing was the only way to prove that they were doing something to help, and successes like the devastation of Hamburg provided the Russians with a great morale boost. As Albert Speer pointed out after the war, the value of bombing cities like Hamburg lay not only in the disruption it caused to German industry but also in the huge resources it diverted away from the Russian Front.
A second issue is slightly more problematic. Towards the end of the war, and immediately after it, there was a great debate over whether the Allies were right to ‘blanket’ bomb German cities, or whether they should have concentrated more on the precision bombing of specific factories and military installations. Most people agreed that precision bombing was preferable, partly because it was much more efficient, but also because it was much less likely to involve civilian casualties.
While I wholeheartedly agree that precision bombing should always be chosen over area bombing wherever possible, in 1943 the RAF did not have the luxury of that choice. They had already tried precision bombing, and the results had been disastrous. Flying in daylight, the British planes were easy targets for German flak and fighters, and they were quickly decimated. Moreover, even during daylight, their equipment was so primitive and their accuracy so bad that they rarely hit what they were aiming for. In short, if they wanted to survive, and if they wanted to destroy specific targets, there was no choice but to go in during the night and bomb the entire area.
When the Americans joined the air war they went through much the same process. They began with a determination to fly by day, and to employ precision-bombing techniques. By the summer of 1943 they were paying for that decision with unsustainable losses. American planes were far less vulnerable to flak than British planes, and far better equipped to defend themselves against fighters – but during the battle of Hamburg their daytime flights meant that, in percentage terms, they were losing up to four times as many planes as the British. By the beginning of August their losses were so bad that they were forced to stop flying altogether. Their policy of flying by day was rescued only by the advent of long-range fighters, which finally began to escort them over Germany towards the end of the year.
It is tempting to view the Americans as the white knights of this particular story because, despite all the pressure to give up daylight bombing, they stuck to their convictions. One of the reasons they were so determined to do so was that they were convinced that the accuracy of their bombing made it worthwhile. The Americans were rightly proud of their Norden bomb sights, which were vastly superior to anything developed by either the Germans or the British, but this remarkable piece of equipment was only useful when the target was visible below. Whenever it was obscured by cloud or smoke, as it was at Hamburg, the Americans might as well have been flying by night. 3So, for example, while they hit the Blohm & Voss shipyards on 25 July they also hit the historic city centre, the river, and a farmer’s fields south of the city. 4The only real difference that the people of Hamburg noticed between British bombs and American ones was that there were far fewer of the latter so they did less damage.
The American decision to stick to daylight bombing over Germany was an incredibly brave one. However, I do not think it gives them any right to claim the moral high ground – and not only for the reasons above. For all their protestations about blanket bombing they were not above employing this method when they thought it appropriate: indeed, their bombardiers on 26 July were told that if they could not locate the port they were to drop their bombs anywhere in the ‘centre of the city’. 5And while they may have exercised restraint in the European theatre of operations, their intentions were not nearly so exemplary in the Pacific. In fact, they used their time in Europe to study British methods of bombing so that they could apply them with equal success in Japan. Their firebombing of Tokyo in 1945 was every bit as devastating as what happened in Hamburg, and the civilian death toll even higher.
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The final moral issue brought up by the bombing of Hamburg is by far the most difficult to justify. It concerns the intentions of those who created the firestorm. The British always claimed that they were aiming their bombs at Hamburg’s docks and military installations: this was what they told the press, who dutifully reported that the aiming point for the RAF was the Blohm & Voss shipyard; it was also what many British crews were told during their briefings. But that was not the case. The largest concentration of purely ‘military’ targets, including the Blohm & Voss shipyards, was on the south shores of the river Elbe, yet this was the only area of Hamburg that the RAF did not aim for. Instead they went exclusively for the residential areas, to the north of the river. The targets of the bombs were not military installations at all, but civilians.
Some might argue that it makes no difference whether the RAF aimed at civilians or not. The vast area over which the bombs were dropped meant that the results were quite likely the same: the town was still flattened, the civilians still dead. But there is a huge moral gulf between bombing a suburban street by accident, and deliberately aiming for it. British planners justified this moral leap to themselves by pointing out that it was much more difficult to destroy factories than it was to kill the people who worked in them. As long as they destroyed the workforce it did not matter whether the Blohm & Voss shipyards were still intact – there would be nobody to build the U-boats.
This idea makes me extremely uncomfortable, but I have to admit that the people who planned the raids had a point. Why should there be any distinction between the German U-boat captain and the German factory worker who helped to build that U-boat? They were both working towards the same end, which was to kill British sailors. And since oil workers produced fuel for that U-boat, surely they were also legitimate targets. Farmers provided sustenance for soldiers at the front, textile workers produced their uniforms, and train drivers got them to and from the battlefield. In a ‘total war’ – and we must remember that it was the Germans who first proclaimed it as such – all of those people are considered fair game, as is anything else that supports the enemy’s war economy.