The RAF Bombing Campaign in Germany: Ethical and Strategic Considerations
Conclusions
By the end of the war, Germany's "heart" had almost ceased to beat.
General Erhard Milch, using the same metaphor, said after the war that the Bomber Command morale campaign "inflicted grievous and bloody injuries upon us but the Americans stabbed us to the heart."
With a smaller force than Lindemann or Tizard had projected, Bomber Command had savaged so many cities by the Spring of 1945 that planners were running out of targets.
But to what end had over 55,000 aircrew lost their lives, and what was gained by killing hundreds of thousands of German civilians?
As we have seen, the closest Bomber Command or the Air Staff ever came to strategic analysis of the morale campaign was the series of memos by Trenchard, the Co's and others which purported to gauge the state of mind (and fortitude) of the German people. Their character and tenacity under bombing was judged to be Germany's critical weakness, which if exploited would surely lead, somehow, to surrender of the Reich.
Britain chose a "strategy" which was never focused, flailing out at the softest targets Bomber Command could find, which endured the bombing on an ever increasing scale. The workers, despite what Cherwell surmised, continued to man the factories which were for the most part on the peripheries of the large cities.
The means by which victory would take place - riots, revolt, decline in productivity - were never examined under close sociological or psychological scrutiny.
Only Lord Cherwell's argument regarding the behavior of de-housed workers approached a reasoned (if completely speculative - he had misinterpreted data from Zuckerman's studies at Hull) argument for what Bomber Command could hope to achieve.
Other than the Cherwell minute, there was no reasoned, utilitarian rationale for the area campaign and the deliberate killing ofGermany's urban residents.
One can reasonably suggest that such a strategy can be justified as long as the results are not yet known and when other options have been exhausted: an experiment in terror is acceptable when the other criteria are met (just cause) and when the evidence indicates that the good end achieved will outweigh the harm done.
(We should also remember Walzer's injunction of the "supreme emergency," although Britain's supreme emergency ended or at least became less severe when the Soviets entered the war.)
Evidence gathered throughout the war made it clear even to MEW and the Air Staff that despite the routine terror attacks on German cities, production continued to rise. By 1943 MEW estimates showed that Bomber Command claims of Terraine has shown the following figures: for tank production, 760 per month in early 1943, 1229 per month in Dec '43, and 1669 in July 1944; for aircraft, Germany produced 15,288 in 1942, 25,094 in 1943 and 39,275 in 1944.
The German economy, unlike in Britain, had remarkable slack and produced "guns and butter" for much of the war. See also USSBS Over-all Report (European War) and USSBS, The Effects of Strategic Bombing on German Morale: v 1 70 having seriously disrupted German production were fiction.
Bomber Command had preferred "intelligence" from dubious sources since the beginning of the Ruhr campaign that conformed to its own predilections.
Bomber Command slipped gradually but relentlessly toward a strategy of terror bombing from almost the beginning of the war. After France fell and when Germany demonstrated its inability to deliver a knockout blow, Britain was free to develop the means to deliver her own. The lessons of the GAF's failure - that bombing can weld people together as well as inure them to further suffering - never found their way into British planning (even though Churchill had recognized this, both in 1917 and in his memo to Portal).
The limitations of a tactical air force employed in terror bombing did, however, drive Churchill to devote 1/3 of Britain's industrial resources to the production of strategic bombers.
Britain did not adopt terror bombing simply because it was the only activity which she could engage in with any success - the Admiralty constantly pressed for bombers to aid in the war against U-boats, and others in the military argued for diversion of bombers to North Africa and other theatres.
The morale campaign was, however, the only strategic contribution Britain could make for several years, at least until the Americans could be brought in.
Even after the entry of the US, the specter of a debacle on the continent against an enemy even Trenchard admitted was superior was always an implicit (and sometimes explicit) theme in British strategic thinking. The result was that the area campaign became the real panacea.
Deluded by its own internal assessments of German morale, Harris and Bomber Command became driven by a loose, uncritical assumption that morale bombing would crush the German war machine by punishing the very people the Chiefs of Staff and the Air Staff said they wanted to influence - its workers. This "strategy" was never admitted in public and never fully articulated internally. It was ultimately found wanting but continued because Harris could not (and after the Spring of 1944 would not) switch to daylight precision raids.
The other factor militating against participating in the oil campaign was Churchill's desire for a punitive campaign againstGermany as a whole. The morale campaign was thus a method without a clearly defined goal - the means employed became an end. Beyond its vaguely Trenchardian means, Bomber Command never really had a strategic view until the disavowal of area bombing by the Air Staff in 1944 and the embrace of Spaatz's oil campaign.
If the strategy of Bomber Command was hard to detect, the ethical restraints against killing non-combatants never seemed to enter the equation at all - at least within the RAF.
Publicly, Sinclair invoked the rule of double effect to stave off "incorrigible" MP's, but the argument was insincere.
Publicly, Sinclair invoked the rule of double effect to stave off "incorrigible" MP's, but the argument was insincere.
Civilian deaths were not collateral, they were the central tenet of Bomber Command's "strategy." Even here, Bomber Command could not come to terms with the consequences of breaking the jus in bello criterion against the slaughter of non-combatants.
If they were not "innocents," but modern combatants in the "pre-fabricated battle," then a strictly punitive campaign could possibly have been justified, even in just war terms. The internal argument, as far as it went, was however that the very people being bombed would revolt (recalling the panic in 1917-1918 London after a modest series of attacks by Gothabombers) and demand an end to the war. Panic and "internal collapse" would surely follow area bombing and in turn would mean defeat of the Nazis.
If there is scant evidence of ethical misgivings over the morale campaign within the RAF, and no evidence for a systematic analysis of the psychological effects of aerial bombardment, the situation within the AAF was very different.
Schaffer has demonstrated convincingly that the "ethical" objections to area bombing by the RAF within USSTAF were often veiled political and pragmatic arguments. Arnold and Spaatz are represented by the official AAF history as moral agents who made strategic decisions on both deontological and utilitarian grounds. The American air chiefs were worried about the post-war world and how morale bombing would affect relations with the occupied Germans. They were also, however, concerned with the domestic American perception of air power and the AAF's morally "clean" precision-bombing heritage.
Spaatz, Arnold, and even Kuter and Lovett were prepared to use terror when it would make a difference in the surrender of the German state towards the end of the war.
This as a more authentically utilitarian argument than had been formulated by Bomber Command and was similar in effect to USSBS findings after the war that gradual and steadily increasing bombing of towns and cities made almost no impact on morale of civilians. In fact, morale tended to be slightly higher in those cities which were categorized as "heavily bombed" (i.e. 30,000 tons on average) than in those receiving a more moderate tonnage (6,000). Repeated bombings of the same city also resulted in diminishing returns.
True shock occurred in cities which were unmolested for long periods and suddenly received large-scale, savage blows, especially at night. The result was not civilian riots or demands for German surrender, however. Lethargy, fear, other minor psychiatric
disorders and anxiety were far more common. As the SBS pointed out, controls in a police state leave few avenues for protest and policy change.
True shock occurred in cities which were unmolested for long periods and suddenly received large-scale, savage blows, especially at night. The result was not civilian riots or demands for German surrender, however. Lethargy, fear, other minor psychiatric
disorders and anxiety were far more common. As the SBS pointed out, controls in a police state leave few avenues for protest and policy change.
While the AAF, in the internal critiques of Thunderclap and Clarion, had reached the conclusion that terror bombing was not likely to have the desired effects, the RAF chose to bomb in the dark, without critical examination of its first principle or a coherent strategy for its Air Marshals. Throughout the war, the dialectic of morale bombing and victory was never subjected to any scrutiny in a formal way within the Air Staff or Bomber Command.
USSBS Over-all Report, pp 96-9
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