STRATEGIC BOMBING
Strategic bombing during World War II was the sustained aerial attack on railways, harbors, cities, housing, and industrial districts on enemy territory. It is a military strategy distinct from both close air support of ground forces and tactical air power. During World War II, many military strategists believed that major victories could be won by attacking industrial and political infrastructure, rather than purely military targets. Strategic bombing often involved bombing areas inhabited by civilians and sometimes bombing campaigns were deliberately designed to target civilian populations in order to terrorize, disorganize, and disrupt their usual activities. The strategy was used from the onset of the war, when Germany invaded Poland and the Luftwaffe (German Air Force) began bombing cities and the civilian population in Poland in an indiscriminate aerial bombardment campaign. As the war continued to expand, bombing by both the Axis and the Allies increased significantly.
THE ALLIES AND STRATEGIC BOMBING
Despite the German use of strategic bombing in Poland in September 1939, in the first months of the war, the Allies attempted to avoid the strategy in order to minimize civilian causalities. The British Government renounced the approach after Germany attacked France and the neutral Low Countries in May, 1940. The Royal Air Force (RAF) carried out its first strategic bombing raid on Germany at Mönchengladbach on May 11, 1940. On May 15, one day after the German bombing of Rotterdam, the RAF was given permission to attack targets in the Ruhr Area, including oil plants and other civilian industrial targets that aided the German war effort, including self-illuminating blast furnaces.
In 1942, Frederick Lindemann, the British government's leading scientific adviser, presented a "dehousing paper" to the Cabinet, showing the effect that intensive bombing of German cities could produce. Lindemann's paper put forward the theory of attacking major industrial centers in order to deliberately destroy as many homes and houses as possible. Working-class homes were to be targeted because they had a higher density and fire storms were more likely. This would displace the German workforce and reduce their ability to work. The plan was highly controversial even before it started, but the Cabinet thought that bombing was the only option available to directly attack Germany and the Soviets were demanding that the Western Allies do something to relieve the pressure on the Eastern Front. Few in Britain opposed this policy, but there were three notable opponents in Parliament, Bishop George Bell and the Labor MPs Richard Stokes and Alfred Salter. No effort to examine the effects of bombing was ever made.
On February 14, 1942, the Area bombing directive was issued to Bomber Command. Bombing was to be "focused on the morale of the enemy civil population and in particular of the industrial workers." Though it was never explicitly declared, this was the nearest that the British got to a declaration of unrestricted aerial bombing.
The first true practical demonstrations were on the night of March 28/29, 1942, when 234 aircraft bombed the ancient Hanseatic port of Lübeck. This target was chosen not because it was a significant military target, but because it was expected to be particularly susceptible. A few days later, Rostock suffered the same fate. Other German targets suffered massive destruction and tens of thousands of civilians died as a result of bombing major cities, including Hamburg, (45,000 dead), Kassel (10,000), Darmstadt (12,500), Pforzheim (21,200), Swinemuende (23,000) and Dresden (25,000). The Allies used the strategy also in Italy and to attack sites critical to German war industry in France. The Soviets applied the strategy in their attacks on Romania, Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Finland.
In Asia, the Allies dropped over 18 thousand bombs on Thailand and in August 1942, the United States undertook the first air raids in French Indochina. The American bombing campaign gained intensity after the surrender of Germany in May 1945, and by July Japanese defenses were incapable of impeding their movement. The Americans had attained complete air supremacy. In 1944–45, the British undertook several raids on the occupied Netherlands East Indies. They also bombed the Japanese-occupied Indian territory of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The United States strategic bombing of Japan took place between 1942 and 1945. In the last seven months of the campaign, a change to firebombing resulted in great destruction of 67 Japanese cities, as many as 500,000 Japanese deaths and some 5 million more made homeless.
US BOMBING IN EUROPE
In mid 1942, the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) arrived in the UK and carried out a few raids across the English Channel. The USAAF commanders in Washington, D.C. and in Great Britain adopted the strategy of taking on the Luftwaffe head on, in larger and larger air raids by mutually defending bombers flying over Germany, Austria, and France at high altitudes during the daytime. Both the U.S. government and its Army Air Forces commanders were reluctant to bomb enemy cities and towns indiscriminately. They claimed that by using the B-17 and the Norden bombsight, the USAAF should be able to carry out "precision bombing" on locations vital to the German war machine: factories, naval bases, shipyards, railroad yards, railroad junctions, power plants, steel mills, airfields, etc. At the beginning of the combined strategic bombing offensive on March 4, 1943, 669 RAF and 303 USAAF heavy bombers were available.
USAAF leaders firmly held to the claim of "precision bombing" of military targets for much of the war, and dismissed claims they were simply bombing cities. In reality, the day bombing was "precision bombing" only in the sense that most bombs fell somewhere near a specific designated target such as a railway yard. Conventionally, the air forces designated as "the target area" a circle having a radius of 1,000 feet around the aiming point of attack. While accuracy improved during the war, survey studies showed that, overall, only about 20% of the bombs aimed at precision targets fell within this target area. The sheer tonnage of explosive delivered by day and by night was eventually sufficient to cause widespread damage, and, more importantly from a military point of view, forced Germany to divert resources to counter it. This was to be the real significance of the Allied strategic bombing campaign—resource allocation.
EFFECTIVENESS
Much of the doubt about the effectiveness of the bomber war comes from the oft-stated fact German industrial production increased throughout the war. There is insufficient information to ascertain how much additional potential industrial growth the bombing campaign may have curtailed. However, attacks on the infrastructure were taking place. The attacks on Germany's canals and railroads made transportation of materiel difficult. The attack on oil production, oil refineries, and tank farms was, however, extremely successful, and made a very large contribution to the general collapse of Germany in 1945. German insiders also credit the Allied bombing offensive with crippling the German war industry.
The impact of bombing on German morale was significant. Around a third of the urban population under threat of bombing had no protection at all. Some of the major cities saw 55-60 percent of dwellings destroyed. Mass evacuations were a partial answer for six million civilians, but this had a severe impact on morale as German families were split up to live in difficult conditions. The United States Strategic Bombing Survey concluded that the bombing was not stiffening morale but seriously depressing it; fatalism, apathy, defeatism were apparent in bombed areas. The Luftwaffe was blamed for not warding off the attacks and confidence in the Nazi regime fell by 14 percent. Some 75 percent of Germans believed the war was lost in the spring of 1944, owing to the intensity of the bombing.
The firebombing of Dresden, Germany. A pile of bodies before cremation, January 31, 1945, Bundesarchiv.
Death and destruction in Dresden left by Allied firebombing.