CAVEAT EMPTOR: THE CLIP IS GRUESOME AND NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART. THINK TWICE BEFORE CLICKING.
When I teach my seminar on monuments, museums, and memorials, I typically cover the Enola Gay controversy. But one of the challenges I face is getting my students to look “beneath the mushroom cloud” (borrowing a phrase from John Dower). So, given that it’s the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima (see here for contemporary coverage), I thought I’d mention that I once juxtaposed Barefoot Gen with the bombing scene from Above and Beyond as a way of accomplishing this goal. This approach has its share of problems, unfortunately, and since I’ll be teaching the course again in the fall, I’d be eager to hear other ideas.
By the way, Barefoot Gen is fascinating for a variety of reasons, almost certainly worth the time for its treatment of class, the role of bureaucracy in Japanese culture, and popular misgivings about the war, not to mention its brutal depiction of Hiroshima’s destruction. It’s not just a one-trick pony, in other words. Above and Beyond, on the other hand, is probably best avoided. No doubt I’m wrong on both counts, though, and will soon hear about it. I eagerly await your replies.
The Edge of the American West 
92 comments
August 6, 2009 at 11:33 am
kevin
Wow. I’d be interested to hear more about your students’ reactions to that, but I’d suspect the complaints would be that the second clip was both (a) too gory and (b) too fake.
Maybe try a different approach, and use the bomb scene from The Day After? The dynamics are different, because the Americans there have some warning it’s coming, but it gets you under the cloud in the same way, but doesn’t have the barrier of the anime form or the Japanese perspective. It was well before your students’ time, so it might be fresh to them.
August 6, 2009 at 11:36 am
kevin
On second thought, the effects there seem hokey now. You might be better off with the anime.
August 6, 2009 at 11:47 am
ari
Manga, dude, not animé. You’re soooooo uncool.
August 6, 2009 at 11:47 am
Ben Alpers
When I teach the Enola Gay exhibition controversy in my course on US history and memory of WWII, it’s part of a unit on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that I begin with John Hersey’s Hiroshima, which is an early (August 1946; it originally appeared as a full issue of the The New Yorker) US view from the other side of the mushroom cloud. I also have the students read Norman Cousins Colliers editorial “The Literature of Survival,” which praised Hersey’s article and raised questions about how atomic weaponry should be handled internationally, and Henry Stimson’s article on the decision to use the bomb (1947), which was in effect written in response to Hersey and Cousins and which established the dominant narrative that the Enola Gay exhibition threatened to disrupt. (Barton Bernstein wrote a good article about all of this entitled “Seizing the Contested Terrain” that I also have the students read).
Only after working through that material do we turn to the Enola Gay Controversy, which I approach by first having students spend a week studying the proposed exhibition script itself (MIT University press published it, though it’s out of print now), and only then turning to the controversy during the third week of the unit.
This set up lets the students see that the refusal to see beneath the mushroom cloud (to use ari’s terminology) was a choice….and not one that was immediately taken by all Americans in the late 1940s (despite what exhibit opponents suggested, which is that these questions about the bombings were essentially a product of the Sixties….though that’s not always said in so many words).
One other thing I’d add: the view on the ground of the conventional firebombing of Japanese and German cities was pretty horrible, too. And one of the things I try to do in class is to suggest that there’s something potentially morally troubling about the way that strategic bombing, which many Americans still found horrific in, e.g., the Spanish Civil War, became domesticated by seeing the use of atomic weaponry as constituting the crucial, moral line that a country potentially ought not to cross. Put another way: if we look too obsessively at the horrors beneath the mushroom clouds, are we really being morally honest about the horrors of “conventional” modern warfare?
I’ve never taught a unit about strategic bombing in general. There are of course wonderful materials one could use, but they constitute complicated thickets of their own. For example, Slaughterhouse Five would be a very interesting book to teach in this regard. But Vonnegut’s depiction of Dresden was based, in part, on the work of David Irving, who has since been discredited.
August 6, 2009 at 11:50 am
Ben Alpers
Erp…that Cousins piece is from the Saturday Review not Colliers.
(Preview button, please!
August 6, 2009 at 12:17 pm
Jason B.
Manga, dude, not animé. You’re soooooo uncool.
Nerd alert: manga is the print version, and animé is the . . . er . . . animated version.
August 6, 2009 at 12:19 pm
timur
Have you looked at Lisa Yoneyama’s “Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory”? Her account doesn’t totally sync up with your project, as she’s focusing on projects of memory within Japan (and not, say, on the Enola Gay controversy), but it might give you another really interesting way to think about the range of ways in which the bombing is being remembered by the Japanese.
One other work not directly pertinent to WWII and American memory is Karen Till’s “The New Berlin” – but like you (I think), she’s interested in thinking about the ways in which certain events (the Holocaust, in particular) are remembered and spatialized as monuments in Berlin.
@kevin – you bring up a good point about “too fake,” but that also obscures the way in which films are always framed from a particular point of view. What we take to be “realistic” depictions come to seem “real” to us in specific ways and through specific techniques. One of the merits of Barefoot Gen might be precisely the way in which the medium of manga provokes us to think about the way in which film is always mediating an experience or event.
August 6, 2009 at 12:23 pm
kevin
Nerd alert: manga is the print version, and animé is the . . . er . . . animated version.
I can’t decide if I’m proud to have been vindicated on that or not. I think not.
August 6, 2009 at 12:33 pm
Ben Alpers
@kevin – Be proud. Literacy in Japanese subcultures is entirely cool…so long as it stops short of cosplay!
August 6, 2009 at 12:36 pm
JPool
Syllabus?
Of course Grave of the Fireflies comes to mind (for comparision with firebombing and the quotidian horrors of war), but I also think it might be useful to show some selected scenes from Kurosawa’s Rhapsody in August. The movie itself is kind of boring, but the scenes in the peace garden and of local memorial services are quite affecting.
Oh, and you provided a link to the manga, but only after the clip from the anime. Hardly seems sporting to say that kevin was using the wrong term.
August 6, 2009 at 12:37 pm
JPool
Should have known that the anime/manga thing would be thoroughly dissected by the time I got around to posting.
August 6, 2009 at 12:59 pm
silbey
And one of the things I try to do in class is to suggest that there’s something potentially morally troubling about the way that strategic bombing, which many Americans still found horrific in, e.g., the Spanish Civil War, became domesticated by seeing the use of atomic weaponry as constituting the crucial, moral line that a country potentially ought not to cross. Put another way: if we look too obsessively at the horrors beneath the mushroom clouds, are we really being morally honest about the horrors of “conventional” modern warfare?
Fascinating point.
August 6, 2009 at 1:09 pm
saintneko
The second clip was a little fakey looking, like where that mans head suddenly fell off – but then again, flying debris? On the other hand, it definitely gives a sense of what under the cloud may have been like, what real footage I’ve seen you can barely tell what happens to a thing before it’s unrecognizable.
Maybe show a series of bomb-test recordings, then show the Barefoot Gen anime. Above and Beyond is very disconnected from the horrible, terrifying reality of what they’d done (and really, arming the bomb in mid-flight? I am not a nuclear scientist but I think a team of nuclear scientists is required to put one of those together.) Then a clip of someone like Howard Zinn, describing his bombings during the war (just cut out the sissy after-thoughts and emotions parts so conservatives don’t cry foul).
There’s also actual bomb footage: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWoNDxjOksM
And aftermath footage to compare with the video experience, as timur mentioned above, to see how films mediate your understanding of an event vs. the unknowable reality of events: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYQ88GB4zBA&feature=related
What I want to know, though, where is the anime treatment of the Nanjing occupation? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanking_Massacre
August 6, 2009 at 1:25 pm
max
Heh. Yeah, Kevin is correct Ari, although it is an adaptation of a manga.
The dynamics are different, because the Americans there have some warning it’s coming, but it gets you under the cloud in the same way, but doesn’t have the barrier of the anime form or the Japanese perspective. It was well before your students’ time, so it might be fresh to them.
Reviewing the Barefoot Gen plot reminded me of the plot of Testament, wherein the American family adopts the developmentally disabled orphan Hiroshi. It’s certainly much milder than Barefoot Gen or even The Day After (and was criticized for that). I’m not seeing how much more awful Barefoot Gen is for gruesomeness though compared to the horror movies they have running about (on all CGI fours, even) these days.
Put another way: if we look too obsessively at the horrors beneath the mushroom clouds, are we really being morally honest about the horrors of “conventional” modern warfare?
Are we really being honest in any sense about conventional modern warfare? WWII is usually presented as this nostalgic, happy business about firebombing some SS men, instead of, you know, Worst War Ever.
It occurs to me that the thing to do with the Hiroshima films would be to helpfully present a happy wartime movie from the Japanese about those subservient inferiors in China, along with a heroic Chinese depiction of resistence to the oppressors at, say, Nanking? Just to provide a framework.
max
[‘Might be hard to find though.’]
August 6, 2009 at 1:35 pm
ari
Note to self: don’t get into a nerdfight on the internet.
August 6, 2009 at 1:36 pm
ari
Also: best to know what I’m talking about before clicking “submit”.
August 6, 2009 at 1:41 pm
saintneko
ari: shoulda played it off as a joke. haha was seeing if anyone was paying attention haha.
:D
August 6, 2009 at 1:50 pm
kevin
Also: best to know what I’m talking about before clicking “submit”.
If everyone followed that philosophy, the intertubes would be awfully empty.
August 6, 2009 at 1:53 pm
ari
I suppose that’s right. But I really did think that even films adapted from manga were still called manga. Then again, I’m pretty sure that Gen is the only piece of animé I’ve ever watched. So I really should have kept my mouth shut.
August 6, 2009 at 1:54 pm
ari
Oh wait, the older boy sometimes watches Bakugan on the teevee, and I’ve seen snippets over his shoulder. Now I’m cool again, I guess.
August 6, 2009 at 2:06 pm
rea
Vonnegut’s depiction of Dresden was based, in part, on the work of David Irving, who has since been discredited.
Well, Vonnegut’s depcition was based primarily on having been there, in Dresden during and after the firebombing, himself (as a POW).
August 6, 2009 at 2:20 pm
max
and really, arming the bomb in mid-flight? I am not a nuclear scientist but I think a team of nuclear scientists is required to put one of those together.
The bombadier loaded the cordite on the flight. He appears to inserting some kind of trigger device and activating a detonation circuit, which would be appropriate for later implosion devices (that is, for Nagasaki-style weapons, although not the actual device used in that instance). Also the pilot turned the plane to port, and looked out the portside window to see Hiroshima, which would have been to his starboard, and also not visible for some hours. Nor would it have any visible secondary explosions.
That seems to play to the fact that before, during, and afterwards, people did not really grasp what they were dealing with, merely that it was horrid.
What I want to know, though, where is the anime treatment of the Nanjing occupation?
You pwned me there. But yeah, the Japanese, much like the Germans, took (and take) the strategic bombing very hard. Not so much with the Bataan Death March (as one example).
Oh wait, the older boy sometimes watches Bakugan on the teevee, and I’ve seen snippets over his shoulder. Now I’m cool again, I guess.
Takin’ this kinda hard, ain’tcha?
max
[‘It’s all good, Ari.’]
August 6, 2009 at 2:28 pm
JRoth
Well, Vonnegut’s depcition was based primarily on having been there, in Dresden during and after the firebombing, himself (as a POW).
Yes and no. Since he was, famously, locked up in a slaughterhouse during the bombing, he only saw the aftermath – the next day I think? Point being, not everything in the book is from his own witness (eyewitness being super-unreliable anyway).
Also, ari, you don’t mean to say that you’ve never seen any Miyazaki, do you? That would be… awful.
August 6, 2009 at 2:35 pm
silbey
Some interesting pictures of Hiroshima here:
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/08/hiroshima_64_years_ago.html
August 6, 2009 at 3:08 pm
Jonathan Dresner
What I want to know, though, where is the anime treatment of the Nanjing occupation?
Well, I seem to recall there being a manga treatment of the war, but Nanjing Massacre denialist conservatives forced the publisher to pull it from circulation.
August 6, 2009 at 6:00 pm
serofriend
a manga treatment of the war
I’m still reeling from anime Hiroshima. What next: manga Boyz N The Hood?
August 6, 2009 at 6:32 pm
Anderson
the bomb scene from The Day After
From a non-expert p.o.v., the dream scene in Terminator 2 was pretty impressive, tho it doesn’t give any sense of the result for those not immediately disintegrated. It really stuck with me, anyway.
… The first chapter of Richard Frank’s Downfall goes into detail on the firebombing of Tokyo in 1945, very grim stuff, if anyone’s looking for such reading for their students. People jumped into swimming pools for relief from the heat and were boiled alive, their bodies found later in the waterless pits.
August 6, 2009 at 6:53 pm
PorJ
I would assign something like Hersey’s Hiroshima, or the chapter on the bomb from Tom Englhardt’s The End of Victory Culture then juxtapose it with Paul Fussell’s Thank God for the Atom Bomb.
I think Fussell’s work is particularly important when discussing the atom bomb because he is making a plea for the value of experience and memory against the professional norms of historical inquiry. Its rare that an academic will do this – as he makes clear in the essay, the kind of American doomed to the sadistic lunacy of the first wave on a home-islands invasion was not the kind of American to lead a graduate seminar in the Ivy League. And I think its important for students to get both the value and weakness of such an argument. And its not just the substance of the essay; its also the style, in which he makes important points about easy condemnation emerging from distance. There’s a reason that essay generated the most mail in the history of The New Republic.
August 6, 2009 at 7:25 pm
serofriend
John Hershey’s book served as my introduction to the horrors of Hiroshima. The interviews contained in the original New Yorker run also demonstrate the effectiveness of oral history in relating the experiential past to the political present.
the dream scene in Terminator 2 was pretty impressive, tho it doesn’t give any sense of the result for those not immediately disintegrated.
No, that’s in Terminator Salvation, for empirical purposes.
August 6, 2009 at 7:28 pm
blueollie
I grew up on Air Force bases and went to junior high and to part of high school in Japan (Yokota Air Force Base).
In junior high, we were shown the actual footage of the post bombing scene (people with skin hanging off, eyeballs leaking out of the socket, etc.) and had a discussion on whether this was justified or not.
Of course, I had seen the photos of the aftermath of the fire boming of Tokyo and that wasn’t any better.
These questions are worthy of debate; on one hand I’ve read that MAYBE Japan would have accepted the terms that they ended up accepting prior to the Okinawa invasion (thereby saving lots of US lives too!) but on the other hand, there were those in the Japanese cabinet that wanted to keep on fighting after the a-bombs.
So, I don’t judge the people who made this difficult decision, but it should be reviewed for lessons that we can learn.
But yeah, this is sensitive; what we did (justified or not) WAS horrific but when this gets discussed, many (especially soldiers) hear you saying “I don’t care that you would have died in an invasion”.
Nice topic.
August 6, 2009 at 8:41 pm
Jason B.
In junior high, we were shown the actual footage of the post bombing scene (people with skin hanging off, eyeballs leaking out of the socket, etc.) and had a discussion on whether this was justified or not.
We were assured we were getting an “above average” education, and we never saw that. I’m not sure if we’d have benefited from that. But I feel like I would have been better educated for that exposure, horrifying as it would have been.
August 7, 2009 at 3:14 am
ajay
the sadistic lunacy of the first wave on a home-islands invasion
A bit strong, surely? Sadistic?
August 7, 2009 at 3:24 am
drip
Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amor (written by Margurite Duras) seems to touch on some of the same themes you and Ben Alpers explore in your courses. The idea of nuclear weapons flying around the world all the time is part of the controversy. It’s definitely film, not anime, and maybe too uncool for contrast, but very cool, none the less.
August 7, 2009 at 5:50 am
PorJ
The problem of teaching by juxtaposing two sources is that we train our students to think they are mutually exclusive (or at least give them that hint). The atom bomb was perhaps both the worst war crime of the twentieth century AND a tool of deliverance for literally millions of lives. It both slaughtered and saved. What you believe is based on perspective rather than “historical facts.” Nothing I have read has made this point as clearly as Fussell’s essay.
In fact, there’s something mature (to my mind) about surrendering to such doubt and uneasiness, about giving up the idea that there exists certainty on this question – that if only we find the “right” memo we’ll prove Truman knew the bomb was unnecessary, etc. Its about accepting the messiness of historical inquiry rather than fighting it by cleaning it up with the certainty of a Michael Sherry or a Gar Alperowitz.
August 7, 2009 at 6:12 am
James B.
In teaching a course on modern East Asia, I struggled with how to present this material.
Ultimately, I gave a handout which explained the differences between the Realist pov on war and those who subscribed to Just War theory (which few students were aware even existed). I then showed images from the Japanese occupation of Nanjing, followed by the clip from “Fog of War” where Macnamara discussed his role in the firebombings.
It didn’t lead to any resolutions, but there was a healthy discussion, to be sure.
August 7, 2009 at 7:00 am
aflandshage
a second vote for Grave of the Fireflies, it’s absolutely devastating in a good way
Ari: if that clip of Barefoot Gen is the only anime you ever watched you have missed out on quite a bit, most of what comes from the studio that also made Grave of the Fireflies, Studio Ghibli, is worth a look (and i’m not one of the nerds, i’m really not, honest)
August 7, 2009 at 7:20 am
silbey
perhaps both the worst war crime of the twentieth century
The really horrifying thing about the twentieth century is that I can immediately come up with at least 4 things that were worse, at least in terms of lives lost.
This is excellent:
In fact, there’s something mature (to my mind) about surrendering to such doubt and uneasiness, about giving up the idea that there exists certainty on this question – that if only we find the “right” memo we’ll prove Truman knew the bomb was unnecessary, etc. Its about accepting the messiness of historical inquiry rather than fighting it by cleaning it up with the certainty of a Michael Sherry or a Gar Alperowitz.
I’m also really taken with Ben A’s discussion of the way in which fixating on the atomic bomb essentially puts in the shadow much of the previous nastiness–strategic area bombing, unrestricted submarine warfare, etc. WWII becomes the Good War that slipped over into horror in August 1945 but has ever since drawn back from that brink.
August 7, 2009 at 7:33 am
Prof Burgos
[i]there’s something potentially morally troubling about the way that strategic bombing, which many Americans still found horrific in, e.g., the Spanish Civil War, became domesticated by seeing the use of atomic weaponry as constituting the crucial, moral line that a country potentially ought not to cross.[/i]
This I’m not so sure about — the relationship of the A-bomb, that is, to the acceptance of strategic bombing.
My own reading is that, while in 1940, Americans still rejected the bombing of cities as the work of “the Hun” (viz, Rotterdam, Coventry), by the time the Army Air Forces released the 1943 “Target for Today” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rt-B6i90X3w) there was a sense — disturbing to the government — that we were simply dropping bombs on Germany (which, of course, we were). Notice that, in that film (which takes quite a while to load, by the way), how much emphasis is put on the fact that we were bombing “specific” targets only and not — as the British were — area-bombing.
What’s interesting, though, is that I’ve seen nothing in the contemporary press that would have suggested Americans [i]rejected[/i] the notion of area-bombing. Surely the fact that the 8th AF in Britain alone suffered nearly half of all AAF casualties of the war — and the fact that such notable high-casualty missions as Schweinfurt and Regensburg were public knowledge — created a sense of sunk-costs acceptance by the public.
And of course as Dower and others show so nicely, there was no such restraint expected in the Pacific War.
If the idea of strategic bombing was “domesticated” (nice term, by the way), then I would argue that the process was (a) rapid and (b) much earlier in the war than August 1945.
FWIW, Penn State has a nice archival collection on the 8th Air Force: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/digital/speccolls/hcla/eighthairforce/
August 7, 2009 at 7:36 am
Prof Burgos
@PorJ:
“the kind of American doomed to the sadistic lunacy of the first wave on a home-islands invasion was not the kind of American to lead a graduate seminar in the Ivy League.”
This is somewhat out of context, don’t you think? In 1941, almost no American was the kind of American to lead a graduate seminar in the Ivy League, what with the lack of educational opportunity associated with the Depression and all. What’s more interesting is that so many of those Americans who survived the landings on Japanese- and German-held beaches went on, like Fussell, to become the kinds of Americans to lead graduate seminars.
August 7, 2009 at 7:44 am
Anderson
Notice that, in that film (which takes quite a while to load, by the way), how much emphasis is put on the fact that we were bombing “specific” targets only and not — as the British were — area-bombing.
Yes, IIRC, we were going to go over there and show the Brits the way it was done. Until B-17’s fell like autumn leaves in daylight bombing w/out fighter escorts. And there was no such thing as precision nighttime bombing.
My vague recollection — Silbey? help? — is that precision bombing didn’t really come into its own until drop-tanked Mustangs could escort the bombers, at which point we actually had a pretty wicked capacity for nailing factories, bridges, etc. But Bomber Command was still devoted to burning down every city and town in Germany.
… Totally agreed w/ above comments re: carpet bombing’s being speciously justified as Much Less Bad Than Da Bomb. Frank’s chapter in Downfall that I mentioned is devastating to that argument, though Frank’s purpose is really to suggest that, whatever moral debate we might have about Hiroshima, the practical decision to kill thousands of men, women, children, and babies had been made and carried out long before.
August 7, 2009 at 7:46 am
Anderson
… Btw, anyone had a look yet at Randall Hansen’s Fire and Fury: The Allied Bombing of Germany, 1942-1945? Saw in bookstore, but was shepherding 4-year-old at the time.
August 7, 2009 at 7:50 am
Fats Durston
(Small world interlude: Former Karen Till student here, and was wondering if silbey knew Tammy Biddle, in whose class I read the Fussell piece alongside something else that I’ve forgotten.)
I’m surprised that no one’s mentioned the opening of The Atomic Cafe which contains, among other things Tibbets’ televised post-bombing misgivings and the casual measurement of corpse shadows on the ground. The film is also an excellent exercise in studying how to make an argument through juxtaposition.
I’ve never tried teaching it, but the (long) short story by Kim Stanley Robinson, “The Lucky Strike,” makes an appealing* alternate history out of an Enola Gay accident.
*Or lefty fantasy, if you will.
August 7, 2009 at 8:03 am
Jonathan Dresner
“the kind of American doomed to the sadistic lunacy of the first wave on a home-islands invasion was not the kind of American to lead a graduate seminar in the Ivy League.”
Actually, thanks to the GI bill, a great many Americans — including my advisor — who faced this prospect did return home and end up in graduate school, some of them in Ivies.
August 7, 2009 at 9:12 am
Western Dave
I usually avoid bomb discussions, not wanting to spend three days on it with my 10th graders. However, I think I may use these clips in our new “long block” format (a 75 minute class) and do a day on warfare in WWII. Will probably use photos from Nanjing (also “baseball” cards that depict the massacre that were my dad’s – hopefully will have scans soon). Previously I’d just used the baseball cards to depict changing American attitudes towards intervention from 1937-1941. My favorite is the depiction of the air raid on an American school with tag line – “Can American remain at peace in a world at war?”
Also a big fan of Michael Sherry’s illustrations, which a colleague used successfully in a History of Violence course.
August 7, 2009 at 9:27 am
ajay
I’m also really taken with Ben A’s discussion of the way in which fixating on the atomic bomb essentially puts in the shadow much of the previous nastiness–strategic area bombing, unrestricted submarine warfare, etc
Rhodes is very good on this, tracking the gradual escalation from Zeppelin raids in the Great War through the first German raids against Guernica and Rotterdam to the all-out bombing policy of the latter war years.
And Deighton (in “Fighter”) found a great quote from 1940 Air Minister Kingsley Wood; when it was suggested that returning RAF bombers should jettison their bombs over the German forests:
“Are you aware,” he said in disbelief, “that they are private property? Why, you will be asking me to bomb Essen next.”
Ben’s point that “fixating on the atomic bomb essentially puts in the shadow much of the previous nastiness” is even more correct, of course, when talking about Japanese memory of the war.
August 7, 2009 at 9:35 am
Western Dave
Horrors of War cards
August 7, 2009 at 9:43 am
Jonathan Dresner
I’m also really taken with Ben A’s discussion of the way in which fixating on the atomic bomb essentially puts in the shadow much of the previous nastiness–strategic area bombing, unrestricted submarine warfare, etc
When I do WWII, in both my World and Japanese history classes, I don’t start with the atomic bombs. They’re the culmination of the process, and their use only makes sense in the context of the military technology and methods of the thirty years previous. The atomic bombings were more or less inevitable unless the war ended before the bombs were ready — obviously you can go into more detail on the end of the war issues in a Japan class than a World survey — because the technological, ideological and tactical habits of the war all supported it.
August 7, 2009 at 9:43 am
Western Dave
Ahg! no link. Trying again. Horrors of War cards
August 7, 2009 at 10:46 am
James B.
“Ben’s point that ‘fixating on the atomic bomb essentially puts in the shadow much of the previous nastiness’ is even more correct, of course, when talking about Japanese memory of the war.”
Which is itself an interesting point. Japanese, especially those on the right, have often played the “victim card” to the neglect of the imperial army’s unsavory behavior. Americans, conversely, have used precisely that behavior as justification for what was in fact a morally questionable act.
I’ve found the morale aspects of the debate, especially in regards to noncombatant immunity, the most interesting. In considering German and Japanese civilians who died during and after the war, my students are often hard pressed to formulate any reaction other than “they got what they deserved.”
August 7, 2009 at 11:07 am
silbey
My vague recollection — Silbey? help? — is that precision bombing didn’t really come into its own until drop-tanked Mustangs could escort the bombers, at which point we actually had a pretty wicked capacity for nailing factories, bridges, etc.
Yeah, the casualties among the 8th Air Force were devastating before the P-51 because the previous fighters couldn’t escort the raids all the way to the target. Things were bad enough that General Spaatz was thinking of pulling his bombers from over Germany for awhile. The Mustangs could go all the way to the targets and back and that made an enormous difference (in a lot of ways: cf Tuskegee Airmen).
(Small world interlude: Former Karen Till student here, and was wondering if silbey knew Tammy Biddle, in whose class I read the Fussell piece alongside something else that I’ve forgotten.)
Know her very well indeed, starting with her signature on my dissertation cover page, through to a few conference panels with her. She’s all kinds of good people.
August 7, 2009 at 11:09 am
TF Smith
How does the following stand up, 40 years after publication?
http://www.history.army.mil/books/70-7_23.htm
I ask as one with an obvious bias; my father was a 23-year-old radio officer aboard an ammunition ship in the Western Pacific in 1945 and would have undoubtedly been included in the supply echelons for OLYMPIC and CORONET…
They’d already seen action in the Marianas, Philippines, and at Okinawa; not unlike Paul Fussell, Kyushu and/or Honshu was widely expected to be their last invasion, one way or the other…
I wonder if any of the 509th’s aircraft were nicknamed “Hosea”…
August 7, 2009 at 11:53 am
Anderson
In considering German and Japanese civilians who died during and after the war, my students are often hard pressed to formulate any reaction other than “they got what they deserved.”
This point of view becomes more difficult to sustain where, for example, incinerated children are involved, unless the students regard children as parental property to be destroyed as punishment for the parents’ sins. (Exactly what sins those were in a totalitarian state is another question.)
Grayling’s Among the Dead Cities has a photograph of an incinerated family — parents and child — that does not bear much thinking about, any more than do the last couple of minutes aboard the jetliners that hit the WTC.
August 7, 2009 at 12:12 pm
Prof Burgos
I’d be careful about this kind of technological determinism with respect to the long-range fighter aircraft. P-51s (and P-47s w/ tanks) certainly made a difference in the daylight bombing campaign, but my recollection is that this was partly a factor of a change in fighter tactics.
Where previously their mission had been to defend the bomber stream, after Schweinfurt and Regensburg they were turned loose to attack Luftwaffe fighters in air-to-air combat. According to the Strategic Bombing Survey, fighter pilots claimed over 3,000 German fighters between January and March 1944 (recognizing, of course, that fighter pilots’ claims were notoriously inflated).
The other piece is the Luftwaffe loss and replacement rates compared to the USAAF’s and RAF’s, particularly given Luftwaffe losses on the Eastern front. By 1944 the new German pilot received less than 50% the training time as his predecessor in 1940-41, and the Luftwaffe was losing some 1,700 aviators per month by 1944. As was the case for the RAF during the Battle of Britain, by 1944 new pilots had very little flying experience and almost none of operational fighters — perhaps 100 hours’ total flying time, less than 10% of which would have been on front-line aircraft.
Consider the massive 8th Air Force raid of 11 September 1944 on the synthetic oil works in southern Germany — JG. 4 was on its first mission as a unit, comprised heavily of new pilots, and lost 29 killed, 9 wounded, and 42 Bf-109s for a 50% loss rate. That simply was not sustainable.
August 7, 2009 at 12:20 pm
TF Smith
http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/sherman/sherman-to-burn-atlanta.html
I wonder if the IJA General Staff read much US Civil War history…
There has been some study of the Civil War’s impact on European military thinking (UKan published a study a few years ago); I wonder, given the interest the Japanese had in Western military experience in the 19th Century, if there was much study of the US goals and experience in the ACW.
And, for that matter, the First World War…Pershing’s prediction that without an unconditional surrender by the Germans and Allied occupation, the sons of the AEF’s veterans would be back in Europe in a coupel of decades would suggest pretty clearly the US would not be looking for a re-run of Versailles…
August 7, 2009 at 12:33 pm
silbey
Where previously their mission had been to defend the bomber stream, after Schweinfurt and Regensburg they were turned loose to attack Luftwaffe fighters in air-to-air combat.
Do you have a cite for this? It doesn’t fit with the readings I’ve done.
August 7, 2009 at 12:41 pm
Erik Lund
Yeah, the shift to daylight escorted bombing, which was not a shift to precision bombing, has more to do with weight of effort than technology. You get back to technology through questions of petroleum refining and engine/airframe development, but then the question circles back round to weight of effort. The Allies had high-octane avgas because they had crude oil to burn, and intercooled superchargers because they had more design resources.
So the German and Japanese governments were in no position to fight a war, and we ended up needing to drop bombs on them to make them stop. Would it really have been the more moral choice to roll over and let them get away with the crap they tried to pull?
August 7, 2009 at 12:45 pm
silbey
Would it really have been the more moral choice to roll over and let them get away with the crap they tried to pull?
That’s not really the question under discussion.
August 7, 2009 at 12:56 pm
Anderson
So the German and Japanese governments were in no position to fight a war, and we ended up needing to drop bombs on them to make them stop.
This is incorrect re: the Germans; the Red Army and the Allies “made them stop” by occupying the country and vanquishing the German army.
Re: Japan, blockade would probably have worked, but was arguably not any less destructive of civilian life than was carpet bombing, if less sensational.
Would it really have been the more moral choice to roll over and let them get away with the crap they tried to pull?
The notion that “rolling over and letting them get away” was the alternative to carpet bombing is one that John Gray advanced the other day, much to my disagreement.
August 7, 2009 at 1:20 pm
TF Smith
Anderson – One point about the Alllied strategic bombing campaigns in WW II (whether “area” or not) was that the efforts of Bomber Command and the 8th, 15th, and 20th air forces forced the Axis to devote a huge amount of their war economy and military to air defense.
Obviously, every pilot, fighter plane, artillery piece, and gun crew defending the Ruhr or Tokyo was one less of the above available for use in the field (or at sea) against the Allied armies and navies.
Certainly the resources the Germans devoted to air defense in 1943-45 could have made a significant difference if available for use elsewhere.
The converse, that every RAF or USAAF bomber diverted important resources from the British or US armies and navies is true as well, but if either “side” in WW II had a surplus of resources, it was the Allies…
August 7, 2009 at 1:31 pm
Anderson
efforts of Bomber Command and the 8th, 15th, and 20th air forces forced the Axis to devote a huge amount of their war economy and military to air defense
This is the well-worn defense, to which the well-worn response is that efforts to bomb legitimate targets, rather than cities, would also have required said devotion.
By the same token, the Brits devoted huge resources to the building of bombing fleets that could have been spent on men and materiel designed to engage enemy soldiers, not enemy civilians.
… Leaving aside which, I tend to doubt that the Germans were going to hold the Red Army back even if we’d never bombed a single German city. More 88s on the Eastern Front were not going to change the outcome of the war.
August 7, 2009 at 1:53 pm
max
TF: How does the following stand up, 40 years after publication?
I think it stands up fine, excepting on two points: the first is on the status of Hirohito. He was deeply involved in the war from the git-go and if we had truly demanded the same conditions from Japan that we demanded from Germany he would have had to go (which, in turn, would have made surrender impossible). The other point:
He knew all about the bomb, was attempting to duplicate it and knew Truman would announce it, so Stalin was definately faking it.
Grayling’s Among the Dead Cities has a photograph of an incinerated family — parents and child — that does not bear much thinking about, any more than do the last couple of minutes aboard the jetliners that hit the WTC.
Oh? I think about that all the time. I try to think about those things first, before anything else.
though Frank’s purpose is really to suggest that, whatever moral debate we might have about Hiroshima, the practical decision to kill thousands of men, women, children, and babies had been made and carried out long before.
‘Total war.’ ‘Unconditional surrender.’
Silbey: The really horrifying thing about the twentieth century is that I can immediately come up with at least 4 things that were worse, at least in terms of lives lost.
That was my thinking. I can think of at least three situations that were worse than the air campaign (inclusive of the Bomb) against Japan in World War II: the German occupation of Poland, the German occupation of the Ukraine, and the Japanese treatment of China in general, and depending on how you want to count (under Poland/Ukraine or no?), the Holocaust.
The atom bomb was perhaps both the worst war crime of the twentieth century AND a tool of deliverance for literally millions of lives. It both slaughtered and saved.
If the Bomb was a war crime, then under that implied standard, WWII was One Long War Crime, and everyone and their dog (excepting the Chiense and the Italians and the peoples of various colonial possessions, who lacked the resources to get truly butcherous) was up to their eyeballs in it.
The atomic bombings were more or less inevitable unless the war ended before the bombs were ready — obviously you can go into more detail on the end of the war issues in a Japan class than a World survey — because the technological, ideological and tactical habits of the war all supported it.
That’s perfect. No one knew or understood quite what the new toy did, excepting it was better and beefier than the old toys.
The US suceeded at what they were attempting to do when they used the weapon. I have a thought experiment in mind that should clarify what would have happened if the use of the atom bomb had failed. Say that the US, UK, Germany, Russia, Japan, Italy and China had all suddenly acquired 50 usable, air-deployable atomic bombs each, around the 5th of May (Cinco de Mayo), 1942. How long until someone uses one on a city?
I expect that many weapons would have been deployed within weeks at most. Goodbye Moscow, Leningrad, Berlin, Munich, London, York, Tokyo, Edo, and a bunch of Chinese cities, and maybe some Indian and Australian cities, and if anyone could figure out a delivery method, New York, Boston, San Francisco and Honolulu. I suspect that the Chinese, the UK, the Japanese and the US (in that order) would have hesitated before initially using one of the weapons on a city. I think the leaderships of all sides (including Hitler) would have suddenly become much more open to calling the whole thing off as a bad job once cities started disappearing. I don’t see how it actually gets called off before all the bombs get used without at least two and maybe more groups collapsing (two of Germany/Russia and China/Japan, I think).
I’ve seesawed back and forth on the use of the bomb. 20 years ago, after ten years of reading, I had shifted to where I was thinking that maybe Truman really would’ve have used the bomb on white people. 10 more years of reading about the war, I had shifted back to where I thought the use was distasteful but probably unavoidable. 10 more years of reading, and it suddenly occurred to me to be surprised that anyone sees it outside the context of the then ongoing butchery; there was never any chance they would not use the Bomb, as needed. Then it occurred to me that the debate TRUMAN BAD: YES/NO has little enough to do with what happened then and everything to do with the fact that a postwar 750 kt citybuster makes the Hiroshima weapon look like a firecracker. So why not have a proxy debate?
max
[‘Ash heaps of history.’]
August 7, 2009 at 2:19 pm
TF Smith
Anderson – This:
“…to which the well-worn response is that efforts to bomb legitimate targets, rather than cities, would also have required said devotion.” is true, but – I think – minimizes the facts that both Bomber Command and the USAAF were, within the fairly fragile limits of the technology of the time, designed to bomb “legitimate targets”…
Such targets tended to be concentrated in industrial cities, of course, and the technologies available in the late 1930s and early 1940s (which is when what ended up being operational in 1943-45 was designed, for the most part) were not advanced enough to allow attacks on “legitimate targets,” especially in the climate conditions of Western Europe, other than by chance, essentially.
This is an interesting statement:
“…I tend to doubt that the Germans were going to hold the Red Army back even if we’d never bombed a single German city. More 88s on the Eastern Front were not going to change the outcome of the war.”
Perhaps not, but given the realities of 1917-18, not something the Western Allies could count on…hence the on-going and quite demanding effort by the UK and US to supply the Soviets with everything they could via the North Russia convoys, Persian Corridor, and North Pacific air and sea routes.
Which, based on various analyses, appear to have been quite significant in allowing the USSR to turn what could have easily become a stalemate on the Eastern Front after 1941-42 into a counteroffensive in 1943-45.
There’s also the flip side; given the Axis powers’ policies to utterly ignore the laws of war unless they were threatened with retaliation in kind, the ability of the Red Army and the Soviet government to persevere had the Axis chosen to engage in unconventional warfare, especially given Germany’s technical capabilities vis a vis those of the USSR, would appear open to doubt…
Max – Interesting post; re-reading Morton’s article, I keep hearing reverberations of the shared experiences of Roosevelt, Truman, Stimson, Marshall, King, etc. (and their peers in the UK and USSR) regarding the conclusion of WW I.
Whatever the differing interpretations of “the imperial system” may have been with regards to Hirohito, it seems pretty clear none of the Allied leaders would accept anything less than the unconditional surrender of the Axis militaries and Allied occupation of the Axis powers.
None of them wanted to have to come back in the 1960s for a second or third go, after all…
August 7, 2009 at 2:41 pm
Anderson
Perhaps not, but given the realities of 1917-18, not something the Western Allies could count on
No one can *count on* anything but death and taxes, but after Stalingrad — which is to say, before the strategic bombing campaign really kicked into gear — that comparison was not plausible. The terrible irony is that, the more defeated the Germans were, the more we burned their cities.
Allied supply may well have been crucial to Soviet victory (as opposed to merely pushing out the Germans), but I do not see where the strategic bombing campaign was a sine qua non for said supply. We didn’t supply the Russians to prevent their collapse, so much as to prevent our soldiers’ dying in place of *their* soldiers.
the ability of the Red Army and the Soviet government to persevere had the Axis chosen to engage in unconventional warfare, especially given Germany’s technical capabilities vis a vis those of the USSR
… “Unconventional warfare” is a tad vague — nerve gas? what?
August 7, 2009 at 3:20 pm
TF Smith
Anderson – Interesting that you see Stalingrad as what allowed the Soviets to take the initiative…I agree, it was a huge victory, but it was also an essentially defensive stand that depended as much on the Russian winter as the Red Army’s capabilities; it also can be compared with Operation MARS, also in 1942, which did turn into a stalemate, at best.
The Germans, quite clearly, maintained the strategic initiative in the East through the summer of 1943, as witness CITADEL; that would seem to indicate the strategic situation was pretty “fluid” on the eastern front, certainly through to the fall and perhaps even the winter of 1943-44…
As far as supplying the Soviets to prevent their collapse, that seems to be the motivation for most of the Anglo-American resupply effort at sea in 1941-42 (PQ 17 was in the summer of 1942, for example), and was the basis for the quite demanding effort in Persia in 1941-42 by the British and for the logistically very costly effort by the US to build up the Persian Corridor in 1942-43 and afterwards – obviously there was some inertia in regards to the Persian Corridor, but if the Soviets were seen by the West as holding their own absent the efforts of the Western Allies, I don’t see it reflected in actual policy.
“Unconventional” could have included chemical, biological, and radiological warfare by Germany against the Soviet military in the field and against the Soviet civilian population, all of which were well within the abilities of the Germans by 1941-42 (and afterwards) and against which the Soviets would have had very little ability to retaliate, much less defend…
Especially in the relative chaos of the Soviet war economy in 1941-42, and certainly much less so than the German capabilities in either attack or defense, simply based on the relative maturity of the German chemical industry, scientific and research establishment, etc…
From what I’ve read, the British had made it clear that they would use gas in the event of a German invasion of the UK as early as 1940; my inference is that, plus the obvious ability of the RAF to put 1,000 aircraft over the Ruhr (Koln was in May, 1942) was probably seen as much a check on various biologists’ and chemists’ nightmares as anything else.
German use of chem/bio was a concern to the Allies as late as 1943, as witness the effects of the Bari raid.
August 7, 2009 at 4:03 pm
silbey
If the Bomb was a war crime, then under that implied standard, WWII was One Long War Crime, and everyone and their dog (excepting the Chiense and the Italians and the peoples of various colonial possessions, who lacked the resources to get truly butcherous) was up to their eyeballs in i
Note that the above may well be true.
August 7, 2009 at 4:49 pm
TF Smith
Ethiopians would disagree with the sentiment that the Italians lacked the resources to “truly get butcherous”… Greeks and Yugoslavs, as well.
August 7, 2009 at 5:47 pm
Prof Burgos
@Silbey 12:33 p.m. 7 Aug: Cite for change in fighter tactics
“The attacks in the winter of 1944 were escorted by P-51’s and P-47’s and with the appearance of these planes in force a sharp change had been ordered in escort tactics. Previously the escort planes had to protect the bomber force as their primary responsibility. They were now instructed to invite opposition from German fighter forces and to engage them at every opportunity. As a result, German fighter losses mounted sharply….By the spring of 1944 opposition of the Luftwaffe had ceased to be effective.”
United States Strategic Bombing Survey (European), Summary Report, 30 September 1945, p. 7.
August 7, 2009 at 6:18 pm
Prof Burgos
@Silbey 12:33 p.m. 7 Aug: Cite for change in fighter tactics (2)
———–
See also Charles W. McArthur, Operations Analysis in the U.S. Army Eighth Air Force in World War II (Providence, R.I.: American Mathematical Society, 1990), 292.
————-
The story is also told here:
“Instead of maintaining close escort, which forced American fighters to absorb the first blow, Doolittle ordered his fighters to take the initiative by attacking and pursuing German fighters. Spaatz and Doolittle risked their bombers in order to expose the enemy. As aerial combat raged and as escort fighters flew to and from their rendezvous with the bomber stream, fighter pilots found themselves at low altitudes and proceeded to strafe targets of opportunity. When Enigma intercepts alerted American air leaders that this caused havoc, Spaatz encouraged the practice. The enemy responded by setting up flak traps at likely strafing targets, which killed, wounded, or resulted in the capture of more American fighter pilots than any other tactic. Spaatz continued the low-level attacks until April 1945. Soon the Luftwaffe could no longer conduct any operations, including training and air transport, without fear of interference.”
Richard G. Davis, “General Carl Spaatz and D-Day,” Airpower Journal, Winter 1997
———–
The story is that the replacement of Eaker by Doolittle on 5 Jan 44 led to the change in tactics. Eaker held the fighters to the bomber stream; Doolittle, who despised Eaker (it was mutual — the two men only ever referred to each other as “General”), immediately ordered Major General William Kepner (a former Marine, former Army cavalryman, and former Army infantryman, as well as a noted balloonist), who commanded VIII Fighter Command, to “flush them out in the air and beat them up on the ground on the way home.”
Eaker had ordered posted at VIII Fighter Command HQ a sign that read “The First Duty of Eighth Air Force Fighters is to Bring the Bombers Back Alive.” Doolittle — much to delight of the fighter jocks — had that replaced with “The First Duty of Eighth Air Force Fighters is to Destroy German Fighters.”
See Robert F. Dorr, B-24 Liberator Units of the Eighth Air Force, Osprey 1999
———-
Steven L. McFarland and Wesley Phillips Newton also cite this in To Command the Sky: The Battle for Air Superiority over Germany, 1942-1945 (Alabama 2006) at pages 159-162. They write: “Though some students of the air war have paid little attention to this change, in Doolittle’s mind it was his ‘most important decision of the war’ (p. 160).
Also see
August 7, 2009 at 6:40 pm
silbey
Prof B., thanks.
August 7, 2009 at 6:59 pm
silbey
So what we’re looking at is two different sides of the coin: on one side, we have the 8th Air Force loss rate, which is essentially unsustainable in 1943, and the other side is the Luftwaffe loss rate, which was relatively low in 1943. The former was overcome by providing fighter escorts all the way to the target and the latter by using those fighters in a more aggressive manner.
August 7, 2009 at 7:39 pm
Jonathan Dresner
If the Bomb was a war crime, then under that implied standard, WWII was One Long War Crime,
That’s another of my 20th century themes: the tradition of meeting after a war and making most of what just happened illegal.
August 8, 2009 at 12:06 am
DaKooch
Ben Alpers notes;
“One other thing I’d add: the view on the ground of the conventional firebombing of Japanese and German cities was pretty horrible, too. And one of the things I try to do in class is to suggest that there’s something potentially morally troubling about the way that strategic bombing, which many Americans still found horrific in, e.g., the Spanish Civil War, became domesticated by seeing the use of atomic weaponry as constituting the crucial, moral line that a country potentially ought not to cross. Put another way: if we look too obsessively at the horrors beneath the mushroom clouds, are we really being morally honest about the horrors of “conventional” modern warfare?”
An excellent point. I fail to see what is the qualitatively “immoral” difference between “Bomber” Harris’ tactics against Germany or Curtis LeMay’s tactics against Japan and the use of the atomic bomb. Given the acceptance of the act of obliterating a city with carpet bombing, doing the same thing with a single plane makes perfect sense.
while PorJ’s
“In fact, there’s something mature (to my mind) about surrendering to such doubt and uneasiness, about giving up the idea that there exists certainty on this question – that if only we find the “right” memo we’ll prove Truman knew the bomb was unnecessary, etc. Its about accepting the messiness of historical inquiry”
My father served with the amphibious engineers in the Pacific (New Guinea and the Philippines) and was actively training for the Japanese landing when the war ended. He, and to a large extent I, have been convinced that without the atomic bombs there is a good chance that he, and consequently I, would not be here now. He then served in the occupation and visited Hiroshima. In the early 70s we visited the Smithsonian for the first time (before the Air & Space Museum) and they had the bomb sight from the Enola Gay on display. Both of us thought this was in very poor taste.
Although this debate will go on and on – and why should it not – Japan was defeated militarily before the Bomb was dropped. An island nation without a navy is a threat to no one and Japan no longer had a navy. The sizable Japanese army in China was little more than an occupation force with no offensive capability outside China’s borders. However, the American public and its government wanted an abject Japanese surrender and, being American, were unwilling to wait “forever” for this to happen. A long term blockade coupled with continued bombing of Japanese industrial infrastructure would almost certainly have been successful . . . eventually. More to the point, at the end of the war the United States had the production capacity to drop an A bomb a month on a select Japanese target. In the end there probably would have never been an invasion, but many, many more Japanese would have died.
August 8, 2009 at 12:53 am
DaKooch
On the tangential issue of strategic bombing, T.F. Smith’s comment,
“One point about the Alllied strategic bombing campaigns in WW II (whether “area” or not) was that the efforts of Bomber Command and the 8th, 15th, and 20th air forces forced the Axis to devote a huge amount of their war economy and military to air defense.”
The great victory achieved by the strategic bombing campaign in Europe was not the destruction of Germany’s infrastructure (which was not significantly impacted until 1945), but in achieving air superiority everywhere else over the battlefield.
On the other hand I disagree with his, ““Unconventional” could have included chemical, biological, and radiological warfare by Germany against the Soviet military in the field and against the Soviet civilian population, all of which were well within the abilities of the Germans by 1941-42 (and afterwards) and against which the Soviets would have had very little ability to retaliate, much less defend…”.
First, the Soviets had extensive stockpiles of chemical weapons and second, chemical/biological warfare is notoriously unreliable in any meaningful tactical sense.
What the Soviet Union suffered at the hands of the Germans is as close as any country has come to suffering a thermonuclear war. Where Max notes of Stalin’s response on being informed of the A bomb, “All he said was that he was glad to hear it and hoped we would make ‘good use of it against the Japanese.’ ” One cannot but wonder whether the marshal was preoccupied at the moment or simulating a lack of interest.”
One could just as easily suppose he was thinking rhetorically “and of what tactical use is it?”
August 8, 2009 at 10:33 am
TF Smith
Dak – Thanks for the endorsement of the “aerial front” concept; not mine, of course.
As far as the German ability to inflict various levels of “unconventional” destruction on the Soviets, given the German invasion, they could threaten far more Soviets (military and civilian) than the other way around. The Germans had both technical and air superiority over the Soviets in 1941 and well into 1942, from what I have read.
Along the same lines, everything I’ve ever read makes it pretty clear the genesis of the US and UK nuclear programs (both intially separate and then integrated) was concern the Germans could unleash something just as devastating without warning; given the level of information possessed by all three major Allied parties about the intentions and capabilities of the German war economy, hardly a concern to be dismissed lightly.
“Keeping the Soviets fighting” was almost the top priority for the Allied powers in 1941-43, second only to the security of their own home territories (the UK and US, respectively). Fears of a Soviet collapse were very real in London and Washington; the Russians were the only one of the BIg Three that evacuated the diplomatic corps from their capital city, after all…
August 8, 2009 at 11:33 am
Erik Lund
The shift in fighter tactics had, again, more to do with the application of mass than a change in command. I don’t know if Richard G. Davis, “The Bomber Offensive: A Statistical History,” is generally available for download yet,l but this command history supersedes –not surprisingly, _United States Strategic Bombing Survey.
As for the effects of the strategic air offensive, we really don’t need to have this argument any longer. Adam Tooze, _Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy_ (Penguin, 2007) confirms that, amazingly, dropping thousands of tons of high explosives on a highly advanced urban economy does indeed have a deleterious affect on its ability to fight total war.
August 8, 2009 at 1:27 pm
Anderson
Adam Tooze, _Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy_ (Penguin, 2007) confirms that, amazingly, dropping thousands of tons of high explosives on a highly advanced urban economy does indeed have a deleterious affect on its ability to fight total war.
Hm. I happen to have Adam Tooze right here (p. 650):
Not that the devastating bombardment did not have serious economic effects. *** But the correlation between the area bombing of Germany’s cities and the collapse of its war production was loose, at best. *** The wanton destruction of German cities could disrupt production, but could not bring it to a standstill. The way in which the bombers achieved their effect was by severing the rail links and waterways between the Ruhr and the rest of Germany.
Tooze has the wit to distinguish between area bombing and bombing targeted at economic infrastructure (as opposed to “workers’ houses”).
Sure, burning down cities and killing thousands of civilians will have *some* military effect. But proportionate to the effort and worth the moral cost? That’s not a reasonable claim. Had efforts been focused upon precision bombing to the exclusion of ticking cities off Bomber Harris’s list, the war could well have been won sooner. Speer could not believe his good luck when, after nearly crashing the war economy, the Allies would cease a given precision-bombing battle and return to scattering their bombs about the population centers.
… Re: Stalingrad, I don’t think I argued that it gave Russia the strategic initiative; I suggested that after Stalingrad, it was no longer plausible to think that the Soviets could not prosecute the war to the finish. And Germany’s “initiative” in 1943 was a poor thing — a limited, silly attack (Kursk) in which the Germans struck first only because the Red Army had planned the battle that way.
August 8, 2009 at 2:30 pm
silbey
Had efforts been focused upon precision bombing to the exclusion of ticking cities off Bomber Harris’s list, the war could well have been won sooner
You assume that precision bombing was actually possible. That’s a bad assumption.
August 8, 2009 at 3:16 pm
serofriend
Just perusing comments in the past 36 hours. I only have access to secondary source interpretations by way of the library and GoogleBooks, and hence no immediate primary sources like folks above, but:
Sure, burning down cities and killing thousands of civilians will have *some* military effect. But proportionate to the effort and worth the moral cost?
I think Erik Lund@11:33AM argues the former and not the latter. If he’s arguing moral economy or prospective tactical advantages of air bombing on urban space, I would hope he would make it explicit. Note that’s a bad assumption. I think he’s just positing that bombs destroy urban space, period. The moral economy argument can be applied to just war in general, which I assume you are eschewing re:arguments prior to 1:27PM. Correct me and then explain if it’s a bad assumption. I’ll check later on.
I suggested that after Stalingrad, it was no longer plausible to think that the Soviets could not prosecute the war to the finish.
According to Antony Beevor, the strategic consequences had more to do with Casablanca and the retreat over a vast land mass. (Stalingrad, page 402). In any event, he counters Anderson’s strategic teleology, but resurrects his classic “turning point” contention via psychology.
Again, I have read some scholarly and mainstream reviews of the book, but since everyone seems to be citing Penguin, I’ll cite Penguin as well. Just wanted to clarify moral economy points before a snowball begins.
August 8, 2009 at 3:39 pm
DaKooch
T.F. – Although it would appear that indeed the Germans were better able to “threaten” the use of CBW early in the war this type of “unconventional” warfare has little practical applicability in tactical doctrine, one reason its traditional use has been merely as a “threat”, not as an operational doctrine. In point of fact, it would have made more “sense” for the Soviets to resort to such tactics in light of their lack of success than the Germans.
As to the Allies concern over the Soviets staying power, it had much more to do with their misunderstanding of a regime no less transparent than the current North Korean and Iranian than actual realities. Following the winter 1941 counteroffensives there was little doubt Stalin had every intention of marching his armies all the way to Berlin.
Erik – “As for the effects of the strategic air offensive, we really don’t need to have this argument any longer. Adam Tooze, _Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy_ (Penguin, 2007) confirms that, amazingly, dropping thousands of tons of high explosives on a highly advanced urban economy does indeed have a deleterious affect on its ability to fight total war.”
Now that’s a pretty bold statement. While acknowledging Tooze’s influential work, one is not required to swallow wholesale every jot and tittle of what is a rather comprehensive evaluation. For instance, Prof Tooze notes the particular effectiveness of allied interdiction bombing in the Ruhr in late 44, much of which was accomplished by US medium bombers in support of ground operations and not part of the strategic bombing campaign. Furthermore, my contention was not that the Allied strategic bombing had no effect on on Germany’s ability to fight, but that its principle effect was enabling Allied ground forces to enjoy unlimited air superiority over the tactical battlefield. In the end Germany was never going to be defeated by strategic bombing, but by “boots on the ground” in German cities.
August 8, 2009 at 6:49 pm
serofriend
my contention was not that the Allied strategic bombing had no effect on on Germany’s ability to fight
For readers, then, just a clarification issue.
While acknowledging Tooze’s influential work, one is not required to swallow wholesale every jot and tittle of what is a rather comprehensive evaluation.
That’s why scholars get paid the, er, big bucks to review provisional interpretations, which provide the basis for some of the above comments.
August 9, 2009 at 12:35 pm
Anderson
You assume that precision bombing was actually possible. That’s a bad assumption.
No such assumption intended. Either bomb with precision, or don’t bomb, would have been the sensible (and moral) choice.
The effort put into city-destroying bomber fleets could’ve been put into escort fighters. The Americans built ’em — were the Brits incompetent?
… Not to go on endlessly re: Stalingrad and the Soviets, but it was evident even at the time that Germany’s only hope of defeating Russia was, as it’s been put, to kick the door down and hope the house fell in. Russia was big, it had lots of people, it had remarkable industrial capacity — Germany was never going to win a war of attrition in the east.
So they kicked the door in in 1941, and the building creaked, but it didn’t fall. Leaving the confused war plan of 1942, which to the extent it can be made sensible, rested on the premise that the house really was about to fall, but seemed more stable than it was. How else to explain the notion that the Germans could push east to the Volga and the Caspian without having their supply lines cut off? As the old joke put it, “has the Fuehrer seen this map???”
The capture of the Sixth Army, and the forcing back of Army Group A, eliminated any plausible notion that the Soviet Union was so damaged as to fall in. One has to ask what a Germany victory could possibly have looked like from Februrary 1943 on, barring some freak of fate.
August 9, 2009 at 12:59 pm
Erik Lund
Adam Tooze has written a fine book that is indeed worthy of sustained attention.
If I were going to go on “Summarise Adam Tooze,” I would begin with Reichsbank bond issue of November of 1938. Coming off a euphoric post-Munich period, this major, long-awaited issue failed. The market had lost faith in the goverment, and the NSDAP would have to reverse course, demobilise, and throw itself on the mercy of the western capitals. (Or seize the foreign currency reserves in Prague, make a desperate and one-sided trade deal with Moscow, and launch a world war so that it could loot all of Europe. But that would be crazy.)
Why did the issue fail?
Coming out of 6 years of NSDAP rule, Germany faced multiple serious economic problems. Overarching was the failure of German exports, but domestically, systemic undercapitalisation of transportation, consumer industries and construction had created weak sectors. Military spending was meanwhile running up against limited steel production and design resources as well as a lack of imports. By the summer 1939, some key munitions approached 90% production shortfalls.
That Hitler did opt for war and a deal with Moscow scarcely resolved these problems. Germany could not pay for what Russia had to offer. Things got worse.
The gap between German steel, coal and oil production and demand was easy enough to see. The massive failures in the rail network in the winter of 1939/40 could not be concealed. Conquests unexpectedly made this worse. “Coal famine” was ever-present, worsening each winter, yet new locomotives and trucks were just not on the table.
Tooze concludes (332) that the analytic paradigm of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, of a German “peacelike” war economy is erroneous.
The Survey discounted the effects of strategic bombing by claiming that the German economy maintained a vast reserve of productive capacity not yet entangled with the war effort. Therefore, strategic bombing (in 1940–44) only reduced the potential future total war production of a fully mobilised German economy. The statistics do not bear this out. Any blow delivered was felt.
But we did not have to wait until 2007 to hear this. The City of London was perfectly aware of the long-running problems of the German economy. In the course of 1940/1 decision makers in London received a ring-side seat demonstration of the effectiveness of strategic bombing. The effects of every home bombed, every high road blocked with rubble, every rail snarl, every air raid alert sounded on a busy dock, had a measurable effect apparent in, for example, delays in delivery of long-awaited new bombers.
Gerrmany and the United Kingdom were different, of course. In no economic sector was the U.K. in such dire straits as Germany. If Bomber Command could just hit the targets…..
Now, clearly Avro Lancasters would not yank the German back to Berlin as though some Rube Goldberg string attached every frontline soldier to a brick facade in Spandau. The effects would be felt in that every soldier would have two clips of ammunition instead of three, and it would be up to the Red Army to make him use up those two clips. The point is that Ivan would not have to make him use up three.
When a truck is stuck in traffic waiting for a pile of bombed-out rubble to be cleared from a street, the labourers who are waiting to unload that truck are idle. The storage areas at the place that produces the things that truck carries fill up, and then those production lines are stilled. If, that is, the people who work at those places did not live in the house destroyed, and are not out right now salvaging their possessions and arranging a new place to live, instead of working. As a way of making economic war, this works. As the bombing finally reached decisive weights of impact in the summer of 1943, it was a significant factor in bringing the “miracle” of rising German war production to a halt. (557).
It was not the intention of the Air Staff to make war by “unhousing” Germans, but neither was this admittedly barbaric mode of war an excuse for prosecuting the apocalyptic vision of some prewar fantasists. People who talked about bombers bringing an end to civilisation were not predicting the future. They were (and are) writing a new form of comedy, in which civilisation is Mr. Furley, and the reader is Jack, and the bombs that will banish Mr. Furley, leaving Jack will to find self-actualisation in the ruins.
As a method of waging war, as opposed to a narrative, area bombing was an expedient into which the USAAF fell just as much as the RAF. It was a technically feasible, it struck at multiple well-known weaknesses in the German economy, and it was morally better than surrender.
August 9, 2009 at 1:07 pm
TF Smith
Victory, presumably not; stalemate, in 1914-18 terms? Certainly a possibilty…
Overall, with regards to Germans and Soviets after 1943 (i.e. the conclusion of Stalingrad), I think one point to remember is that if February, 1943 is seen as the point at which the Western Allies “should have known” the Soviets were in for the duration, is there much evidence that London and Washington recognized it as such?
If one looks at the policies the Western Allies pursued regarding aid for the Soviet war effort, it does not appear so…the Arctic convoys resumed after the 1942 hiatus, the Persian Corridor was expanded and ioperations there intensified, and the North Pacific route remained in operation – at significant cost in personnel and resources.
And even if so, I think one still has to acknowledge the fact that FDR, WSC, and their various advisers and commanders could not make that same judgment at any point during the 1940-42 period, i.e. during the ABC staff conferences, the formulation of the Victory plan and Plan Dog, Argentia, ARCADIA (1st Washington), 2nd Washington, or Casablanca, which are the points at which the Allied powers created their strategy for the war…
The US and UK had to plan for the possibility of a 2nd Brest-Litovsk at least up until the winter of 1942-43, and that possibility influenced everything the Allies did for the remainder of the war, whether overtly or simply through institutional inertia.
Regarding CITADEL as demonstrating which side had the initiative in 1943 seems open to interpretation, given that it demonstrates, if nothing else, the German ability – despite almosty four years of war – to create a army group-sized mobile force for the Eastern Front of significant size and capability; seeing ahead of time that the Germans would chose to use that force in an offensive, rather than husbanding it as a mobile defensive reserve that could have defeated a Soviet offensive – as, in fact, MARS was defeated in 1942 – suggests foresight the Allies could have had…
If the Germans had chosen to remain on the strategic offensive in the east in 1943, they could have extracted a heavy price from the Soviets and, in fact, if the Germans had withdrawn to a defensible line from the Baltic states south through Belarussia and Ukraine to the Black Sea, have significantly increased their odds of forcing a stalemate in 1943 and – possibly – afterwards. Again, it would have taken an amazing amount of foresight for the British and Americans to see otherwise.
I think the same holds true on the question of German technical superiority regarding unconventional weapons vis a vis the Soviets in 1941-45; in a strategic situation where all else was equal, (say if if both combatants survived past 1945), I think it unlikely that a Russo-German “race for the bomb” (or chem/bio/radiological weaponry) would have ended to the Soviet advantage…
August 9, 2009 at 1:22 pm
Erik Lund
Spam alert!
North American P-51 Mustang: empty weight, 7,125lb; all up weight, 11,600lb. Disposable weight equals 39% of auw. All up thrust-to-weight ratio (1590hp engine): 0.14 hp/lb.
Supermarine Spitfire IX: 5,610/7,500: disposable weight, 25.2% auw. Thrust to weight ratio (1560hp engine): 0.20 hp/lb.
Notice that the Hawker Hurricane is at 29%, the Tempest at 34%. It wasn’t like the Brits couldn’t build ‘planes that could carry much heavier loads. They just privileged thrust-to-weight ratio.
The question is not how you build fighters with long ranges. The question is how you escort bombers with fighters at long ranges. I won’t go into the technical details, because enough electrons have died already today. They are apparent enough if you investigate the technical issues. You don’t need to write an appendix of your history of the RAF lambasting the Air Staff for being stupidheads for not inventing the P-51 or B-24. (John Terraine, I’m looking at you.) You just need to know how planes work.
August 9, 2009 at 7:52 pm
DaKooch
“You don’t need to write an appendix of your history of the RAF lambasting the Air Staff for being stupidheads for not inventing the P-51″
The P-51 program was originally designed as an aircraft for the RAF under one of their designers. That aircraft proved to be a disappointment until the power plant was changed (among other things) to a Rolls Royce Merlin engine, the same used in the Spitfire.
T.F. – ” Overall, with regards to Germans and Soviets after 1943 (i.e. the conclusion of Stalingrad), I think one point to remember is that if February, 1943 is seen as the point at which the Western Allies “should have known” the Soviets were in for the duration, is there much evidence that London and Washington recognized it as such?
If one looks at the policies the Western Allies pursued regarding aid for the Soviet war effort, it does not appear so”
I’m not sure what your point is. That they did is true. Stalin did much to play upon the Allied guilt over not opening a second front. Allied lend lease, particularly trucks did much to enhance Soviet offensive capability, but the reality is that Stalin would never have rested without removing German forces from Soviet territory and this was his intent from the Spring of 1943 on.
August 10, 2009 at 8:03 am
Anderson
As the bombing finally reached decisive weights of impact in the summer of 1943, it was a significant factor in bringing the “miracle” of rising German war production to a halt. (557).
Erik, perhaps you should specify what kind of “bombing” you mean.
Tooze, 556-57:
And by the summer of 1943, these constraints [“same fundamental trade-offs” endemic to wartime Germany], combined with the first systematic attack against German industry by Allied bombers, brought Speer’s “miracle” to a complete halt.
This is at the beginning of the chapter introducing Speer’s effort to manage the Nazi war economy. In the next chapter, Tooze describes the Hamburg firebombing, in terms of morale and horror (601). But he thinks the Ruhr bombing (597-98) was much more effective:
Reading contemporary sources, there can be no doubt that the Battle of the Ruhr [March-July 1943] marked a turning point in the history of German war production, which has been grossly underestimated by post-war accounts. As Speer acknowledged, the RAF was hitting the right target.
At 602, Tooze writes:
The Ruhr was the choke point and in 1943 it was within the RAF’s grip. The failure to maintain that hold and to tighten it was a tragic operational error. The ongoing disaster that Speer and his cohorts clearly expected in the summer of 1943 was put off for another year.
There is no question that bombing of genuine industrial targets (the Ruhr) was superbly effective. The problem is that the issue here is area bombing, i.e., burning cities down for the alleged effect on the German economy. And Tooze simply cannot be made to support the thesis that area bombing was as effective as bombing centered on real industrial targets.
The list of Ruhr bombings by Tooze in “the Battle of the Ruhr” ends in July 1943. Which is when Harris diverted the RAF’s fleet to the incineration of Hamburg. What if the Brits had simply kept on with the Ruhr? As it was, the dispersal of Allied bombing effort came as a relief to Speer.
August 10, 2009 at 11:20 am
TF Smith
Dak –
My point is that whatever Stalin’s intentions were at any point during the war (as in, “Following the winter 1941 counteroffensives there was little doubt Stalin had every intention of marching his armies all the way to Berlin.”) the Western Allies still had to plan for the possibility that Stalin’s intentions might be frustrated, by the Germans and – possibly – by rivals within the Soviet leadership…
It may have been the intention of Kerensky and Brusilov to march on Vienna and Berlin in 1917, but that didn’t quite work out the way they planned…
August 10, 2009 at 11:43 am
Erik Lund
There is some confusion here. The attacks on the Ruhr industrial towns that began in March of 1943 and terminated in June _were area bombing attacks_. The new OBOE beacons pointed bombing at the centres of compact orefield urban areas to maximise structural and infrastructural damage delivered by the expected bomb distribution. Bomb loads were up to 50% incendiaries which would tell us that these were area attacks even if Bomber Command obfuscated the point, as 8th Air Force was later to do. (Davis, “Statistical History;” I believe these details may be in Middlebrook, _Bomber Command War Diary_, too.)
Area bombing against similar targets in Britain had been highly effective, and proved to be so again.
Nevertheless, there good reasons not to persist exclusively against the Ruhr towns. Static AAA defences were building up, and the “bouncing rubble” effect privileged new targets. As Tooze summarises immediately following your citation, the Hamburg firestorm of 28 July 1943 was thought by many to have brought the regime to the verge of collapse. The decision to pursue a firestorm in Berlin was a tragic error, but an understandable one .
There is, in any case, reason to think that the 1943 Ruhr attacks had reached a point of diminishing returns. They had included highly effective precision attacks to the limit of available targets, specifically the unrepeatable Dambusters raid. The next really high value Ruhr precision target, the Bielefeld Viaduct, would not be attackable for another year.
August 13, 2009 at 11:06 am
Daniel G.
Wow, I never thought I’d see that movie again. I’m an american who grew up in Japan as a missionary kid. I went to Japanese grade school, and I remember having to watch “Hadashi Gen” in first grade. I was horrified and felt physically sick for the rest of the day.
Since then, I’ve tried to describe what that experience was like to a number of different people, but it’s a little bit hard to communicate what it was like to be the only foreigner in an auditorium full of japanese kids, watching a disturbingly grotesque cartoon rendition of the horrors your nation visited upon the nation you are a guest in. It was something of a formative event, for me.
Well, thanks for posting this. Now I know what the name of the movie is. I feel like I’ve reclaimed a bit of early childhood. I may not ever watch it again, but I’m glad I found this.
August 14, 2009 at 6:43 pm
Marie
These cartoons are really, really, scary!
August 14, 2009 at 6:49 pm
Marie
I think it’s also scary that people get annoyed with each other over how important a battle is when the post is about nuclear holocaust.
August 14, 2009 at 7:57 pm
ari
You’re welcome, Daniel. And that really does sound like a tough experience, a bit like being the only German kid sitting in on a Hebrew school class.
And Marie, historians are easily annoyed; it’s an occupational hazard.