Guy Leitch

In modern warfare it’s not the soldiers who die – it’s the civilians. One of the best examples of this is carpet bombing.

In the bad old days, soldiers used to line up and face the enemy, expecting to be attacked man to man, on foot, or with horses, and later, to mow each other down with machine guns. The soldiers were maimed, bled and died by their thousands on behalf of civilians.

World War 2 changed that as it was the first major war where more civilians died than soldiers. This continues today – at risk of stirring up a hornets’ nest – I reckon that the Israel-Hamas war is primarily a massive public relations stunt by Hamas to make their citizens unwilling martyrs and make Israel a pariah. At time of writing (8 April 2024), wiki says that over 34,000 civilians (33,091 Palestinian and 1,410 Israelis) have been killed. In stark contrast, Hamas claims to have lost 6,000 ‘fighters’  while the IDF claims up to 12,000 Hamas combatants killed. The  point is, civilian casualties are three to six times higher than soldiers.

The reason I venture into this minefield is that I recently watched the Oppenheimer movie, and am sporadically watching the Netflix series, Masters of the Air, which is a semi-serious attempt to dramatize USAAF B-17 bomber crews who, contrary to claims, indulged in area, and not precision, bombing. Only the leader aimed his bombs, the others released theirs when they saw the leader’s bombs drop.

The Oppenheimer movie is about Dr Robert Oppenheimer, who headed the Manhattan project, whose two atomic bombs killed 129,000 – 200,000 civilians – and ‘just’ 10,000 soldiers. The atomic bombs had the desired effect because the cost in human life was just too much, even for the Japanese Emperor.

Which raises the question of whether bombing with conventional high explosive bombs was ever really a useful strategy in the WW2. Hundreds of thousands of civilians died on the ground in horrors such as the RAF’s Dreden firestorm and the USAAF’s Operation Meetinghouse Tokyo raid.

Morale Bombing

At the start of World War II, aerial bombing meant total destruction. The Luftwaffe’s London Blitz was designed to demoralise the British into submission. England’s response was Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, who many consider a psychopath, and who would probably have been executed as a war criminal if the Germans had won. Harris was one of the chief architects of the British tactic of what he called ‘morale bombing’. Despite the heroics of Londoners during the Blitz, Harris also believed that reducing German cities to rubble and incinerating civilians would force surrender.

In contrast, the Americans tried precision bombing under General Haywood Hansell, who believed their much-vaunted Norden bombsight really could drop a bomb down a ‘pickle barrel’. Hansell’s argument was that civilian casualties could be minimised if, instead of carpet bombing cities, you could surgically take out key infrastructure such as ball bearing and aircraft factories.

A few years ago our columnist  Darren Olivier wrote, “In World War II there was a debate between the advocates of precision bombing and area bombing. Some, especially the ‘Bomber Mafia’ of the US Army Air Force, believed that, with the introduction of the Norden bombsight, it was finally possible for bombers to hit targets such as factories, rail yards, bridges, and other strategic infrastructure with pinpoint accuracy, therefore avoiding unnecessary civilian deaths and, as they claimed, shortening the war by picking out and destroying Germany and Japan’s key infrastructure.

“Their opponents, mostly in the Royal Air Force, believed that precision bombing was not yet possible with the technology available at the time and that less discriminate area bombing would have a greater effect, both by destroying large amounts of industry at a time, and demoralising German and Japanese civilians.

“Ultimately neither was entirely correct. The advocates of area bombing were right about precision bombing being unfeasible: The Norden bombsight was overrated, and USAAF aircraft never achieved anything close to the level of accuracy needed to make the approach effective. As a result, even the USAAF switched to area bombing later in the war. But the British were wrong about area bombing working to demoralise civilians, proving conclusively that wars could not be won by terrorising populations from the air.”

Malcolm Gladwell has written a book about ‘The Bomber Mafia’.  He keeps the readers attention by presenting two protagonists:  General Haywood Hansell and Curtis LeMay. 

As a strong proponent of precision bombing, Hansell justified it, both in terms of effectiveness and morality. In contrast, LeMay was the ‘get it done at any cost’  action man who did what had to be done to accomplish the larger mission.

In Gladwell’s somewhat romantic view, the story is about innovators and disrupters. His heroes are versions of Elon Musk or Steve Jobs — disruptors who brought a unique perspective and, through determination and insight, pursued a dream.

For Gladwell, the difference in leadership and operational approach is not just tactical – it’s moral. The precision bombing proponents were the good guys, trying to avoid the mass slaughter of earlier wars.

In World War 1, which was the ‘war to end all wars,’ the British, French and Russians lost more than five million troops and the Germans lost over four million. What mortality statistics fail to tell us is the 21 million who were wounded: many of whom would never make a full recovery, having lost limbs or been blinded. Compared to the soldiers deaths, it is estimated that there were barely one million civilian deaths, perhaps the last time more soldiers than civilians died in a war.

For those with a conscience, for World War 2 there had to be a better way. Hansell was the panacea, with his belief that precision bombing from 40,000 feet really can take out key ‘choke points’ and win wars.

However, precision bombing was never as accurate as was hoped. Many bombers missed their targets completely, either because it was clouded over, or in Japan, because jet streams blew the bombs off target.

Gladwell considers the morality of carpet bombing and compares, not just the tactics of area vs precision bombing, but also the morality of the leaders, particularly Haywood Hansell to Bomber Harris and Curtis LeMay. Gladwell quotes Tami Biddle, a professor at the U.S. Army War College, who says, “I think there’s a strong moral component to all this, a desire to find a way to fight a war that is clean and that is not going to tarnish the American reputation as a moral nation, a nation of ideas and ideology and commitment to individual rights and respect for human beings.”

And so the argument is not just one of which is more effective: carpet bombing or precision bombing. Like the Israel-Hamas war, it is about the moral high ground. It is not about technology, whether it be the Norden bombsight or the Manhattan Project’s atomic bombs. Rather, it is a story about the ways in which the governments justified the wholesale killing of civilians.

As Darren Olivier says, it turns out Norden’s bombsight couldn’t provide the precision he said it would, and thus Hansell had very limited success carrying out precision bombing over Japan. Which is why he was replaced by Curtis LeMay, who used napalm bombs to burn 100,000 civilians to death in Tokyo in just one raid. Even by American estimates, more people were burned to death in a single attack, than at any other time in history.

Although he practised indiscriminate carpet bombing, LeMay’s use of area and incendiary bombing is now justified as having avoided the wholesale slaughter of military personnel and civilians that would have happened if it had been necessary to invade Japan. Estimations of the casualties that would have been incurred if America had invaded Japan vary widely, but based on the Battle for Okinawa, it’s reckoned that if the war had continued, it would have cost America another million troops. 

Supporters of area bombing therefore claim that it is the lesser of two evils, and it was not as terrible as the trenches and starvation of World War 1, or the bloody conflict of Guadalcanal and the retaking of the Pacific islands.

I reluctantly have to agree. My callous view is that the atomic bombs and firestorms from carpet bombing were indeed a military success. The ‘genocide’ created by these weapons of mass destruction have made the stakes so high that we have had ‘Pax Americana’ where no nuclear nation has dared attack another for the past 75 years.  

The final analysis is bleak – if you strip away the rationalisations, air war is about the destruction of cities and the murder of civilians. It may accomplish other military goals in the process, but the wanton destruction of innocent life is its primary purpose.