UNITED STATES STRATEGIC BOMBING
By Steven Stoneman
390th Memorial Museum Foundation

The overall international posture of the U.S. government under the Roosevelt Administration was that the ideological and territorial aggrandizement of both Nazi Germany and Militarist Japan in the 1930s posed direct threats to the security of the United States, its articulated interests abroad, and the entire Western Hemisphere. The Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 and Nazi Germany's subsequent declaration of war on December 11th united America's previously divided public opinion on the wisdom and propriety of resolutely opposing the Axis powers through force. Eventually, the government later held that the United States would support nothing less than total victory over Germany and Japan as the stated goal of U.S. policy.

President Roosevelt believed that the Allies' failure to crush the Militarist German regime in 1918 brought about Hitler's stab-in-the-back posture that so powerfully occasioned his rise and eventually the Second World War itself. (1) At a meeting of Allied heads of state in Casablanca in January 1943 FDR and British Prime Minister Churchill called for the "unconditional surrender" of Germany and Japan. This had the effect of putting the Axis nations on notice that the two English-speaking powers would not negotiate a settlement prior to the total military demise of German and Japanese power and it sought to reassure the wary and hard-pressed Soviet and Chinese governments that the war would not be concluded at their expense. The Big Three heads of state Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin reaffirmed the Unconditional Surrender notion in a joint declaration at Yalta in the Soviet Crimea in February 1945. (2)

The concept of unconditional surrender was the foundation of America's "positive" political objective during World War II. The stated goal was positive in that it could be effectuated only through military force. To attain this draconian objective the Allies had to destroy the Axis nations and their totalitarian political institutions. It is notable that "negative" military objectives--those attainable by restraining one's own military power, were nonexistent. Accordingly the United States could brandish its umbrella of strategic bombing air power against the Nazis with devastating effectiveness (over time).

The active military cooperation between the Soviet Union and the Anglo-Americans promised the best means of maintaining a winning posture among members who had differing thoughts regarding Germany's postwar political structure. To make certain that the Soviets and the British survived the Nazi onslaught, President Roosevelt committed the United States to General George Marshall's long-held conviction that the defeat of Nazi Germany must come ahead of the defeat of Militarist Japan. This "Germany First" posture was affirmed by the British-American Combined Chiefs of Staff at the Arcadia Conference in January 1942. One year later after a massive buildup of aircraft and personnel on the British Isles, the Anglo-American air power jauggernaut commenced a "round-the-clock" schedule of strategic bombing to ensure the annihilation of German power. FDR's accentuation of U.S. aircraft production fused with the Army Air Forces' plan to produce a bombing strategy focusing on MASS and PRECISION. The U.S. government believed that air power presented a way to deploy overwhelming force to attain Unconditional Surrender in the briefest period of time. This would, it was hoped, terminate the conflict forthwith and bring American soldiers back home the soonest.

Significantly, both the President and his Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, believed that the deployment of American strategic air power would demonstrate the seriousness of American resolve to both China and the Soviet Union with the smallest possible expenditure of American manpower and money. The American and British leaders came up with a way to achieve this overarching objective in an economical manner with the release of AWPD-1, Air War Plan Development One, the paper released in August 1941 which guided the Anglo-American bombardment campaign against Germany. (3) Designed to bring about--or make unnecessary-- the invasion of Europe, AWPD-1 aimed at smashing Germany's war making capabilities through air raids on basic production facilities. What's more, by focusing on strategic over tactical deployments of air power, Allied air planners sought to manifest the bomber's unique wherewithal to strike deep behind the current battle lines, a mission which if successfully achieved might lead to air force autonomy in years to come after the termination of hostilities. At Casablanca in January 1943, both Britain and the United States announced the goals of the Combined Bomber Offensive (CBO). The Americans, through their "pinpoint precision" daylight attacks, focused their measure of striking power on the German war-making capability while the British designed their nighttime raids to have the most devastating blow inflicted on the morale of German industrial workers themselves.

Owing to British shipping losses in the Atlantic and German air supremacy over the Continent (in early 1943), the Combined Chiefs made submarine construction facilities and the German aircraft industry the principal targets of Allied bombs. As indicated earlier in this paper, it was not until early 1944, after massive losses had been sustained by the daylight U.S. bombing forces in their attempts to curtail German ball-bearing production, that the arrival of the North American P-51D Mustang caused the allied air forces to achieve air supremacy over the Nazis Luftwaffe. In March of that year General Dwight D. Eisenhower took control of the entire Anglo-American air forces in England and aimed them at the transportation network of Northern (occupied) France. The neutralization of German use of this network being accomplished, German oil facilities became the highest priority target once the amphibious Anglo-American armies had safely landed at Normandy on June 6, 1944 and thereafter. But Eisenhower retained total control of the air armadas until September to prevent the Germans from massing a counterattack against the hard fought-for beachhead. On the 23rd of September, Eisenhower relinquished his control over the combined air forces and, as mentioned, German oil production became the principal target of the Air Commanders. Rail and water transportation systems assumed a second priority. (4)

The following is an explanation as to how the infamous terror bombing of Dresden in February of 1945 came about, a raid in which some sources contend that up to 135,000 persons died, both directly and indirectly, making it the most costly raid of World War II. Although bombing oil facilities still retained the highest priority of all targets listed by the U.S. command, a very perplexing and unusual order came down regarding new targets which now assumed a second level of priority. Certain cities in eastern Germany (Berlin, Leipzig, and Dresden) were to be earmarked "where heavy attack will cause great confusion in civilian evacuation from the east and hamper reinforcements." (5)

The U.S. command structure directed its February 1945 attacks at these cities on such military related targets as railroad marshaling yards. Unfortunately, these targets were in close proximity to residential areas. The German offensive in the West in December 1944 truly shocked the Allied High Command and demonstrated that Germany still retained a substantial wherewithal and will to resist. In order to clear up matters as to what was permissible, 8th Air Force Commanding General James H. Doolittle wired his superior, General Carl A. Spaatz, asking whether Berlin was still open to air attack. He was searching for guidance as to what degree it would be permissible to hit residential targets in large German cities at this stage of the bombing offensive. General Spaatz's reply was stark and brief. Oil should be hit if visual siting was assured; otherwise Berlin's residential areas were open to attack. As it turned out cloud cover over the primary target forced Doolittle's bombers to hit residential Berlin. As a consequence of this, 25,000 people were killed. In the well-known joint Anglo-American raid against Dresden on February 13-14, 1945 the whole city was blown off the map and later caught up in a giant fire storm that consumed the remains of the city. The very minimal estimates of the civilian casualties on that raid start at at least 35,000 dead and probably much, much higher. Former reputable historian David Irving called the Dresden raid the greatest Allied atrocity of World War II. (6) Despite General Ira Eaker's expressed wish never to allow "the man in the street" to become the primary target, by 1945 American city attacks had come to resemble the nighttime aerial attacks of the RAF. (7)

Back in Washington both Roosevelt and his successor Truman firmly guided grand strategy at the very top. However, the absence of prohibition or negative political objectives allowed them to give the military commanders a free hand in such matters as strategic bombing. President Roosevelt frequently overruled the Joint Chiefs on specific military affairs. For example, General "Hap" Arnold, the head of the Army Air Forces, disagreed with the President's 1942 decision to invade North Africa and extend greater military assistance to General MacArther in the Southwest Pacific Theater. These policies distracted from what he saw as the overriding objective of building up the strategic bomber armada of the 8th Air Force. Yet Arnold noted that once the parameters of a decision were made by the Chief Executive, he depended on his Chiefs of Staff to implement them, to activate plans for the consummation of these broad, general ideas. General Arnold in turn delegated broad authority to his subordinates LeMay and Spaatz. General Carl Spaatz, in particular operated with a free hand in the European Theater of Operations. By far the larger portion of command restraints on the U.S. Eighth Air Force stemmed from General Dwight Eisenhower, particularly after he assumed direct control over the entire Allied air armada in preparation for the D-Day landings in mid-1944, as previously mentioned. (8)

For all their freedom from political controls at the very top of the command hierarchy, Army Air Forces commanders faced a great many operational constraints in their daily activities. On top of frequent diversions of bomber aircraft and their crews from England to other theaters, the arrival of untrained and unmotivated air personnel undercut the build-up of the 8th Air Force. (9) As mentioned earlier, the lack of a superior long-range fighter to escort the 8th's B-17s and other bombers to their targets and back curtailed raids against Germany after the slaughter of the unescorted B-17s over Schweinfurt in mid-1943.

It was not until the second month of 1944 that the situation was rectified in the superlative North American P-51D Mustang which arrived and turned the tide against the German Luftwaffe in their home skies over Germany. Looming ever over the British Isles and the continent of Europe was the all-pervasive specter of frequent bad weather. To keep "round-the-clock" bombing applications on Germany, the crews of the Mighty Eighth resorted to the blind radar bombing techniques of their aerial brothers in the RAF. With increasing sophistication the American heavy bombers in England became more and more able to imitate the "blind" target acquisition success of Bomber Command.

Not until the later stages of the war did the heaviest raids carried out by the 8th Air Force's B-17s occur. The total bomb tonnage for the Second World War dropped by both the RAF and the 8th and 15th Air Forces in Europe on Germany totalled 1,234,767 tons of bombs more than 60 percent of which were dropped between July 1944 and April 1945. The Allied aerial onslaught killed no fewer than 305,000 German factory workers or area residents in targeted cities. It wounded about 780,000 other persons, made 1,865,000 people refugees, compelled the removal of another 4,885,000 additional persons, and cut off 20,000,000 people from their public utilities. By the third quarter of l944, coping with the aftermath of the Allied air strikes tied down an estimated four and one-half million workers, about 20 percent of the non-farm labor force, in cleaning and rebuilding operations. Bombing had annihilated half of the sum total of all petroleum products by December 1944. In turn, reserves of aviation gasoline had plummeted by 90 percent of their availability from May 1944 when the Allied air campaign against aviation gasoline had formally begun. The assault on German rail transportation that had commenced in September 1944 had in the course of five months lessened the volume of railroad car loads by 75 percent. (10)

Obliteration of a nation's war making capacity was only part of the equation for the proponents of Allied bombing. The annihilation of the enemy's will to make war and resist attackers of its air space and territory was of equal significance. The postwar United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS) showed how a besieged population fared under relentless American and British bombing:

The mental reaction of the German people to air attack is significant. Under ruthless control they showed surprising resistance to the terror and hardship of repeated air attack, to the destruction of their homes and belongings, and to the conditions under which they were reduced to live. Their morale, their beliefs in ultimate victory or satisfactory compromise and their confidence in their leaders declined, but they continued to work efficiently as long as the physical means of productivity remained. The power of a police state over its people cannot be underestimated. (11)

The Strategic Bombing Survey had this prescient observation about one country's (or side's) gaining control of the airspace of another (warring) nation:

It [the Survey] further supports the findings in Germany that no nation can long survive the free exploitation of air weapons over its home-land..... It is important to fully grasp the fact that enemy planes enjoying control of the sky over one's head can be as disastrous to one's country as its occupation by physical invasion. (12)

Germany at the end of World War II illustrated to a large degree this tendency; nevertheless one has to cross the globe to the Pacific War to see this carried to grim perfection. Unlike Germany no invading land army ever touched Japanese soil during the fighting. The unsurpassable horror of atomic bombs, fused with the ongoing firebombing of Japanese cities through conventional incendiaries, compelled the Japanese Emperor to take control of the government and accept the Allied terms of surrender. In Germany the Anglo-American air war continued until the Red Army and Western land armies overran every last corner of German territory. Most observers believe that the combination of air and land offensives together forced Nazi capitulation. But even without the massed land forces literally overrunning them, the air war against Germany had virtually demolished that Power's ability to stand alone for very long. (13)

ENDNOTES

1.Bernard Brodie, War and Politics (New York: MacMillan, 1973), p. 39. 2.Gaddis Smith, American Diplomacy During the Second World War (New York: John Wiley, 1965), p. 55. 3.David MasIsaac, General Editor, The United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS), 10 Volumes (New York: Garland Publishing, 1976), Volume I: x-xi. 4.Paul L. Kesaris, Editor, ULTRA and the History of the United States Strategic Air Force in Europe vs. the German Air Force, (Frederick, MD.: University Publications of America, 1980), p. 89. 5.Wesley F. Craven and James L. Cate, The Army Air Forces in World War II, 7 Volumes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948-1958, Volume III: p. 725. 6.Mark A. Clodfelter, "Culmination Dresden: 1945" Aerospace Historian 26 (Fall 1979): 134-147. 7.Ira C. Eaker and Arthur G.B. Metcalf, "Conversations with Albert Speer," Air Force, April 1977, p. 57. 8.Craven and Cate, Army Air Forces, Volume V, p. 624. 9.Meldon E. Smith, Jr., "The Strategic Bombing Debate: the Second World War and Vietnam," Journal of Contemporary History 12 (1977): p. 180. 10.MacIsaac, USSBS, Volume I, The Effect of Strategic Bombing on German Morale: p. 7 and Volume I, Overall Report (Europe): p. 37. 11.MacIsaac, Volume I, Overall Report (Europe): p. 108. 12.Alfred E. Hurley and Robert C. Ehrhart, Editors, Air Power and Warfare: Proceedings of the Eighth Military History Symposium at the U.S. Air Force Academy (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Air Force, 1979), p. 223. 13.MacIsaac, USSBS Volume VII, Summary Report (Pacific War): p. 28.

Dedicated to the Memory of Walter Stoneman