Bloomsbury £20 pp379
Since the 1990s, the shame regarding the Nazi past that haunted West Germany’s public culture (East Germany had no reason to apologise for German “imperialism and militarism”) has been supplanted by a gathering mood of self-pity. Since the war, of course, the far right has sought to lighten Nazi criminality by darkening the Allied record, the difference being that nowadays a subtler version of this approach has leached into mainstream German culture.
Novelists have invited us to empathise with ethnic German expellees or civilians killed by Allied bombers, although only Bernhard Schlink sought sympathy for an illiterate former concentration-camp guard in his The Reader. Historians have contributed to this sense of German grievance, with studies (again) of the Allied strategic bombing campaign, or the depredations of the invading Red Army. The recent film Downfall depicted not just the German people, but also army and SS men, as hapless victims of a psychotic who regarded them all as expendable.
The media don AC Grayling is fully aware of this German cultural context in his judicial-cum-moral audit of RAF Bomber Command’s strategic bombing campaign. He repeatedly distances himself in Among the Dead Cities from continuing efforts to “relativise” Nazi criminality through reference to German civilian suffering. So far, so good.
From the start, he asserts his local patriotic credentials. The boy Grayling liked to make model fighters or to swoop around with his arms outstretched in imitation of a wartime aircraft. To cover himself from outraged former wing commanders, he strives to imagine the courage of those young airmen who night after night lumbered across the North Sea through flak to drop tons of bombs on enemy cities. With something halfway to self-knowledge, Grayling writes: “To be told after the war, and moreover by people who never had to face the dangers they faced, that they had been party to the commission of a moral crime, and in the retrospective light of subsequent international law a legal crime also, must understandably feel like a bitter insult.” That sentence, with its lawyerly precision, gives the game away regarding what this book seeks to do, although one suspects that it is British and American pilots operating over Afghanistan, Iraq and, perhaps, Iran whom the professor would like to see in the dock rather than the elderly veterans of Bomber Command.
Among the Dead Cities is not a satisfactory historical account of the RAF Bomber Command and USAAF campaigns against Germany and Japan. Anyone looking for that should read the works of, among others, Sebastian Cox, Max Hastings, Richard Overy or Ronald Schaffer, or the histories of specific raids by Martin Middlebrook or Frederick Taylor. In a couple of chapters Grayling takes us from Giulio Gavotti, tossing four grenades out of his cockpit during the Italo-Turkish Libyan war in 1911, to the atom bombs dropped on Japan. Regarding the second world war, Grayling tells the familiar tale whereby the inaccuracy of bombing technologies when employed over cloud-covered northern Europe led both sides to abandon restricted targeting in favour of indiscriminate bombing of civilians. The prospect of a decisive blow, using the only force the British had available to strike directly at Hitler’s Germany, went together with a comprehensible desire to wreak revenge on an enemy that was killing thousands of civilians in British cities. As Arthur “Bomber” Harris commented as he watched flames circling St Paul’s cathedral, “ Well, they are sowing the wind.”
Harris took over at Bomber Command in February 1942, bent on making Germany reap the whirlwind. He dispatched ever-larger fleets of bombers to rain incendiary and high-explosive bombs across entire urban areas, in the belief that such raids would give Nazi Germany the obliterating shock that would collapse its civilian morale and wartime economy. Anything else, whether the tactical use of bombers or an American-style focus on eliminating fuel plants or ball-bearing factories, was a diversionary “panacea”. The campaign assumed a deadly momentum (more vividly conveyed in the 2004 documentary film Fog of War than in Grayling’s book), as the raids on Hamburg in the summer of 1943 and Dresden and Tokyo in 1945 proved to devastating effect.
A more modestly conceived book, Firestorm (Pimlico £8.99) by Paul Addison and a team of experts, examines in detail the fate of Dresden. Defenders of area bombing point to the part the bombing campaign played in showing Stalin that the West was fighting, rather than spectating, as the Soviets suffered huge casualties, and to the German resources it diverted (notably clean-up crews and guns that might otherwise have been deployed against the Russians).
The interdiction of key transport hubs effectively cut the German economy up into disconnected fragments.
Opponents prefer to highlight the lack of impact upon either the German economy, or civilian morale, which in any event was less significant in a totalitarian state than in a democracy. They also echo the minority in wartime Britain who had serious moral reservations about a strategy that, as Grayling concedes, was not a crime under the laws of war at the time. He insinuates that Bomber Command was attempting, not to win a deadly war of national survival, but covertly to implement the long-term destruction of German industrial civilisation as envisaged in the Morgenthau plan to reagrarianise Germany, although he fails to show that Harris and his colleagues were even aware of a project that was soon abandoned.
While Grayling’s discussion of the ethics of bombing does not improve on a rather good book on that very subject by Stephen Garrett, who did not feel the same desire to “iterate” as compulsively as the philosopher, he fully enters into the spirit of his own time, with his lawyerly attempt retrospectively to criminalise Bomber Command under laws that only became explicit after the war in the 1977 Additional Protocol to the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention — that is, 32 years later.
Huge tracts of international law are reprinted by Grayling, their soporific effect only fitfully dispelled by bizarre comparisons between British raids on Hamburg and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima with the terrorist murders of 9/11. While Grayling implicitly regrets that he can’t haul wartime Allied airmen into the International Criminal Court that he dearly wishes to see established, the purpose of his book is to increase the likelihood that contemporary American (and British) pilots will face that prospect every time one of their precision bombs hits a collateral target. Lawyers already abound at the United States Central Command in Florida. If Grayling has his way, they’ll be scuttling along beside the pilots on the runways. Perhaps they should be encouraged to get into the cockpits, giving backseat driving a whole new meaning? And then there’s the matter of compensating the Germans, although Grayling is far too fastidious to connect lawyers with money via the word grabbing.
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Read on... websites:
www.bbc.co.uk/history/war/wwtwo/area_bombing_03.shtml
Well-structured BBC site
