Understanding Society
Bomb Mongers
EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION
Area bombing promised to break Germany by destroying its cities. In this passage from Rutger Bregman’s Humankind: A Hopeful History, Doug recounts the immense civilian devastation that followed Winston Churchill’s authorization of a harsher campaign. Against that destruction, he places a damning contrast: only a limited portion of Allied air power was directed toward strategic targets such as factories and bridges.
A Note on the Original Text
Doug’s writings are presented as originally written. Spelling, punctuation, and grammatical irregularities have been retained to preserve his words and the integrity of the original record.
ORIGINAL WRITING
The content in this post is based on the book Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman.
The bomb-mongers felt the enemy needed to be dealt an even harsher blow. Churchill gave the signal and all hell broke loose over Germany. When the bombing finally ended, the casualties numbered ten times higher than after the blitz. On one night in Dresden, more men, women, and children were killed than in London during the whole war. More than half of Germany’s towns and cities were destroyed. The country had become one big smoldering rubble.
All the while only a small contingent of the Allied air force was actually striking strategic targets such as factories and bridges. Right up through the final months, Churchill maintained that the surest way to win the war was by dropping bombs on civilians to break national morale. In January 1944, a Royal Air Force memo gratifyingly affirmed this view: ‘the more we bomb, the more satisfying the effect.’
Was this true?
An eyewitness from a respected psychiatrist follows: Between May and July 1945, Dr. Friedrich Panse interviewed almost a hundred Germans whose homes had been destroyed. ‘Afterward,’ said one, ‘I was really full of vim and lit up a cigar.’ The general mood following a raid, said another, was euphoric, ‘like a war after it was won.’
There was no sign of mass hysteria. On the contrary, in places that had just been hit, inhabitants felt relief. ‘Neighbors were wonderfully helpful’ reported Panse. ‘Considering the severity and duration of the mental strain, the general attitude was remarkably steady and restrained.’
Shortly after the German surrender in 1945, a team of allied economists visited the defeated nation, tasked by the U.S Department of Defense to study the effects of the bombing. Most of all, the Americans wanted to know if this tactic was a good way to win wars.
The scientists finding were stark: the civilian bombings had been a fiasco. In fact, the appeared to have strengthened the German wartime economy, thereby prolonging the war. Between 1939 and 1944, thy found that German tank production had multiplied by a factor of nine, and of fighter aircrafts by a factor of fourteen. A team of British economists reached the same conclusion. In the twenty-one devastated towns and cities they investigated, production had Increased faster than in a control group of fourteen cities that had not been bombed. ‘We were beginning to see,’ confessed one of the American economists, ‘that we were encountering one of the greatest, perhaps the greatest miscalculation of the war.’