To Destroy a City: Strategic Bombing and Its Human Consequences in World War II - Book Review

Parameters, Spring, 2004 by Jeffrey Record

To Destroy a City: Strategic Bombing and Its Human Consequences in World War II. By Hermann Knell. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2003. 373 pages. $32.50.

Hermann Knell was a 19-year-old living in the crowded old medieval town of Wurzburg, Germany, on the night of 16-17 March 1945 when hundreds of Allied bombers paid a lethal visit. In one night, the bombers killed more than 5,000 people and flattened 92 percent of the city's structures, leaving 90,000 Wurzburgers homeless. To Destroy a City combines Knell's personal memoir of that night and a discourse on the "why" of it. Germany's collapse was imminent and its major industrial cities lay in ruins. "Why," asks Knell, "would such a city of small strategic value and with few facilities to support the German war effort be the target of a bomber fleet?"

Knell arrives, I believe, at the right answer, but the journey to it leaves much to be desired. As a self-acknowledged amateur historian, Knell sometimes gets his facts wrong (he twice dates Hitler's reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1935), occasionally dwells on topics not germane to his subject (e.g., the political origins of World War I, the relationship of the Treaty of Versailles and Hitler's rise to power), and on at least one issue falls for a whopper (Goebbels' claim that the Nazi invasion of Russia was a preemptive attack on a Soviet army assembling for an invasion of Germany). He also blames the Allies for the failure of the 20 July 1944 plot by a group of dissident German officers to overthrow the Nazi regime, when in fact the Allies were in no position to act on the attempted coup, which failed because of bad luck, plotter incompetence, and Goebbels' quick thinking.

An engineer by trade and now a Canadian citizen, Knell furthermore wanders through the history of strategic bombing (from 1914 to 1945), paying much attention to its horrors (as one would expect of someone who experienced them) but not enough attention to the power and attraction of the idea behind it. During the interwar period, British and American proponents of strategic bombardment believed they had discovered a way to win wars without the necessity of bloody and protracted land combat, and they pursued their vision right through World War II, notwithstanding the early degeneration of the strategic air campaign against Germany into an aerial trench warfare of attrition between Allied bombers, German fighters, and flak. The Allies prevailed in the end only by using bombers as bait to bring up the German fighters, which were then downed by P-51s and P-47s. By March 1945, of course, the Allies owned Germany's skies, the momentum of the strategic bombing campaign had become irresistible, and the mass slaughter of civilians had become routine. Wurzburg's destruction may have counted for nothing on the strategic ledger, but the Allies were running out of significant targets. What else was there to do but to keep bombing? Knell sums it up correctly: "Wurzburg was bombed because the bombing offensive had long ago become an end to itself, with its own momentum, it own purpose, devoid of tactical or strategic value, indifferent to the needless suffering and destruction it caused."

Knell's greatest strength is the personal perspective he brings to the subject. The literature on strategic bombing available in English is short on the perspectives of those who were bombed as opposed to those who were doing the bombing. And any way you cut it, then or now, the indiscriminate bombing of civilians is an act of terrorism. British Bomber Command's Arthur "Bomber" Harris made no bones about it--he believed in terrorizing the German population into overthrowing their government. To be sure, those who directed the US Army's "Mighty" Eighth Air Force may have believed or at least wanted to believe that they were conducting precision bombing of legitimate military and economic targets, but Dresden and the mass incineration of Japan's cities put an end to any pretense of it. Such are the wages of total war.

But if Knell is certainly right in concluding that strategic bombing between 1914 and 1945 "does not represent a leaf of honor in the annals of mankind," he is wrong to say that "the losses and destruction were unnecessary." In the case of World War II, more than just civilians were being destroyed by Bomber Command and Eighth Air Force. Strategic bombing wrecked much of the Axis's war-making capacity and forced that enemy to divert enormous resources into air defense, pulled most of the Luftwaffe off the Russians' backs, and helped isolate the Normandy beaches from German reinforcement. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine defeating Nazi Germany absent air superiority over Europe (including Normandy on 6 June 1944), which was obtained by compelling the Luftwaffe to exhaust itself against ever-larger waves of Allied bombers and their escort fighters. In the case of Japan, strategic bombing, with the tremendous psychological assist of two atomic weapons, arguably spared the United States--and the Japanese--the bloodbath of an invasion of the home islands. The price of all these successes was, of course, paid out in the form of hundreds of thousands of German and Japanese civilian lives. But this was total war, and there was no other way to get at the enemy's war-making capacity except via strategic air attack using technologies that could not be employed in a manner that spared civilians.