Yet there is continuity in military doctrine. It was the commander of the US 8th Air Force in Europe, General Carl Spaatz, who first placed such a premium on "precision bombing". Though he did not have the technical means to deliver it, both the American and the British bombing campaigns in 1940-45 made remarkable progress towards that goal. They sought to turn war into a science by enlisting scientists as warriors. The fact that American air power can again be unleashed - with decisive impact on the war in Iraq, just as in Kosovo and Afghanistan has been predicated on a technology that makes strict discrimination between military and civilian targets possible. Public opinion will no longer tolerate the subordination of morality to strategy.
This, too, is nothing new. In the mid-1930s, Stanley Baldwin's dictum "the bomber will always get through" was a mantra of appeasement. The present Poet Laureate might well share the sentiments, though not alas the stature, of Cecil Day Lewis, whose poem "Bombers" was written at the time of Munich: "Black as vermin, crawling in echelon / Beneath the cloud floor, the bombers come: / The heavy angels, carrying harm in / Their wombs that ache to be rid of death. / This is the seed that grows for ruin, / The iron embryo conceived in fear".
In Germany, the revulsion against bombing has acquired an intensity that is peculiar to the nation which suffered the most prolonged and systematic bombing campaign in history. The memory is mightier than the missile. And one book, read by millions through the medium of tabloid serialization, has played a crucial part in evoking those memories over the past six months. It is no exaggeration to say that Jorg Friedrich's history of the bombing of Nazi Germany, Der Brand, has had an even greater impact on German public opinion than Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners did seven years ago.
Goldhagen helped to create a climate in which Germany had no choice but to compensate Nazi slave labourers. Friedrich has helped to create a climate which, by mobilizing public opinion against Anglo-American bombing, whether of Germany or Iraq, has made it easier for Chancellor Schroder to overcome the residual reluctance of the Germans to distance themselves from their post-war allies.
The originality of Der Brand lies in its account of the impact of bombing on the bombed. It is, in a sense, a response to the critique by Anglo-American historians such as Goldhagen and Christopher Browning of "ordinary Germans" as accomplices in genocide. The implication, which is never spelt out, is that while some Germans were committing one kind of genocide in the East, in Germany their families were enduring another kind of genocide from the air at the hands of the Allies. The book does not directly accuse Allied leaders of war crimes, but Churchill, together with his Air Marshals Portal and "Bomber" Harris, are accused of deliberately transforming the most densely populated areas into a Vernichtungsraum ("extermination space"). The forensic character of the indictment extends into Friedrich's language, which alternates between the clinical and the apocalyptic.
The impassive accumulation of gruesome detail serves a rhetorical purpose: to demonstrate the utter inhumanity of the air war. Throughout, he echoes the idiom of the Holocaust. The cellars in which people take refuge from the firestorm become "crematoriums"; bomber squadrons are "Einsatzgruppen". Allied plans for the use of biological warfare, including anthrax, are emphasized. The bombing of Swinemunde in 1945 is a "massacre". The dehumanization of the Germans suggests parallels with the Nazi attitude to the Jews: "Churchill disposed of the people of Cologne, Berlin and Dresden as 'Huns'". One knows, too, whence Friedrich derives the metaphysical tone in which he describes the "rupture with civilization of the strategic air offensive". It "is beyond discussion. In the face of what took place in its breadth and depth, all dispute falls silent". What is "Der Brand" (literally, "fire" or "blaze") if not another word for Holocaust?
As a monument to the victims, Der Brand is impressive. It is a highly readable synthesis of the (overwhelmingly Anglo-American) research on the air war.
Friedrich has tapped rich new sources on the German side and he organizes his material in a striking and effective way, demonstrating how military and technological decisions resulted in social and cultural catastrophe.
As an interpretation of history, however, the book fails to convince. Friedrich argues that Germany would have lost the war even without strategic bombing, though he admits that it might have taken longer for the Allies to win. Was that a risk that Churchill and Roosevelt could have taken? Given the rapidly increasing power and destructiveness of the Third Reich, which for four years had Europe at its mercy, every day by which the war was shortened was precious.
