On the bombing of cities

Historian Adam Tooze has responded to the Oppenheimer movie about the scientist and the A-Bomb with a reminder that American and British bombing campaigns against cities in WWII can be seen as "the most concentrated expression of modern industrialism."  Hiroshima and Nagasaki are only the most remembered episodes. Eighty years ago this summer, the Allied bombing of Hamburg incinerated at least 40,000 humans.

On the ascending curve of aerial attacks on cities - a terrifying vision that haunted the 20th century - a crescendo that started in earnest in Guernica in 1937 and continued with the attacks on Warsaw, Rotterdam, the London Blitz and Coventry, after the RAF’s 1000-bomber raid on Cologne in 1942 and the sustained campaign against the German industrial centers of the Ruhr in the spring of 1943, Hamburg marked a point of culmination. It was the first aerial attack that came close to fully destroying a big city and rendering it at least temporarily uninhabitable. It was an important way-station en route to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

... The temperatures generated by the fire storm were unprecedented and anticipated those of the atomic explosions to come. Glass and metal melted. Bodies were mummified en masse.

In the aftermath, one million people were forced to flee the city in panic. In Berlin, in Albert Speer’s Armaments Ministry the mood was apocalyptic. If the British and American bombers could do this to any German city at will, Speer remarked that the German economic planners might as well put a bullet in their brains.

... The most devastating single aerial attack of the war came not in Europe but in Japan, with the firebombing of Tokyo on March 9-10 1945, which likely killed over 100,000 people. The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 was not an isolated or unprecedented act of urbicide. It was the deliberate and long-planned extension of a campaign that first showed its terrifying potential in Hamburg 80 years ago.

Though historians have thoroughly documented all this, such is still not a common understanding in the Anglosphere, where we still (for some good reasons as well as morally ignorant ones) cling to the notion of WWII as "the good war."

Reading Tooze on urbicide-past had great resonance for me as it threw me back into the moment, in 1963 as an impressionable high school sophomore, when I first encountered the possibility that, though the Nazis had been unspeakably evil, "the West" had its own faults. I had a sort of in-school paper route that year, distributing paper copies of the New York Times delivered daily to a few student and faculty subscribers. For this I earned a few dollars a month which were all mine -- and which I immediately blew on a paperback book sale rake next to the school's administrative office. I don't imagine anyone else ever bought any book from that very haphazard collection, but I experienced buying from it as a tiny taste of freedom.

Somehow Dwight MacDonald's Memoirs of a Revolutionist caught my attention. Why it was there I don't know; MacDonald wrote cultural criticism for the New Yorker, and was a moderately well-known intellectual pundit. He'd have a successful Substack nowadays. The heart of this volume was the story of how he stopped being a very ordinary 1930s American leftist, took up Trotskyism and recovered, and made his unhappy peace with the 1950s United States as the world's lesser evil.

In the main essay, first published before the end of the European war in March 1945, he struggles with the morality of the Allies, already fully aware of Auschwitz, the attempted extermination of all European Jews and other misfits, as well as Nazi atrocities across occupied Europe. But even then -- before Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- he wasn't about to let the Allies off an ethical hook for the bombings of cities.

There was much moral indignation, for example, about the [V-8] rocket bombs [aimed by the Germans at London]. But the effects of "saturation bombing," which the British and American air forces have brought to a high degree of perfection, are just as indiscriminate and much more murderous. "The Allied air chiefs," states this morning's paper, "have made the long awaited decision to adopt deliberate terror bombing of German population centers. ... The Allied view is that bombardment of large German cities creates immediate need for relief. This is moved into the bombed areas by rail and road, and not only creates a traffic problem but draws transport away from the battle front. Evacuations of the homeless has the same result." The only mistake in the above is to say the decision has just been adopted ...

Even in 1945, even during a "good war," it was possible to observe that much of what one's "own side" was doing was immoral -- and to wrestle vigorously with the implications. Not necessarily to condemn one's side (MacDonald at length does not) but neither to erase crimes. 

In 1953, MacDonald added a footnote:

Six months after this was written, “we” humane and democratic Ameri­cans dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, destroying in the twinkling of an eye some 90,000 civilians— men, women, and children. This was the climax of the Anglo-American Policy of massacring civilian populations from the air, a policy which later evidence shows to have been morally indefensible, politically disastrous, and militarily of dubious value.

Not surprisingly, in 1963, I had never encountered anything like this moral complexity. MacDonald gave me a righteous preparation for the decade of Civil Rights struggle and Vietnam -- not mention his introduction to the Catholic Worker, a New Yorker profile of Dorothy Day, also reprinted in this book.

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I think I'm going to skip the Oppenheimer film; I've agonized plenty over that era and the reviews don't point me to anything new. Besides, I seldom warm to movies. In 2011, I wrote up the book the film is based on here on the blog if anyone is interested.