Strategic Bombing: Whats the Strategy?

Discuss the concept of strategic bombing. How did it differ from traditional practice in war? What was the motivation behind it and how effective has it been in practice?

Strategic bombing is used in total war to destroy an enemy’s morale. Total war refers to a conflict in which both sides are willing to make any sacrifice in order to achieve victory. A country in the midst of a total war mobilizes its entire economy and society to fight this war and considers all enemy targets legitimate even civilian ones. In fact, this is what strategic bombing is: the purposeful and planned to target of civilian targets in order to apply pressure to the enemy’s government to surrender.

Much of traditional warfare is based upon Hugo Grotius, widely considered the be the father of international law. Because of his life experience living through the 30 years’ war, he wrote a book called “On the Law of War and Peace” describing what warfare should consist of. This book was widely circulated and states that “just wars” must be tolerated because there is no other means of settling conflicts between nations, however there were some very important caveats to this. He believed that in war, civilians should be kept out of the fighting as much as possible, and that war should be conducted between soldiers on the battlefield. For a long time, this “limited war” was used as another form of politics with many wars not involving civilians very much at all. However, as weapons became more lethal, and the stakes of war became greater, total war became the norm for the World Wars.

Strategic bombing comes from the idea that a countries ability to wage war is not determined solely by their military, but also in large part by the civilian population that is complicit in building and supplying the weapons of war that the military uses. During World War two, both the Allies and Nazi Germany engaged in this type of warfare. It often starts by targeting factories that produce tanks, or infrastructure that disrupts supply chains, but, at least during the second world war, it turned into something different. The Allies, as well as the Axis powers, would try and sneak their planes over their enemy’s cities and carpet bomb residential areas attempting to maximize casualties.

The “Blitz” was one such campaign adopted by the Germans. It actually began by accident, on the night of August 24th, 1940, when Luftwaffe bombers missed their military targets on the outskirts of London and dropped their bombs in the middle of the city destroying homes and killing civilians. The British responded by sneaking 40 bombers into the airspace above Berlin before dropping their payloads over the city, inflicting minimal damage. While the damage was not significant, it enraged Hitler and perhaps caused him to make a fatal error that possibly changed the tide of the war.

For 57-nights Hitler bombed London in response to the attack on Berlin. By this time in the war, the Germans had been targeting the royal air forces airfields and areal defense systems and had all but eliminated the power of the RAF. By focusing their firepower on London instead of military targets, this gave the royal air force the break they needed to repair their airfields and fix their planes. The intention of the bombing London, as with any strategic bombing campaign was to demoralize the enemy and push the civilians into pressuring their government into ending the war. This had the opposite effect to the British. It instead brought the British people closer together to face their common enemy.

While it’s clear that the Germans failed in demoralizing the British population, it is not quite as clear whether the American Firebombing of Tokyo had the same result. The firebombing of Tokyo was the single deadliest bombing campaign of the war, worse than Dresden, Hiroshima, or Nagasaki. An estimated 100,000 civilians were burned alive overnight. The goal of the firebombing campaign was the same, to demoralize the Japanese civilian population and force a surrender. However, it’s unclear exactly how much this campaign actually contributed to the end of the war. By this time in the war, the US had all but eliminated Japans air force, and faced little resistance. Many claim it was only a matter of time before Japan surrendered. On the other side however, there is the argument that even though Japan knew that they could no longer win by this point, they refused to surrender. A land invasion of Japan would have resulted in many more American casualties than a strategic bombing campaign.

The final example that I would like to bring up is the firebombing of the city of Dresden. There are many claims, most of them created by the Nazi propaganda machine, that Dresden was a peaceful city that had nothing to do with the war at large. However, the reality was that it was in fact an industrial center for the Reich that produced many of the resources of war for the Nazis. The strategic bombing campaign forced the Nazis to invest many of their resources into anti-aircraft artillery and deploy many of their soldiers into defending their cities that could have been used on the front lines. This was all done so that the German citizens would not feel the full force of Total War. In fact, by the end of the war, almost all the artillery produced by the Germans was anti-aircraft, a stark contrast to the power that their regular artillery commanded near the beginning of the war. By forcing the Germans to defend their cities and change the types of weapons that they had to produce in order to do this, it’s very likely that the strategic bombing campaign in Europe did in fact contribute to ending the war.