The Bomber Mafia - Chapter Three: Human Sympathy PDF

## The Bomber Mafia ### Chapter Three “He was lacking in the bond of human sympathy.” The Bomber Mafia was ready for war. A British motorcycle messenger drove up to my residence at Castle Combe, outside London. He delivered a message from General [Hap] Arnold, which, after decoding, said "Meet...

## The Bomber Mafia ### Chapter Three “He was lacking in the bond of human sympathy.” The Bomber Mafia was ready for war. A British motorcycle messenger drove up to my residence at Castle Combe, outside London. He delivered a message from General [Hap] Arnold, which, after decoding, said "Meet me tomorrow morning at Casablanca." -Commanding General Ira Eaker Casablanca, in what was then French Morocco, was the site of a secret conference in January of 1943 between Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt. The war was just starting to turn in the Allies’ favor, and the two leaders were meeting to plan what they hoped would be the final, victorious chapter. Both men brought their senior military brass. For Roosevelt that included General Hap Arnold, who commanded all American airpower. And now, midway through the conference, Arnold was sounding the alarm by sending an urgent wire to his most important deputy. Ira Eaker was a distinguished graduate of the Air Corps Tactical School at Maxwell Field. Eaker was a charter member of the Bomber mafia, a true believer in daylight high-altitude precision bombing. And he was the head of the Eighth Air Force- the fleet of bombers stationed in England that was charged with hitting all the targets outlined in the crucial war-planning document AWPD-1. Come to Casablanca, the message to Eaker said. Now. As Eaker recalled it: They had kept the Casablanca Conference under such secrecy and wraps that I didn’t even know what that meant. But I knew that I’d better comply. So I called General [Frederick Louis] Anderson, who was the bomber commander, and I said, “Have one of your crews pick me up in a B-17 at Bovington at midnight tonight to fly me to Casablanca, to arrive there shortly after daylight tomorrow morning.” Eaker arrived and went straight to General Arnold’s villa. And General Arnold said, “I have bad news for you, son. Our president has just agreed, upon the urging of the prime minister, that we discontinue our daylight bombing and you join the RAF in night bombing.” The RAF was the Royal Air Force. The ideas that had so enthralled Eaker and his classmates at Maxwell Field did not have quite the same effect on the other side of the Atlantic. The British were skeptical about precision bombing. They had never fallen in love with the Norden bombsight. They never got tantalized by the possibility of dropping a bomb into a pickle barrel from thirty thousand feet. The Bomber Mafia said that you break the will of your enemy by crippling it economically - by carefully and skillfully taking out the aqueducts and the propeller-spring factories - so that the enemy is incapable of going on. They believed that modern bombing technology allowed you to narrow the scope of war. The British disagreed. They thought the advantage of having fleets of bombers was that you could broaden the scope of war. They called it "area bombing," which was a euphemism for a bombing strategy in which you didn’t really aim at anything in particular. You just hit everything you could before flying home. Area bombing is not done in daylight, because if you aren’t bombing at anything specific, why do you need to see anything? And it was explicitly aimed at civilians. It said: You should hit residential neighborhoods, and keep coming night after night, in wave after wave, until your enemy’s cities are reduced to rubble. Then the will of the enemy is going to sink so low that it will just give up. When the British wanted a better euphemism for what they were doing, they called it “morale bombing” - bombing with the intent to destroy the homes and cities of your enemy and reduce your enemy’s population to a state of despair. The British thought the American Bomber Mafia was crazy. Why were they taking all the risks of flying during the day against targets too hard to hit? The British were trying to win a war, and it seemed to them that the Americans were holding an undergraduate philosophy seminar. So at Casablanca, Churchill said to FDR, Enough. You’re doing it our way now. And in a panic, General Arnold summoned his commander in Europe, Ira Eaker, to tell him the bad news: area bombing had won the day. But Ira Eaker was a member of the Bomber mafia. He wasn’t about to give up so easily. In Eaker’s words: I said, "General, that makes no sense at all. Our planes are not equipped for night bombing; our crews are not trained in night bombing. We’ll lose more crews coming back into this fog-shrouded island in the darkness than we will attacking German targets in the daytime.” I said, “If they're going to make this kind of a mistake, count me out. I won’t play.” Well, he said, “I suspected that would be your reaction... I know the reasons you’ve outlined as well as you do. But... since you feel so strongly about it, I'll see if I can make a date for you to talk to the prime minister tomorrow morning.” Eaker went back to his quarters and stayed up half the night drafting a response for Churchill. Everyone knew that Churchill wouldn’t read a document longer than a page. So the briefing had to be really brief. And convincing. So when I reported in, the old PM came down the stairway—the high glass windows and the sun was shining through the orange groves—and he came down resplendent in his air commodore’s uniform. He had a penchant, which I knew of—when he was seeing a naval person, he wore his naval uniform; air, air [uniform], and so forth. Well, he said, "General, your General Arnold tells me you're very unhappy about my request to your president that you discontinue your daylight bombing effort and join Marshal [Arthur] Harris and the RAF in the night effort.” I said, “Yes, sir, I am. And I’ve set down here on a single page the reasons why I’m unhappy. And I have served long enough in England now to know that you will listen to both sides of any controversy before you make a decision.” So he sat down on the couch and took up this piece of paper, called me to sit beside him, and he started reading. And he read like some aged person, with his lips, half audibly. So what did Eaker write? The most basic argument he could come up with. “I’d said that if the British bombed by night and the Americans by day, bombing them thus around the clock will give the devils no rest.” When he got to that point of the memo, Churchill repeated the line to himself. As if he were trying to understand the logic. Then he turned to Eaker. He said, "You have not convinced me now that you are right, but you have convinced me you should have a further opportunity to prove your case. So when I see your president at lunch today, I shall say to him that I withdraw my objection and my request that you join the RAF in night bombing, and I shall suggest that you be allowed to continue for a time." The Americans got a reprieve. By the skin of their teeth. ## 2 Put yourself in the shoes of the Bomber Mafia at this moment: Ira Eaker, Haywood Hansell, Harold George, Donald Wilson, all the others from the Air Corps Tactical School. They have been working side by side with their closest ally to defeat the Nazis. And yet their ally seems incapable of comprehending the conceptual advance they have made in waging war. When he first got to England, Eaker lived at the home of his counterpart in the Royal Air Force, Arthur Harris, otherwise known as Bomber Harris. They would drive together every morning to bomber command headquarters, at High Wycombe. As historian Tami Biddle explains: It’s very odd. Ira Eaker and Arthur Harris have doctrines of bombing that are 180 degrees out from one another, completely different. Yet they become fast friends. They really genuinely like each other. In fact, at one point, Harris tells Eaker, if anything happens to [my wife] Jill and me... we’d like you to have [our daughter] Jackie. We’d like you to be her godfather. It’s quite the interesting relationship, but they are operating in completely different ways. Marshal Harris’s steadfast belief in the power of “morale bombing” must have offended Eaker. Or at the very least baffled him. Because what had the British just been through? The Blitz. The Blitz was a textbook example of area bombing. On September 4, 194o, Hitler had declared: “The hour will come when one of us will break, and it will not be the National Socialist Germany!” And in the fall of 194o, he sent German bombers thundering across the skies above London, dropping fifty thousand tons of high-explosive bombs and more than a million incendiary devices. Hitler believed that if the Nazis bombed the working-class neighborhoods of East London, they would break the will of the British population. And because the British believed the same theory, they were terrified that the Blitz would cost them the war. The British government projected that between three and four million Londoners would flee the city. The authorities even took over a ring of psychiatric hospitals outside London to handle what they expected to be a flood of panic and psychological casualties. But what actually happened? Not that much! The panic never came. As a British government film from 1940 described it, “London raises her head, shakes the debris of the night from her hair, and takes stock of the damage done. London has been hurt during the night. The sign of a great fighter in the ring is, Can he get up from the floor after being knocked down? London does this every morning." The psychiatric hospitals were switched over to military use because no one showed up. Some women and children were evacuated to the countryside as the bombing started, but by and large people stayed in the city. And as the Blitz continued, as the German assaults grew heavier, the British authorities began to observe—to their astonishment—not just courage in the face of the bombing but also something closer to indifference. The Imperial War Museums later interviewed many survivors of the Blitz, including a woman named Elsie Elizabeth Foreman. As she described it, We used to go in the shelter all the time, and then as they petered off a little bit, we got a bit blasé, I suppose you might say. And we stayed in bed some of the time, but we still used to go dancing. [If] there was an air raid on, if anybody wanted to leave, they could, and all that. And the same at the pictures, if we went to the pictures... we used to just sit there. We never used to move and go out or anything until the actual time when we were bombed out twice, I think. We weren’t actually bombed out the first time, just the glass... One of my sisters—she came home and she was sweeping the glass from the front, because all the windows came in. But she swept it into the curb. And my eldest sister came out and—this was during an air raid that the all-clear hadn’t gone. And they had this terrific row because my sister had put my oldest sister’s best high-heel shoes on, which were very hard to get in those days, same as silk stockings were... Bombs were dropping all over the place, and there were these two having a row over a pair of shoes and sweeping the glass at the same time. It turns out that people were a lot tougher and more resilient than anyone expected. And it also turns out that maybe if you bomb another country day in and day out, it doesn’t make the people you’re bombing give up and lose faith. Maybe it just makes them hate you, their enemy, even more. The area-bombing advocates had this cleverly deceptive word they used to describe the effect of their bombing: dehousing. As if you could destroy a house without disturbing its occupants. But if my house is gone, doesn’t that make me more dependent on my government, not more inclined to turn on my government? Historian Tami Biddle takes the long view on area bombing: “I think we’ve seen this over and over again in the history of bombing. We’ve seen [that] the state, the target state—if we’re talking about coercive bombing, long-range coercive bombing—finds ways of absorbing the punishment if it’s really determined to do so.” When Blitz survivor Sylvia Joan Clark was asked whether she ever thought the Germans might win the war, she replied, No. I never thought that. I am very proud to be English, and I thought they’ll never beat us. Never. I had that in my heart that if I worked, and I helped everybody, we’d get there in the end…I used to say this to people. It’s no use being down. I had a home. I’ve had a mother. I’ve had a father and I’ve lost [them], but I’ve made up my mind nobody’s going to get me down. I’m going to survive, and I’m to work hard and be proud that England will be England again. Once they tallied up the damage, the British determined that more than forty-three thousand people had been killed and tens of thousands injured. More than a million buildings were damaged or destroyed. And it didn’t work! Not on London or Londoners. It did not crack their morale. And despite that lesson, just two years later, the Royal Air Force was proposing to do the exact same thing to the Germans. Ira Eaker said that he and RAF Marshal Harris, when they were living together, had discussions—though I’m guessing arguments would be a better term. They’d talk long into the night, and once, Eaker turned to Harris and made this exact point: “I asked Harris if the bombing of London had affected the morale of the British. He said it made them work harder. But in the case of the Germans, however, he thought the reaction was different because they were a different breed from the British.” To Eaker and the rest of the Bomber Mafia, the British attitude made no sense. And it was only later that they came to understand why. The British had their own version of a Bomber Mafia—with an equally dogmatic set of views about how airpower ought to be used. Actually, the word *mafia* is not quite right—more like a single bombing mafioso. A godfather. And his name was Frederick Lindemann. ## 3 In the decades after the Second World War, scholars on all sides tried to make sense of what the war had meant, and among them was a prominent British scientist named C. P. Snow. Snow had served in the British government during the war. He was a Cambridge don, a successful novelist, and friends with everyone who was anyone in the British intellectual elite. In 1960 he came to Harvard University to give a lecture, a big chunk of which was devoted to the story of Frederick Lindemann.* Snow believed that Lindemann had played a hugely underappreciated role in the way the British chose to use their airpower. If you wanted to understand the befuddling attitude the British had about bombing, Snow said, you had to understand Lindemann. As Snow put it in his Harvard lecture: Lindemann was by any odds a very remarkable and a very strange man. He was a real heavyweight of personality. Lindemann was quite un-English. I always thought if you met him in middle age, you’d have thought he was the kind of central European businessman that one used to meet in the more expensive hotels in Italy… I mean, he might have come from Düsseldorf. He was heavy-featured, pallid, always very more about Lindemann in "The Prime Minister and the Prof," an episode from the second season of my podcast, Revisionist History. * explore He truly believed what the Army and Navy were telling him. And that is that we’re going to destroy machines of war, not the people of war. We’re not going to do like [we did in] World War I, where we slaughtered millions of soldiers. We’re not going to try to slaughter millions of civilians. We’re only going to try to blow up factories and blow up machines of war. And he bought into that. That was part of his basic philosophy of life, his Christianity. So for Commanding General Ira Eaker, that midnight trip to Casablanca to save precision bombing was the most morally consequential act of his life. And when he came back to his air base in England, he said, We need a new plan for the war in Europe, one that will show the British that there is a better way to wage an air war. And whom did he pick to think up that plan? Haywood Hansell, now General Hansell, one of the brightest of the young lights in the US Army Air Forces. The same Hansell who would one day abruptly lose his job to Curtis LeMay on the island of Guam. Who worked in the production of munitions must expect to be treated as active soldiers. Otherwise, where do you draw the line? They were all active soldiers, to my mind. Children. Mothers. The elderly. Nurses in hospitals. Pastors in churches. When you make the leap to say that we will no longer try to aim at something specific, then you cross a line. Then you have to convince yourself that there is no difference between a soldier on the one hand and children and mothers and nurses in a hospital on the other. The whole argument of the Bomber Mafia, their whole reason for being, was that they didn’t want to cross that line. They weren’t just advancing a technological argument. They were also advancing a moral argument about how to wage war. The most important fact about Carl Norden, the godfather of precision bombing, is not that he was a brilliant engineer or a hopeless eccentric. It’s that he was a devoted Christian. As historian Stephen McFarland puts it, You might wonder, if he thought he was being in service to humanity, why he would develop sights to help people drop bombs. And the reason was because he was a true believer that by making bombing accuracy better, he could save lives. He truly believed what the Army and Navy were telling him. And that is that we’re going to destroy machines of war, not the people of war. We’re not going to do like [we did in] World War I, where we slaughtered millions of soldiers. We’re not going to try to slaughter millions of civilians. We’re only going to try to blow up factories and blow up machines of war. And he bought into that. That was part of his basic philosophy of life, his Christianity. So for Commanding General Ira Eaker, that midnight trip to Casablanca to save precision bombing was the most morally consequential act of his life. And when he came back to his air base in England, he said, We need a new plan for the war in Europe, one that will show the British that there is a better way to wage an air war. And whom did he pick to think up that plan? Haywood Hansell, now General Hansell, one of the brightest of the young lights in the US Army Air Forces. The same Hansell who would one day abruptly lose his job to Curtis LeMay on the island of Guam.