"“The raid on Darmstadt lasted fifty-one minutes, from the fall of the first Target Indicators to the release of the last Mosquito incendiary load. In the cellars and shelters of the city, almost a hundred thousand people lay numbed by the continuous concussions, the dust swirling in and through the ventilators, the roar of falling masonry all around them. The lighting system collapsed almost immediately, and as foundations trembled cellar-doors buckled, brickwork began to fall. The civil defense organization disintegrated as streets were blocked and bombs cut the vital cable links to the control center on Hugelstrasse and the emergency control on lower Rheinstrasse. The firemen were thenceforth without orders. The fire-watching center behind the city church was itself ablaze. Gas, water and power mains were severed. In the first minutes of the attack, Darmstadt lost its identity as a coherent body of citizens, capable of mutual assistance. It became a splintered, blazing, smoking battlefield…�
- Max Hastings, Bomber Command

The Allied victory over Germany, Italy, and Japan in World War II did not occur without controversies. Even at the time, Allied methods were criticized. This was especially true with regard to America’s fight with Japan, in which the United States firebombed Japanese cities and ultimately dropped two atomic bombs.

No less devastating � and perhaps even more costly � however, was the air war over Germany, especially the nighttime strategic bombing campaigns conducted by the Royal Air Force’s Bomber Command. Starting with ineffectual raids against strictly military targets in 1939, and ending with the complete � and some argue completely unnecessary � razing of cities in 1944 and 1945, British heavy bombers killed thousands of civilians (with total civilian deaths due to bombing somewhere between 300,000 to 600,000).

Great Britain’s bombing operations are the subject at the heart of Max Hastings’s Bomber Command. Originally published in 1979, it has a couple advantages over other books on the same topic. First, Hastings was able to talk to many of the participants, including Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris himself, the head of Bomber Command. This type of top-of-the-hierarchy interviewing is no longer possible, as men of high rank during the Second World War have long since passed away.

The second advantage is Hastings himself. One of the premier author-historians of World War II, Hastings can be depended upon to deliver a bracing narrative peppered with his own candid, blunt judgments. Indeed, Sir Arthur Harris was encouraged to sue Hastings for libel upon Bomber Command’s release. Even if you do not agree with him � and he can be disagreeable � he always brings vim and vigor and a bit of vinegar to the debate.

***

Bomber Command spans the entirety of the war, from 1939-1945. Hastings employs an extremely effective hybrid approach to the material, interspersing wide-angled, strategy-focused chapters, with intimate, unit-based chapters that tell the tales of the flying men. By way of example, the first chapter of Bomber Command is an overview of British bombing strategy that starts in the waning days of the First World War and shows the evolution of operational thinking. The very next section drops us into the midst of 82 Squadron, based out of Norfolk. We meet the men of the squadron, follow them on their missions, learn what they saw and felt and suffered.

There were times when this method meant that certain concepts were introduced without explanation, only to be discussed later. Mainly, though, I loved how Hastings toggled between the tactics and the execution, the technical details and the visceral ones. There are the cold-blooded discussions in the high command about “de-housing� efforts and the relationship between tonnage of bombs, square miles devastated, and lost-work-hours in German factories. Hastings also presents the cat-and-mouse game between Bomber Command and German air defenses: about how the British vectored their planes with radio beacons, and how the Germans tried to jam it; about how the British employed German-speakers to issue false commands, launched spoof raids to distract from the real targets, and used a precise mixture of high-explosive and incendiaries to create the most damage; about how the Germans countered by lighting fires away from population centers � to mimic a dying city � used fake Target Indicators to lead bombers astray, and placed cannon on top of their night-fighters to tear open the bottom of British planes.

Then you get the terrifying details of what it was like for extremely young men to put these plans into motion. I have often thought that being in a submarine � combining the primitively fear-inducing elements of depth, confined spaces, and darkness � would be the worst wartime posting. But Hastings makes a case for night bombing, in which you have height, darkness, and cold, and the reality that if your plane got hit, your last minutes of life would be spent in a blind, nauseatingly-corkscrewing ride into the ground.

***

Hastings is known for a pugnacious style. Early in his career he tended to overpraise the Germans, give all credit for victory to the Russians, and deprecate Great Britain and the United States to the point of insult. Some of that is at play here, as he presents Bomber Command as initially ineffectual and ultimately misguided.

Broadly speaking, area bombing can be judged by the metrics of ethics and effectiveness.

As to morality, my take on Hastings is that he does not put much stock in purely moral arguments. With the exception of certain late-stage missions, such as Dresden (which he deplores), he does not expressly blame the Allies for a policy that would necessarily � even purposefully � kill civilians. In his view, context matters, and beginning in 1939, Great Britain was at war for its very life, against an annihilationist enemy bent on a conquest of such a vast scope it is almost cartoonish in its villainy. Whether or not you ultimately agree, it’s important to remember � as the Second World War recedes further into the past � that Great Britain and Germany had sharply different war aims. Seventy-six years later, with Germany (and Japan) fully reintegrated into the family of nations, the bombing campaign seems like pure murder. Viewed in a vacuum, it was. But the bombings did not occur in a vacuum, they occurred in a framework of aggressive war in which Germany caused incalculable devastation through systematized mass murder, deportations, slave labor, territorial occupation, and theft, and the Allies had to scramble to respond in real time.

According to Hastings, that does not mean the bombings should have been carried out. Purportedly unleashed to break German morale (thus ending hostilities), they pointedly failed to bring about the collapse envisioned by the architects of area bombing. To the contrary, a famed study � the United States Strategic Bombing Survey � showed German civilian morale to be remarkably steady. Partially this was due to Nazi efforts in rushing supplies to afflicted areas, but a lot of it can be attributed to the human ability to endure.

In terms of slowing German industrial production, Hastings nearly mocks the claims made by Bombing Command. Relying heavily � and a bit too credulously � on the viperous Albert Speer, he argues that British area bombing made only a marginal dent on Germany’s ability to wage war, pointing to the fact that production continued to rise till almost the end (which is something that can be managed when you utilize near-unlimited slave labor, and then work those people to their literal deaths).

Hastings is absolutely right that bombing alone could not topple Germany, no matter what Arthur Harris believed. But I think he overstates the ineffectiveness of the bombers, while understating the side-effects of the aerial campaign. At least a million people were needed to staff German air defenses, and even if some of those slots were filled by non-combatants, it still took those people away from other war work. Furthermore, nearly 9,000 88mm guns were used as antiaircraft weapons, instead of being utilized on the Eastern Front, while the Luftwaffe was decimated trying to protect German cities from both British and American bombers.

Hastings's strongest point is the contention that Bomber Command should have spent far more time going after oil than burning homes. Though overlooked because it is not inherently dramatic, oil was the lynchpin of the Second World War. Had an overwhelming effort been made to destroy Germany’s oil stocks, it would not have mattered how many planes and tanks they built, or the level of morale among the civilian population.

***

Bomber Command can be clinical in its deconstruction of high-level thinking, yet it is remarkably empathetic towards the men and women, the bombers and the bombed, who were involved in this cataclysm. Hastings never blames the nineteen, twenty, and twenty-one-year-olds who manned the Wellingtons and Lancasters, who risked and sacrificed their lives, and who experienced things that simply cannot be translated to words. And though it is not the book’s focus, he devotes a chapter � a case study, of sorts � to the death of Darmstadt, vividly recreating a Boschian hellscape that is all the more chilling because other cities experienced far worse. At its best � and it is very good � Hastings puts you there, at the extreme margins of existence, where death and life were so close together they almost became one."