A Brief History
On October 22, 1943, 569 bombers of the Royal Air Force dropped firebombs on the German city of Kassel, population around 240,000, killing 10,000 and making another 150,000 homeless. The firestorm that resulted from the bombing destroyed the city center and burned for 7 days. Important military targets were virtually untouched. American and British (Allied) bombing of cities, especially bombing raids with incendiary devices meant to cause massive “firestorms” have become a topic of contention as a military tactic, and is sometimes referred to as “terror bombing.” So what is firebombing cities? A legitimate military tactic or a mere act of terrorism?
Digging Deeper
Kassel had a prewar population of close to 240,000 people, and was home to important war supporting industries, including Henschel factories (Tiger tanks and locomotives), Fieseler Aircraft factory, motor transport factory, engine factory, railway yards, and important military headquarters. Other important government buildings and courts were also present. Obviously, these targets would be legitimate missions for bombing attacks. Unfortunately, Allied bombing in 1943 was not all that accurate, and with effective German anti-air defenses, the British RAF was forced to do their bombing at night, meaning only broad areas could be targeted, and not specific precision targets.
On the night of October 22-23, 1943, 569 British bombers, mostly Lancaster heavy bombers, dropped 460,000 magnesium fire sticks among the 1800 tons of bombs dropped on the city center. The massive ensuing fire resulted in a conflagration known as a “firestorm,” a fire so large and hot that it produces its own cyclonic winds, winds so strong they can actually drag people and objects into the fire. Actual tornadoes can develop during a firestorm. During the Kassel raid, 90% of the city center was destroyed, the industries escaped damage, and by 1945 only about 50,000 people remained in the city. Other raids followed all the way until late March, 1945, but the firestorm raid of October 22-23, 1943 was the largest the city endured.
The vast majority of the people killed in the firestorm were civilians, with the second largest group being hospitalized wounded German soldiers. Although the Kassel firestorm killed fewer people than other famous fire raids such as Hamburg and Tokyo, an incredible 23 square miles of the city was destroyed, more than other fire bombing targets. The Allied tactic of targeting large cities and population centers was supposed to displace workers (it didn’t work) and demoralize the population (bombing never stopped the population from being committed to fighting, neither the British during the “Blitz,” nor the Germans and Japanese). Notable firestorm attacks with resulting massive civilian casualties included cities such as Hamburg (the original firestorm raid of July 27, 1943 in which 46,000 were killed) and Tokyo (100,000 dead and 16 square miles burned out), as well as Dresden, Germany, a city that was supposedly an “open” city not dedicated to the war effort (February 13-14, 1945, 25,000 dead and 8 square miles burned). The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan in August of 1945 are also considered firestorm raids and killed mostly civilians (as many as 60,000+ dead in Hiroshima and half that in Nagasaki).
Since World War II, “terror bombing,” alternately called “carpet bombing,” “area bombing” or “city bombing” has drawn much criticism from humanitarians and measures to restrict the bombing of population centers have been taken. Revisionist historians have sometimes labeled American and British bombers as war criminals and terrorists. Proponents of “strategic bombing” have fiercely defended the tactic, claiming there was no technology at the time to allow for the targeting of precision military and industrial targets while keeping “collateral damage” to a minimum. These bombing proponents also point out the fact that the Germans and Japanese had indiscriminately bombed civilians prior to the Allied practice of city bombing. The debate over the use of atom bombs over Japan centers on whether or not those bombs were really necessary. Apologists claim the US could have just as easily dropped the bombs on places where not many people would be killed, as a demonstration of the power of the new weapons, while those advocates of nuclear warfare claim only by hitting actual cities would the Japanese get the clue and quickly surrender, supposedly avoiding thousands and thousands of Allied casualties an invasion of Japan would result in. (The number of Allied and Japanese casualties in a theoretical invasion of Japan is also hotly debated.)
Question for students (and subscribers): Obviously, the use of nuclear weapons pretty much automatically results in massive civilian collateral damage, and if we are willing to use nukes, why would using fire bombs be any different? Why would carpet bombing be any different? Or should the use of nuclear weapons as well as bombing of civilians in any form be erased from the military repertoire? If so, how could that be accomplished when all sorts of countries (North Korea and Iran, notably) lust after developing nuclear weapons? Please feel free to offer your opinions on the subjects of firebombing, nuclear weapons, and the bombing of cities, both historically and in the modern context in the comments section below this article.
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Charles River Editors. The Firebombing of Dresden: The History and Legacy of the Allies’ Most Controversial Attack on Germany. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2014.
Charles River Editors. The Firebombing of Tokyo: The History of the U.S. Air Force’s Most Controversial Bombing Campaign of World War II. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015.
The featured image in this article, a photograph of two people observing fires ravaging the Bettenhausen district after bombing, is a work of a U.S. Army soldier or employee, taken or made as part of that person’s official duties. As a work of the U.S. federal government, the image is in the public domain. This image is available from the United States Library of Congress‘s Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID cph.3a21897.
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There are no easy answers on this. War shows humanity a mirror and as the historian Will Durant wrote, “From barbarism to civilization required a century, from civilization requires one day.”
War is not based on the chivalric code of the 12th century, but is uniquely terrifying and inevitably destructive, with civilian’s as the main victims. This despite targeting of civilians has been prohibited in Article 25 of the 1899 Hague Conventions, and the 1907 Hague Convention states “the attack or bombardments, by whatever means of towns, villages dwellings, or buildings which are undefended is prohibited.” With the adoption of the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and 1977 Additional protocols the laws of armed conflict were adopted and today, this would be in violation with humanitarian principles and the law of armed conflict.
Prior to the great war, the American State Department declared “civilian bombings are in violation of the most elementary principals of those standards of human conduct which have been as an essential part of civilization.”
President Franklin Roosevelt spoke to the issue as well calling civilian bombing “inhuman barbarism.”
Early in the war, until 1944, at least, American officers recognized this and were very wary of the ethical problems that resulted from indiscriminately bombing of civilians, pursuing a “tactical” or “precision” bombing doctrine which was to target exclusively German military and industrial facilities, and not to bomb entire urban “areas.”
After the conference of Casablanca, , the American commanders finally agreed nn February of 1945to bombard Berlin — foregoing the strategy of targeting only military sites. With the bombing of Berlin, home to nearly four million civilians, “a moral threshold” was crossed. This made everything else, including the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, more acceptable.
Obviously Prime Minister Winston Churchill did not have such reservations and the “absolutely devastating exterminating” attacks against the Nazi homeland suited his character well. Consequently in February 1942 Bomber Command focused on area bombing. The monstrous fire bombings, such as in Berlin, Dresden, Hamburg and Kassel were seen as a small price to save civilization from tyranny and fascism.
These ethical problems and erosion of moral values that govern our world society were never recognized as Winston Churchill noted in a conversation to John Lawrence
“We should never allow ourselves to apologize for what we did to Germany.”
Personally I beg to differ.
tough choices indeed. Pitting the lives of innocent civilians against the lives of your own people. Obviously, the immediate, prudent answer is to bomb, but when the long run is considered, especially against the ethical standard of the future, the question does not seem clear cut at all. The ruthlessness of Germany and Japan probably played a role in the Allies decision to bomb cities. No matter how that decision is justified, the results are sad and lamentable. War is no picnic at many levels.
The bombings on cities and the enormity of atomic bombings on the civilian population of Hiroshima and Nagasaki give reason for pause, and confirms the underlying nature of and man’s barbarity, how man’s capacity to think was overwhelmed with the abandonment of moral constraints and reason, resulting from moral and political degeneration.
I was reminded what Admiral William Leahy, Truman’s chief of staff wrote in his 1950 memoir “the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender… In being the first to use it, we … adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages.”