Air University Review, September-October 1969
That tiresome old soldier Clausewitz once offered a warning to soldiers and statesmen, one thus far heeded more in the breach than in the observance. Reflecting on the new forces released by the French Revolution and the wars that followed, he observed that in the new circumstances, once battle was joined, warfare tended to swallow up its original purposes and take on a momentum of its own.
Events since Clausewitz’s day have amply demonstrated the accuracy of that gloomy observation. Who, for example, South or North, could have foreseen that the firing on Fort Sumter would lead to the butchery of Antietam and Gettysburg, the burning of Atlanta and Columbia? Surely none of the powers that rushed to the aid of Serbia in 1914 had any idea at all of the holocaust awaiting them. And who in the governments of Great Britain and France a quarter-century later could have foreseen the outcome of their decision to go to the defense of Poland, a nation whose fate they abandoned before the war was over? Wherever we look (and Vietnam promises to be no exception), the end result of a decision to commit a problem to a solution by force almost invariably turns out to be either unforeseen or unintended or both.
All this is not to say that the intended victim is not done in. Hitler and the Japanese warlords were, after all, defeated, and decisively so. But who in 1939 or 1941 could foresee either the limits to which that war would go or the problems it would in itself create and leave behind? Even within the confines of a single conflict the self-generating momentum of modern warfare seems to carry men well beyond the limits of rational calculation. A case in point might be made of the theorists at the Air Corps Tactical School in the 1930s. Carefully nurturing a doctrine predicated upon the precision bombardment of selected industrial targets, not for a minute would they have conceded that Dresden or Tokyo or Hiroshima lay at the end of the furrow they ploughed.
The nuclear age brought with it new imperatives to find solutions to the problem of controlling and directing military forces. Many rose, both within and without the professional military establishment, to answer the call. But whether we take gaming theory or computer-aided command/control systems, Kahn’s escalation ladders or McNamara’s “controlled response,” the dispassionate observer on the sidelines might be pardoned if he smiles now and then, out of turn as it were. “Have these men done their homework?” he might ask. “Are they aware that their essential confidence in their ability to direct and keep under control an actual conflict situation is a confidence that has been shared by innumerable predecessors?” It is this question that darts in and out between the lines of two new contributions to the ever increasing flood of books dealing with World War II. In the first of the two, and that most likely to be of interest to present readers, the question is put in stark terms; in the second it appears in more muted form, but it is there nonetheless.
Setting aside questions of theme for the moment, let me say at the outset that Anthony Verrier’s Bomber Offensive* is a good book, representing a valuable addition to the pioneering work of Craven and Cate1 in this country and Webster and Frankland2 in Great Britain. A former defense correspondent for New Statesman, Observer, and Economist and author of An Army for the Sixties, Verrier has put together the best one-volume interpretation of the strategic air offensive over Europe. What happened and when is by no means ignored, but his primary concern is with showing how and why the chosen policies and strategies developed. In attempting this he takes into account the struggle of the Royal Air Force to remain independent after World War I, the doctrinal development in the thirties, the situation (and personalities) when war broke out again, Germany’s air defense system, and the purely tactical (or operational) factors that determined the limits of flexibility open to Britain’s Bomber Command and the U.S. Eighth Air Force. Relying largely on the British and American official histories (both of which he takes to task on occasion) and other published materials, Verrier supplements these with the results of interviews with numerous survivors, especially crew members. The interviews paid off in at least one respect: his treatment of the day-to-day life of crew members, in training and in combat, in the air and on the ground, provides insights often lacking in the official accounts.
Unlike a number of other writers, Verrier took the pains to find out, and explain, the precise workings of the radio and navigational aids introduced during the offensive; whether it is Gee, Oboe, H2S, H2X, or SN-2 (German night fighter radar), he introduces each at the appropriate place and describes it in terms a layman can understand. In this same respect his description of the German defensive techniques (e.g., the Kammhuber Line) is more informative than that found in most German accounts that have been published on this side of the water. Thus, in crew life, danger, courage, technique, Verrier’s account, for reasons other than its comparative brevity, is likely to be favored by those performing similar tasks today.
But for all this, Verrier is a journalist first and historian second; in the conduct of the offensive he sees a message for today, and his basic theme dominates the whole book. The offensive, he argues, except for its part in preparing the way for OVERLORD, never held a clear-cut place in overall Allied strategy. As a result of this, along with the personality of Sir Arthur Harris, the vacillation of Churchill, and the American attempt to make General Carl Spaatz “the top airman in Europe,” the RAF closed ranks behind Harris, and the bombing offensive ran on out of control. The defeat of the German Air Force and the depletion of its fuel supply (largely U.S. achievements), coupled with new techniques for increasing the accuracy of both British and American air forces, opened up possibilities never present in the early stages of the war. Nevertheless, by early 1945, wedded to tactical doctrines that earlier were inescapable, both air forces reverted, night and day, to what can only be fairly described as “area bombing.” Having become obsessed with what was tactically feasible and being determined to break the ground stalemate, they pounded away at Germany with club rather than sword; Dresden was the inevitable result. After citing the differences and disagreements at all the higher levels (FDR, Churchill, the Combined Chiefs of Staff, Eisenhower and his staff at SHAEF), Verrier concludes: “The fact nevertheless remains that they were not of one mind and it follows therefore that airmen who knew what they wanted to do were allowed to go ahead and do it, and in their own way.”
If this analysis is correct (and Generals Spaatz, Eaker, and Doolittle would not agree that it is), how might it be relevant for us today? Let Verrier answer:
The short answer to the question is that the twentieth-century version of total and global war has led to a search for deterrents to it, but one on the whole conducted by men whose capacity for taking a political or strategic argument to its logical conclusions has been rather less than their wish to preserve the fabric of national armed forces and, above all other considerations, retain separate, and so far as administratively and operationally possible, independent services for the planning and the prosecution of campaigns by sea, land or air.
Hard words, these, and reflecting deepseated fears. The problem with Verrier’s thesis is one that affects any more or less one-sided interpretation of historical events: somewhere within it lies at least an element of truth; or, lacking that, an insight into the processes of change that participants in the events, blinded by the exigencies of the moment, were unable to grasp. (Cynics, of course, point out that this is what keeps historians in business.) But the major question is unavoidable: Is Verrier’s analysis on the whole correct? This reviewer takes a charitable (wishy-washy?) position and suggests that it is closer to the mark than we might wish it were. A close reading of the records justifies the late Major General Orvil A. Anderson’s observations that during World War II (1) air warfare advanced from infancy to adolescence, and (2) what evolved over Europe was “an improvised air war.” Perhaps the really relevant question is whether the sort of control and review of policy whose absence Verrier deplores is even possible in the throes of total war. The Herman Kahns among us either think so or hope so. If the former, let us be skeptical; if the latter, we can only join them.
Controversy and provocative interpretation take second place to dispassionate narrative in Gordon Wright’s truly excellent and quite unusual history of the war in Europe.** Wright’s volume is the twentieth in the justly famous “Rise of Modern Europe” series, edited by William L. Langer and published by Harper & Row. What makes this volume so unusual (and valuable) is the author’s decision to concentrate not on the military, air, and naval conduct of the war but rather on what was going on behind the fighting fronts, how the war affected the lives and fortunes of the peoples of Europe as a whole. True, he begins in the standard manner: Chapter I, “Europe on the Brink”; Chapter II, “The Expansion of German Power.” But beyond this point he departs from the normal pattern, and only 37 of the remaining 224 pages of narrative are devoted to the resurgence of Allied power and the defeat of the Third Reich. Total war, Wright reminds us, means something more than hurling every available element of physical force into the fray; it also involves the total ordering behind that effort of society in all its parts—political, economic, social, scientific, and psychological.
The chapters on the psychological and scientific dimensions of the war cover ground that has been worked before in great depth if not within integrated narratives of the war as a whole. But other chapters provide cogent summaries of less familiar aspects of the war, its “economic dimension,” for example, and “Europe’s response to conquest: the Resistance movements.” The economies chapter treats the following general topics: the economics of blitzkrieg; the Western Allies, from complacency to action; economics as an offensive weapon; the Soviet economic effort; and the economics of total war in Germany. Here one finds, just as an example, a comparative analysis of what lengths each country went to in supporting its war effort. If the German side of the story is well known to many Americans, the Soviet and British sides are not. Here, however, the mysterious workings of Britain’s Ministry of Economic Warfare (involved in commodity control, pre-emptive buying, selection of targets for the bomber offensive) are explained and evaluated.3 The chapter on Resistance movements covers each country, from Norway to the Balkans, and does not omit the part played by such organizations as the Special Operations Executive, Britain’s equivalent of our Office of Strategic Services (OSS).
It is this broad-gauge treatment that gives the book its special dimension. The student concerned to find out what was going on in Hungary or Czechoslovakia during the Nazi occupation can find out quite a bit if he is a patient researcher and can read a number of languages. But he cannot normally find such matters in a general history of the war-not, that is, until now. And as with all the volumes in this series, the Bibliographical Essay, arranged under 28 subheadings4 in 37 closely packed pages, is a significant contribution in its own right.
Al1 this is not to say, however, that the soldiers’ war finds no place; it is merely condensed and placed within a larger context, one which most veterans of that war never saw but which European civilians can never forget. The bomber offensive, for example, is covered in only nine pages, but, interestingly enough, its contribution to final victory is rated higher than its frequent critics would allow. It “undoubtedly hampered the German war effort in much more than a marginal way. What it failed to do was to destroy civilian morale—to break the German people’s will to work and to endure.”5
Wright concludes with two chapters in which he tries to show, first, how the war itself, particularly the conflicting purposes of the Allies, prepared the way for the cold war; and second, the impact of the war on the social, cultural, and psychological stability of the European peoples. Calmly, dispassionately, and with no trace of the rancor that bedevils the “revisionists” who try to show that the cold war was entirely the fault not of the Russians but of the Western Allies, he traces in detail the misunderstandings and mutual distrust that began to infect the Great Coalition once victory seemed assured.6 These concluding chapters contain many of the most thoughtful pages yet addressed to questions of lasting importance. Not only to end where we began but, more importantly, to give Professor Wright’s own eloquence its due, it seems appropriate to conclude in his words:
The changes for which men consciously thirst and work and die are not the only ones produced by a great war. More profound and more sweeping, perhaps, are those that are unintended and even unforeseen . . . . Thus the Second World War seems to have initiated or reinforced trends toward a mood of lawlessness, toward a confusion and corruption of values, toward a decline in man’s belief in a rational universe.. . . The battlefield, no longer limited and defined, was everywhere; it was occupied by civilians and soldiers alike. . . .Old beliefs in causality tended to dissolve before these evidences of chaos; there was a growing sense that irrational forces rule man’s fate. No scientist, no historian has yet discovered a technique for measuring the enduring after effects of war; but no thoughtful man can doubt their severity or their persistence.
United States Air Force Academy
*Anthony Verrier, The Bomber Offensive (New York: Macmillan, 1969, $8.95), x and 373 pp., appendices, maps, diagrams, bibliography, index.
**Gordon Wright, The Ordeal Of Total War, 1939-1945 (New York: Harper & Row, 1968, $7.95), xviii and 315 pp. (Also available In paperback, Harper Torchbook, TB 1408, $2.25.)
Notes
1. Wesley Frank Craven and James Lea Gate, eds., The Army Air Forces in World War II (University of Chicago Press, 6 vols., 1948-55).
2. Sir Charles Webster and Noble Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany, 1939-1945 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 4 vols., 1961).
3. The U.S. counterpart to Britain’s Ministry of Economic Warfare was our Foreign Economic Administration. While almost all histories of the war refer to the FEA’s main responsibility, the Lend-Lease program, rare indeed are these that treat its other, rather more clandestine, activities. Very secret at the time and involving activities somewhat at variance with those normally associated with a free-enterprise system, the whole story of the FEA (like that of the Economic Warfare Division of the U.S. Embassy in London) will probably never be told.
4. To wit: published or microfilm source materials; periodicals; general accounts; immediate background; the problem of Hitler’s war aims; military aspects, general; Polish campaign; Norwegian campaign; western campaign; Battle of Britain; Mediterranean and North African campaigns; the war in Russia; the campaign in Italy; Normandy and the invasion of Germany; war in the air; war on the sea; espionage and intelligence operations; civil-military relations in wartime; economic aspects of the war years; science and technology; psychological warfare; psychological impact of the war; German occupation policies; Nazi persecution of “racial” and political enemies; Resistance movements (5 pages on this alone); wartime diplomacy intellectual and cultural aspects of the war period; domestic events in the nations of Europe.
5. This view accords with that of Webster and Frankland and the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey. The latter’s report on morale concludes that morale was affected, but nowhere does it go so far as to suggest that morale was destroyed. Craven and Gate pretty much skirt the question. Among Verrier’s five specific conclusion, (pp. 312-23) is one that states: “. . . the collapse or even the deterioration of enemy civilian morale should not be included as an objective.” This conclusion is labeled a “factor” pertaining to air warfare as demonstrated in World War II. The other four conclusions are that control of operations must be concentrated; intelligence of enemy strength must be reliable and up to date—more so than is required for ground operations; command of the air is more than the capacity to continue operations; and “precision bombing” is a term of art only, making for false optimism and inaccurate estimates of the ratio of force to target.
6. Chapter X abounds with examples. One to which Wright gives special place is the U.S. and British refusal to allow the Soviets to participate in the Italian settlement in 1943. In Stalin’s eyes, he suggests, here was the cordon sanitaire being re-established. “Although Stalin’s charges of bad faith were unfounded, he was doubtless convinced of their validity.”
Major David MacIsaac (A. M., Yale University) is an Assistant Professor of History, United States Air force Academy. Since his commissioning in 1957 from AFROTC, his assignments have been as Chief, Personnel Control Branch, 4245th Strategic Wing, Sheppard AFB, Texas, 1959-61; Chief, Officers Branch, Military Personnel Division, Hq Sixteenth Air force, Torrejon AB, Spain, 1961-64; Instructor in History, USAFA, 1964-66; and Ph.D candidate in history (AFIT-sponsored), Duke University, 1966-68. His dissertation on the U. S. Strategic Bombing Survey, 1944-47, is nearing completion. His articles have been published in Air University Review, and he is on the Editorial Board of Aerospace Historian.
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.
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