10 ms·

Burning Hamburg 1943 – the first culmination of liberal militarism

32 points by hackandthink 3y ago

magwa101 3y ago
[dead]
paganel 3y ago
Read a diplomatic dispatch sent by the Romanian ambassador in Athens sometime around 1941-42, maybe 1943, where the Romanian government was informed that Turkey didn’t want to get involved in the war (presumably on the Germans’ side) because Istanbul would have been burned to the ground via aerial bombardments. Back then Istanbul was made up mostly of wood-based buildings.
tgv 3y ago
What's the point being made here? Bombing bad, but in increasingly convoluted prose? Economical considerations bad? Does the author think the UK had the manpower to simply waltz into Germany and convince Hitler peacefully of his folly? Or the capability to sustain what was effectively a siege forever? The author wants to express indignation at something. That much is clear from the shrill tones of the opening paragraph. That the UK and US relied on high-tech is not that odd. It is odd that the author contrasts that with Germany. They too did fight a high tech war (U boats, enigma, tanks, V1 and V2), but they couldn't achieve their goals with just tech. You don't get Lebensraum by bombing your neighbours. You need an actual occupation force. The UK was very much on the defensive, and had to resort to blockades and bombing to stay afoot. Or is the point "to destabilise liberal complacency", whatever that may mean?
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  The weird use of "liberal" confused me, too. It's more "liberal" to bomb than to have ground troops do the killing, because it minimizes your own casualties? No, that's just efficient use of military resources. "Liberal" might be holding on to the idea of minimizing civilian casualties. (Though, in an industrial production war like WWII, that might be a significant handicap. And it wasn't the Allies that started the bombing of civilians.) So, yeah. What's the point being made here? It sure feels like some weird axe is being ground, but it's done so badly that I can't even be sure what the axe is.
  - c_crank 3y ago
    To the extent that there is any historical continuity between then and now, the 'liberal' USA still tends to value heavy bombing as a way to condition enemy forces into surrendering. Something it has a poor overall track record of.
  - kouru225 3y ago
    It seems to me like the author thinks being smart is “liberal” and also he doesn’t like it.
  - mediumdeviation 3y ago
    That's what confused me too. Is the point because somehow the word liberal is in both "liberal" (as in unrestricted, total?) war and liberal economics / politics that there's somehow a connection there? That's such a tenuous argument it seems incongruent with the rest of the article which seems decently articulated.
  - claytongulick 3y ago
    I've noticed in academia, as well as other places, that's it's becoming more fashionable to be anti "liberal", as in, against small "L" liberal values. There's a sort of concerted effort to destroy the meaning of the word, or it's been co-opted by political organizations and bent to an extent that it's become meaningless. To those on the "right" - the word "liberal" is almost a curse word, it doesn't mean liberal values (which many of them share) it means some fuzzy combination of "woke, democrat, evil, america hating". To progressives, it's an increasingly inconvenient word as it becomes more difficult to reconcile the cognitive dissonance of simultaneously supporting authoritarian positions (censorship, consolidated power, militarism, embrace of public/private blurring, health dictates) while attempting to retain the mantle of liberalism that powered the "left" for the past fifty years. So it's easier for everyone to just attack the word, this article is a great example of that. It leaves us "classic liberals" stranded on a sinking island surrounded by sharks.
    - c_crank 3y ago
      "The classical liberals seem much like the old Tsarists, happy to wax poetic about a regime they were incapable of defending or restoring."
- JPLeRouzic 3y ago
  > ". The UK was very much on the defensive" By bombing Hamburg or Dresden and deliberately targeting civilians? Even France, Belgium or the Netherlands were bombed. They even bombed their own troops during Operation Overlord! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_Wa... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_the_Bezuidenhout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_the_Bezuidenhout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgium_in_World_War_II#cite_ref-45 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgium_in_World_War_II#cite_r... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Normandy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Normandy https://www.wiki-rennes.fr/Bombardements_des_9_et_12_juin_1944 https://www.wiki-rennes.fr/Bombardements_des_9_et_12_juin_19...
  - tekla 3y ago
    Yes. You can be on the defensive and still bomb enemy positions
  - Aloha 3y ago
    As I point out in a parallel comment - By 1943 the Germans had mostly successfully moved their production to small workshops, which were often in cities. Essentially providing a justification why any civilian population center was also a valid military target.
  - kouru225 3y ago
    Yes. What did you want them to do? Deescalate? England’s absurd attempts to deescalate in response to Hitler’s aggression was what made WW2 a war in the first place.
- gumby 3y ago
  The point is that modern war is an industrial process. The failure to recognize this led to the vulnerability of the US processes from Viet Nam through the 2000s' Iraq and Afghanistan. The irony of this failure is that the US civil war was the first true economy-vs-economy conflict, with mechanized rail changing the scope and nature of conflict (while actual combat was still with napoleonic-class cannon, cavalry charge and the like). European powers mostly ignored this conflict, and so it took a while for them to understand what WWI was really about. Then the US took this lesson to heart, and didn't recognize that the only alternative for their adversaries was asymmetrical combat...a full circle as that was the approach the US had taken in its own war of liberation from a superpower. The other, even more meaningful point about industrialized warfare is that it has its own Taylorist logic. For the European theatre, they built an enormous machine that assembled planes, filled them with fuel and tons of bombs, and then daily launched them eastward from the UK. Long after this machine could materially affect the course of the war it was still operating at full tilt, with the allies seemingly unable to switch it off. In small (pop < 50K ppl today) cities of Germany you can find plaques in the Marktplätze indicating that the city had been flattened, bombed for the first time, in late April 1945. The machine had been flattening cities in order of importance, and had run down the list to the point where they'd run out of anything worth bombing. It's hard to argue that any of those bombings were individually "unethical" (assuming you can accept carpet bombing cities at all) because they were bureaucratic decisions with no real room for individual judgement any more. That is a critical lesson both for wartime and for peacetime. We don't really mind if a company makes a worthless product -- it merely goes out of business. But at the state/strategic level it can be tragic.
  - ltbarcly3 3y ago
    The Germans could have avoided bombing entirely by not attacking their neighbors and trying to genocide 1/2 or more of the population of the countries they invaded to "make room" for more Germans. At any point in the war the Germans could have stopped it, but they didn't, they kept shoveling children in to ovens (or for slavs, bullets to the back of the head at the edge of a ditch). All the German cities could have been spared if they had simply stopped murdering everyone and stealing everything. That they chose to continue isn't the fault of the victims who were desperately trying to conclude the war to avoid the sensless deaths. There are moral grey areas in war but trying to find them in the desperate attempts to slow down and stop the NAZI genocide machine, by the victims of that machine who were still being killed by the millions, is a bit insulting. I would love to be able to put these great military minds in charge of the allies in 1940 and see how well they stick to their moral sensibilities as they become directly responsible for more and more deaths.
woodruffw 3y ago
The US and UK's reliance on heavy bombing is thought provoking, but perhaps not as profound or unique as the author suggests: Germany attempted a similar policy at the beginning of the war (culminating in the London Blitz), and largely failed for strategic rather than technical reasons. In other words: what really sets the Allied bombings apart is learning from the strategic errors that the Germans made (destroying entire industrial bases, not trying to smear small amounts of damage across the target's entire economy), not some uniquely "liberal" world view.
- hackandthink 3y ago
  I agree it's not unique: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_of_strategic_bombing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_of_strateg... Bombing of North Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia is missing. The terrible scale of Bombing of North Korea is not well known: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_North_Korea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_North_Korea
- JoeDaDude 3y ago
  Sir Arthur Harris, the British head of Bomber Command which was responsible for the bombing campaign against Germany, has some choice words on how the bombing was a response to Germany's own campaigns earlier in the war: "The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ujzVqwJnB0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ujzVqwJnB0
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    There's also the fact that it was well understood that Germany meant to conquer everyone. This was a war of survival for all countries involved
- hef19898 3y ago
  No, the allies didn't learn. The British knew very well that moral was not negatively affected by the Blitz, nor was industry. The targeted workers living quarters and civilians regardless. And no amounz of data confirming that these bombings had no real impact on German production rates, nor moral (in fact, POWs from Normandy confirmed that they fought to defend Germany from allied bombing), and still contimued. Heck, the leveled Caen in France in order to destroy three bridges. Caen was leveled, thousands killed. And the bridges still intact.
Aloha 3y ago
I generally disagree with this article, mostly tone - but also conclusions too. What other options were there for the Allies? By 1943 the Germans had mostly successfully moved their production to small workshops, which were often in cities. This is also in the long shadow the Blitz cast, which inflicted not dissimilar damage to London. If London was a valid Military Target in 1940, then Hamburg was certainly one in 1943. To quote from wikipedia about sessions learned by the British the Blitz "From 1943 to the end of the war, he [Harris] and other proponents of the area offensive represented it [the bomber offensive] less as an attack on morale than as an assault on the housing, utilities, communications, and other services that supported the war production effort." They do get one thing correct however - the horrors of the Nuclear Bomb are not that unique, many many more were killed, in Europe and Pacific theaters by firebombing (I'll point folks at the firebombing of Tokyo as a starting point) as the than were killed by nuclear bombs. Both Germany and Japan violated the normal, commonly understood rules of war - we responded, in ways that, could be argued to have an ethical shadow - and while I dont consider these acts unethical (including the nuclear bomb), they're not ethically clean - they're a gray area that can only be justified in context. We have this mental narrative of war that its this clean thing, either black or white, just or unjust - and thats not reality, war it dirty, even when its just and good - for a good reason, it means much death and killing, it leaves indelible stains on those who fight, and those who survive for the rest of their lives. To present otherwise is foolish and lying to ourselves.
- c_crank 3y ago
  >What other options were there for the Allies? We know that what actually ended the war was invading the territory that was held, not strategic bombing. Not that it really matters, since the German state was so thoroughly interrogated for the war that they aren't going to complain, but the Allied bombing campaign bears much similarity to the Vietnam bombing campaign in that it was killing stuff for the stake of killing stuff with little tactical or strategic advantage.
  - Aloha 3y ago
    How much longer would the war have lasted without the strategic bombing? Would those civilians have died anyhow had the germans had the military materiel to hold each city longer, which would have required fighting block by block - Imagine the Battle of Berlin but on a continental scale.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
With regard to Oppenheimer, I find it interesting that others on the Manhattan project such as von Neumann and Teller did not have nearly the angst about nuclear weapons. Looking at where they were born may make sense. Oppenheimer was born in the United States in New York City. He had probably never faced a real threat of invasion and destruction. However, von Neumann and Teller were both born in Hungary and had seen first hand that there is evil in the world, and the world is a dangerous place, and the way to protect ourselves from that danger is being more powerful than your enemies. There is no good war. All war involves killing. In the grand scheme of morality, killing 18 year old conscripts is also pretty bad.
kouru225 3y ago
It’s arguably this exact mentality that separated the Nazis and the rest of the Axis from the Allies. The Nazis had valued an outdated concept of ruling with an iron fist, which led them to discount the opinions of their scientists (as well as all other intellectuals.) Whatever advantage they gained by being absurdly and annoyingly aggressive, they slowly lost as the Allies gained the technological advantage. The Allies then promptly punished them for their mistake. I think this author is correctly identifying the attitude shift, but they don’t seem to understand that the attitude they’re describing was actually correct at the time. They’re passing judgment on it because they’ve seen it used for evil in recent years, but it’s like a bit of old useless programming: it was probably added in for a reason, and that reason was probably a pretty good one at the time even if it’s now a nuisance or even outright problematic in the current era. The Allies didn’t want to go into war, but were forced to by Hitler. Hitler’s actions were a bit like the tragedy of the commons: if you break the precedent then the precedent is broken and we all suffer together. The Nazis were bombing London every night. What are you gonna do? “When they go low we go high?” I mean, cmon…
- petsfed 3y ago
  >Whatever advantage they gained by being absurdly and annoyingly aggressive, they slowly lost as the Allies gained the technological advantage I think there was also a lag between when the Nazis committed any given strategic blunder, and when the real consequences of that blunder came due. Hitler's obsession with Stalingrad in particular, bailing out Mussolini's adventurism, the constant and maddening obsession with complexity in their war materiel, etc Its also not that the Allies were more technologically advanced per se, its that they had a much better understanding of design for manufacturing. The Sherman tank and the T-34 were, in most every respect, inferior tanks to the Tiger. But in the time it took to build that 1 tiger, American factories churned out 6 Shermans. Soviet factories churned out 6 T-34s. The entire German offensive strategy hinged on blitzkrieg, and their economy was barely able to sustain that, let alone a besieged economy with limited resources, supporting increasingly bogged-down and defensive campaigns. A lot of hay is made out of the Nazi superweapons, but not many people reflect on the fact that only about 50,000 Kubelwagens were ever produced, while the US shipped that many Jeeps to the Soviets, then built another 550,000 for themselves. Because of all of this, Germany basically lost the war when they failed to hold any of their objectives on the Ostfront, it just took years for the whole train to come to a stop. I think a similar analysis can be applied to Japan regarding their failure to end the Pacific carrier fleet at Pearl Harbor (I recall reading that as Japanese industrial capability failed through the war, A6M "Zero" fighters had to be moved by horses because Japan could not afford the cars necessary to move them around at the factory).
dhoe 3y ago
Just some context, in light of some of the comments here - Tooze is a highly respected professor of economic history, and author of an 800 pages book on the economy of Nazi Germany.
dhoe 3y ago
Just some context, in light of some of the comments here - Tooze is a highly respected professor of economic history, and author of an 800 pages book on the economy of Nazi Germany.
LargeTomato 3y ago
I like this article a lot. War is not a struggle of good vs evil. It is a series of unfortunate trolly problems. When we tell people that the allies were the "good guys" it makes it sound like all of their actions were good. That's inaccurate and dangerous. They may have resulted in a victory over a deeply evil enemy but they also inflicted untold violence. Let's say you're Obama and you need to authorize a drone strike. There's an 85% chance the target is a terrorist. The target is surrounded by children. One of the children is a US citizen. Do you authorize the strike? There's no proper answer here. It's morally grey. It was undoubtedly important to destroy the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese. I hope no one on HN would question that. But that doesn't mean the allies were morally absolved from their own violence. The allies have 2 options. Option 1, firebomb and nuke Japan. Option 2, invade and slaughter millions, sacrificing your own military in the process and ceding north Japan to the Soviets. Are you morally justified to go with option 1? Maybe. Are we better off today for picking option 1? Probably. But trolly problems don't have good and bad, they have bad and worse.
- rented_mule 3y ago
  I think there's important learning in this that I wish all leaders of militarily powerful nations understood. When engaging in war, the one certainty for all sides is that it will be a tragedy. Even if you "win", there will be horrible consequences (on your own side!) in terms of lives lost, lives irreparably damaged, money / resources lost, and any moral/ethical high ground. In anything of any scale, this can't be avoided. Therefore, the choice to go to war is only sane if not going to war would be an even bigger tragedy. It's not hard to argue that Hitler taking over Europe (and beyond) would be worse. When viewed in this light, Russia going into Ukraine, the US going into Iraq twice, the US going into Vietnam, etc. all look like pretty bad decisions. But we keep falling into this complacency that the next war will be an easy one or a clean one. It will not, that is not what war is.
AlbertCory 3y ago
Comments so far seem to have ignored the relationship between the Eastern front and the strategic bombing. In fact, they were directly related. Stalin agitated ceaselessly for the Allies to open a second front in France, even back to 1942, to draw off German troops. The Allies weren't ready, but the bombing did at least tie up a lot of German planes and anti-aircraft that otherwise would have been used against the USSR. It had a political value, in other words. Whether it really did disrupt German logistics for the Eastern front is debatable, but it showed Stalin that at least the Allies were doing something. Even if the German civilian suffering was for naught, I don't think Stalin saw it that way.
paulmd 3y ago
Framing this as "liberal militantism" is going to be a tough take for this board, and for people on the english-speaking, western-dominated internet generally. But it's not an unfair take, as LeMay said they were committing war crimes, and if they'd lost the war then history would have regarded their actions very, very differently. We simply are not socialized by media to think of western war crimes and abuses/oppression in this fashion. If the victims of communism includes the nazi soldiers killed during WW2, it seems like the victims of capitalism number should probably include the civilians burned alive en-masse during firebombing campaigns in Germany and Japan. If the victims of communism number includes the holodomor, surely it should also include the people starved as a result of famines caused by export subsidies (and the collapse of imports as prices surge, leaving their former customers with no domestic production and a famine). If the victims of communism include NK or Russian gulags, surely it includes the political prisoners held in US slave labor camps for trivial offenses by the state, and then exploited for the manufacturing profits of the companies that own them as chattel property. If the victims of communism include whatever murderous dictator of the day, then surely the victims of capitalism include those of Pol Pot, Indonesia, and Malaysia today. I say this not because communism is so great but because most people can’t even acknowledge that such a “victims of capitalism” number even exists. But it does, you just haven’t been propagandized to think it’s a number of matters like the “victims of communism” number. People will literally cry over dead nazis killed during the act of invading and annexing another country as long as they can make a political point against the right person for killing them. And that is used to push back against the entire concept, we can't have public healthcare because "that's socialism" and you know what happens in socialism right? Gulags and dictators. We don’t even have a slur for capitalism-tankies, because we havent been propagandized that it’s a bad thing we should be disdainful of. I guess it’s just “neoliberal”? Or “air strike/dronestrike liberal” depending on the era? But the firebombing and atomic weapon campaigns were shocking large compared to even air striking a single wedding. We burned millions of people alive inside their own homes, mummified and suffocated them from the inferno. “Firebombing liberals” or “bombies” doesn’t have the ring but it’s so much more apt for the kinds of behavior that are justified and excused in those communities (like tankies). But maybe “firebombing humanitarian” is a little more on-point, capture the “we had to kill the people to save them” vive? Or maybe the term is just tankie, whether it’s actual tanks or air bombing? Either way we certainly don't treat the abuses of this system as being something implicit to the system - Pol Pot, Suharto, or other murderous, abusive authoritarians aren't an indictment of capitalism as a concept and a system of organization, it just happens sometimes. But North Korea condemns communism forever, that's why the US can't give you healthcare. But the reality is that capitalist-tankieism is absurdly widespread. Again, this is not the way we are socialized to regard western history, but the firebombing campaigns were acts of terrorism and mass-murder against a civilian population, killing them en-masse for military ends such that the war effort would no longer be sustainable. Total war is a crime against humanity and an atrocity, and would be properly labeled as such if the other guy did it. You can't just firebomb millions of civilians... unless you are the right political system.

32 points by hackandthink 3y ago

[dead]

Read a diplomatic dispatch sent by the Romanian ambassador in Athens sometime around 1941-42, maybe 1943, where the Romanian government was informed that Turkey didn’t want to get involved in the war (presumably on the Germans’ side) because Istanbul would have been burned to the ground via aerial bombardments. Back then Istanbul was made up mostly of wood-based buildings.

tgv 3y ago

What's the point being made here? Bombing bad, but in increasingly convoluted prose? Economical considerations bad? Does the author think the UK had the manpower to simply waltz into Germany and convince Hitler peacefully of his folly? Or the capability to sustain what was effectively a siege forever? The author wants to express indignation at something. That much is clear from the shrill tones of the opening paragraph. That the UK and US relied on high-tech is not that odd. It is odd that the author contrasts that with Germany. They too did fight a high tech war (U boats, enigma, tanks, V1 and V2), but they couldn't achieve their goals with just tech. You don't get Lebensraum by bombing your neighbours. You need an actual occupation force. The UK was very much on the defensive, and had to resort to blockades and bombing to stay afoot. Or is the point "to destabilise liberal complacency", whatever that may mean?

AnimalMuppet 3y ago
The weird use of "liberal" confused me, too. It's more "liberal" to bomb than to have ground troops do the killing, because it minimizes your own casualties? No, that's just efficient use of military resources. "Liberal" might be holding on to the idea of minimizing civilian casualties. (Though, in an industrial production war like WWII, that might be a significant handicap. And it wasn't the Allies that started the bombing of civilians.) So, yeah. What's the point being made here? It sure feels like some weird axe is being ground, but it's done so badly that I can't even be sure what the axe is.
- c_crank 3y ago
  To the extent that there is any historical continuity between then and now, the 'liberal' USA still tends to value heavy bombing as a way to condition enemy forces into surrendering. Something it has a poor overall track record of.
- kouru225 3y ago
  It seems to me like the author thinks being smart is “liberal” and also he doesn’t like it.
- mediumdeviation 3y ago
  That's what confused me too. Is the point because somehow the word liberal is in both "liberal" (as in unrestricted, total?) war and liberal economics / politics that there's somehow a connection there? That's such a tenuous argument it seems incongruent with the rest of the article which seems decently articulated.
- claytongulick 3y ago
  I've noticed in academia, as well as other places, that's it's becoming more fashionable to be anti "liberal", as in, against small "L" liberal values. There's a sort of concerted effort to destroy the meaning of the word, or it's been co-opted by political organizations and bent to an extent that it's become meaningless. To those on the "right" - the word "liberal" is almost a curse word, it doesn't mean liberal values (which many of them share) it means some fuzzy combination of "woke, democrat, evil, america hating". To progressives, it's an increasingly inconvenient word as it becomes more difficult to reconcile the cognitive dissonance of simultaneously supporting authoritarian positions (censorship, consolidated power, militarism, embrace of public/private blurring, health dictates) while attempting to retain the mantle of liberalism that powered the "left" for the past fifty years. So it's easier for everyone to just attack the word, this article is a great example of that. It leaves us "classic liberals" stranded on a sinking island surrounded by sharks.
  - c_crank 3y ago
    "The classical liberals seem much like the old Tsarists, happy to wax poetic about a regime they were incapable of defending or restoring."
JPLeRouzic 3y ago
> ". The UK was very much on the defensive" By bombing Hamburg or Dresden and deliberately targeting civilians? Even France, Belgium or the Netherlands were bombed. They even bombed their own troops during Operation Overlord! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_Wa... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_the_Bezuidenhout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_the_Bezuidenhout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgium_in_World_War_II#cite_ref-45 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgium_in_World_War_II#cite_r... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Normandy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Normandy https://www.wiki-rennes.fr/Bombardements_des_9_et_12_juin_1944 https://www.wiki-rennes.fr/Bombardements_des_9_et_12_juin_19...
- tekla 3y ago
  Yes. You can be on the defensive and still bomb enemy positions
- Aloha 3y ago
  As I point out in a parallel comment - By 1943 the Germans had mostly successfully moved their production to small workshops, which were often in cities. Essentially providing a justification why any civilian population center was also a valid military target.
- kouru225 3y ago
  Yes. What did you want them to do? Deescalate? England’s absurd attempts to deescalate in response to Hitler’s aggression was what made WW2 a war in the first place.
gumby 3y ago
The point is that modern war is an industrial process. The failure to recognize this led to the vulnerability of the US processes from Viet Nam through the 2000s' Iraq and Afghanistan. The irony of this failure is that the US civil war was the first true economy-vs-economy conflict, with mechanized rail changing the scope and nature of conflict (while actual combat was still with napoleonic-class cannon, cavalry charge and the like). European powers mostly ignored this conflict, and so it took a while for them to understand what WWI was really about. Then the US took this lesson to heart, and didn't recognize that the only alternative for their adversaries was asymmetrical combat...a full circle as that was the approach the US had taken in its own war of liberation from a superpower. The other, even more meaningful point about industrialized warfare is that it has its own Taylorist logic. For the European theatre, they built an enormous machine that assembled planes, filled them with fuel and tons of bombs, and then daily launched them eastward from the UK. Long after this machine could materially affect the course of the war it was still operating at full tilt, with the allies seemingly unable to switch it off. In small (pop < 50K ppl today) cities of Germany you can find plaques in the Marktplätze indicating that the city had been flattened, bombed for the first time, in late April 1945. The machine had been flattening cities in order of importance, and had run down the list to the point where they'd run out of anything worth bombing. It's hard to argue that any of those bombings were individually "unethical" (assuming you can accept carpet bombing cities at all) because they were bureaucratic decisions with no real room for individual judgement any more. That is a critical lesson both for wartime and for peacetime. We don't really mind if a company makes a worthless product -- it merely goes out of business. But at the state/strategic level it can be tragic.
- ltbarcly3 3y ago
  The Germans could have avoided bombing entirely by not attacking their neighbors and trying to genocide 1/2 or more of the population of the countries they invaded to "make room" for more Germans. At any point in the war the Germans could have stopped it, but they didn't, they kept shoveling children in to ovens (or for slavs, bullets to the back of the head at the edge of a ditch). All the German cities could have been spared if they had simply stopped murdering everyone and stealing everything. That they chose to continue isn't the fault of the victims who were desperately trying to conclude the war to avoid the sensless deaths. There are moral grey areas in war but trying to find them in the desperate attempts to slow down and stop the NAZI genocide machine, by the victims of that machine who were still being killed by the millions, is a bit insulting. I would love to be able to put these great military minds in charge of the allies in 1940 and see how well they stick to their moral sensibilities as they become directly responsible for more and more deaths.

woodruffw 3y ago

The US and UK's reliance on heavy bombing is thought provoking, but perhaps not as profound or unique as the author suggests: Germany attempted a similar policy at the beginning of the war (culminating in the London Blitz), and largely failed for strategic rather than technical reasons. In other words: what really sets the Allied bombings apart is learning from the strategic errors that the Germans made (destroying entire industrial bases, not trying to smear small amounts of damage across the target's entire economy), not some uniquely "liberal" world view.

hackandthink 3y ago
I agree it's not unique: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_of_strategic_bombing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_of_strateg... Bombing of North Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia is missing. The terrible scale of Bombing of North Korea is not well known: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_North_Korea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_North_Korea
JoeDaDude 3y ago
Sir Arthur Harris, the British head of Bomber Command which was responsible for the bombing campaign against Germany, has some choice words on how the bombing was a response to Germany's own campaigns earlier in the war: "The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ujzVqwJnB0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ujzVqwJnB0
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  There's also the fact that it was well understood that Germany meant to conquer everyone. This was a war of survival for all countries involved
hef19898 3y ago
No, the allies didn't learn. The British knew very well that moral was not negatively affected by the Blitz, nor was industry. The targeted workers living quarters and civilians regardless. And no amounz of data confirming that these bombings had no real impact on German production rates, nor moral (in fact, POWs from Normandy confirmed that they fought to defend Germany from allied bombing), and still contimued. Heck, the leveled Caen in France in order to destroy three bridges. Caen was leveled, thousands killed. And the bridges still intact.

Aloha 3y ago

I generally disagree with this article, mostly tone - but also conclusions too. What other options were there for the Allies? By 1943 the Germans had mostly successfully moved their production to small workshops, which were often in cities. This is also in the long shadow the Blitz cast, which inflicted not dissimilar damage to London. If London was a valid Military Target in 1940, then Hamburg was certainly one in 1943. To quote from wikipedia about sessions learned by the British the Blitz "From 1943 to the end of the war, he [Harris] and other proponents of the area offensive represented it [the bomber offensive] less as an attack on morale than as an assault on the housing, utilities, communications, and other services that supported the war production effort." They do get one thing correct however - the horrors of the Nuclear Bomb are not that unique, many many more were killed, in Europe and Pacific theaters by firebombing (I'll point folks at the firebombing of Tokyo as a starting point) as the than were killed by nuclear bombs. Both Germany and Japan violated the normal, commonly understood rules of war - we responded, in ways that, could be argued to have an ethical shadow - and while I dont consider these acts unethical (including the nuclear bomb), they're not ethically clean - they're a gray area that can only be justified in context. We have this mental narrative of war that its this clean thing, either black or white, just or unjust - and thats not reality, war it dirty, even when its just and good - for a good reason, it means much death and killing, it leaves indelible stains on those who fight, and those who survive for the rest of their lives. To present otherwise is foolish and lying to ourselves.

c_crank 3y ago
>What other options were there for the Allies? We know that what actually ended the war was invading the territory that was held, not strategic bombing. Not that it really matters, since the German state was so thoroughly interrogated for the war that they aren't going to complain, but the Allied bombing campaign bears much similarity to the Vietnam bombing campaign in that it was killing stuff for the stake of killing stuff with little tactical or strategic advantage.
- Aloha 3y ago
  How much longer would the war have lasted without the strategic bombing? Would those civilians have died anyhow had the germans had the military materiel to hold each city longer, which would have required fighting block by block - Imagine the Battle of Berlin but on a continental scale.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago

With regard to Oppenheimer, I find it interesting that others on the Manhattan project such as von Neumann and Teller did not have nearly the angst about nuclear weapons. Looking at where they were born may make sense. Oppenheimer was born in the United States in New York City. He had probably never faced a real threat of invasion and destruction. However, von Neumann and Teller were both born in Hungary and had seen first hand that there is evil in the world, and the world is a dangerous place, and the way to protect ourselves from that danger is being more powerful than your enemies. There is no good war. All war involves killing. In the grand scheme of morality, killing 18 year old conscripts is also pretty bad.

kouru225 3y ago

It’s arguably this exact mentality that separated the Nazis and the rest of the Axis from the Allies. The Nazis had valued an outdated concept of ruling with an iron fist, which led them to discount the opinions of their scientists (as well as all other intellectuals.) Whatever advantage they gained by being absurdly and annoyingly aggressive, they slowly lost as the Allies gained the technological advantage. The Allies then promptly punished them for their mistake. I think this author is correctly identifying the attitude shift, but they don’t seem to understand that the attitude they’re describing was actually correct at the time. They’re passing judgment on it because they’ve seen it used for evil in recent years, but it’s like a bit of old useless programming: it was probably added in for a reason, and that reason was probably a pretty good one at the time even if it’s now a nuisance or even outright problematic in the current era. The Allies didn’t want to go into war, but were forced to by Hitler. Hitler’s actions were a bit like the tragedy of the commons: if you break the precedent then the precedent is broken and we all suffer together. The Nazis were bombing London every night. What are you gonna do? “When they go low we go high?” I mean, cmon…

petsfed 3y ago
>Whatever advantage they gained by being absurdly and annoyingly aggressive, they slowly lost as the Allies gained the technological advantage I think there was also a lag between when the Nazis committed any given strategic blunder, and when the real consequences of that blunder came due. Hitler's obsession with Stalingrad in particular, bailing out Mussolini's adventurism, the constant and maddening obsession with complexity in their war materiel, etc Its also not that the Allies were more technologically advanced per se, its that they had a much better understanding of design for manufacturing. The Sherman tank and the T-34 were, in most every respect, inferior tanks to the Tiger. But in the time it took to build that 1 tiger, American factories churned out 6 Shermans. Soviet factories churned out 6 T-34s. The entire German offensive strategy hinged on blitzkrieg, and their economy was barely able to sustain that, let alone a besieged economy with limited resources, supporting increasingly bogged-down and defensive campaigns. A lot of hay is made out of the Nazi superweapons, but not many people reflect on the fact that only about 50,000 Kubelwagens were ever produced, while the US shipped that many Jeeps to the Soviets, then built another 550,000 for themselves. Because of all of this, Germany basically lost the war when they failed to hold any of their objectives on the Ostfront, it just took years for the whole train to come to a stop. I think a similar analysis can be applied to Japan regarding their failure to end the Pacific carrier fleet at Pearl Harbor (I recall reading that as Japanese industrial capability failed through the war, A6M "Zero" fighters had to be moved by horses because Japan could not afford the cars necessary to move them around at the factory).

dhoe 3y ago

Just some context, in light of some of the comments here - Tooze is a highly respected professor of economic history, and author of an 800 pages book on the economy of Nazi Germany.

dhoe 3y ago

Just some context, in light of some of the comments here - Tooze is a highly respected professor of economic history, and author of an 800 pages book on the economy of Nazi Germany.

LargeTomato 3y ago

I like this article a lot. War is not a struggle of good vs evil. It is a series of unfortunate trolly problems. When we tell people that the allies were the "good guys" it makes it sound like all of their actions were good. That's inaccurate and dangerous. They may have resulted in a victory over a deeply evil enemy but they also inflicted untold violence. Let's say you're Obama and you need to authorize a drone strike. There's an 85% chance the target is a terrorist. The target is surrounded by children. One of the children is a US citizen. Do you authorize the strike? There's no proper answer here. It's morally grey. It was undoubtedly important to destroy the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese. I hope no one on HN would question that. But that doesn't mean the allies were morally absolved from their own violence. The allies have 2 options. Option 1, firebomb and nuke Japan. Option 2, invade and slaughter millions, sacrificing your own military in the process and ceding north Japan to the Soviets. Are you morally justified to go with option 1? Maybe. Are we better off today for picking option 1? Probably. But trolly problems don't have good and bad, they have bad and worse.

rented_mule 3y ago
I think there's important learning in this that I wish all leaders of militarily powerful nations understood. When engaging in war, the one certainty for all sides is that it will be a tragedy. Even if you "win", there will be horrible consequences (on your own side!) in terms of lives lost, lives irreparably damaged, money / resources lost, and any moral/ethical high ground. In anything of any scale, this can't be avoided. Therefore, the choice to go to war is only sane if not going to war would be an even bigger tragedy. It's not hard to argue that Hitler taking over Europe (and beyond) would be worse. When viewed in this light, Russia going into Ukraine, the US going into Iraq twice, the US going into Vietnam, etc. all look like pretty bad decisions. But we keep falling into this complacency that the next war will be an easy one or a clean one. It will not, that is not what war is.

AlbertCory 3y ago

Comments so far seem to have ignored the relationship between the Eastern front and the strategic bombing. In fact, they were directly related. Stalin agitated ceaselessly for the Allies to open a second front in France, even back to 1942, to draw off German troops. The Allies weren't ready, but the bombing did at least tie up a lot of German planes and anti-aircraft that otherwise would have been used against the USSR. It had a political value, in other words. Whether it really did disrupt German logistics for the Eastern front is debatable, but it showed Stalin that at least the Allies were doing something. Even if the German civilian suffering was for naught, I don't think Stalin saw it that way.

paulmd 3y ago

Framing this as "liberal militantism" is going to be a tough take for this board, and for people on the english-speaking, western-dominated internet generally. But it's not an unfair take, as LeMay said they were committing war crimes, and if they'd lost the war then history would have regarded their actions very, very differently. We simply are not socialized by media to think of western war crimes and abuses/oppression in this fashion. If the victims of communism includes the nazi soldiers killed during WW2, it seems like the victims of capitalism number should probably include the civilians burned alive en-masse during firebombing campaigns in Germany and Japan. If the victims of communism number includes the holodomor, surely it should also include the people starved as a result of famines caused by export subsidies (and the collapse of imports as prices surge, leaving their former customers with no domestic production and a famine). If the victims of communism include NK or Russian gulags, surely it includes the political prisoners held in US slave labor camps for trivial offenses by the state, and then exploited for the manufacturing profits of the companies that own them as chattel property. If the victims of communism include whatever murderous dictator of the day, then surely the victims of capitalism include those of Pol Pot, Indonesia, and Malaysia today. I say this not because communism is so great but because most people can’t even acknowledge that such a “victims of capitalism” number even exists. But it does, you just haven’t been propagandized to think it’s a number of matters like the “victims of communism” number. People will literally cry over dead nazis killed during the act of invading and annexing another country as long as they can make a political point against the right person for killing them. And that is used to push back against the entire concept, we can't have public healthcare because "that's socialism" and you know what happens in socialism right? Gulags and dictators. We don’t even have a slur for capitalism-tankies, because we havent been propagandized that it’s a bad thing we should be disdainful of. I guess it’s just “neoliberal”? Or “air strike/dronestrike liberal” depending on the era? But the firebombing and atomic weapon campaigns were shocking large compared to even air striking a single wedding. We burned millions of people alive inside their own homes, mummified and suffocated them from the inferno. “Firebombing liberals” or “bombies” doesn’t have the ring but it’s so much more apt for the kinds of behavior that are justified and excused in those communities (like tankies). But maybe “firebombing humanitarian” is a little more on-point, capture the “we had to kill the people to save them” vive? Or maybe the term is just tankie, whether it’s actual tanks or air bombing? Either way we certainly don't treat the abuses of this system as being something implicit to the system - Pol Pot, Suharto, or other murderous, abusive authoritarians aren't an indictment of capitalism as a concept and a system of organization, it just happens sometimes. But North Korea condemns communism forever, that's why the US can't give you healthcare. But the reality is that capitalist-tankieism is absurdly widespread. Again, this is not the way we are socialized to regard western history, but the firebombing campaigns were acts of terrorism and mass-murder against a civilian population, killing them en-masse for military ends such that the war effort would no longer be sustainable. Total war is a crime against humanity and an atrocity, and would be properly labeled as such if the other guy did it. You can't just firebomb millions of civilians... unless you are the right political system.