Bomber Command, World War II (1939-45); and the lies and corruptions of Geopolitics

Regular readers will know that I have fairly recently become very interested in the aircraft of World Wars I and II - which is the re-ignition of a similar "craze" when I was aged about 11-13. 

I have never known or understood much about WWI except that both sides had dubious motivations; but I did think that I broadly understood WWII - especially since I remember and had read a fair bit of historical material from before the massive distortions of the 1960s began to bite. 

But this re-visitation has been one major eye-opener after another; at the end of which my main conclusion is that my previous understanding of WWII was very defective and that I am not-at-all-sure my present understanding is correct either!

What is clear is that HUGE facts about the war - which were often once widely known (some, in a sense, that I did know but misinterpreted), really ought to have been either obvious, or were easy to ascertain - have made an equally-huge different to... well, if not my understanding, then to my confidence in my understanding. 

Naturally, given my starting point, most of these revisions have been at the expense of a previous stance of confidently regarding the British (and allied) side as clearly "superior" in some general sense. This has not reversed, but neither is it secure. 

There have been many surprises - but I will just outline one here. A particular aspect has been the strategic bombing of Germany - by Bomber Command. In a sense I was familiar with the criticisms of the strategy of bombing German cities - both the idea that it was not very effective, and that it was morally... dubious. 

What I had not realized until recently was that strategic bombing was By Far the major British war effort and expenditure - dominating all RAF policy, consuming most of RAF expenditure, and using more resources than the entire British Army and Royal Navy put together! 

Think about that for a moment... 

The major and (literally) overwhelming British strategy to win WWII was - for most of the war - quite simple: that Britain could destroy the German capacity to wage war solely by means of heavy bombing - after which the Army could essentially just stroll-in, and take-over.  

This was the extraordinary conviction of the RAF, and of Churchill. I say "conviction" but it had more of the attributes of a delusion - in the sense that the doctrine was not true, there was no actual evidence to support it (and never had been anywhere or at any time); And Yet belief in the doctrine held with absolute conviction and was immune to the evidence of experience. 

Britain crippled her war effort overall, almost lost the war at least three times* and bankrupted herself for decades afterwards, in pursuit of a delusion! 

This doctrine of The Bomber as a war-winner dated back to pre-war times, and its strength came from the fact that it was the major military justification for maintaining then expanding the RAF into by-far the most resourced UK military service. 

The delusory nature of the Bomber strategy was perfectly obvious at the time to empirically-minded people who studied the accumulating and consistent evidence of gross inefficiency and lack of effectiveness of bombing at its task destroying the German "war machine" such that Germany would collapse. 

In the early years of the war, there inaccuracy of bombing (and the inadequacy of the aircraft and bombs) meant that precision bombing of military targets was impossible - and night bombing meant that even hitting particular cities was not reliably achieved. 

After moral objections to the mass slaughter of (overwhelmingly) civilian non-combatants - a major breach of the rules of war - led to arguments that (what we would now call) genocide of the Germans was a valid goal of bombing. This was increasingly achieved as the war progressed and equipment and improved technologies and techniques (such as using radar-guided pathfinders to mark targets, and creating firestorms by phased types of bombs).

However, the fact is that - by the time the ability to annihilate cities was perfected (especially by the USAAF in Japan - where the building were flimsy and wooden) - it was too late significantly to affect the course of the war in Europe.  

The above discovery (or perhaps fuller realization) about Britain and strategic bombing in WWII - which seem to have the status of objective fact attested by multiple credible authorities - by-itself makes a big difference to my attitude to that war; and there have been several other equally major discoveries of a broadly similar nature. 

My take-home message from this is not that I now know the truth whereas previously I was in error; but that I have concluded that the truth about such matters is not something I can be sure of. 

Geopolitics - including war - at the scale of modernity; is by its nature almost-always a domain of dishonesty, and of insufficient and misleading information; whose morality is therefore nearly-always a choice of lesser evils.

This, despite that war is also a domain in which great courage, hope, endurance, comradeship, patriotism, and other human "goods" are probably commoner and more highly achieved.  

But - looking around at a world in which WWIII has apparently begun, I hope to keep these lessons in mind - and (despite the encouragements and temptations) to refrain from making Geopolitics a central feature of my system of values and hopes.  

*First was the Battle of Britain - where the RAF resisted almost until too late the provision of enough fighters to defend Britain - believing that fighters were almost unnecessary, and that the airforce ought to be about attack not defense. And two times more (1940-41, again in 43) when Britain almost ran out of essential supplies due to the U-Boat campaign; while the RAF deliberately starved the highly-effective Coastal Command of adequate resources (CC was a kept-small branch of the RAF that provided aircraft to protect shipping - especially the Atlantic sea lanes) - again on the excuse that nothing could be spared from the task of bombing Germany. The telling point was this happened twice - apparently nothing was learned from the first near disaster. The strong conviction/ prejudice of RAF high command, and crucially of Churchill; was that Coastal Command was an unnecessary and defensive diversion of scarce resources, that ought to go into the vital and war-winning activity of bombing Germany.)