Fire and Fury: The Allied Bombing of Germany, 1942-1945

In a speech delivered in 1941, Winston Churchill noted "Hitler and his Nazi gang have sown the wind, they will reap the Whirlwind". A literal form of the "Whirlwind" was the Allied bombing campaign against Germany during World War Two. That much argued about topic gets brilliantly analyzed in Political Science professor Randell Hansen's fine study Fire and Fury. The Allies had 2 main schools of thought regarding bombing the Reich:area bombing and precision bombing. Area bombing's most famous believer was Air Marshall Arthur "Bomber" Harris who felt the war could be won by bombing alone if all Germany's cities could be razed. Precision Bombing was widely advocated by the Americans who wanted to target explicit war related industrial targets such as oil and ball bearings. Area bombing grew out of England's inability to strike out at Germany in any other way in the dark days of 1941. It had also been championed by bombing advocates in the inter- war period. Hansen posits that the precision campaign was much more efficient and that if pursued it may have ended the war earlier.(He liberally cites from Nazi Arms Minister Albert Speer to help make his case) His use of sources is first rate from documents between the bombing chiefs (The letters between Harris and his superior Lord Portal are a revelation), to recollections of both those who bombed Germany and those who were bombed. The descriptions of fire bombing are chilling. Hansen chides Harris for blindly pursuing a policy that cost thousands of Allied lives as well as thousands of Axis lives despite evidence that his theories were not working by late in the war. Bombing was and is a topic of controversy, but no study of that dimension of the war is complete without consulting this fine book. Not only does the author take the reader into the councils of the high command, but you are in the cockpit and on the ground.This is first rate thought provoking history.

The controversy over the effectiveness of Allied bombing of Germany in WWII has gone on since the war. This book settles the argument forever, and draws a clear distinction between the effectivenes of "area" and "precision" bombing. The research is complete and unbiased. The moral question will continue to haunt us.

Randall Hansen's "Fire and Fury" is superb. The book begins with a riveting description of the British fire bombing of Hamburg in 1943, told from the perspective of the German civilians who suffocated in shelters and cellars, sank into molten asphalt while bursting into flame, boiled alive in Hamburg's canals or were sucked into the world's first fire storm by hurricane-force winds. 40,000 people died in one city in one night, and Hansen makes it painfully clear what it felt like to be on the receiving end of the British "area bombing" campaign. Hansen carefully explains the differences between British and American strategy. For Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris, the point of night time area bombing was to kill, injure and demoralize the workforce that served German industry. Destroying the factories themselves was fine, but only incidental to the primary mission of incapacitating the workers. The Americans, led by Generals Hap Arnold, Carl Spaatz, and Jimmy Doolittle, insisted on "precision" bombing, dropping their bombs in daylight on military targets like ball bearing factories, oil refineries, railroad marshalling yards and other critical infrastructure. They also insisted on engaging and destroying the Luftwaffe, something they did very effectively. The Americans also killed civilians, but that was a side effect rather than the goal of bombing. The US air forces only participated once in the bombing of a German city center (Berlin in February 1945), and then only over the protests of General Doolittle and other senior commanders. It is hard to come away from "Fire and Fury" without disliking Bomber Harris. The British had a very limited ability to strike back against Germany from 1939 to 1942, so area bombing was arguably justifiable as the only way to wage war during this period. But as the war went on, British precision bombing skills improved dramatically, as evidenced by the famous "dam busting" raids in the Ruhr Valley. It became increasingly obvious to the Americans and those who were reviewing Ultra intercepts that precision raids (conducted mostly by Americans and to a lesser extent by the British) were seriously disrupting the German war effort. Hansen skillfully brings in the testimony of German Armaments Minister Albert Speer, who feared that the British would follow up on their dam buster missions (they did not) or that the British and the Americans would combine their efforts against oil, rail, ball bearing and other vital targets. By 1943 or so, it should have been reasonably clear that precision bombing was producing the desired results and that area bombing was merely murdering people and stiffening Germany's determination to fight. Hansen sets out the memos between Harris and his boss, Chief of Air Staff Sir Charles Portal. Harris had decided that killing German civilians in large numbers was the only way to win the war quickly, and he was determined to execute his strategy even if doing do bordered on insubordina

In this book Randall Hansen attempts a fresh look at an old and controversial subject, the Allied bombing of Germany in WWII. A major goal of his work appears to be rehabilitating the reputations of America's bomber generals -- Arnold, Spaatz, Eaker, and Doolittle -- at the expense of their British counterparts. The emphasis throughout is how the Americans were right, and essentially moral, in their strategic focus on "daylight precision bombing" as a means of winning the war against the Germans. In contrast the British--especially "Bomber" Harris and Portal, his nominal superior--were wrong and almost criminal in the way they conducted and/or condoned area bombing and mass destruction of German cities during the latter stages of the conflict. Hansen clearly offers an alternative interpretation of events compared to works like Wings of Judgment: American Bombing in World War II by Ronald Shaffer, which reflects academic thought in the 1980s on the Combined Bomber Offensive. Shaffer's thesis was that the Americans and British had more in common in their bombing goals than was suggested by the simplistic "American precision bombing good, British area bombing bad" equation, and that neither side's "bomber barons" gave much thought to the morality of what they were doing. Thus, Shaffer argued, their sins were the same, differing only in degree. Hansen makes a very persuasive case that strategic bombing American style was effective in crippling German war-making ability, and that the wanton RAF destruction of countless German cities in 1944-45 was essentially worthless, immoral, and significantly counterproductive to the overall war effort. Consider a question never asked at the time because military parochialism made even the suggestion unthinkable: How much more quickly would Germany have collapsed had RAF Bomber Command wholly embraced precision bombing methods in early 1944, after the P-51 Mustang took control of the air away from the Luftwaffe? Hansen also shows that American radar bombing through undercast, using US modified versions of British terrain radar like H2S, was very much a second best solution to the perennial problem of bad weather over the Continent. American military leaders almost always preferred the Norden bombsight to radar, but were loathe to bring the bombs back when over Germany itself--hence radar bombing. If civilians were killed--and tens of thousands were--due to "precision" bombing mistakes or daylight radar bombing, it was more a reflection of how crude bombing technology was in the 1940s than the result of any plan to kill civilians and achieve victory by sapping enemy "morale." In Hansen's calculus, intentions do matter. For that reason, together with superior strategic results, the Americans come off as the real winners of the air war against Germany. I think he's right, in purely strategic terms, but I am less comfortable with his conclusions about the morality of the American bombing effort. I say

this is the clearest discussion of the bomber campaign during wwII that i have read. Most books on any aspect of wwII tend to be difficult to follow. While not being over simplistict this book gave me a excellent overview of the subject and a narrative that did not get bogged down in escentially useless information. The only problem I found was the lack of maps. Not knowing the geography of Germany I fould I had to keep a map of the country handy to fully follow the narrative. Overall, an excellt book that I would recommend to anyone interested in the use of bombers in wwII.