Bombs Away

Today bombing has a very different form from even the quite recent past. In the Russia-Ukraine war, and now in the very recent conflict between Israel and Iran, we are seeing fleets of pilotless drones and precision-guided missiles, typically launched a long way from their targets. This kind of bombing, while often hugely destructive (and no less traumatic, of course, for those actually affected), does not generally incur high civilian casualties, certainly not on the scale that large urban populations in Europe and Asia suffered during WW2. In that more global conflict, strategic bombing (to give it its precise military meaning) was almost entirely carried out by crewed aircraft, typically heavy bombers in massed formations, which flew to their targets (the British Lancaster had a range of well over 1000 miles, the American B-17 Flying Fortress 2000 miles) and dropped colossal explosive tonnages over a wide area, missions aptly named as carpet-bombing - not least because for most of WW2 precision had a very low threshold, with British and American payloads typically missing their targets by as much as five miles (a failing that the air force authorities kept a closely guarded secret at the time and for long after). Targeting had improved greatly by the end of the war, but the widespread use of incendiary bombs on cities caused intense fire-storms that resulted in massive loss of civilian life, with many victims incinerated beyond recognition. By modern standards, the statistics are on a breathtaking scale, with some cities enduring extraordinary civilian losses from single raids. To mention only the worst, Hamburg lost some 37,000 killed over a few days in July-August 1943, Dresden 25,000 over two days in February 1945, and Tokyo up to 100,000 on 9/10 March 1945 - the latter a tally worse even than the respective losses from the subsequent atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It would be naive to think that either the RAF or the USAF were unaware of their impact on civilians. As time went on, the tendency of the air war, even despite conspicuous failures, was invariably to escalate, so that initial attempts to stick to military targets quickly became much more indiscriminate 'area-bombing', where the implicit aim was not just to hit industrial centres but to kill as many people in the vicinity as possible, thus disrupting the enemy's economic might and undermining civilian morale. WW2 air forces continued to believe that bombing raids did damage the enemy's economy and morale, but all the evidence suggests that they did not, whether it was the Blitz in Britain or raids over Germany and Japan (only perhaps in Italy did the bombing of its cities hasten its early surrender in September 1943 - and, arguably, in 1944 Allied bombing, by then much more precise and enjoying air supremacy, began to have a significant impact on the Nazi war machine). Ironically, bomber crews, on all sides, came off particularly badly during the war in Europe, certainly in proportional to other services, for enemy flak and anti-aircraft fire took a heavy toll on both men and planes: RAF Bomber Command lost a staggering 41% of its personnel killed in action (almost 10,000 were Canadians), while the US Eighth Air Force suffered 26,000 killed. Overall, only one in three airmen survived the air war in Europe. In the pilotless, precision-guided drone-missile conflicts of 2025, we are unlikely to see such unparalleled casualties among either civilians or air crew. A small positive perhaps in an unrelentingly gloomy world outlook.

If you think you know about WW1 and WW2, it's time to think again.

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