In another example of misleading blurbs, the first quote on the back cover of Conrad Crane’s Bombs, Cities and Civilians appears to claim that a major topic of the book is the decision to use the atomic bomb. In fact, the meat of the work concerns the American conventional bombing of Europe. Of the various books I’ve been reading about the morality of bombing, this is the least polemical and most objective. Crane notes that most USAAF commanders in Europe went out of their way to avoid civilian casualties, even to the extent of disobeying orders. Operation THUNDERCLAP was a late war attack on Berlin; Operation CLARION was supposed to destroy the German transportation network by targeting 100 cities as important rail junctions. Fifteenth Air Force commander Jimmy Doolittle sent numerous messages to Carl Spaatz trying to avoid THUNDERCLAP, and eventually ordered his crews to attack only military targets. Spaatz was not enthusiastic about the plan either and his orders to Doolittle were (perhaps deliberately) vague enough to allow this latitude. The attitude of USAAF officers and crews was not, of course, all sweetness and light; they were properly more concerned about the safety of their aircrews over heavily defended targets and possible reprisals against Allied POWs than German civilian casualties.


Japan, of course, was a different story. There just weren’t that many “precision” targets to bomb, and, since the B29s flew at a higher altitude than B17s and B24s it was harder to hit the targets. With a comment I’ve never considered before, Crane points out that high altitude winds were strong and variable enough to also cause major problems with bombing accuracy. This lead to LeMay’s decision to use low altitude night fire raids, something even he had reservations about. Crane doesn’t mince words with the horrors, but he also points out that alternative strategies involved entirely destroying Japan’s transportation and electrical grids, dropping herbicides in rice fields, and even bombing schools of fish off the coast, with the implication that the alternative to agonizing but quick death in an inferno was agonizing but slow death from starvation. Crane also notes that all Japanese men between 15 and 60 not already in the military, and all Japanese women between 17 and 40, were conscripted into the People’s Volunteer Corps, and thus were technically not civilians, and mentions Prince Konoye’s comment that the B29 fire raids were the fundamental reason for Japan’s surrender. In that context, the atomic bombings are almost an afterthought.


The last part of the book concerns the US air campaigns in Korea, Vietnam and DESERT STORM (the book was written in 1993 and thus was too early for Kosovo and Iraq II). He’s quite critical of US military planning for Korea and Vietnam, noting that the experience in Japan should have proved that precision bombing just doesn’t work against Third World countries; however, he grants that the advent of smart bombs and the advantage of being able to operate against enemy troops in the open lead to a different situation in Iraq I. Although he does confirm that most of the Iraqi military losses were to Coalition ground troops, the disruption and moral problems created by bombing greatly contributed to victory.


An easy a quick read, with a lot of interesting things not covered in other military histories. ( )