ISBN 0-7864-1412-X
244 pages

Acknowledgments; Preface; photos; Chapter Notes; Bibliography; Index

   This book by a professor of history (who also spent two years "analyzing bomb accuracy tests for the US Army Ordnance Corps") examines the glittering story of American precision bombing in World War II and exposes it as a huge fraud intentionally perpetrated by the highest echelons of the Unites States Army Air Force partly to frighten the enemy, partly to bolster American morale, and partly to further the aims of the aviation generals for a powerful, independent air force. Of the Americans who can still remember the war years, most continue to believe the wartime stories of strategic bombing. Even the aging air veterans themselves tend to believe the myths manufactured by USAAF public relations officers. Just a few years ago, a perfectly sensible and sober B-24 "bombigator" of the 15th Air Force explained to us in all seriousness that during the war he and his equipment had been fully capable of placing bombs so accurately that he could consistently drop them down the smokestack of a moving locomotive. Stewart Ross would politely beg to differ.
   Ross opens his book with an outspoken rebuttal of the official assessment—written by General Carl Spaatz in August 1942—of the first B-17 raid over occupied Europe by the American 8th Air Force. It becomes clear immediately that the book will be pulling no punches while separating fact from fiction in the story of World War II bombing. The author especially emphasizes how the devotion to duty and self-sacrifice of brave men was usually translated into hyperbolic baloney by Air Force PR staffs anxious to create heroes and inflate their own self-importance.

   Uncritical interpretations of reconnaissance photographs of the rail yards taken the next day showed "exceptionally good" placement of the bombs, and General Spaatz, 8th Air Force commander, exuberantly wired Washington that the attack "far exceeded in accuracy any previous high-altitude bombing in the European theater by German or Allied aircraft" and that he was pleased with "the speed, armament, armor, and bomb load of the B-17" and considered it "suitable for the task at hand." Spaatz was carried away with his enthusiasm. Throughout the war—over Germany in B-17s and B-24s and later over Japan in B-29s—these aircraft only rarely achieved "good" and practically never "exceptionally good" bombing accuracy, however loosely these subjective terms were defined. The 8th Air Force daylight bombers sometimes hit the wrong cities, even the wrong countries; often bombed the countryside; and typically missed their intended targets by hundreds and thousands of yards.
   There were ample reasons for this lack of precision. Hitting a target smaller than a football field from five miles up with a plain "iron bomb" was then—as it has remained over 50 years later—a daunting challenge. America's secret wonder weapon, the vaunted and well-publicized Norden bombsight, was nearly useless over cloud-covered targets, whatever their size. The radar bombsights that came later, to overcome the problem of hitting targets through the overcast, achieved even less precision. Furthermore, American bombardiers arrived in England inadequately trained, as were the rest of the hurriedly trained bomber aircrews. And as the Luftwaffe fighter planes and radar-directed antiaircraft batteries took an increasing toll on American bombers, the planes were flown higher to reduce losses, further degrading bombing accuracy.
   Spaatz was equally sanguine about the ability of his B-17s to defend themselves against Luftwaffe fighters. Contributing to this sense of the relative invulnerability of his heavy bombers was an overly optimistic November report from his subordinate Eaker, informing him that on the basis of the first 1,100 sorties, aircraft losses had totaled a readily acceptable 1.6 percent. What Eaker had not bothered to mention was that nearly all the short-range missions had been well protected by fighter escorts. Those attacks that had flown to the fringes or beyond of U.S. fighter-plane range, on the other hand, had suffered far heavier losses. No missions had yet flown over targets in the German homeland where it would be learned immediately that enemy defenses, fighter planes and antiaircraft fire, would be devastatingly stronger.
   ....
   As for the "speed, armament, armor, and bomb load" of the optimistically named Flying Fortress itself, Spaatz was wrong on every count. The B-17, faster than contemporary "pursuit" planes when it first flew in 1936, in 1942 and throughout the war was outclassed by Germany's fighters. While it bristled with up to 13 .50-caliber machine guns, the Fortress was unable to defend itself against the aggressive and skilled German Luftwaffe. German fighter-plane pilots, close-up observers, referred to the B-17s and their sister B-24s as "flying coffins." Regarding the Fortress' "suitable-for-the-task" bomb-carrying capability, RAF air commanders would have snorted to hear of Spaatz's impertinence. Their four-engine Stirlings, Wellingtons, and Lancasters delivered twice the load of bombs to the same targets and furthermore had long bomb bays to carry big bombs.

   Just as he finds Spaatz's assessment wanting, Ross also measures the wartime exaggerations of the results of the Doolittle raid against the far more meager reality. Likewise, the mythology around the death of Colin Kelly comes in for debunking. Following these same threads of PR hype, again and again the book shows how seriously the Air Force undertook to manage the news and create favorable reports in the media about the accuracy, success, and efficiency of aerial bombing. Ross carries the same theme through the post-war years up to the Gulf War and even to the state of American airpower in the 21st Century.
   Whether or not the reader agrees with this perspective, Ross is not just tossing out unsubstantiated opinions. To begin with, the book surveys the origins of aircraft, the development of air-to-air combat during World War I, and the theories of inter-war strategists and theoretician such as Douhet, Mitchell, Trenchard, and Liddell Hart. Especially interesting, the fourth chapter relates how in the summer of 1941 four American officers with two assistants in ten days drew up from scratch the fundamental premises, outlined the basic goals, made their best estimates, and calculated the exact numbers of men and aircraft required to defeat the Axis powers. AWPD-1 ("Air War Plans Division-1") called for 2,165,000 men and 63,500 aircraft. Ross points out some of the difficulties associated with the numbers and their derivation.

   While a remarkable document considering the constraints of time and the handful of people involved, many of its analyses would prove to be seriously flawed. The planners were privy to no intelligence from foreign agents, for example, and apparently knew little about the structure of the German economy. AWPD-1 postulated a German economy that was inflexible and incapable of repairing bomb damage. The planners did not even consider that the Germans might disperse their production facilities, nor that they could or would built impregnable underground manufacturing facilities. Nor could they know the extent of the efficient integration of western Europe's industry into the Nazi war machine, nor the use of millions of slave laborers. Furthermore, and even more importantly, they had not a clue that Germany, until 1944, was operating on an almost peacetime-economy footing with enormous surplus capacity to be exploited when necessary. AWPD-1 would erroneously characterize Germany's economy as operating under "heavy stress," with the needs of war production adversely impacting the social and industrial fabric of the country.
   Where the planners also exhibited a portentous myopia was in their total disregard of advances in enemy fighter aircraft performance and antiaircraft artillery. This, coupled with their ignorance of the potential of radar, were major factors in their assumption of bomber invulnerability—if not invincibility. This assumption is perhaps understandable in light of the fundamental mission of the Air Force to build a strong case for independence. For if squadrons of bombers could be forced to turn back from their targets—a worst-case scenario that never occurred—or if defensive aircraft and antiaircraft fire could inflict unsustainable losses on the bomber formations—a scenario that nearly occurred—the entire concept of strategic bombardment was flawed.

   In August 1942 the air blueprint was revised and AWPD-42 called for increased numbers of aircraft and men. Even so, the planning, according to Ross, "was influenced by the rose-colored-glasses assessments of the 8th's first missions over lightly defended French targets."

   The planners were still tuned into their own rhetoric—that the defensive firepower of the bombers and their high-altitude performance would enable them to penetrate German airspace, drop their bombs accurately with the Norden, and return safely. By mid 1942, however, the seven-year-old B-17 was nearing obsolescence and the three-year-old B-24 was close behind. The planners remained smugly confident that these aging bombers nevertheless could defend themselves against the newest and best the Luftwafte could hurl against them. More ominously, AWPD-42 would again disregard the need for long-range fighter escorts, even the fitting of droppable fuel tanks to extend the range of the P-47s and P-38s. Nevertheless, the planners' estimates for a bomber force of precisely 7,097 "heavies" were remarkably prescient. In March 1945, 7,177 B-17s and B-24s were in combat over Europe.

   Ross goes on to quote US policy to show that bombers were officially prohibited from attacking anything other than military targets, but at the same time it was determined that any city large enough to show up on H2X radar—meaning just about any city with a population of over 50,000—would by definition contain military targets, thereby making the city itself a legitimate target, even when "blind bombing" through cloud cover. Given those circumstances, chapter 5, "The Crucible," charts the course of the bomber war in outline, showing how in both Europe and the Pacific the Air Force gradually abandoned precision bombing in favor of indiscriminate area bombing aimed at cities, but did so only while rationalizing the changes and controlling the press releases in order to conceal the true nature of the campaign.
   After tracing the bombing campaigns in Europe and the Pacific, Ross expounds on the actual bombers themselves in the next chapter.

   These big airplanes were expensive to build, operate, and maintain. A force of several thousand such bombers required tens of thousands of aircrew and groundcrew to fly them and to keep them flying, as well as endless convoys of aviation-gas tankers. For example, it took 12 officers and 73 enlisted men on the ground to keep each B-29 flying and an average of 7,500 gallons of 100-octane gasoline for its nearly 3,000-mile round trip from bases in the Mariana Islands to Japan.
   By D-Day in June 1944, the 8th Air Force had more than 2,000 B-17s and B-24s in service and poised to fly combat missions from their bases in England on short notice, together with two full aircrews for each bomber. Only the wealthiest nation in the world, rich in financial, material, and human resources, could afford such weapons. It has been estimated these big-bomber airfleets accounted for about 10 percent of the total expenditures involved in the U.S. war effort—and the RAF's Bomber Command about 30 percent of Great Britain's.

   The author then devotes several pages each to the B-17, B-24, and B-29. For each aircraft he inventories all the strengths as well as all its deficiencies, which will be surprisingly numerous for anyone familiar with the "queen of the skies" mythology. For example, General Curtis LeMay, who probably knew the B-29 better than anyone, remarked that the B-29 was "the buggiest damn airplane that ever came down the pike." As with much else, the PR officers cranked into high gear to impress the public with all these big bombers.

   Most Americans, as might be expected, treated their B-17s with far more respect and affection [than the more capable British bombers]. Throughout the war, and in postwar reminiscences, the B-17 got wonderful media coverage about its toughness and its ability to bring its crew home safely even when seriously damaged. The Air Force's public relations officers saw to it that the nation's newspapers were filled with photographs of the bombers with shredded wings and tails, gaping holes in fuselages, and crumpled turrets—all safely back on their home-base hardstands with their intact crews smiling into the cameras. Of course, what the PR people could not show were the smashed and fire-charred hulks of the many hundreds of B-17s littering the German countryside that never made it back to England.

   Despite these sour notes, Ross rates the B-17 as, overall, a durable, successful design.
   Ross also reviews the fighters that escorted the bombers, and an entire chapter of almost twenty pages is devoted exclusively to bombs. A fuller description of bombs and their use against various targets might exist, but this is the best account of which we're aware, including data on developing incendiaries and explosives as well as more advanced weapons, such as the "smart" Azon guided bombs. Ross also explains how the Air Force copied the German V-1.

   General Arnold was understandably intrigued by the German V-1 and in mid 1944 arranged for salvaged parts to be shipped to Wright-Patterson Field in Ohio for study. Within a month, the engineers there had built a "Chinese copy" called JB-2 (Jet Bomb 2). Contingency plans called for launching hundreds of JB-2s at close-in German targets such as the Ruhr if the Germans developed new weapons that would reduce the ability of the 8th Air Force to continue its air bombardment. Despite initial teething problems in successfully flying the missile, the AAF ordered 1,000 units in August and planned for production of 5,000 per month starting in September. The project received an AA-1 production priority, the same as that for the B-29. Accuracy was disappointing to the Air Force's missiles advocates, with an average impact error of about eight miles at a range of 127 miles using a preset guidance system similar to the Luftwaffe system. By the end of the war, accuracy was improved somewhat, to an average error of five miles at 150 miles range. Over 1,000 JB-2s were ultimately built, although none were flown against enemy targets. These V-1 look-alikes are scattered at American air museums throughout the country as examples of early guided-missile technology.

   The same chapter covers in considerable detail the Air Force's Project Aphrodite—the attempt to deliver worn-out bombers, packed with explosives, against targets by remote control. (This project, and its USN equivalent, cost the life of Joseph Kennedy, Jr.) Ross mentions in passing the German composite Mistel aircraft, but mistakenly reports "...there are no records of these Luftwaffe hybrids ever flying in combat." (For their actual combat record, see, for example, Mistel by Robert Forsyth.) Ross also looks at Hap Arnold's abortive, unmanned "Bug" project and provides a rather humorous glimpse at "X-Ray," the fabled "bat bomb" project. Less humorously, the story of the making of the atomic bomb is condensed into a few pages.
   A chapter devoted to bombsights and radar bombing makes it clear again and again that precison bombing was little more than a PR-inspired myth. The fabled Norden bombsight in particular comes under critical scrutiny, and Ross identifies some crippling limitations.

   The target had to be acquired from many miles away, requiring a continuous clear view of the target during the approach, which had to be straight and level for ten minutes or more. This mandatory undeviatlng final approach would become well known by attacking fighter pilots in the air and antiaircraft battery commanders on the ground during combat operations in the years immediately ahead, and would contribute directly to the horrendous losses suffered by U.S. heavy bombers over Europe.
   Most significantly, the Norden was an optical device, which depended entirely for its successful performance on the bombardier seeing his target through a telescope. When targets were hidden by clouds, haze, or smoke—as they were, routinely, over Europe and Japan—the bombardier could not hit his target. This "no see, no hit" paradigm governed all of U.S. bombing operations during World War II and put the indelible lie to the concept of precision bombing. Radar bombsights which were intended to overcome this inherent deficiency, proved to be even less accurate.

   In scenes right out of Catch-22, Ross explains how bombardiers training with the Norden bombsight during the war had to pledge oaths practically religious in nature and, to prevent "secret" data from falling into the wrong hands, weren't allowed to take notes during their training, even though the Germans had obtained complete details about the Norden in 1938. In any event, given the weather patterns over the targets in Europe, bombers often had to rely on non-visual bombing, which—as the RAF was quick to point out—was even less accurate than Bomber Command's nighttime bombing. In order to achieve even these low levels of accuracy, the airmen paid an enormous price.

   Air combat was hazardous and cruel for U.S. bomber aircrews and life expectancy was startlingly short. In early 1943, when B-l7s and B-24s began to bomb targets in Germany, replacements from the United States learned that they could expect to complete only five and a half combat missions before becoming statistics: killed in action, missing in action, wounded, or prisoners of war. A year later a report by the Office of the Air Surgeon for the European Theater pointed out that during the first six months of 1944, out of each 1000 crewmen who had flown combat missions during that period, 712 were killed or missing and 175 were wounded—an 89 percent casualty rate. It closely matched an individual assessment by a B-24 crewman who disclosed that only 27 out of the 250 men in his July 1943 gunnery class had completed 25 missions

   In his chapter on aircrews, Ross looks behind those raw statistics to investigate the human dimension of precision bombing. He points out that the USAAF suffered more casualties from frostbite than enemy fire. For example, any crew member who walked through the rain or exerted himself enough to work up a sweat before climbing aboard his plane would almost certainly return as a frostbite casualty. Ross also attends to the sad fact that American air gunners, spraying machine gun fire wildly at attacking fighters, inflicted untold damage and casualties to other bombers in the formation. Ross further investigates morale problems, "lack of moral fiber," and "flying into internment" in Sweden and Switzerland.
   After reviewing German and Japanese defenses, Ross tours five cities that suffered especially dreadful fates: Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. Here he describes how Hamburg was set afire:

   Creating a bonafide firestorm demanded the confluence of two principal factors: the weather had to be dry with low humidity and many large individual fires had to be started at the same time. Fire fighters also had to be driven into shelters, if only temporarily, to allow the fires to build up. This meant blanketing the city area with a mix of bombs: tens of thousands of incendiaries and hundreds of high-explosive bombs. The HE bombs were also intended to smash water mains, create road blocks, break windows, hole roofs, and open up building walls. Unlike a large fire, which starts at a single point and spreads by stages over perhaps several hours, a firestorm starts with incredible speed.
   For example, within only 20 minutes of the first attack wave striking Hamburg, two out of three buildings in a nearly five square mile area were on fire. This rapid build up made fire fighting extraordinarily difficult. As flames broke through roofs, a column of superheated air shot up to a height of about 13,000 feet, sucking in cooler air at its base, creating a street-level draft of gale-force velocity. The resultant winds carried burning material and sparks down the streets and heated all combustibles in the area to their ignition points. The fire consumed the free oxygen in the area and replaced it with the products of combustion, one of which, carbon monoxide, heavier than air, seeped into basement bomb shelters killing the huddled, terror-stricken occupants painlessly and silently. It was estimated that 70 percent of the deaths in the fire storm came as a result of carbon-monoxide poisoning.

   The attack on Dresden proved even more destructive, so much so that Winston Churchill began to distance himself from the bomber offensive. Although the USAAF ostensibly wanted to knock out the rail marshalling yards in Dresden, the transportation network was functioning again within three days. Ross quotes a German newspaper article dated 1953: "One is amazed at the extraordinary precision with which the residential sections of the city were destroyed but not the important installations." An official USAAF post-war analysis emphasized that "the Communists" were behind public concerns about the Dresden attack, with Moscow deliberately spreading misinformation to feed anti-American propaganda. Was the bombing justified on military grounds? Whatever the answer, estimates of deaths in the city range from 35,000 to 135,000. For all its infamy, Dresden was not the ultimate firestorm.

   Three weeks after Dresden, on the night of March 9/10, from their bases in the Mariana Islands, 334 B-29s dropped nearly 1,700 tons of incendiary bombs on Tokyo, creating a firestorm of unprecedented proportions that razed 15 square miles, about one quarter of the city, destroyed nearly 300,000 buildings, and made over 1 million of its residents homeless. Official reports listed 83,793 killed and 40,918 wounded. It took 25 days to remove all the dead from the ruins. While the loss of life was less than in Dresden, the physical destruction exceeded that of any of the previous giant conflagrations of the western world: London, 1666 (436 acres, 13,200 buildings); Moscow, 1812 (38,000 buildings); Chicago, 1871 (224 acres, 450 buildings); San Francisco, 1906 (4 square miles, 21,124 buildings). Only the great earthquake that had struck Tokyo and nearby cities in 1923, killing 110,00 and razing about 20 percent of its dwellings, matched it. The USSBS later concluded that "probably more persons lost their lives by fire at Tokyo in a 6-hour period that any [equivalent period of] time in the history of man."
   Concerned that its B-29s might be viewed as terror bombers, the XXIst Bomber Command's report of the mission included a new propaganda twist: "The object of these attacks was not to indiscriminately bomb civilian populations. The object was to destroy the industrial and strategic targets concentrated in the urban areas." On March 14, LeMay received a message from Washington pointing out that American "editorial comment is beginning to wonder about blanket incendiary attacks upon cities." The message went on, urging LeMay to continue "hard hitting your present line that this destruction is necessary to eliminate home industries and that it is strategic bombing." It concluded with a firm admonition: "Guard against anyone stating that this is area bombing."

   Ross quickly points out that while the validity of Dresden as a military target might be open to question, such was not the case with Tokyo according to all the information available during the war. While the Air Force's PR machine might be self-serving, the city, as far as anyone knew, did indeed contain innumerable small, home-based manufacturing plants scattered throughout the urban area. The planning and execution of the Tokyo mission of 9-10 March 1945—performed "contrary to accepted Air Force doctrine and practice in nearly every way"—is described in considerable detail. In particular, Ross notes that the change in policy from using B-29's for precision attacks, no matter how loosely defined, to sheer area bombing was a decision made not in Washington DC but by General LeMay on the spot. Ross also points out that such tactics were incontrovertibly outlawed by the Geneva protocols, to which the United States was a signatory, "that specifically banned indiscriminate area bombing of city centers."
   Of course, Ross goes on to describe the dual atomic bombing missions, explaining the events coolly and unemotionally without falling into the simmering controversies except to point out that over the years much of what the American public believed about the missions, and the necessity for them, has come from a Public Relations piece ghost-written by McGeorge Bundy.
   In his final chapter, Ross investigates the United States Stragic Bombing Survey's appraisal of the campaigns, quickly showing the documents to be full of self-contradictions. John Kenneth Galbraith's interpretations of the data are much quoted, notably his famous statement about the relative costs of the operations. "The aircraft, manpower, and bombs used in the campaign had cost the American economy far more in output than they had cost Germany. However, our economy being much larger, we could afford it." Ross goes on to repeat more USSBS conclusions that the bomber offensive was not decisive and was in fact far less effective than any of the air generals claimed. Against Japan, the bombing paid greater dividends, but here too Galbraith and others found problems. For example, despite the generally accepted premise that Japan relied on small, home-based workshops to turn out war material, the report discovered that "by 1944 Japan had almost totally eliminated home industry from the war economy." Similarly, even before they were bombed, the US Navy's blockade had already put many factories out of action for lack of raw materials.
   Of devastated Hiroshima, Galbraith found that the bulk of plant capacity was in the suburbs and untouched by the atomic bomb, 94% of the industrial work force survived uninjured, and the remaining plants could likely have resumed three-quarters of Hiroshima's original production within thirty days if the war had continued.
   The efficacy, or lack thereof, of strategic bombing in World War II also had ramifications in later wars. Ross quotes John Kenneth Galbraith again as saying that, had the USSBS been more forthright about the shortcomings of aerial bombardment, "this would have better prepared us for the costly ineffectiveness of the bombers in Korea and Vietnam." Ross goes further, quoting findings from the Gulf War that 33% of air missions were aimed at cities, and that 70% of all bombs missed their targets in Iraq, some with results similar to area bombing in World War II. His final paragraph even describes problems with pinpoint bombing in Afghanistan. All in all, given the myths handed down by Air Force Public Relations officers during WWII, Ross urges cautious handling of today's news about the latest and greatest advances in "precision" bombing.
   Highly recommended. A well-written, insightful, thought-provoking survey of American strategic bombing in World War II, one of the most interesting books we've read in quite awhile, and a perspective controversial enough to leave our old friend the B-24 bombigator steaming.
   Available from online booksellers, local bookshops, or directly from McFarland & Company.
   Thanks to McFarland for providing this review copy.