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By Root 856 0

Ramrods, Lagoons, Jim Crows, Roadsteads, Rhubarbs. In the last months of the war, “anything that moved on the road was fair game, as only the military had petrol. But sometimes military traffic mixed in with the refugees in their horse-drawn vehicles. I saw open trucks crammed with infantry, with innocent ox-drawn carts in front and behind. Of course we killed civilians—we couldn’t help it.” Hough, like most pilots, acknowledged that it was much easier to overcome scruples if the consequences of one’s own actions were invisible. “You sometimes saw too much with ground strafing. At the same time, with the hunter’s instinct, the heart lifted with excitement at the sight of a target below, and the hunter’s blood ran faster as you pushed down the stick, opened the throttle wide, made a quick intercept calculation, switched on the sight and slipped the shield from the gun button.” Every ground strafer hated flak gunners as personal enemies, and would take extraordinary risks to get in a shot at them after bombing a target.

An age ago, in the innocent days of 1940, a British fighter pilot in France was appalled to see the Luftwaffe’s “knights of the air” machine-gun refugees on the roads. “They are shits after all,” Paul Richey observed in shocked dismay in his officers’ mess. Yet by 1945 few of the leaders of the American and British air forces found anything to trouble them in their orders for Operation Clarion, an assault on German communications links which was unleashed on 22 February. Clarion was allegedly designed to inflict a massive blow on the remaining German transport net, by striking with 9,000 American and British bombers and fighters across the widest possible area. The bombers, as usual, were deployed against railroads and bridges, but their attacks also covered many small towns. All those concerned with Clarion’s planning recognized that, whatever the targeting pretext, its real purpose was explicitly terroristic—to demonstrate the power of the Allies to strike at will into every corner of the Reich. General Ira Eaker of Eighth Air Force expressed concern that Clarion would demonstrate to the Germans “that we are the barbarians they say we are, for it would be perfectly obvious to them that this is primarily a large-scale attack on civilians, as, in fact, it of course will be.” General Charles Cabell, an adviser to General Arnold, scribbled bitterly on a copy of the Clarion proposal: “This is the same old baby-killing plan of the get-rich-quick psychological boys, dressed up in a new kimono.” Clarion went ahead anyway. Allied fighters were committed to attacking road movements of every kind. “CLARION hit people who had never been bombed before,” notes a German historian. “The psychological effect was very great.” The civilian casualties inflicted by the operation were never documented, but certainly ran into thousands. For the rest of the war, Allied pilots attacked German civilians with growing promiscuity. Who could blame them, after the lead Clarion had given them from the top?

The Allied fighter-bomber pilots, like those of the Luftwaffe in 1940, were very young men. Few denied the adrenaline rush that often transcended the terrors of operational flying: “I could see the cannon strikes dancing along the road like a hysterically fast fuse racing to its point of detonation,” wrote Richard Hough. “The car was packed with passengers—there must have been five or six inside, and not one with the sense to keep a look-out through the window. My glimpse of them, alive, intact, perhaps talking together and smoking, was one frame from a film, flickering like the Odessa Steps sequence from Eisenstein’s Potemkin. The next frame, as the full weight of my shells tore in, was all blood and fire.” In the spring of 1945, even in rural Saxony German civilians became reluctant to go shopping because of the danger of being strafed by passing fighter-bombers. They learned to throw themselves flat on the ground whenever aircraft approached. It was so easy for a bored young man to touch his gun-button, to relieve the monotony of