Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [35]
While Churchill, Portal, and Pierse reshaped British air-war strategy, Arthur Harris waited for orders. When war broke out he was given command of the No. 5 Group at Grantham, a cluster of clumsy and uncomfortable Hampden bombers. He moved, in late 1940, to the Air Ministry, then the following June was posted to Washington as head of an RAF delegation charged quietly to discuss joint strategy and the possibility of more American planes for the British. In February 1942, with the Americans in the war at last but with the Allies reeling from setbacks in Europe, North Africa, the Soviet Union, and Asia, Harris replaced Pierse as Air Command C-in-C. He inherited a new Air Directive that listed a number of German industrial cities, including most of the Ruhr, as legitimate targets for British bombers, which were about to be equipped with a new navigational technology that would make attacks on cities, as well as precision attacks on buildings, more fruitful. Harris’s job, according to the 14 February directive, was ‘to focus attacks on the morale of the enemy civil population, and, in particular, of the industrial workers’. Explaining his mandate, Harris would also cite an earlier Air Staff paper, which declared that the aim of bombing towns was ‘to produce (i) destruction, and (ii) the fear of death’; the production of death itself was, curiously, left off the list. Enabled by these directives, inclined by his instincts, and increasingly equipped with planes numerous and powerful and well flown enough to produce both destruction and fear of death, Harris opened his bomber offensive.35
His planes dropped two types of bombs. Most common were high explosive or ‘general-purpose’ bombs, which were powerful and volatile chemical cocktails encased in metal. Early in the war, the RAF used mainly 250- and 500-pound high explosives, equipped with fins for guidance and fuses that would detonate the explosive on contact with the ground. Later in the war, and particularly after the destruction of Hamburg in July and August 1943, the RAF increasingly used a second type of bomb, the incendiary, to burn German cities and towns. Incendiaries were thermite or magnesium-based weapons that burned at temperatures exceeding 12000 f. In their use the British were urged on by the Americans, whose universities and chemical and oil companies had developed sophisticated versions of the weapons. A Harvard University chemist, working for Standard Oil, devised napalm, a jelly-like substance that was propelled out of the rear of a bomb called the M-69 and burned remorselessly anyone or anything with which it came into contact. If the Trenchard-Harris doctrine of air war was to destroy civilian morale and thereby end the war quickly, a good thing for all remaining alive concerned, it followed that the most terrifying weapons were finally the most humane.36
4. The discovery of nuclear fission, and the bomb reimagined
As the doctrine of air power evolved toward the targeting of civilians, and as weapons to be dropped from aircraft became more powerful, so did the refugee scientists, at Cambridge and elsewhere in Great Britain, come to discover that the awesome power of the atomic nucleus might ultimately be of interest to those with seemingly more prosaic strategic and military concerns. Weaponized atomic energy was not, as it turned out, mere ‘moonshine’ or H. G. Wells’s fictional Carolinum. Nuclear research continued throughout the 1930s at an astonishing pace. In 1934 Irene Curie and Frederic Joliot made radioactive isotopes from ordinary stable elements by blasting them with alpha particles. The same year, Enrico Fermi, in Rome, switched from alphas to recently discovered neutrons and had even better success producing isotopes, and found, mostly by chance and good guessing, that a barrier of paraffin