Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [83]
The Germans fought on, in Italy and Eastern and Western Europe. As the Manhattan Project scientists, along with Groves, confronted problems—not enough atomic fuel, puzzles concerning bomb size and implosion and how best to trigger the weapon—Allied troops continued to tighten the circle. Rome was finally captured on 5 June 1944. The Russians liberated Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Poland, and Hungary through the year and into 1945. Stalin had chafed while awaiting a British-American assault across the English Channel; D-Day came finally on 6 June, and France was restored in August. Everywhere, German armies were falling back and ordinary Germans were dying. And yet there might still be surprises, as in the German counterattack at the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944. That the Germans were not close to having an atomic bomb was established with certainty by Alsos only in the spring of 1945— indeed, the Germans had started building a new atomic pile in Haigerloch that February. Until they were sure that Hitler was dead and Germany defeated, those working on the American bomb felt they could not afford to let up, and they did not.
2. The allies and the strategic bombing of Germany
There was one important facet of the European war of particular interest to those at the highest level of the Manhattan Project, and that was the strategic bombing campaign against Germany. Chickens hatched during the First World War, then coaxed to maturity by bombing theorists such as Hugh Trenchard, Arthur Harris, Giulio Douhet, and Billy Mitchell, were roosting thickly by the 1930s. Far from being represented as mass murderers, warplane pilots were portrayed as gallant individualists, knights of the air whose noble mission was to end wars quickly. As British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin had put it in 1932, ‘the bomber will always get through’, holding civilians hostage and therefore requiring their governments to sue for an early peace. Thus, presumably in the name of reducing casualties overall, Italian planes bombed and strafed Ethiopian villages (and hospitals) in 1935. Thus the Japanese bombed Chinese cities in 1937 and after without regard for civilian casualties. The Germans, after practicing bombing technique at Guernica in 1937, attacked Warsaw, Rotterdam, London, and other cities, aiming ostensibly at military or industrial targets but in reality exercising little care over where the bombs dropped. Attacks on Britain alone had killed 40,000 by May 1941. In the early fall of 1940 the British began the ‘area bombing’ of German cities by night; with Prime Minister Churchill’s permission, air crews made only perfunctory efforts to drop their bombs on factories, and then only on fully moonlit nights. Their true target was the morale of the German populace.6
The American position on bombing was at that point unsettled. Air doctrine, established by the American Air Corps during the 1920s, endorsed bombing ‘attacks to intimidate civil populations’, without saying precisely that such populations would themselves be bombed. When other nations had targeted civilians, however, the US government had condemned the practice. Roosevelt’s secretary of state, Cordell Hull, called the Japanese air attacks in China ‘barbarous’, and his decision to embargo the sale of airplane parts to the Japanese was pointedly linked to this bombing. The military commentator Fielding Eliot foresaw in 1938 the need for US air attacks against Japanese cities should it come to war, but suspected that the American public would reject such a course, and that American fliers would also resist targeting civilians