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By Root 1276 0

‘unless driven to do so as a measure of reprisal for like enemy conduct’. As war threatened in Europe in 1939, Roosevelt declared his government and people opposed to ‘the unprovoked bombing and machine-gunning of civilian populations from the air’. When elements of the US Army Air Forces (AAF) first came to England in the spring of 1942, their commanders refused to join the RAF in its newfound commitment, under Butch Harris, to ‘de-house’ German workers. Instead, the AAF would rely on precision, daylight bombing of German military and industrial targets, in this way destroying Germany’s warmaking capacity without, the commanders told themselves, slaughtering civilians like the profligate and debased Europeans. Besides, the AAF thought that attacks on civilians might increase their will to resist.7

Notice, however, the qualifications in these statements: the American people would forbear from air attacks, wrote Eliot, ‘unless driven... as a measure of reprisal for like enemy conduct’; the United States would refrain from ‘unprovoked’ attacks on civilians, Roosevelt declared; the AAF at first shunned British air doctrine in good part because of doubts concerning not its morality but its effectiveness. The American knights of the air who flew daylight missions against German targets, mainly in the Low Countries and France, beginning in 1943, could believe, if they wished, that they were fighting more ethically than their British counterparts, bombing, as Air Force General Henry Arnold put it, ‘in accordance with American principles using methods for which our planes were designed’. What they were doing in fact was subjecting the enemy to constant bombing—the Americans by day, the British by night—and to the bombing of targets of every description. Arnold and others also believed that the Americans were better suited than the British, by training and equipment (‘methods for which our planes were designed’), to launch precision raids by day. While they did, according to Ronald Schaffer, keep an eye on American public opinion, the air generals nevertheless acted largely out of utilitarian conviction rather than an abiding sense of moral scruple. General Carl (Tooey) Spaatz, the first commander of the Eighth Air Force, said after the war that ‘it wasn’t for religious or moral reasons that I didn’t go along with urban area bombing’, but rather because of his belief that going after ‘strategic targets’ was more likely to end the war sooner. Ira Eaker, who succeeded Spaatz, ‘never felt there was any moral sentiment among leaders of the AAF’. The Americans also scoffed at British warnings about the dangers and ineffectiveness of daylight precision bombing. What the RAF had failed to do, the Americans would manage, without killing Dutch civilians or angering German civilians and thus increasing the latter’s resolve to fight on.8

The Americans’ plans failed to work. Their navigation was imperfect, the daylight bombing allowed the Germans to mount successful countermeasures using interceptor planes and anti-aircraft fire, and the weather over northern Europe provided a challenge the Americans were unused to. Panicky air crews dropped their payloads prematurely (‘creep-back’), not only resulting in missed targets but inadvertently killing civilians in occupied countries. Postwar estimates were that the Eighth Air Force placed only 20 percent of its bombs within 1,000 feet of its intended targets. The British, ironically, felt themselves compelled to advise Eaker that the Americans were alienating captive populations with their inaccuracy. Henry Arnold scolded his commanders, reminding them that each American pilot ‘is handling a weapon which can be either the scourge or the savior of humanity, according to how well he uses it’.9

The problem, the pilots would have replied, was not with their determination and courage but with the AAF’s strategy. The discrepancy between the AAF’s results and those of the RAF were vividly pointed up in July 1943, when Harris and Eaker sent their bombers over the German port city of Hamburg. The RAF struck