Bombs

I'm coming towards the end of Keith Lowe's Inferno: The Devastation of Hamburg, 1943. This is an interesting book, which tells 'both sides' of the story of the RAF/USAAF bombing of the German city; there are some slightly strange (to my mind) tonal elements that sit a little awkwardly with the generally measured, objective and sombre tone of the book (as if he's trying too hard to create a sense of tension/drama or anticipation, or (unnecessarily) synthesise traditional human interest angles), but for the most part it is vividly and fluently written.

Having read many books about the bomber war in Europe in 1939-45, I was particularly impressed at how convincingly, powerfully and comprehensively he had portrayed the horror and suffering of those who lived and died under the bombs; Lowe's account of the firestorm that resulted from the second RAF raid of 27 July 1943 is detailed, relentless and harrowing, as are his descriptions of the aftermath of the firestorm, the subsequent raids, and the 'clean-up' operations that followed. These chapters speak compellingly of the fear, horror, exhaustion and suffering of the German civilians and service people. This is the most moving and insistent treatment I have read on this subject.

Something else that struck me as I read this book was how closely I identified with the bomber crews (particularly the RAF crews, whose cultural background I feel I know so much more about). This identification partly stems from my reading of Len Deighton's Bomber. I'm not sure exactly what age I was when I fist read my brother's thick, tatty, black-covered, bold red capital-lettered Pan Books copy of this novel, but it was probably around 1974 or 1975, when I would have been 12 or 13. I remember reacting powerfully to this book, and re-reading it often in the following years; in fact, I think it became something of an obsession - I thought it was such a fantastic book. (At this time I had a mental list of books that were the 'best' in different genres: Bomber was the best book about night bombing; Colin Forbes' Tramp in Armour was the best book about the war in France in 1940, Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey was the best science fiction book - and so on.) And Bomber keyed into another of my pre-adolescent/adolescent obsessions: war and war machines. Even at junior school I had been fascinated by war (particularly the Second World War) and I had been building model warplanes, warships and armoured fighting vehicles since I was six or seven; this book gave me a coherent narrative structure and set of imagined visual images around which I could shape my model-building and play, as well as a set of imagined characters whose voices and perspectives I could adopt as part of my creative world.

In retrospect, I think that one of the reasons I found Bomber so affecting and powerful was that it somehow legitimised this play-world of pilots, warplanes conflict and death that I had innocently been engaged in for years; the cool, objective writing of the book created a quasi-scientific narrative that delineated the use and effects of the weapons - bombers, bombs, night fighters, cannon-shells - in such a way (vivid but distant) that let me maintain a distance from the reality of those effects and avoid a deeper moral or emotional engagement with the issues. In retrospect, it is rather strange to think that most of the people in the book were mere adjuncts to the stunningly-written sections about air combat or the effects of explosions: the bits of the book that I approached with the greatest sense of pleasurable anticipation were the ones where German night-fighters and British bombers encountered each other in the dark night sky, 20mm cannon shells were fired, and holes were blasted through the stressed metal skins of Lancaster bombers. This was something like a pornography of violence: thrilling, abstract, rewarding. This, despite what I later came to understand as the novel's distinct anti-war thrust - there are no 'good' and 'bad' people, just the living and the dead.

It strikes me now that this unemotional focus on machines and imaginative abstractions helped to cement my crude sense of the morality of the Second World War, derived from comics and popular culture: a clash of Good (the Allies) against Evil (the Axis). Thus the bomber crews were fighting a just campaign against the people on the ground (who were largely faceless and unreal to me); this picture was nuanced by the sense that the German night-fighter crews were noble 'Knights of the air', unsullied by any unpleasant ideological taint from Nazism (in fact, this was implicitly reinforced by the portrayal of some of the airmen's disgust on finding evidence of the medical experiments that were being carried out 'for their benefit').

This 'good German/bad Nazi' element of the book did not make as big an impact on me as it might later have done. My early readings of Bomber were completed in a naive state, before my awareness of the Holocaust began and developed. In a way, my awareness of the Holocaust made it even easier to duck any moral questions about mass bombing and the explicit targeting of civilians, since it fostered a (largely unconscious) sense that 'they' (the bombed) had (all) 'deserved it', (a) because the Nazis had launched a war of aggressive conquest, and (b) because since the regime's genocidal policies were clearly morally repugnant, any qualms about adopting the measures of 'total war' could be easily dismissed (even if I had framed them in that way).

I've read number of books in recent years that approach the question of mass bombing in a more morally-charged way (previously, most of the books cantered over any questions of morality). These kind of books (e.g. A.C Grayling's Among the Dead Cities or Frederick Taylor's Dresden reflect a recent trend whereby questions about Bomber Command's campaign have shifted from 'objective' discussions about the bombing's cost-benefit-based validity to starker questions about whether the bombing can be seen as morally defensible (these questions are also entangled with questions about the responsibility of the individual in a set of social contexts and about whether to admit that something is immoral necessarily taints the individual who was carrying out their duty in good faith); it's easy to see how you might have a similar discussion about moral/individual responsibility over the role of - say - a German soldier who had grown up from childhood under the Nazis regime and knew no other moral/social universe other than the one that they had lived their life within.

I realise that I have no established position on these questions: this does not strike me as necessarily a bad thing - it seems better to me to have a morally complex, difficult position than one which is simplified and polarised. Neither do I have the language or structured arguments of a moral philosopher with which I can express myself properly (at least, not without making a proper 'essay plan' instead of just putting finger to keys as I have done here. So the questions are still open in my mind - something to work on some more.