Customer Reviews

The Bomber War: The Allied Air Offensive Against Nazi Germany

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Robin Neillands' "The Bomber War" is a book of limited value that plows old ground. The author sets out to rehabilitate the memory of Arthur "Bomber" Harris, address the morality of the bombing campaigns waged in the Second World War and dispell myths. In the end, he makes much ado about nothing new.

Respecting Harris, Neillands early on establishes that he did not initiate the "area bombing" campaign he is so well identified with and then commences what can only be called a whitewash campaign. Neillands blithely ignores many indicators of the truth,--even those evident in his prized oral history --that paint a less improved picture of Harris. In the final reflection, Neillands reveals nothing new about Harris and ignores the real implications of a barely acknowledged ruthlessness and obstinacy.

Denis Richards' 1994 book ("The Hardest Victory") did as much to dispell any evidence of Harris initiating the area bombing campaign and contains a much more realistic summation of Arthur "Butch" (short for "Butcher") Harris' connection to area bombing: "...he became not only its chief executant but also--though always within the official channels--its most ardent, eloquent and obdurate champion." Neillands's faint observation that Harris continued to hold on to "the bomber dream" does not describe Harris so well. As for Harris's good qualities as a commander, those too were addressed by Richards seven years before.

Thus one is left to wonder if Harris' reputation needed, or deserved, rehabilitation.

Concerning the morality of the bombing campaigns, Neillands spills a tremendous amount of ink only to retrace the path of a multitude before him and conclude "there was a war on." While this is thoroughly true, it is hardly new or revealing. Along the way, he disgraces his arguments by attempting to bolster the rationale for area bombing by essentially pointing a finger at the USAAF on behalf of the RAF and declaring "you did it too" largely as a result of systemic flaws that rendered the basic USAAF doctrine unworkable.

While his arguments are technically and militarily correct, they fall short morally (in the ETO). Certainly both bomber forces (and the high commands that directed them) suffered an erosion of the ideals they initially entered the war with, but the RAF went much farther than the USAAF as a matter of policy in Europe. The fact that imperfect practice on the part of the USAAF often amounted to the same thing as what was policy in the RAF fails to disguise the fact that the RAF was blatantly attacking cities with the intent of killing large sectors of their populations with relative indiscriminacy.

Neillands would have been more wise to mark the parallel decline in ideals between the two services that is evident if the bombing campaign against Japan is also taken into account on the USAAF side. Instead, Neillands, like so many before, is at least partially blinded by the racial issue. When one includes the USAAF experience in the PTO in the overall continuum, the decline in moral compunctions of the RAF and the USAAF is remarkably similar.

Neillands' conclusions that the bomber was available in insufficient numbers, hampered by weather and technically immature are quite correct. So too is his conclusion that there "was a war on." These points simply required much less proof to make and did not require finger-pointing to do it.

This brings up Neillands's third purpose: dispelling myths. As nearly as I can tell, after studying this subject for a quarter of a century I'm at a loss to discern just where some of the myths he purports to identify hold sway. In 25 years I have encountered no credible work that does not conclude the following:
1) That the RAF deliberately targeted civilians as a de facto matter of policy that was not beyond the standards of the war being fought and arguably had a significant impact on German production, but not on morale;
2) That the USAAF attempted to make the precision bombing doctrine work but was largely unable due to the weather, the initial lack of fighter escorts and the immaturity of the weapons system, with the result that its attacks wrought similar and often indiscriminate damage akin to RAF raids;
3) That the USAAF fire bombing in Japan was every bit as ruthless and morally disappointing as what the RAF did to Hamburg and Dresden;
4) That the RAF developed a small cadre of highly capable precision bombing units;
5) That the bombing commands suffered a drain of resources to other fronts.
6) That the fire bombing of Japanese cities was actually worse than the atomic bombings.
None of this is new, or revealing, and given that it represents mainstream thought it hardly constitutes truth hidden behind the veil of myth.

Neillands also falls prey to a few myths and errors himself. Henry Arnold was never actually taught to fly by either of the Wright brothers and the conclusion of the Pacific War had more to do with internal Japanese politics than the use of the atomic bombs. (had a very few things gone differently, Japan would not have surrendered on 15 August 1945). So when it comes to myth-busting, Neillands is seven years late and $14.55 short (just comparing to Richards).

Even Neillands' avowed purpose of using oral history to ensure the veterans are heard before they pass is nothing new or unique. Richards's book contains 33 pages of nothing but air crew quotes. Richards's book also contains extensive appendices completely absent from Neillands's work.

Neillands's book comes off as old news. It is RAF/Euro-centric and seeks to both absolve the RAF and damn the USAAF by association on the issue of area bombing. It was not necessary to spend 406 pages reaching the same conclusions as those who have gone before. Richards's 363 pages are much more informative.

The story was very good and engrossing. It is well written. The author starts out with a thesis and sets out to support it. It is shocking how many men went to their deaths daily in the bomber war over Europe. Given the very close accounting kept of current skirmishes, I think it would have been truely appalling, though informative, if everyone knew exactly how many people were being killed every day during World War II.
However, I do find the book to be very repetitive and I have never seen a professionally published book with more typographical errors than this one. Editing and proofreading were lacking.

A lot of errors here, ranging from the minor--a claim that the Me-262 was not used as a night fighter (it was) and that the Ar-234 never saw combat (it did), to the major--no mention whatsoever of the 8th Air Force's Operation Argument (February-May 1944), possibly (I nearly wrote "aguably") the turning point of the entire Allied air campaign, to the imbecilic--August 6, 1945 is somehow transformed to "mid-August" (P. 380). And I could go on. The book badly needed both careful editing and close reading by experts well-versed in the subject.

The fact that it received neither renders it useless in its stated aim, as an argument calling for a reappraisal of RAF Bomber Command chief Arthur Harris. Such an argument could be made, but not with the level of error here.

A detailed discussion of the morality of area bombing (one reaching the exact opposite of Neilland's conclusion) can be found in Michael Walzer's "Just and Unjust Wars". For a good history of the RAF bombing campaign I would suggest Max Hasting's "Bomber Command", both available nowhere else but on Amazon.

While providing a good history of the RAF's Bomber Command at war the author provides only the most limited space to the the US 8th AF and 15th AF. The phenominal advances in aircraft technology are also given very little attention. The author does, however, provide the reader with an outstanding history of the revolution in avionics with special attention being paid to long-range night navigation.
The prolonged defense mounted on "Bomber" Harris' behalf reads as false and disconnected. The author is trying to refute the arguments put forth by an ealrly 1990's CBC/BBC documentary on the bomber offensive. In the absence of first-hand knowledge of the documentary the reader is asked to accept Neillano's explanation of the program's thesis. I could not make that leap of faith given Neillano's far to dogged (syncophantic?) defense of Harris.
Leave this on the shelf, unless you want to read the author's defense of Ol' Bomber. Read Hasting's "Bomber Command" and Freeman's "The Mighty Eighth" for excellent depictions of the Anglo-America bomber offense as conducted by the US 8th Air Force and RAF Bomber Command. I dearly wish there was a similiar work available about the 15th AF but historically it seems to have been consigned to some sort of footnote to the air war in Europe. Ambroses' "The Wild Blue" is good but it addresses only one tour (9/44-5/45) of one B-24 crew of the 15th.

As noted by other reviewers, the appearance of easily avoided errors of fact and the absolutely atrocious proof reading and indexing embarrass the publisher (s), not to mention the author.
Written with good intentions, but not at all scholarly in discipline, the book's unique virtue is the aircrew letters and interviews, presumably not found in other works.
As far as the thesis - that Bomber Command, RAF was not engaged in war crimes -some suitable evidence and arguments are developed.
This is a story which should be told, perhaps more expertly than herein.

Robin Neillands's account of the bombing campaign against Germany has many interesting aspects. His description of the methods, techniques and aircraft in the (English) Bomber command and the (American) USAAF is clear and entertaining. He puts some emphasis, rightly in my view, on the German effort to thwart the bombing war's aims and vividly illustrates (German) general Kammhuber's successful tactics. The stupidity (with hindsight perhaps) of sending bombers into Germany with no fighter escort until early 1944 (when the long range Mustang P-51 fighter became available), because the brass had decreed several years before that "the bomber will always get through" needlessly cost their lives to many crews and the point is not lost on the reader. By necessity, telling the story of bombing raid after bombing raid could be tedious, but Mr. Neillands makes up for that with frequent and often moving stories from the men who actually fought that war.
I enjoyed the book but Mr. Neillands's insistence in defending Air Chief Marshal ("Bomber") Harris's memory and his somewhat lengthy and convoluted arguments over the Dresden tragedy or the "morality" of the bombing war are a bit disappointing. One is left wondering about the point of the exercise: war is cruel and immoral by necessity. Should we really keep debating whether Dresden was a "legitimate" target and whose "responsibility" it was almost seventy years later? Was it "moral" for Nelson to catch the French unaware at Trafalgar?

Neillanos is open that he wrote this book to defend the British leaders of the bomber campaign, above all Arthur Harris, the chief wartime commander of the RAF Bomber Command. His subject is "Bomber Command" in the Second World War. He includes a fairly extensive discussion of what the US Eight Air Force did insofar as it is necessary to explain what Bomber Command did, and to clear up several myths about differences between the RAF and the USAAF.

This book has almost nothing to say about the experience of the majority of the people involved in The Bomber War, the tens of millions of Germans, French, Dutch, British, and Japanese people who suffered under Allied, Nazi, Italian, and Japanese bombing during the Second World War. This book discusses them only in regard to the wrangling of military chiefs or the lives of the flight crews. For that story I highly recommend _Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945 by Frederick Taylor_, _The Night Tokyo Burned by Hoito Edoin_ and _To Destroy a City: Strategic Bombing and Its Human Consequences in World War II_ by Hermann Knell. Each one of them can be reached by clicking on the links to my other reviews above this comment.

What Neillanos is good at and what he really seems interested in is explaining the real lives of Allied flight crew. The book is laced with many descriptions of bombing missions, life on the bases, the training regimen, and other features of the lives of aircrew of both the RAF and the USAAF, all in the words of British, American, and German aircrew. You find out more of what the missions were really like for the men flyign the planes.

This book also provides a clear account of the various bombing campaigns, aircraft, technical equipment, and tactics used by the US, British, and German air forces in Western Europe.

Neillanos is good at detailing the technical and organizational development of Bomber command and its tactics. However, Neillanos is self-contradictory and unobjective because in broader discussion he clings to a defense of Arthur Harris's determination to continue following the "Bomber Dream" first put forward by Italian air power theorist Douhet.

The idea was that bombing cites, killing people, and demoralizing the enemy in war time would produce so much political dissatisfaction with a war, that it would force the enemy government to cease war or be overthrown. Bombing alone without support from land or naval actions could win a war. Harris and his colleagues believed that by terror bombing the cities of Germany, they could force an end to the war. They even believed that land invasion or bombings aimed at strategic military targets or purely economic targets like oil or transport were diversions from this.

Despite claims made especially by the USAAF and crack "precision" units of the RAF, WWII bombers were incapable of serious precision bombing of anything without overwhelming losses. It was a constant struggle to lead the bombers to the right cities, let alone to hit precision targets without special efforts. The RAF Bomber command learned this after the first two years of WWII. They then changed their strategy to aim at massive destruction aimed at setting entire cities alight in firestorms. Their models were the Nazi blitz, particularly the small firestorm raid against Coventry, England in 1940. While exception and horror has been raised by the bombings of Hamburg in 1943 and Dresden in 1945, these were not exceptional. They were simply successes at what Bomber Command hoped to do every time it hit a major German city with a heavy raid. You will not learn this in Neillanos's book but Taylor and Knell's books tell that grisly story.

Harris was so extreme that even Neillanos has to admit that by the fall of 1944 he had been proven wrong and needed to relent. Yet, Neillanos simply ignores evidence that was developed in the strategic bombing survey carried out by the US government at the close of the war and several years after, that the political impact of the bombing was to harden Germans against the allies, and to embitter some who opposed Hitler and the war against an Allied victory. Neillanos simply ignores the fact that these bombings were relatively ineffective in damaging military and economic targets, even though they killed hundreds of thousands of Germans and other Europeans and nearly tens of thousands of Allied aircrew.

Neillanos is right to show that despite public relations attempts to distance themselves from British terror-bombing, particularly after world uproar after the February 1945 bombing of Dresden, the United States Eighth Air Force came to the same conclusions and carried out raids with the same results. He is particularly vociferous in pointing out that the US air force bombers cooperated with the RAF in the bombing of Dresden, and bombed Dresden for several days after the British night bombing of February 13, 1945. Showing the USAAF was no better than the RAF, he explains how P-51 fighters that escorted US Bombers would swoop down and attack fleeing civilians and firefighters at Dresden and elsewhere.

At the end of the book Neillanos embarks on an embarrassing attempt to defend Harris's terror bombing tactics morally and militarily. His arguments are all over the place and completely inconsistent. The author has already explained that Harris considered bombings with military targets or with transport or oil targets to be diversions from simply slaughtering Germans and destroying their homes ("dehousing" being the term Bomber Command used). Yet in his defense of Harris Neillanos tries to take credit for raids with economic or purely military targets that Harris was forced to carry out by his superiors. Likewise, while Neillanos uses the amount of German resources involved in shooting down the bombers, fighting the fires, and clearing cities to justify the terror bombing, he says nothing about what the resources that went into the terror Bombing campaign could have been used for. Approximately 10 thousand British and American strategic bombers were shot down. The majority of crews were killed, captured, or wounded, leaving more than 100K aircrew casualties. These figures do not include aircrew from the tactical air forces that worked directly with the Allied armies and navies bombing targets on the battlefronts.

Yet, the real point is the indifference of the imperialist British and American governments to the lives of the working people of Germany, or for that matter, to the lives of the aircrew. In this regard they were no different than the German imperialists who prosecuted the war at such a heavy price to their own population and carried out massive atrocities including terror bombings of their own.

The real question is the replacement of the capitalist system that engenders insane rivalries for control over the world between plutocratic governments of "democratic" or fascist nature.

Hello,

Excellent book, Niellands put you really back into the mindset of times we never hope to encounter it again.

Furthermore it offers an excellent analysis of the "we were victims" version of WW2 which is gaining popularity in Germany.

Niellands also doesn't spare Bomber Command and the USAAF regarding tactics and results.

Niellands ask the obvious questions, "historians" out on anti Harris mission fail to ask. A must read for someone who seriously wants to learn about WW2 events, or someone who just wants to read an original analysis of these horrible times.

Nothing new here, except the fact that, in the writer's opinion, Butcher Harris was a great guy, just trying to make the war end faster... What a nice fellow Harris was...

One thing was to believe that destroying german cities and killing their civilians by the thousands was a good way to shorten the war and, doing so, spare the lives of thousands of Allied men. Another completely different thing is TO ENJOY doing it, as Harris apparently did!

The wildly different reviews of this book I suspect reflect politcs not judgement. As usual with books on subjects like this one.

This is a pretty straightforward account of the "bomber dream" as practiced against the third reich. It rarely strays beyond that scope. It is a useful corrective to the bombers-were-useless nonsense and a readable narrative.