Customer Reviews

Fire and Fury: The Allied Bombing of Germany, 1942-1945

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In this book Randall Hansen attempts a fresh look at an old and controversial subject, the Allied bombing of Germany in WWII. A major goal of his work appears to be rehabilitating the reputations of America's bomber generals -- Arnold, Spaatz, Eaker, and Doolittle -- at the expense of their British counterparts. The emphasis throughout is how the Americans were right, and essentially moral, in their strategic focus on "daylight precision bombing" as a means of winning the war against the Germans. In contrast the British--especially "Bomber" Harris and Portal, his nominal superior--were wrong and almost criminal in the way they conducted and/or condoned area bombing and mass destruction of German cities during the latter stages of the conflict.

Hansen clearly offers an alternative interpretation of events compared to works like Wings of Judgment: American Bombing in World War II by Ronald Shaffer, which reflects academic thought in the 1980s on the Combined Bomber Offensive. Shaffer's thesis was that the Americans and British had more in common in their bombing goals than was suggested by the simplistic "American precision bombing good, British area bombing bad" equation, and that neither side's "bomber barons" gave much thought to the morality of what they were doing. Thus, Shaffer argued, their sins were the same, differing only in degree.

Hansen makes a very persuasive case that strategic bombing American style was effective in crippling German war-making ability, and that the wanton RAF destruction of countless German cities in 1944-45 was essentially worthless, immoral, and significantly counterproductive to the overall war effort. Consider a question never asked at the time because military parochialism made even the suggestion unthinkable: How much more quickly would Germany have collapsed had RAF Bomber Command wholly embraced precision bombing methods in early 1944, after the P-51 Mustang took control of the air away from the Luftwaffe?

Hansen also shows that American radar bombing through undercast, using US modified versions of British terrain radar like H2S, was very much a second best solution to the perennial problem of bad weather over the Continent. American military leaders almost always preferred the Norden bombsight to radar, but were loathe to bring the bombs back when over Germany itself--hence radar bombing. If civilians were killed--and tens of thousands were--due to "precision" bombing mistakes or daylight radar bombing, it was more a reflection of how crude bombing technology was in the 1940s than the result of any plan to kill civilians and achieve victory by sapping enemy "morale."

In Hansen's calculus, intentions do matter. For that reason, together with superior strategic results, the Americans come off as the real winners of the air war against Germany. I think he's right, in purely strategic terms, but I am less comfortable with his conclusions about the morality of the American bombing effort. I say this not because of anything the U.S. bomber barons did over the ETO, but because any judgments about American strategic bombing in WWII has to take full account of the firebombing strategy Curtis LeMay used against Japanese cities after VE day. Hansen touches on it, but I don't think he squarely confronts the contradiction between the relative morality of American efforts in the ETO and what we did over Japan. Everything that was wrong with how Bomber Harris devastated German cities, was repeated by Curtis LeMay against the Japanese. There is no escape from the bitter and disturbing reality that both British and American air commanders in WWII resorted to wholesale civilian slaughter from on high if more precise bombing wasn't feasible. In context, Harris comes off worse only because he persisted in these methods when technology offered him other options.

In addition to confidently discussing "the big picture" and offering individual accounts in the air and under the bombs, Hansen does a creditable job exposing some of the foibles of those at the top, including Churchill and Hap Arnold. He also touches on the role of General Fred Anderson, Ira Eaker's deputy commander in the early days of the Eighth Air Force, in a way I've never seen before. Essentially, we learn that Anderson was a Hap Arnold "spy" inserted into the chain of command to make sure that Eaker was sufficiently "aggressive." Interesting to know.

I highly recommend this book as a concise, one volume introduction to this fascinating if depressing subject. If I had read nothing else on the subject this is where I would want to start.

Brian O'Neill, Author of Half a Wing, Three Engines and a Prayer

Randall Hansen's "Fire and Fury" is superb. The book begins with a riveting description of the British fire bombing of Hamburg in 1943, told from the perspective of the German civilians who suffocated in shelters and cellars, sank into molten asphalt while bursting into flame, boiled alive in Hamburg's canals or were sucked into the world's first fire storm by hurricane-force winds. 40,000 people died in one city in one night, and Hansen makes it painfully clear what it felt like to be on the receiving end of the British "area bombing" campaign.

Hansen carefully explains the differences between British and American strategy. For Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris, the point of night time area bombing was to kill, injure and demoralize the workforce that served German industry. Destroying the factories themselves was fine, but only incidental to the primary mission of incapacitating the workers. The Americans, led by Generals Hap Arnold, Carl Spaatz, and Jimmy Doolittle, insisted on "precision" bombing, dropping their bombs in daylight on military targets like ball bearing factories, oil refineries, railroad marshalling yards and other critical infrastructure. They also insisted on engaging and destroying the Luftwaffe, something they did very effectively. The Americans also killed civilians, but that was a side effect rather than the goal of bombing. The US air forces only participated once in the bombing of a German city center (Berlin in February 1945), and then only over the protests of General Doolittle and other senior commanders.

It is hard to come away from "Fire and Fury" without disliking Bomber Harris. The British had a very limited ability to strike back against Germany from 1939 to 1942, so area bombing was arguably justifiable as the only way to wage war during this period. But as the war went on, British precision bombing skills improved dramatically, as evidenced by the famous "dam busting" raids in the Ruhr Valley. It became increasingly obvious to the Americans and those who were reviewing Ultra intercepts that precision raids (conducted mostly by Americans and to a lesser extent by the British) were seriously disrupting the German war effort. Hansen skillfully brings in the testimony of German Armaments Minister Albert Speer, who feared that the British would follow up on their dam buster missions (they did not) or that the British and the Americans would combine their efforts against oil, rail, ball bearing and other vital targets. By 1943 or so, it should have been reasonably clear that precision bombing was producing the desired results and that area bombing was merely murdering people and stiffening Germany's determination to fight.

Hansen sets out the memos between Harris and his boss, Chief of Air Staff Sir Charles Portal. Harris had decided that killing German civilians in large numbers was the only way to win the war quickly, and he was determined to execute his strategy even if doing do bordered on insubordination. Portal and other leaders eventually began to realize that Harris was wrong, but they refused to order him bluntly to stop area bombing and to take up precision bombing. In part, it seems, they feared that the popular Harris would resign in the face of unequivocal orders. As it was, Harris read his ambiguous instructions in a way that enabled him to order a minimal number of precision "oil plan" and "transportation plan" raids, while aggressively pursuing his own strategy of leveling Germany's population centers. The exchange of memoranda among Harris, Portal and other leaders illustrate how a stubborn, popular and insubordinate officer can do great damage to a war effort even with the best of intentions--it is remarkable that the British high command did not deal more firmly with Harris, in the way that President Truman did when he relieved the popular General Douglas MacArthur from command during the Korean War.

The supporters of Bomber Harris' strategy of terror bombing (it's hard to call it anything else) will find Hansen's book a bitter pill. This emotionally powerful and well written book will make it clear that there is a huge difference, both morally and strategically, between bombing military targets while knowing that civilian casualties will be likely, and affirmatively seeking to kill, injure and demoralize civilians as a matter of policy. Another excellent book with a similar theme that covers the entire history of air power from Kitty Hawk through 2003 is Stephen Budiansky's Air Power : From Kitty Hawk to Gulf War II - A History of the People, Ideas and Machines That Transformed War in the Century of Flight--it, too, argues that the oil plan and the transportation plan very nearly brought Germany to its knees. Had British Bomber Command been led by a man able to move beyond his original vision, the war with Germany might have ended much sooner and with far less territory in Soviet hands.

Randall Hansen's new book on the Allied bombing campaign over Germany is probably the best written book I ever hated. Hansen's research and writing skills are on fine display in this highly readable history. My criticism of "Fire and Fury" is that Hansen's analysis is so fatally flawed that I almost stopped reading the book several times (quite frankly, I kept reading because I was sure Hansen would address the shortcomings of his theory by the end -- he didn't).

Basically, Hansen condemns everything British and praises everything American. Hansen thoroughly denounces British area bombing of Germany as immoral, unjustified, and irrelevant to final victory. In fact, Hansen argues that area bombing actually galvanized German resistance and prolonged the war. Hansen has particular disdain for Bomber Command Leader, Sir Arthur Harris, as well as British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill. You will be hard pressed to find a single complimentary word about either man throughout Hansen's book. Indeed, although Hansen admits Harris' crews remained exceptionally loyal to him, even after the morality of the bombing campaign was questioned following the war, Hansen apparently believes that such loyalty was misplaced and that bomber commands crews should have revolted against their leader. Yet, Hansen cannot cite to a single instance where one of Harris' men, with the benefit of decades of hindsight, agree with such an analysis.

On the other hand, Hansen idolizes the American leaders of the bombing war. Hansen's elevation of all things American turns even vices into virtues. For example, Hansen describes both British commander, Harris, and American commander, General "Hap" Arnold, as having legendary tempers. However, where Hansen describes Harris' temper as counter-productive, Hansen determines that Arnold's equal propensity to fly into a rage served him well. In fact, Hansen repeats a story where one of Arnold's tantrums resulted in a subordinate having a fatal heart attack as if it were a badge of honor.

More catastrophic than the above shortcomings is the overall thesis of the book: that the Americans were more "moral" and more effective than the British by attempting precision daylight bombing. What the author overlooks is that the British tried precision daylight bombing earlier in the war with catastrophic results. Not many Bomber Command aircrews flying missions between 1939-1941 lived to see the change in tactics to night area bombing in 1942-43. Furthermore, American tactics were not a product of morality, they were a product of their equipment. The B17 and B24 carried a fraction of the bomb load of the Lancaster, Sterling and Halifax. The B17 and B24 simply were not effective night area bombers - they were built with the American mindset that a heavily armed bomber will always get through (a mindset that proved disastrously flawed until long range fighters could accompany the bombers to their targets). The Americans simply chose to equip their aircraft with more defensive armament instead of bombs. Tactics and equipment go hand in hand. Yet any discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of the main British and American bombers is curiously missing from Hansen's book.

For proof that Hansen's study is disastrously flawed, one has to look no further than what became of this supposed American "morality" once the American military had an effective night area bombing weapon, the B29. In a fact conveniently omitted entirely from the book, the Americans used the B29 against the Japanese as the British used the Lancaster against the Germans: with impunity and without remorse. The night bombing raids over Tokyo and other Japanese cities and their associated body counts made Essen, Dresden, and Hamburg look like the work of amateurs. I was very much looking forward to reading how Hansen was going to reconcile two of the main premises he presents in his book: (1) that Americans were too moral and concerned about civilian casualties to bomb cities and (2) area bombing can never win a war and actually prolongs it, with what happened in the skies over Japan. I was sorely disappointed. Hansen actually poses the question himself near the end of his fatally flawed analysis, when he writes "the question is why this moral concern was less fully extended to the Japanese, whose cities were firebombed (with the exception of Kyoto) and then hit with nuclear bombs." But that is it. Hansen never explores or attempts to answer the question he himself asked. The logically flaw of this analysis is overwhelming and condemns this otherwise very readable history to the rubbish heap. Hansen spends nearly 300 pages condemning the British pursuit of pulverizing the enemy's population into submission, concludes it does not and cannot work, and then ignores that the Americans did exactly that against the population of Japan with, arguably, war winning results.

This recent release on the allied bombing of Germany, the years 1942 through 1945, offers a balanced view of the entire activity, while in addition offers collateral information on, for example, the Battle of the Bulge.

The book gives insight into the men who directed the overall bombing on both the British and the American sides. While the British continually wanted to have the Americans join in their nighttime bombing, we felt bombing around the clock was better, hitting the Reich both during the day and at night. Losses were expected to be higher with daytime bombing while greater success was expected. Concentrating and contrasting nighttime bombing (area bombing) by the British with and to daylight bombing (precision bombing) by the Americans the author examines the carpet bombing and mass destruction of city after city by "Bomber" Harris on the British side with the more precision bombing of oil and ball bearings on the American side. The author shows quite clearly that destruction of cities did not bring the war to a speedy end as Harris continually said but the destruction of essentials such as oil and ball bearings, and this is a long shot, could have brought the war to an end by possibly late 1943. Maybe, but taking the essentials away from Albert Speer and the Reich did hurt the Nazi war effort more than the city bombing and waste that killed German civilians by the score, while incidentally causing not only mass homelessness, resistance and anger throughout Germany. Just as with civilians of Rotterdam, Coventry, and London, the people of Germany stiffened in their behavior and resistance to post area bombing with its needless destruction.

The system used by Harris of overflight marking the city, then dropping HE bombs, and finally incendiaries completly destroyed the cities, but did nothing to touch most of the war industries of the Reich. Which either lay on the outskirts of the cities or had been moved to the country to avoid the saturation area bombing. The mean temperature of the bombed cities could become 1000-1400 degrees, with asphalt melting at 200 degrees, and winds swirling up to 140 miles per hour. Individuals suffocated in cellars, or caught fire when stepping and sinking into the liquid asphalt, becoming immediate flaming torches. With the strong winds others were either blown or sucked into the hellish inferno. The city and some inhabitants were destroyed true, but beyond that effect all Harris got back was losing planes and crews, while exhausting untold tonnage of bombs in the British arsenal. Both Harris' immediate boss and Winston Churchill somehow let him get away with it. Prior to reading this material I felt Harris may have been correct, after the reading I wonder why in the face of after bombing facts, Harris could remain so subborn and so wrong.

I have made no great study of this subject, since most of my library has few other books that look at the bombing in its entirety rather examing certain cities such as Dresden and Hamburg, so I can claim little expertise here, with that said, my estimation is that this book offers both a more interesting and complete overview concerning the entire Allied bombing enterprise.

Prior to reading this book, I felt Harris was correct in his efforts, but now see that he not only avoided his orders to seek out oil and ball bearings, but offered mostly lame excuses so he could could continue to bomb all the cities of the Reich and destroy them only because he had desire to do so. Of all the people in this study both Harris and his boss, Portal, come off the worst. Followed by Winston Churchill, whom I admire, but was certainly not without huge flaws.

Hopefully Randall Hansen will write a few more books concerning WWII and should they be anywhere near this one he become the standard on whatever subject to chooses to cover.

Semper Fi.

The thesis of this writer is that the British were wrong to concentrate on the destruction of cities while the US was correct in their precision bombing of economic targets, although the writer does admit on some occasions that the US did engage on city bombing too.

Often I think the British policy decision makers were more honest than the US what they were doing. Although like the Americans the British rarely stated that the targets were civilians. Generally their raids was officially directed at war targets. Bomber Harris's target may be the city, but rarely would it be so listed. Officially, it might be a factory, a railway yard, etc.

Another point would be having decided to bomb at night. The British did not have fighters that could engage the German fighters at night. Beside even if they could, the destruction of these German night fighters would have little effect on the land war. Furthermore, because of this night policy the British planes were unable to penetrate as deeply into Europe as the US as British bombers could not fly over Nazi dominated air space during the daytime, this restricted their targeting.

Still I am not sure whether much of the writer's criticism is valid. For example, with oil, Bomber Harris disagreed with the policy of bombing oil, but he certainly was not going to have the policy failure blamed on him. So from 1943 onwards the British bombed oil targets in Nazi Europe at approximately the same percentage as the US.

Having said that I think the writer does give very good descriptions of much of the bombing. He makes a good point that bombing and destruction of cities did not produce a quick end of the war promised, and that it was a human tragedy and a waste of resources. Much of which I think people like Bomber Harris have to answer for! Considering how the earlier Blitz on Britain and earlier city bombings in Germany had failed, they should have considered alternatives earlier.

this is the clearest discussion of the bomber campaign during wwII that i have read. Most books on any aspect of wwII tend to be difficult to follow. While not being over simplistict this book gave me a excellent overview of the subject and a narrative that did not get bogged down in escentially useless information. The only problem I found was the lack of maps. Not knowing the geography of Germany I fould I had to keep a map of the country handy to fully follow the narrative. Overall, an excellt book that I would recommend to anyone interested in the use of bombers in wwII.

I have just finished narrating this book for the Library of Congress's program for the blind. As a young boy in England I was bombed by the Germans in WW2 and after the war I married a German girl, so I approached this book with some 'emotional' background knowledge: they bombed us indiscriminately and we gave as good as we got--in fact a whole sight more. But,over the years,as I read more about the bombing of Germany--about Hamburg and Dresden, and even in the early fifties saw some of the remaining damage in Germany, I began to realize that the bombing of Germany by us Brits went far, far beyond anything the Germans had done to us--not, I think, that they wouldn't have, had they been able. After all, the V-1s and V-2s were totally indicriminate assaults on the civilian population.
But this book spells out in a thoroughly convincing way that 'Bomber' Harris--the
C-in-C of Bomber Command--was totally obsessed by the idea that area bombing of cities--flattening acres and acres of working class urban areas--would destroy the morale of Germany and bring the war to a quick close. And no matter how much the evidence showed that it was not working: no matter how much the evidence showed that precision bombing of vital industrial targets(oil, aircraft factories, ball bearing producers) WAS working: and no matter how clearly he was ordered to attack these vital targets--he pursued until the bitter end his own course of putting far and away the major weight of his attacks on towns and cities, with no intent whatsoever of focussing on industrial targets. Had Lord Portal--his commanding officer--had the guts he would have dismissed him for diobeying orders.
The book is thoroughly researched and an excellent exposition of the history of British and American bombing, with the Americans taking an approach that was much, much more focussed on industrial targets--and losing, proportionately, many more aircrew and airplanes. In the end the bombing war killed something close to 600,000 persons, mostly German civilians but also foreign workers and some concentration camp inhabitants. And this for the cost of some 80,000 aircrew. The book poses the question--was it worth it?--and the answer is pretty clear: the loss of aircrew was worth it when industrial targets were attacked, but definitely not worth the losses of men and planes when the targets were cities.
The book intersperses the historical narration with vivid and horrifying accounts of what the bombing was like for the German civilians who were the victims--thus bringing things down to a human level, where fire and fury wreaked havoc on men, women, and children.
An excellent book that any student of WW2 should read.

In "Fire And Fury", Randall Hansen has made an outstanding contribution to an understanding of the importance and contribution of American and British bombing of Germany during World War II to winning and ending the war. Drawing on extensive resources, Hansen shows both the destruction caused by precision bombing versus area bombing, and the problems of justifying the human losses, both German and allied. Without condemning those who were ordered to do the bombing, he questions the morality of the practice of aiming at civilians, and makes it clear that, ultimately, the responsibility for the war, and the devastation rests with one man, Adolph Hitler. Using very effective descriptions, he also shows the horror of war, making it evident that the old maxim, "war is hell" is, indeed, true. And, perhaps, that is what makes it such a terrible thing to be avoided, when possible. Perhaps it is just my nature, but one thing that frustrated me was the amount of space, at least two chapters, devoted to the debate between Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, Commander-in-chief of Bomber Command, and his superior, Sir Charles Porter, who failed to insure that Harris followed orders. Harris continued to spend most of his time bombing cities specifically for the destruction of civilians, under the cover of destroying the morale of the German citizens, instead of aiming at specific targets like oil production and transportation, but was never effectively disciplined by Portal for his insubordination. Still, Hansen used the debate effectively to portray the differences in philosophy between British and American leaders, and the overall uncertainty of how to bring Germany's leadership to the point of surrender. At least one reviewer referred to "Fire And Fury" as an "anti-war" book. I found it not so much an anti-war book, as a cautionary history that warns about the seriousness and devastation of bombing and war in general, and the importance of doing what is necessary to win it and get it over with for the sake of humanity. In other words, avoid it if you can, but if you have to fight it, fight to win. I found Hansen's book to be an extremely even-handed analysis of allied conduct between 1942 and 1945. At the same time, it is made clear that the tragedy of World War II was not only, if most importantly, the loss of human life, but also, the wanton destruction of a millennium of culture, literature, and architecture. All of which is now gone forever.

In a speech delivered in 1941, Winston Churchill noted "Hitler and his Nazi gang have sown the wind, they will reap the Whirlwind". A literal form of the "Whirlwind" was the Allied bombing campaign against Germany during World War Two. That much argued about topic gets brilliantly analyzed in Political Science professor Randell Hansen's fine study Fire and Fury. The Allies had 2 main schools of thought regarding bombing the Reich:area bombing and precision bombing. Area bombing's most famous believer was Air Marshall Arthur "Bomber" Harris who felt the war could be won by bombing alone if all Germany's cities could be razed. Precision Bombing was widely advocated by the Americans who wanted to target explicit war related industrial targets such as oil and ball bearings. Area bombing grew out of England's inability to strike out at Germany in any other way in the dark days of 1941. It had also been championed by bombing advocates in the inter- war period. Hansen posits that the precision campaign was much more efficient and that if pursued it may have ended the war earlier.(He liberally cites from Nazi Arms Minister Albert Speer to help make his case) His use of sources is first rate from documents between the bombing chiefs (The letters between Harris and his superior Lord Portal are a revelation), to recollections of both those who bombed Germany and those who were bombed. The descriptions of fire bombing are chilling. Hansen chides Harris for blindly pursuing a policy that cost thousands of Allied lives as well as thousands of Axis lives despite evidence that his theories were not working by late in the war. Bombing was and is a topic of controversy, but no study of that dimension of the war is complete without consulting this fine book. Not only does the author take the reader into the councils of the high command, but you are in the cockpit and on the ground.This is first rate thought provoking history.

The controversy over the effectiveness of Allied bombing of Germany in WWII has gone on since the war. This book settles the argument forever, and draws a clear distinction between the effectivenes of "area" and "precision" bombing. The research is complete and unbiased. The moral question will continue to haunt us.