A History of Bombing
By Sven Lindqvist
Granta Books, 2001
224 pages $39.95 (hb)
REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON
http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/24176
When the first bomb was dropped from the air on November 1, 1911, the pattern for the subsequent history of aerial bombing was set. A European power (Italy) bombed a Third World country (Libya, as its colony in North Africa became known), targeting non-combatants (Arab tribespeople at an oasis) to terrorise them and thus break their will to resist. Only four small bombs were dropped on this historic occasion but the terror potential of bombing would escalate exponentially in the following decades.
Sven Lindqvist's book records the history of the technological "advance" and military applications of aerial bombing.
From the first hot air balloon in 1783 to the first motorised flight in 1903, powerful ruling classes and their military thugs had cast longing eyes at the new potential to deliver destruction at long range and thus secure more empire.
In the hundred years to 1914, land armies and naval bombardment had helped to deliver 85% of the world's peoples to European imperialist control but the "natives" were, alas, all too often restless. A bigger stick was needed and Winston Churchill was one of the first to grasp it.
In 1917 the British airforce staked its claim as the armed services branch to watch when it bombed the "mad mullah" of Somaliland into colonial submission inside a week for a fraction of the cost of using the army. The economics impressed war minister Churchill who sent the new RAF to subdue Iraq which had refused to accept its British masters. Other colonies of Britain felt the sting of RAF bombs — India, Egypt, Afghanistan, Iran and Jordan got the message as did Morocco from Spain and Syria from France.
When in 1935, in a systematic policy of terror and extermination, Mussolini's fascist Italy bombed Ethiopia, the last of the African countries to have retained its independence finally joined the list of colonial bombing targets as waves of death from the air swamped the country.
If the European "democracies" thought they were safe from their own medicine, however, they were deluded. The Nazis started it when Hitler's pilots dropped millions of bombs on republican Spain in the curtain-raiser to World War II. The Basque town of Guernica was a special target of 5700 of these bombs for an experiment in incendiary, high-explosive bombing which destroyed the town and killed thousands in a horrifying inferno.
The Nazis weren't the only ones to apply the lessons of this Spanish experiment in barbarism. Churchill was now prime minister of a country which, with the US neutral and Western Europe under Nazi rule, "stood alone" against Hitler and this situation was exploited by Churchill to justify the policy of terror bombing of German cities.
Churchill's propaganda that only military sites were the targets of his "area bombing" strategy was a fiction, a fiction which was exploded with each bomb which fell on a broad "carpet" of civilian and other sites.
The economics of bombing, which had earlier won over Churchill, now didn't add up. Two thirds of the RAF bombs hit nothing of military-industrial importance. Panic and defeatism also failed to materialise as a military outcome, and with both the US and the Soviet Union now in the war against Germany, Churchill's terror bombing had lost its rationale. Churchill, however, and the RAF head, Arthur "Bomber" Harris, intensified the bombing, especially of residential areas, from 1942, focussing on the "morale of the enemy" civilian population, in particular industrial workers.
In 1943 in one raid in Hamburg on July 27, more people were killed (50,000) in a firestorm than from all German bombing of English cities during the Blitz. Dresden, packed with civilian refugees, was a burning hell for the 100,000 civilians who were killed on February 13, 1945, to "show the Russians what Bomber Command can accomplish".
Freeman Dyson, the renowned physicist who was then working in the air ministry, felt sickened by the pointless massacre and his complicity as a "bureaucrat-murderer". Liddell-Hart, the military theorist, who was an early advocate of civilian bombing, also turned against strategic bombing as "barbaric and stupid".
In the US military, the air force head, General Curtis Le May, was impressed by the outcomes in Hamburg and Dresden. Adding the newly invented sticky, inflammable substance, napalm, to the terror cocktail, Le May ordered the fire-bombing of Tokyo in March 1945. One raid on March 9 reduced one quarter of the city to ashes, killed 100,000 people and made a million homeless.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were reserved for a special fate as nuclear bombs were dropped on these intact cities, not to end the war or save the lives of US troops, but to intimidate the Soviet Union. Nazi Germany in Europe, fascist Italy in Ethiopia, and militarist Japan in China, did not stand alone when it came to the war crime of using weapons of mass destruction.
With the war at an end, the European powers went back to their bombing business as usual, against the usual targets. On the day the war ended in Europe, France, newly liberated from Nazi occupation, bombed 40 villages in Algeria which was claiming its liberation from French occupation.
The victorious Allied states all signed various UN statutes on the "principle of equal rights and self-determination" but this, and the subsequent history of international resolutions, conventions, treaties and laws negotiated by the powerful states, was just so much "rhetorical fanfare". In practice, the capitalist states upheld "the rights of the conqueror" wherever their bombs could reach.
The US assumed post-war leadership in this law of the jungle. Napalm strutted its stuff — 32,000 tonnes of it in Korea and 373,000 tonnes of the sticky fire in Vietnam. B-52 carpet bombing was a staple in Vietnam, alongside vastly enhanced anti-personnel bombs in which multiple bomb particles penetrate the body at high velocity.
The bombing frenzy prolonged the war at great human and environmental cost, and although the US lost the battle, it won the strategic war as bombs became a currency which raised the international price of guerilla warfare for those contemplating national liberation struggles against US political and economic domination.
Because of the domestic political problems arising from the use of ground troops, aerial bombing has moved to the forefront of military strategy. The US relied almost exclusively on bombing in the Gulf War in 1991, continuing the grand old tradition of bombing "a third rate power in the Third World". And ever present in the background is the arsenal of nuclear bombs, a majority in the hands of the trigger-happy North American state, with the ability to destroy the world hundreds of times over.
Lindqvist's book turns up the moral heat on the barbaric military practice of bombing and the political goals of global imperialist carve-up and maintenance that it supports. With the massively hypocritical and rigidly selective outrage being pumped out by the US state (and their loyal allied states like Australia) in response to the "Attack on America" as they gear up for a further episode in the long history of state terrorism, the history of bombing is about to see a new chapter written in blood.
Lindqvist's book is a reminder that terrorism — the deliberate and indiscriminate killing of civilians for political purposes — was authored by the powerful states against the weak, is the root cause of the abhorrent retaliatory strikes such as the World Trade Center atrocity, and will not be eliminated from the world until the bombs, conventional and nuclear, are taken away from the imperialist states and destroyed forever.