Technology as Destiny

Technology and culture have interacted no more consequentially than in warfare and weapons. The development of the chariot, first by the Hittites and then by the Egyptians, shaped the history of the ancient Near East. The effects in Europe of the introduction of gunpowder ordnance are well-known; and the gunned man-o'-war led to European global hegemony, with both its modernizing and doleful consequences. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the pace of innovation in military technology quickened: dreadnoughts, the explosive shell, rapid-firing ordnance, the tank, self-propelled vehicles, the warplane, and weapons of mass destruction.

Traditionally, innovations in military technology were played out on the field of battle—soldier against soldier. But even then there were ambiguous legal and ethical issues: the definition of a soldier, the distinction between regular and irregular armies, the rights of prisoners of war, and the protection of noncombatants. Before international laws of war were conventionalized in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a few customary rules were already in place—prisoners were not to be sacrificed and noncombatants were not to be harmed. Then, in the era of conventional law there have been further restrictions and clarifications: poison gas was prohibited, sailors adrift after their ships are sunk are not legitimate targets, reprisals must be moderate, and the protective custody of prisoners was more clearly defined. But one tactic, enabled by twentieth-century technology, has escaped proper control—the aerial bombardment of cities.

Within fifteen years of the invention of the airplane, before passenger service or airmail delivery, warplanes were already used to attack urban targets. In step with technical developments in aviation, aerial bombardment became a common component of war during the 1920s and 1930s. When World War II began in 1939, President Franklin Roosevelt appealed to the belligerents, on humanitarian grounds, to refrain from targeting cities, especially residential districts. But as we know, technological innovation has a logic and an agenda of its own; in this case it led to escalating reprisals and indiscriminate attacks culminating in the buzz bombing of London, the incineration of German cities, and the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The pluck of the Londoners in the face of indiscriminate bombing has been celebrated in word and film, and the political and ethical issues surrounding the atomic attacks on Japan have been hotly debated. But the firebombing of Germany has received much less attention, and even less scrutiny. Oddly, the reticence is on both sides. Britain and the United States, the perpetrators of the most destructive air raids, with by far the most civilian casualties, have been understandably reluctant to review the justice of their actions. At the end of the war many Germans were brought to trial and charged with war crimes, but none, not even Göring, the commander of the Luftwaffe, was ever charged with what were seen at the time as the German terror bombings of Warsaw, Rotterdam, and Coventry. Would it have been the pot calling the kettle black? On the other side, Germans have largely maintained, at least in public, a stoic silence about the destruction of their own cities. Could the deputies of mass murder have the brazen nerve to equate air raid casualties on the same scale as Auschwitz?¹ The collective amnesia was described by the late German writer W. G. Sebald:

There was a tacit agreement, equally binding on everyone, that the true state of material and moral ruin in which the country found itself was not to be described. The darkest aspects of the final act of destruction as experienced by the great majority of the German population remained under a kind of taboo like a shameful family secret, a secret that perhaps could not even be privately acknowledged.²

Over the past few years the situation has been changing. German writers have begun to remember. Sebald himself led the way. Then the Nobel laureate Günter Grass published a novel about the German refugee ship Wilhelm Gustloff, which was torpedoed by a Soviet submarine in 1945 and went down with more than 9,000 passengers.³ And now, J...