To Destroy a City: Strategic Bombing and Its Human Consequences in World War II (review)

I picked up this book with curiosity and optimism. There are plenty of books about World War II strategic bombing, typically written by airmen, historians, and defense analysts, with a fair input from lawyers and ethicists as well. Hermann Knell, on the other hand, comes to the issue from a very different perspective. He is a German engineer who, at the age of nineteen, survived the 1945 bombing of his hometown, Wurtzburg. He later immigrated to Canada and now, in his retirement, has been able to write the book about strategic bombing he had wanted to write since the end of the war. There is much to like about this book, but ultimately it is quite disappointing.

First, the good stuff. Knell has searched far and wide to try to understand what happened to his hometown. In the resulting book he assembles an extraordinary amount of information on strategic bombing. With chapters on the psychological impact of bombing, international law, civil defense, poison gas, etc., he tries to be comprehensive in a way that very few authors would attempt in a single volume. The information he provides on bombing in the interwar period is particularly useful because (aside from the Spanish Civil War) that period is usually neglected. In covering so much ground so quickly he makes dubious generalizations, and factual errors creep in, but that is to be expected. More jarring for the modern American reader is that Knell displays the prejudices and resentments typical of Germans of his generation. For example, he still resents the Versailles Treaty, the Nuremberg trials, and the Allied occupation of Germany.

The main problem with this book is that Knell does not clearly argue his thesis but instead piles up information in the hope that somehow the picture will become clear if he just throws in a few more statistics. His thesis is that strategic bombing was evil (because it killed enemy civilians) and useless/stupid (because it failed to incite a revolution that would force the bombed nation out of the war). These are not new or surprising conclusions, but close examination of and careful argument for these points would have made this a much more important and interesting book. For example, Knell traces the "evil" of killing hostile civilians to the British concentration camps for Boer civilians during the Boer War of 1899-1902 (p. 94). But when we think about killing enemy soldiers we make a fundamental distinction between killing armed enemy troops on the battlefield (a legitimate military goal) and killing helpless, unarmed enemy soldiers in a POW camp (a criminal act). Does something similar apply to civilians? Is there a fundamental difference between killing a civilian in enemy territory working for the enemy's war effort (e.g., strategic bombing) and killing the same civilian after he is under your control (e.g., in a concentration camp)? There is ample room for argument over this issue but the question never occurred to Hermann Knell. Similarly, does the fact that bombing did not "break" German civilian morale (i.e., win the war by itself) make the effort a waste of time? Since no single Allied campaign won the war by itself, were they all failures? In his relentless emphasis on the fact that German civilian morale did not break, he slides past other possible contributions to the Allied war effort. Still worse, he misses the chance to explain why German civilian morale broke in 1918 but not in 1945, even though his personal experience puts him in an excellent position to address the issue.

Watching these, and many other critical questions slip through Hermann Knell's fingers makes this a fascinating, but maddening, book.