Fire and Fury: The Allied Bombing of Germany 1942-45 (review)

Fire and Fury by Canadian political scientist Randall Hansen is an examination of the Combined Bomber Offensive against Germany. Using a story telling style reminiscent of Martin Middlebrook, Hansen argues that Air Marshal Arthur "Bomber" Harris's area bombing did not win the war, but rather lengthened it. While this line of reasoning has been well debated by military historians, Hansen uses it as the basis for a long and fairly aggressive attack on Harris and the immorality of area bombing in comparison to the ethical precision campaign waged by the United States Strategic Air Forces in Europe (USSTAF).

There is relatively little new research in this volume, but it will cause readers, new and experienced, to ask themselves about the morality of bombing of non-combatant targets, and perhaps by extension of war itself. Hansen does use many first hand accounts of what civilians on the ground experienced in raids against such centres as Hamburg and Dresden, to name the most controversial of Bomber Command's targets. He also does a good job of counterpoising these vignettes with the policy decisions, tactical debates and technical challenges faced by both the RAF and the USSTAF.

While these qualities make the book worthy of a read there are several limitations which detract from it. First, the work seems to be a fairly obvious attack against Harris. Hansen occasionally admits to Harris's character strengths; however, the author by and large misses no opportunity to explicitly or implicitly criticize the head of Bomber Command as a commander who readily ignored both direction and argument that he shift the Command's targeting away from apparently pointless and ruthless city busting. By comparison Hansen paints the leadership and rank and file of the USSTAF as white knights who had the means to hit militarily relevant targets with precision and who abhorred the rare occasions when directed to attack cities.

Hansen in taking this approach has not done his homework, or so it seems. Sources consulted and used, according to the bibliography, are considerable, but he has missed or misread a number of key ones which would allow a different understanding of what really happened. A curious omission is that of the Canadian official history, The Crucible of War 1939-1945, which actually takes a critical view of Harris. As well, Hansen seems to be very selective in his use of two sources which point out that the USSTAF did do city bombing by policy and practice. Both Richard G. Davis in Bombing the European Axis Powers and Tami Davis Biddle in Rhetoric and Reality make clear and unequivocal reference to these circumstances. Davis cites primary sources and even shows that there were occasions where such sources were at the time doctored to avoid having to talk about area bombing. He also offers a discussion of the area bombing of Japanese cities, concluding that while Harris destroyed 60 German cities, Spaatz did the same in Japan—an issue which Hansen all but ignores. One other important omission from Hansen's bibliography is William Hays Parks's 1995 article, "'Precision' and 'Area' Bombing: Who Did Which and When?" (which Davis too neglects) which draws from extensive primary data to show that while the RAF bombed cities so too did the USSTAF.

Adding to this curious and unbalanced treatment of the literature, the book contains a number of glaring errors of fact. Hansen claims for instance that the 1941 Butt report showed that two thirds of RAF bombers bombed more than 75 miles from their targets while in fact Butt said that aircraft were bombing outside of a five mile radius of the target (an area of 75 square miles). On another occasion Hansen refers to a raid of 11,000 aircraft while the figure was in fact 1100. As well he indicates that the Harris Papers are in the Churchill Archives when they are most definitely...