The Literature of Urbicide: Friedrich, Nossack, Sebald, and Vonnegut

But strategic bombing had not won the war. At most, it had eased somewhat the task of the ground troops who did. The aircraft, manpower and bombs used in the campaign had cost the American economy far more in output than they had cost Germany...A final paragraph or two written by Henry Alexander somewhat overstated the contribution of air power to the outcome without altering the basic facts. The purpose of both history and future policy would have been served by a more dramatic finding of failure, for this would have better prepared us for the costly ineffectiveness of the bombers in Korea and Vietnam, and we might have been spared the reproach of civilized opinion.

John Kenneth Galbraith¹

It is impossible to fight any war wholly humanely. In most respects, the Western allies displayed commendable charity in their conduct of total war against an enemy bereft of civilized sentiment. Aerial assault, however, provided the exception. It was a policy quite at odds with the spirit in which the Americans and the British otherwise conducted their war effort. The remoteness of bombing rendered tolerable in the eyes of Western political leaders and military commanders, not to mention their aircrew, actions which would have seemed repugnant and probably unbearable had the Allies confronted the consequences at close quarters.

Max Hastings²

As the bomber crews quickly discovered, their front in the sky bore no more resemblance to gladiatorial single combat than did the trenches of Flanders. In its sheer, overwhelming scale, the strategic-bomber offensive was eerily akin to the grinding, anonymous, assembly-line war of attrition that had dehumanized, or at least deromanticized, the ground soldier in the last war. A bomber crew was a mere cog in an immense machine that spanned half the globe, a machine that scooped men up and hurtled them into the air with all the finesse of a catapult smashing boulders against the stone walls of an enemy castle.

Stephen Budiansky³

Most historians, in the words of Erich Hobsbawn, consider the 20th century the ‘age of extremes.’⁴ Some historians have gone as far as making more precise the nature of those extremes by calling the 20th century, the century of genocide⁵. While most of the killing in the 20th century took place in concentration camps, gulags, and the steppes of Eurasia, a large number of deaths were due to the emergence of area bombing, strategic bombing, and what later during Korea, and Vietnam would be called “carpet bombing.” As sociologist Mary Kaldor noted in her important Old and New Wars, the 20th century also marked an important reversal in the ratio of military to civilians death due to war. Whereas in most wars from the 17th to late 20th century the ration of military to civilian deaths was 8 to 1, in the 20th century it was 1 to 8⁶. The 20th century became the century of genocides precisely because civilian immunity in wars was crushed by the logic of total war. Furthermore, the majority of civilian deaths were inflicted as consequences of the transformation of total war into urbicide. Thus, the 20th century was a century of genocide partly because it was a century of urbicide. The logic of total war that makes the home front the battle front, where there are no innocent bystanders, and where civilians are de facto implicated in the war policies of tyrannical governments, converted cities into military targets. The logic of total war culminates in urbicide. At the center of this logic is also what military historian Michael Sherry has called “technological fanaticism.” And driving this fanaticism was, and remains, the idolatry of the airplane and its bombs, whether dumb or smart. The killing of cities in the 20th century by what was called “moral bombing,” but which soon turned into carpet-bombing, and then the deliberate “destruction” of the urban centers, was made possible by the development of the heavy bomber, and then the jet. Technological developments allowed for the control of sea and land to be superseded by total control of the air. At the same time...