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  • Death from the Heavens: A History of Strategic Bombing
  • Harold Dorn (bio)
Death from the Heavens: A History of Strategic Bombing. By Kenneth P. Werrell. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2009. Pp. xv+332. $44.95.

The history of military aviation is packed into the 105 years from the Wright brothers' wood-and-canvas contrivance to today's astonishing technological innovations—missiles fired from submarines, pilotless aircraft, and "smart" bombs. Kenneth Werrell has chosen to write an account of one dimension of this dismal history: strategic bombing. It is fraught with moral and political issues and controversies. Many millions of civilians have been killed or injured, sometimes accidentally ("collateral damage"), sometimes as victims of indiscriminate bombing, and sometimes as deliberate targets. Most of these civilian casualties were the result of American operations, a circumstance that muddies the moral and political waters. Werrell skirts these issues and devotes most of his text to the aircraft used to carry out the operations and to the strategic principles that guided them.

Strategic bombing, which means the bombing of the enemy's rear areas, including cities, rather than auxiliary operations like the support of ground forces, was conducted extensively by the American, British, and German air forces during World War II. Werrell's knowledge of the technical specifications of the aircraft that carried out the attacks is impressive: "The manufacturer modified the aircraft by moving the fuel tanks from the nacelles into the fuselage, substituting props rotating in the same direction for opposite rotation, and using high power engines, which merited its redesignation as the O/400" (p. 17). He also gives clear accounts of the strategic bombing doctrines of its early advocates, who expected the bomber to bring about short wars, albeit with high civilian casualties. He quotes British prime minister Stanley Baldwin, who reported to Parliament in 1932 that "there is no power on earth that can protect [the civilian] from bombing.… The only defense is the offense, which means you have to kill more women and children than the enemy if you want to save yourselves" (p. 32).

In his final chapter, Werrell offers a sober assessment of strategic bombing in the twentieth century, asking whether it has "delivered on the promises of its advocates." His provisional answer is negative—it did not break civilian morale, and while the attacks disrupted the enemy's war effort, they were not decisive: "The record during its first century reveals that strategic bombardment is a case study of promises unfulfilled" (p. 300).

On the moral, political, and legal controversies surrounding strategic bombing, Werrell is disappointingly brief, in contrast to his extensive discussion of the technical and doctrinal dimensions of the subject. The ongoing controversy over the decision to use the atomic bomb is dismissed in a few sentences with the common opinion that it was justified by "the desire to win the war as quickly as possible, with the fewest American casualties" [End Page 1035] (p. 148). The book would have more to ponder and chew on if Werrell had at least referred to some of the political factors that may have influenced the decision to use the bomb (see e.g. Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb [1995]). And on the legality of strategic bombing, Werrell turns a blind eye. There are some grounds to believe that strategic bombing overlapped the doctrine of war crimes. Telford Taylor, who was chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg war-crimes trials, believed that American pilots shot down in North Vietnam should have been tried as war criminals because their actions violated the Geneva Conventions that forbid indiscriminate bombing. And Robert McNamara, secretary of defense at the time, later estimated that between 1965 and 1968 American bombardment of North Vietnam caused more than a million deaths and injuries each year (Robert Richter, "War Hero or War Criminal?" Counterpunch, 14 October 2008, http://www.counterpunch.org/richter10142008.html [accessed 18 May 2010]). A few untidy facts such as these could have found their place in a historical study of aerial bombardment. They would have given the book the provocative quality that the subject calls for.

As it stands, this book is long...

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