1 Though this quote refers to nuclear warfare, what happened at Hamburg fits better into a nuclear context than it does into the context of conventional bombing, as I will argue in this chapter. In 2003 Eisenhower’s words were quoted during a debate on nuclear weapons in the US House of Representatives; see ‘Notable Words: S&T Policy Quotations from 2003’, in FYI: The American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Science Policy News, no. 2, 8 January 2004.
2 All statistics here and in the following paragraphs are taken from the USSBS, Economic Effects of the Air Offensive against German Cities: A Detailed Study of the Effects of Area Bombing on Hamburg, Germany(November 1945), pp. 7–10. The Hamburg Police Report also contains most of these figures (pp. 17–18), and by and large they agree. Where they do not, I have assumed that the compilers of the former document, who based many of their findings on data from the Hamburg Police Report, also had access to later, more accurate sources of information. The report of the BBSU is slightly less reliable, since the unit was run on a shoestring budget.
3 Ibid., pp. 9–11. The Hamburg Police Report claims that 2,632 ‘commercial establishments’ and 580 ‘industrial establishments’ were destroyed, but this does not seem to square with the huge amount of damage done to residential property, or the figure given by the USSBS of around forty thousand industrial buildings lost.
4 Hamburg Police Report, pp. 17–18.
5 The figures for the number of dead, which had not yet been completed by the time the Hamburg Police Report was finished, are taken from the USSBS, Hamburg Report, pp. 1 and 7A. I have assumed that the majority of the two thousand reported ‘missing’ were also dead, since many bodies were completely incinerated, and corpses were still being discovered in rebuilding works as late as 1951. The Hamburg Police Report has the number of injured slightly lower at 37,214 (p. 17), but it is likely that the real figure was much higher than either estimate.
6 This figure does not include the many deaths in months and years to come from radiation poisoning. For a detailed discussion of casualty estimates at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, see Richard B. Frank, Downfalclass="underline" The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire(New York, 2001), pp. 285–7.
7 USSBS, Economic Effects, p. 33A. The percentage of industrial workers who still had not returned is slightly lower: of the city’s 250,000 industrial workers, 75,000 (or 30 per cent) had still not returned by the end of 1943 (see USSBS, Economic Effects, p. 1).
8 This unrecoverable loss in production is estimated at about 11.6 per cent. See ibid., p. 42.
9 Ibid., p. 1.
10 USSBS, Economic Effects, Submarine Plant Report no. 2, p. 13. The BBSU put the estimate higher, at twenty-six or twenty-seven U-boats lost: see Sir Charles Webster and Noble Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany 1939–1945(London, 1961), p. 287.
11 Hamburg Police Report, p. 84.
12 Solly Zuckerman et al., The Strategic Air War Against Germany, 1939–45: Report of the British Bombing Survey Unit(London, 1998), p. 161. See also USSBS, Economic Effects, p. 2.
13 See for example, Max Hastings, Bomber Command(London, 1979), p. 241.
14 Quoted in ibid., p. 241.
15 For a comprehensive analysis of the shortcomings of the Luftwaffe, as told by the Luftwaffe generals, see Harold Faber (ed.), Luftwaffe: An Analysis by Former Luftwaffe Generals(London, 1979).
16 Adolf Galland, The First and the Last(London, 1955), pp. 241–2.
17 Ibid., p. 243. Cajus Bekker quotes Hitler as having made this same declaration at a situation conference on 25 July, directly after the first Hamburg raid, to his Luftwaffe adjutant, Major Christian: see Cajus Bekker, The Luftwaffe War Diaries, trans. Frank Ziegler (London, 1966), p. 312. It is quite possible that he said it on both occasions: it was a sentiment he had been repeating since 1940.
18 Galland, First and Last, pp. 252–3. In fact, Goering never took him up on this resignation, and Galland retained his post.
19 ‘Cost of destruction of Hamburg 24 July – 2 August 1943’, according to US Statistical Control Division, Office of Management Control, 1 September 1943. This figure does not take into account the huge amount of time spent in planning, administration and so on. Air Force Historical Research Agency, Maxwell, Alabama, film copy A1107, 1654–6.
20 Original figure taken from USSBS, Economic Effects. The website http: //eh.net uses fairly reputable sources and has the historical exchange rate as 1 Reichmark to $0.40, and projects $1 in 1943 to be worth about $11.29 today. (Website last viewed 19 April 2006.)
21 This is A. J. P. Taylor’s figure, in The Second World War(London, 1975), p. 129. While Webster and Frankland’s Strategic Air Offensiveclaims that only 7 per cent of the nation’s manpower was involved in keeping the bomber offensive going, this does not represent the true cost: the bomber offensive monopolized not only the skilled workforce but also the majority of scientific and technological institutions.
22 For reactions to the Butt Report, which showed the bombing war to be a huge drain on national resources for disappointing results, see Hastings, Bomber Command, pp. 108–15.
23 Quoted in F. H. Hinsey et al., British Intelligence in the Second World War(London, 1979–90), vol. III, pt I (1984), p. 44.
24 Redemption
1 Agathon, quoted by Aristotle; see The Nicomachaen Ethics, trans. H. Rackman (London, 1926), VI.ii.6. This is a passage in which Aristotle defines the concept of ‘choice’. It is particularly apt because he uses the sacking of Troy as his example of something that cannot be undone.
2 Hamburger Abendblatt, 24 July 1993.
3 Even in clear conditions their bombing was not as accurate as the Americans liked to believe. All bombardiers were supposed to drop their bombs at the same time as the formation leader, but if they were just a fraction of a second late it could mean that the bombs landed hundreds of yards from where they were supposed to. Cloudy or smoky conditions merely compounded this problem. Towards the end of the year, Hap Arnold finally accepted that precision bombing was rarely possible in the cloudy skies over Germany, and gave a general order instructing US bomber crews to use radar to locate their targets whenever they were obscured – in other words, to employ exactly the same methods of ‘blind bombing’ that the British used. By the end of the following year around 80 per cent of allUS bomber raids over Germany were conducted by means of blind bombing. See Eric Markusen and David Kopf (eds), The Holocaust and Strategic Bombing: Genocide and Total War in the Twentieth Century(Boulder, 1995), pp. 165–6.
4 See Immediate Interpretation Reports S.A.410 and S.A.417, UK National Archives, AIR 24/257.
5 See Bombardier’s Log, 26 July 1943, 351st BG, US National Archives, RG18, E7, Box 1002, Folder 22.
6 For statistics on total war losses for the RAF and USAAF, see Robin Neillands, The Bomber War(London, 2001), p. 379.
7 Statistics from ibid., p. 379. See also Max Hastings, Bomber Command(London, 1979), p. 11. The USSBS estimates casualties at the bottom end of this scale, but is probably overly conservative: see its Economic Effects of the Air Offensive against German Cities: A Detailed Study of the Effects of Area Bombing on Hamburg, Germany(November 1945), p. 1. Likewise, the BBSU estimates the total number of deaths at 305,000: see Sir Charles Webster and Noble Frankland, The Strategic Air War Against Germany, 1939–45: Report of the British Bombing Survey Unit(London, 1998), p. 69.