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So between 1941 and 1945, the US drops about 3 million tons
of bombs on Germany and Japan.
This is industrial capitalist war to the extreme in every sense.
First of all, it takes a huge investment of industrial production.
Of the 200,000 combat aircraft that the US builds in World War II,
35,000 were heavy bombers used for attacking the homelands of enemies.
These were expensive.
One of the most common was the B-17 Flying Fortress
which cost a quarter million dollars in the 1940s.
In fact, strategic bombers cost the US $10 billion overall during the war,
or more than the entire 1940 federal budget.
And this is 5% of all war spending right there.
And that doesn't even account for the cost of fighter aircraft
to escort them to target, munitions, the fuel, and the training.
And that pushes the total up to about 20% percent of all US war spending
on strategic bombing.
And strategic bombing was costly in other ways as well.
10,000 of those bombers were shot down, along with 8,000
of the fighter aircraft that flew alongside them.
80,000 air crew die in the effort.
This is the population of a small city.
And it's also something like a quarter of all US war deaths
during World War II.
500,000 Germans and 500,000 Japanese civilians were killed.
So what could justify this investment of resources?
And what could justify the direct violation, or so it seemed,
of a longstanding rule within the overall laws of Western war, a rule
which directly exempted noncombatants from deliberate attack by combatants?
And strategic bombing was the deliberate attack by combatants on noncombatants.
That much is quite clear.
To understand these shifts, you have to understand World War I
and how that transformed people's thinking
about what modern war was like.
World War I was a brutal shock.
Tens of millions of people died, including many millions
of soldiers in the trenches of the Western Front.
And yet, even as millions of people were dying,
civilians in London and other English cities or in German cities
seemed to be living a fairly placid, undisturbed kind of life.
This dissonance was troublesome, certainly,
to soldiers who went back home on leave, but even to some civilians as well.
And what was also the case was that the industrial production
that these civilians were able to accomplish
was part of what fueled and made possible the continuing
war in the trenches just a few miles away.
Some thinkers began to reason, in particular
in the few years after World War I, that the way
to create a shorter, less bloody war would actually, almost paradoxically,
be to make those civilians, if you will, feel the pain of the war.
And maybe even more importantly, affect and limit
their capacity to support the war through their industrial production
which put the guns on the battlefield and the ammunition
in the guns and the fuel in the trucks, and so on and so forth.
With another new technology, with a new technology
that had emerged during World War I, the airplane, the military airplane,
with this technology becoming more and more successful and more
and more capable during the 1920s, thinkers
began to reason that you could use aircraft
to bomb the strategic productive capacity of economies,
to destroy the factories that supported their war machines from the air,
and limit their ability to actually carry out modern war.
If you could do that, thinkers reasoned, and if you could frighten
the civilian population to such an extent
that they would demand an end to war, policymakers and voters
and civilians would all be much sooner to-- they would come
to the idea of peace much more readily than they had done in World War I.
Thus, bombing factories, destroying or at least threatening
civilian populations, these things would actually, in a way, be humane acts.
They would bring an end to war before it could last as long
and be as bloody as it had been in 1914 and 1918.
Now, some of the thinkers and theorists who articulate this policy first
are people like Giulio Douhet, who was in Italian army officer,
or Billy Mitchell, who was a US Army aviation officer.
And they're articulating these ideas in the 1920s.
But the first people to put it into practice, not surprisingly,
are the decision makers of Nazi Germany.
After practicing by bombing Spanish cities
as they intervene on the Nationalist side in Spanish Civil War,
they are ready to go in 1939 and 1940.
And what's perhaps the most sort of iconic attack
is their bombing of the city of Rotterdam
in the course of their invasion of the Netherlands in early 1940.
But where the Germans really take things to another level is in late 1940.
After conquering France, being stopped at the edge of the English Channel,
unable yet to mount an invasion of Britain itself,
Hitler and his closest associates decide that the thing to do
is reduce Britain to surrender by bombing Britain's civilian population
from the air.
And so in weeks of raids that are called the Blitz by London civilians,
they kill something like 50,000 civilians.
But a surprising thing happens.
British citizens are not made more ready to surrender.
They are not made more ready to come to terms by the German attack.
In fact, you could argue that they are simply made more resolute.
And the thing that we have to think about
as we look at what happens over the course of the rest of the war
is whether this is because of some special property of British citizens,
or whether this is, in fact, not an uncommon outcome
for civilian populations that are literally
being brought onto the battlefield.
Perhaps they start to think of themselves
as soldiers who have a new kind of commitment
to securing victory in the war.