Wars begin when you will, but they do not end when you please.
~ Niccolò Machiavelli
Arthur Travers Harris was a career officer in the British Royal Air Force. He was made Deputy Chief of the British Air Staff in 1940. In 1942, Harris was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the RAF’s Bomber Command—the mission of which was made self-evident by its name.
In a military role Harris occupied before taking charge of Britain’s Bomber Command he witnessed Nazi Germany, in 1937, test its air force by bombing, at the behest of Spain’s fascists, the Basque town of Guernica, killing one-third of the inhabitants of that town of no strategic importance. Two years later, Harris witnessed Germany begin what would become World War II. As the war progressed, the Luftwaffe bombed Warsaw, Rotterdam, and numerous towns and cities in Britain—including, famously, Coventry and London.
In 1942 Britain’s cabinet authorized the RAF to prosecute a “strategic bombing campaign” against German cities. At the outset of that campaign Commander Harris stated:
The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation.
Harris concluded that observation by quoting a biblical prophet, Hosea, in announcing that the bombing campaign the RAF was about to launch, targeting German cities, was the consequence of the German decision “to bomb everyone else”:
They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.
What followed by necessary implication was Britain’s determination that the regime that had prosecuted the bombing of Guernica, Rotterdam, Warsaw and London had to be extirpated—by whatever means, and however terrible the costs. The objective, which never wavered, was Nazi Germany’s conclusive defeat—not a truce . . . not a ceasefire.
In the following months, the RAF—later joined by bombers of the American Air Force—bombed fifty of the fifty-four largest German cities, including Hamburg, Berlin, Cologne, Munich, Bremen, Hannover, Kassel, Stuttgart, Dusseldorf and Dresden.
The overwhelming majority of those killed in the bombings of Hamburg (37,000) were not wearing military uniforms. Virtually none of those killed in the bombings of Cologne (20,000) carried Nazi Party membership cards.
In total, it is estimated that between 300,000 and 600,000 German civilians were killed by Allied bombing raids during the Second World War. Hundreds of thousands of German lives—lives of men, women and children—were thus extinguished in the whirlwind that descended on that country because some smaller number of Germans had decided to sow the wind.
The whirlwinds that descended on Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in 1945, can be ascribed to causes that are for present purposes identical. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians—men, women and children—died because a group of Japanese militarists and racial supremacists determined to sow the wind in Manchuria; in Korea; and at Pearl Harbor.
In the above capsule histories are seen the usages of war. As Machiavelli recognized, in the observation employed as the epigraph to this piece, wars are not susceptible of nice modulation once they are begun. That being true of wars, those with common sense, and a regard for innocent human life, are reluctant to start them.
Reminders of the foregoing precedents and verities are timely—not only now, but always—even if their lessons seem never to be learned.
The whirlwind’s terrible power, once loosed, makes no fine distinctions between women and men, young and old, zealots and non-believers—a reality that is well considered by those who are considering whether to sow the wind. Unless they choose to ignore the admonitions of protagonists, such as Harris, and prophets, such as Hosea, and are content to watch as history is repeated . . . As is being demonstrated, even now, in Gaza.
Copyright Stephen Dvorkin 2024