The Incredible Violence of It

Once, I remember, we came upon a man-of-war anchored off the coast. There wasn't even a shed there, and she was shelling the bush. It appears the French had one of their wars going on thereabouts. Her ensign dropped limp like a rag; the muzzles of the long six-inch guns stuck out all over the low hull; the greasy, slimy swell swung her up lazily and let her down, swaying her thin masts. In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent.
Pop, would go one of the six-inch guns; a small flame would dart and vanish, a little white smoke would disappear, a tiny projectile would give a feeble screech--and nothing happened. Nothing could happen. There was a touch of insanity in the proceeding, a sense of lugubrious drollery in the sight; and it was not dissipated by somebody on board assuring me earnestly there was a camp of natives--he called them enemies!--hidden out of sight somewhere.

-Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness


I was talking with the guy there to repair the cable box; he'd been in the U.S. Navy. Like a lot of us, he was waiting impatiently for the Democratic primary season to settle. His issue was the War- ending this war that has faded from the headlines. His perspective: he'd been studying Vietnam. The only U.S. weapon the Vietcong were truly terrified of was the B-52, he said, the massively huge U.S. bomber, still in service today and piloted sometimes by the children of the original pilots.

We were talking about the Iraq war.

"My father, he says 'bomb them all.' He doesn't know what the hell he's talking about. He doesn't understand the incredible violence of it."

"Metal moving through flesh at high velocity," I offered, as if I knew anything.

Another description: a few weeks ago I was chatting with a guy who was in a memorial organization for the Japanese Internment camps - as it happened he'd been in Vietnam, and had seen the results of high altitude bombing.

"They were so high up, you couldn't seem them - a clear sky." Without warning, everything you saw "just suddenly exploded." There was the concept of strategic bombing in action, a flattening of the enemy, created just after World War I, brought to fruition over Southeast Asia, against the jungle itself.

As you might imagine, working on the B-17 sculpture project, I've been reading a bit about the strategic bombing campaign in Europe.

I met recently with a director at Simpson Center for the Humanities and the Jacob Lawrence Gallery at UW to develop some ideas for related exhibition design, and possibly an academic forum on Seattle history, ethics and technology, and the impact of total war and strategic bombing on Western and Asian culture, the forms of local destruction that bombing created. This is dependent of course on whether the sculpture proposal advances to funding, assembly and installation stages. (Update on that- I'm now have a metal shop to use to build the initial model of the installation, and am about to anxiously try to cram basic soldering.)

Working as a visual artist, I'm freed somewhat from normal academic sobriety. I've been reading for the visual and emotional, poring through available images and short accounts. Images of the aircraft themselves, the bomb damage, short video of combat footage. And sketches - we think of film and photography, but WWII, at the time, was still very much a war described by drawing.

But to us today, this was a war of silver grains, and a nostalgia that becomes more intense as the we Americans look to WWII as a kind of moral guide for our nationalism: when we were strong, unselfish, victorious, reluctant and just. That belief is real, and also somewhat false, noble and incomplete. Wars are not neatly described. What we built and unleashed was vast beyond any individual's actual comprehension.

Below is an iconic version of the B-17 in its slow destruction by a German fighter, footage you have seen a hundred times, but in parts. Normally we watch WWII footage in grainy black and white, in short snippets of exciting film. But if you watch it here in its full length, the glaze of the nostalgic history of inevitable victory melts. The fighter approaches to what might be described as walking distance. The bomber's guns hang limply. Nothing moves but the engines. There is nothing alive left to want to stay alive.

Here are a couple more relevant B-17 videos on YouTube; turn down the sound - the sound tends to lie.

Original footage from the Memphis Belle John Ford documentary.

Wreckage of a B-17 G, viewed by a happy-looking family.

A well-edited sense of a mission; excellent formation shots. Part I, II.

The next I find impossible not to include. Caution: these next are particularly graphic. I include because I am trying to wrap my mind around what actually happened, and images have a necessary power.

Difficult to watch: the Destruction of Hamburg, from a German/Nazi film. If I recall correctly, this was primarily a British attack, if it matters.

Bales of human hair, and other possessions, from Auschwitz. These are analogous to the ultimate rationale for the war, and touching in a way that the horror of more graphic films overwhelms.

Destruction of Guernica in 1937. This is considered to be the modern European beginning of mass targeting of civilians by air forces, and - in no surprise to anyone, it was the fascists who really started it. The Japanese had pioneered it earlier in China.

Among the readings I encountered, there were a couple that were particularly resonant. Antoine De Saint-Exupery, of The Little Prince fame, wrote one of my favorite books on aviation, Wind, Sand and Stars, and I just found another, Flight to Arras, is about a desperate flight through German lines in the days of the defeat of France.

When the body sinks into death, the essence of man is revealed. Man is a knot, a web, a mesh into which relationships are tied. Only those relationships matter. The body is an old crock that nobody will miss. I have never known a man to think of himself when dying. Never.

This interesting work, Bombs, Cities, and Civilizations makes a compelling argument: that the U.S. Army Air Forces in Europe did not generally abandon precision daylight bombing, and that they generally avoided targeting civilians, unlike the RAF. This is a important distinction, somewhat lost today - early on, the U.S. didn't generally try to kill civilians in spite of the massive strategic bombing strategy. This is consistent with several pilot accounts I read, although you can feel as shift in tactics as the war progresses. This was with the B-17 and B-24.

With the new Seattle-built B-29, it was under the direct command and philosophy of Curtis LeMay that the Americans really and fully began to target civilians, particularly Japanese civilians- with incendiaries, adopting the bombing philosophies of the Axis, and of the British, which killed far more people than atomic weapons.

The author also spoke to something that strikes me as essential - the tactics began to be developed to fit the technology. What was possible became the driving force of strategy: such as the adoption of radar guidance; the suggestion was even that the skills of precision bombing were being lost in the B-29s after radar targeting was introduced. Indiscriminate bombing became the dominant path, partly because the technology lead the tactics. The result was massive obliteration..

Thinking with visual emotion, it feels this way in the design of the aircraft - the B-17 is a ship, with a little window and a bump on it's surface for every individual- there is something valiant and humanistic in it's appearance. It's successor, the B-29 is an aluminum ice-pick, sleek, advanced, a killing tool. By the time of the B-47, the human being looked incidental.

Does it matter? No. And yes.

Thinking of all this, George McGovern, also a B-24 pilot in WWII had the most persuasive take: what we did was truly terrible, but Hitler was such a monster, it had to be done. In reading the accounts, looking at the photos, it seems like a mass-scale industrial killing, at an incredible sacrifice. 88,000 young Americans died just in the air war in WWII. And we killed many, many more. It was also a cost to our self-concept as a just nation.

To this day this is an aspect of war in America- the moral burden that we place on young soliders, that we seem unable to confront as a nation. We assume- partly from the real justice of our victory in WWII - that we are the good guys, so that is not an important issue. Of course, it is. And one we are failing, as the blame for Abu Ghraib focused absurdly and cruelly on corporals and sergeants.

Strategic bombing was a factor in winning World War II, and maybe an unavoidable one. It was total war and it had to be, if the future was to have anything other than industrial scale genocide-presumably ongoing until the enemies and victims of Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo were exhausted. When would that have been?

But I think we underestimated the cost to the future of opening the genie of annihilation as acceptable strategy. The Italian fascist general Duohet was influential in its development. He foresaw and advocated total war through strategic bombing as desirable and necessary. Billy Mitchell met him once after World War I, (when German dirigibles, amazingly, killed over 1000 British citizens through bombing. ) Our love of the airplane - and by larger extension, of technology, must be questioned, and decisions made consciously. We cannot cede our decision-making to the wonders of technological possibility, which in the United States has become the defacto approach to war.

Rumsfeld's faith in technologically-driven tactics is a factor in our disaster in Iraq. The chain of the logic of strategic bombing eventually lead to Curtis LeMay screaming at Kennedy to launch a first strike attack on Russia with his waves of fueled and armed B-47s sitting on the tarmac. It lead to that bizzare improvement in the Cold War- Mutually-Assured Destruction. And it led to another strange faith in technology to solve a tactical problem: obliterate the jungle using B-52s.

And this is where the guy there to fix the cable, the Navy vet, spoke the name of Curtis LeMay. It was not flattering. LeMay seems to have become a man indifferent to mass death through exposure.

I also found a resonant essay by the late John Kenneth Galbraith, the brilliant, popularizing, heretical economist, from the Guardian, in 2004.

At the end of the second world war, I was the director for overall effects of the United States strategic bombing survey - Usbus, as it was known. I led a large professional economic staff in assessment of the industrial and military effects of the bombing of Germany. The strategic bombing of German industry, transportation and cities, was gravely disappointing. Attacks on factories that made such seemingly crucial components as ball bearings, and even attacks on aircraft plants, were sadly useless. With plant and machinery relocation and more determined management, fighter aircraft production actually increased in early 1944 after major bombing. In the cities, the random cruelty and death inflicted from the sky had no appreciable effect on war production or the war.

These findings were vigorously resisted by the Allied armed services - especially, needless to say, the air command, even though they were the work of the most capable scholars and were supported by German industry officials and impeccable German statistics, as well as by the director of German arms production, Albert Speer. All our conclusions were cast aside. The air command's public and academic allies united to arrest my appointment to a Harvard professorship and succeeded in doing so for a year....

But this is incidental to his musings on contemporary war and political influence, rather than rehashing the bombing debate.

In a more comprehensive defense of the strategy, it was a conscious strategy by people like Jimmy Doolittle to use the bombers essentially as bait to draw out the Luftwaffe and destroy it. Bait - all those bombers, all those bombs, all those airmen, all those civilians and workers. This succeeded- and in an of itself, as horrifying a concept as it sounds, almost certainly speeded the defeat of Nazi Germany.

But you can ask innumerable questions. Why did we not send a raid to target the railroads leading to Auschwitz? That the Allied victory finally ended the slaughter does not I think, exculpate this failing. And you should ask many more, but at some point you end up escaping from the present. And that is another failing. Galbraith's essay above bears on the present war, not WWII.

The war strategy that saved the world from fascism hangs over us now. We are inspired by the technology, by its accomplishment, intelligence and beautiful form, but that is a primrose path. As one WWII pilot put it memorably: there was only one possible excuse for the destruction: Justice. That the justice of the result, the justice of peace, democracy, and the rule of law, was superior to the injustice of a massive rain of death from the sky.

Yesterday, I was kayaking out in Lake Union. Overhead there was a huge rumble of radial engines, not unusual here, with a lake full of old floatplanes. But there was a strange depth to the roar, and I glanced up: a real B-17 roared by at low altitude, flying east in its graceful way, the sun glinting on the unmistakable top turret, the big bomber flickering between black and silver as it turned against the sky.

And then a new sound gradually droned into our ears. The sound was a deep, and all encompassing, with no notes in it- just a gigantic faraway surge of doom- the heavies!
They came from directly behind us, and a t first they were mere dots in the sky. You could see clots of them against the far heavens, too tiny to count them individually...They came on with a terrible slowness....in constant procession, and I thought it would never end.
What the Germans must have thought is beyond comprehension. Their march across the sky was slow and steady. I've never known a storm, or a machine, or any resolve of Man, that had about it the aura of such relentlessness. You have the feeling that even if God appeared beseechingly before them in the sky, with palms up to persuade them back, they would not have had within them the power to turn from their irresistible course (.)
The Germans began to shoot heavy, high ack-ack. Great puffs of it, by the score spackled the sky until it was hard to distinguish the smoke puffs from the planes.
The formation never varies, but moves on as if nothing had happened. Nothing deviates them. They stalk on slowly, with the dreadful pall of sound, as though they were seeing only something at a great distance and nothing in between. -Ernie Pyle, Scripps-Howard Correspondent.