Four quotes on civilian bombing around the time of the Second World War

I.  Terror

“People scare better when they’re dying.”  - Frank

The Axis powers discovered early on that aerial bombardment was a powerful instrument of terror, and a useful negotiating tool.  Duch resistance fell off precipitously after the Nazis leveled Rotterdam in 1940.  See also Guernica and Shanghai (both 1937), and London and Conventry in 1940.

Rotterdam, 1940

II.  Retribution

“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. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.” - Arthur 'Bomber' Harris

Harris kicked off his campaign with the "Thousand Bomber Raid" on Cologne, and it really got into high gear with the destruction of Hamburg, as show in the newsreel below.  See also Dresden and Pforzheim in 1945...there was not much military justification for these later attacks, nor for the losses of Allied aircrew in conducting them.  But the Allies were motivated by more than a desire to win the war -  revenge had been part of the plan all along. According to this article, already by June 1940 "Churchill was musing about 'a devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers on the Nazi homeland'. In October the War Cabinet decided that 'the civilian population around the target areas must be made to feel the weight of the war’." And so they did, precisely so that newsreels like this could be shown to audiences at home:




III. Destroyer of Worlds

"We call this a trophy map," he said. "It's meant to convey, quite crudely, only the destruction of this city – and the absolute dominance of the Army Air Forces by the end of firebombing campaign. It's a way of capturing the might of American air power that emerged out of this conflict…. a total of 66 Japanese cities were targeted and destroyed during World War II.” - link

Faced with an enemy determined to fight to the last, in 1945 the U.S. sought to end the war by demonstrating the utter futility of resistance.  Burning Tokyo (and 63 other cities and towns) did not achieve this, but it was surely part of the rationale for the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  I have no idea why the Japanese surrendered when they did - Russia entering the war may have had something to do with it.  But it is hard to make the case you're going to win - or even inflict serious damage - against an opponent that can destroy cities with impunity:

I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal.... Every soldier thinks something of the moral aspects of what he is doing. But all war is immoral and if you let that bother you, you're not a good soldier.” - Curtis LeMay