The Bomber War: Arthur Harris and the Allied Bomber Offensive 1939-1945

Rating:
Summary: Concise history of British and American bomber war
Review:
This is a balanced account of Allied bomber war. Both RAF and USAAF contribution is considered. It rightly concentrates on Germany, because the pre-war doctrines of strategic bombing were put to practise above Germany. This concentration lets him to condense the war to manageable 400 pages, while including many reminisences by those involved: both commanders, pilots, navigators and gunners, and he also lets German fighter pilots and flak gunners as well as bombed civilians to speak.

Neillands tries to understand the bombing effectiveness, unlike Harris, who preffered to bomb cities because they were large enough targets to hit with lousy navigation aids. Neillands spends a lot of time discussing morality of area bombings, but very little on alternative ways of fighting the war: heavy bombers are accepted as the main fighting vehicle of bomber war and no alternatives are considered or cost-benefit analyses tried. Yet USAAF 10% losses per mission (which translates to 12% chances of surving 20 mission tour of duty) and even the 4% RAF losses (with 30% chance of finishing 30 missions) should have made somebody think about alternatives (like Mosquito "light" bomber which could carry the same bomb load as the B-17 "heavy" bomber, but with 0.2% loss rate).

Neillands has the tendency to repeat selected topics so many times as to drive the reader furious. His favourites: 88 mm flak gun was an excellent anti-tank weapon; bombing accuracy in cloud-covered Europe under enemy fire is worse than in training bombing in sunny Texas; losses are prohibitive in daylight bombing without fighter escort. These comments and many others appear 5-10 times in the book. 50 pages could have easily been culled by removing repetition.

On page 387 Neillands commits a statistical fraud when discussing losses: assumably he tries to soften the allied losses by quoting side by side the Luftwaffe fighter command losses. These two, however, have very little to do with each other: Bomber command and the 8th USAAF were minor contributors to German fighter losses, compared with the Eastern front. Early in the bomber offensive Germans lost one fighter for two heavy bombers, which in economic terms was a bargain: two shot down fighter pilots who could often parachute to safety of fatherland, vs. 20 airmen who either died (only 20% survived, based on Neillands's scattered statistics on the topic), or were captured and imprisoned. 8 aircraft engines destroyed against two. Towards the end of the war the situation developed into parity: one fighter for one bomber.

Neillands spends a lot of time speculating whether bombers could have won the war without ground forces, and he believes that Harris and Arnold could have done it. But then, on page 396, he refutes his own argument: "Germany was still fighting in 1945, and fighting hard." which means that the infantry had to invade Germany to end the war, and the "bomber dream" of winning the war from the air was just a dream.

Despite these deficiencies and shortcomings Neillands's book is clearly the book of choice on bomber war. It may be complemented by Arthus Harris's memoirs "Bomber Offensive". A book to be avoided at all cost is Denis Richards's RAF Bomber Command.