Death from the Heavens: A History of Strategic Bombing
By Kenneth P. Werrell. 400 pp. Naval Institute Press, 2009. $49.95.
Kenneth P. Werrell stands in the front rank of aviation technology and air power historians. His account of the destructive U.S. Army Air Forces firebombing campaign against Japan in 1944 and 1945, Blankets of Fire, has justifiably become the standard work on the subject. Now he turns his talents to producing a concise yet comprehensive survey of strategic bombing from its inception with the zeppelin raids of the First World War to the present.
Quite properly, nearly half the book is devoted to the strategic bombing campaigns of the Second World War. He reserves the most detailed treatment for the costly and protracted air offensive by the Royal Air Force and the USAAF against Nazi Germany. His coverage of the B-29 campaign in the Pacific also includes a consideration of Japan’s feeble response, the balloon bomb raids against the West Coast of the United States. He does not neglect the German attempts to conduct strategic air warfare, including the V-weapons campaign. There has been an enormous amount of new scholarship dealing with strategic bombing (to which Werrell has contributed his fair share), and no small amount of passionate debate. Werrell navigates his way through this historical and ethical minefield with intelligence and discretion, raising important questions while acknowledging that consensus will continue to elude us. For instance, the book sounds a somewhat pessimistic note regarding the utility of strategic bombardment as a war-winning weapon, yet concludes that the bomber made “a major yet expensive contribution to Allied victory.”
Werrell’s expertise as a scholar of aviation technology is especially evident here. Offering far more than a buffish litany of aircraft types and specifications, he carefully traces the impact of technological development on the operational effectiveness of bombing forces. It is impossible to understand the RAF’s night area offensive or the USAAF’s incendiary campaign against Japan without a full awareness of the capabilities and limitations of the new generation of bombers (Lancasters and Halifaxes on the one hand, and Boeing B-29s on the other) that waged them. Technical issues such as target-finding aids, bombsights, and offensive and defensive munitions are given their proper place in the larger story. This is one of those rare books that will engage the general reader without alienating the specialist.
Many fine earlier histories of strategic bombardment end their coverage in 1945 with the dawn of the nuclear age. Death from the Heavens is distinct in that it carries the narrative and analytical thread right up to the present. While readers of World War II may understandably focus on Werrell’s thorough coverage of that conflict, it has cast a very long shadow over air power theory and practice for decades. The air power debates of the 1940s would resurface in Korea, Vietnam, and throughout the cold war. They still reverberate in the age of intercontinental ballistic missiles, precision weaponry, and stealth technology. This excellent book demonstrates once again that the events and legacy of World War II are still to be reckoned with.
Originally published in the July 2009 issue of World War II. To subscribe, click here.
