WW II Air Assaults

A new book uses the bombing of Gernika as an example of air assault against civilian population. This article published at the Telegram talks about it:

Two authors examine World War II air assaults

BOOK REVIEW

By Jeffrey Burke Bloomberg

“Guernica and Total War” by Ian Patterson (Harvard University Press, $22.95) “The Fire: The Bombing of Germany 1940-1945” by Joerg Friedrich, translated by Allison Brown (Columbia University Press, $34.95)

On April 26, 1937, market day in Guernica, German and Italian bombers took off from a Spanish airfield to try out new techniques. They razed the ancient Basque town.

In “Guernica and Total War,” Ian Patterson, a Cambridge University English professor, looks at the history of and cultural response to the spread of airborne military assaults on civilians. Focusing on a brutish tactic — still considered useful in the form of “shock and awe” — Patterson has written a rich and engaging study.

The idea of bombing nonmilitary targets quickly followed the advent of flight itself. The British bombed “tribesmen on the Indian frontier from 1915 onward,” Patterson writes.

In the 1920s South African, French and Spanish planes targeted civilians. Mussolini’s son Vittorio enjoyed dropping bombs on Ethiopian horsemen after Italy invaded the country in 1935. Patterson quotes his description of them “blooming like a rose when my fragmentation bombs fell in their midst. It was great fun.”

For the devastation of Guernica, Patterson cites a diary entry by Wolfram von Richthofen, commander of the German Condor Legion, which led the raid, and a cousin of the famous Red Baron. Richthofen writes of the success of a new strategy using first heavy blast bombs to destroy buildings and water supplies, then incendiary bombs to ignite wooden buildings and finally machine guns to finish off people and farm animals. The entry begins, “Guernica, town of 5,000 inhabitants, literally razed to the ground.”

Guernica became a target partly because the Basques resisted Franco’s Nationalists. It became an enduring icon largely because of Picasso’s painting.

As Patterson notes, though, “it was only one of a huge number of cultural artifacts — paintings, films, novels, poems, plays — to explore the idea of indiscriminate death from the air.” Auden, Bunuel, de Kooning, Riefenstahl, Verne, Sontag and myriad more-obscure figures — Patterson casts a wide net as he explores how artists dealt with the atavistic fear of what Proust called, during earlier zeppelin raids on Paris, “an apocalypse in the sky.”

The author’s academic side only occasionally muddies clear prose, in phrases like “a trope of visualization” or “the shorthand metonymy of wings.” It’s a minor complaint about a slim book of considerable rewards.

Annihilation became the norm in World War II. In “The Fire: The Bombing of Germany 1940-1945,” the German historian Joerg Friedrich looks at the brutal effects on the ground when total war came to German cities. (The book was attacked in some quarters when it was published in Germany, in 2002, for depicting Germans as victims rather than as perps.)

Friedrich’s tone varies from clinical to literary to almost lyrical as he first examines the strategy and methods behind saturation bombing, then surveys one city after another targeted for destruction. He notes the history behind each town’s architectural heritage before it is wiped out, comparing the result of centuries of building to that of minutes of bombing.

His statistics range from body counts to acres of destroyed window panes to cubic yards of rubble per resident; the stream of horrifying facts and figures can become hypnotic. Friedrich doesn’t explicitly judge either side for attacks that mainly killed women, children and elderly men, but he often pushes the reader to question the reasoning that sanctioned such slaughter.

Jeffrey Burke is an editor for Bloomberg News.

Those bombings "of tribesmen" were ordered by no one else than Winston Churchill, a sinister little character that a lot of people consider a great statesman.

.... ... .