for now…. ‘The problem is the will to launch. We have to break the will of Hezbollah.’” Don’t hold your breath is the first lesson history teaches on this particular assessment of the powers of air war. The second is that, a decade from now, some other senior commander in some other country will be saying the same thing, word for word.
When it comes to brutality, the fact is that ancient times have gotten a bad rap. Nothing in history was more brutal than the last century’s style of war making—than those two world wars with their air armadas, backed by the most advanced industrial systems on the planet. Powerful countries then bent every elbow, every brain, to support the destruction of other human beings en masse, not to speak of the Holocaust (which was assembly-line warfare in another form), and the various colonial and cold war campaigns that substituted the devastation of airpower in the third world for a war between the two superpowers that might have employed the mightiest air weaponry of all to scour the earth.
It may be that the human capacity for brutality, for barbarism, hasn’t changed much since the eighth century, but the industrial revolution—and in particular the rise of the airplane—opened up new landscapes to brutality. The view from behind the gun sight, then the bomb sight, and finally the missile sight slowly widened until all of humanity was taken in. From the lofty, godlike vantage point of the strategic, as well as the literal heavens, the military and the civilian began to blur on the ground. Soldiers and citizens, conscripts and refugees alike, became nothing but tiny, indistinguishable hordes of ants, or nothing at all but the structures that housed them, or even just concepts, indistinguishable one from the other.
One Plane, One Bomb
We have come far from that first bomb dropped by hand over the Italian colony of Libya. In the case of Tokyo—then constructed almost totally out of highly flammable materials—a single raid carrying incendiary bombs and napalm that began just after midnight on March 10, 1945, proved capable of incinerating or killing at least 90,000 people, possibly many more, from such a height that the dead could not be seen (though the stench of burning flesh carried up to the planes). The first American planes to arrive over the city, writes historian Michael Sherry, “carved out an X of flames across one of the world’s most densely packed residential districts; followers fed and broadened it for some three hours thereafter.”
What descended from the skies, as James Carroll recounts it in his book House of War , was “1,665 tons of pure fire…the most efficient and deliberate act of arson in history. The consequent firestorm obliterated fifteen square miles, which included both residential and industrial areas. Fires raged for four days.” It was the bonfire of bonfires, and not a single American plane was shot down.
On August 6, 1945, all the power of that vast air armada was again reduced to a single bomb, “Little Boy,” dropped near a single bridge in a single city, Hiroshima, which in a single moment of a sort never before experienced on the planet did what it had taken three hundred B-29s and many hours to do to Tokyo. In those two cities—as well as Dresden and other German and Japanese cities subjected to “strategic bombing”—the dead (perhaps 900,000 in Japan and 600,000 in Germany) were invariably
preponderantly civilian, and far too distant to be seen by plane crews often dropping their bomb loads in the dark of night, giving the scene below the look of hell on earth.
So 1911: one plane, one bomb. 1945: one plane, one bomb—but this time at least 120,000 dead, possibly many more. Two bookmarks less than four decades apart on the first chapter of a history of the invention of a new kind of warfare, a new kind of barbarism that, by now, is the way we expect war to be made, a way that no longer strikes us as barbaric at all. This
When it comes to brutality, the fact is that ancient times have gotten a bad rap. Nothing in history was more brutal than the last century’s style of war making—than those two world wars with their air armadas, backed by the most advanced industrial systems on the planet. Powerful countries then bent every elbow, every brain, to support the destruction of other human beings en masse, not to speak of the Holocaust (which was assembly-line warfare in another form), and the various colonial and cold war campaigns that substituted the devastation of airpower in the third world for a war between the two superpowers that might have employed the mightiest air weaponry of all to scour the earth.
It may be that the human capacity for brutality, for barbarism, hasn’t changed much since the eighth century, but the industrial revolution—and in particular the rise of the airplane—opened up new landscapes to brutality. The view from behind the gun sight, then the bomb sight, and finally the missile sight slowly widened until all of humanity was taken in. From the lofty, godlike vantage point of the strategic, as well as the literal heavens, the military and the civilian began to blur on the ground. Soldiers and citizens, conscripts and refugees alike, became nothing but tiny, indistinguishable hordes of ants, or nothing at all but the structures that housed them, or even just concepts, indistinguishable one from the other.
One Plane, One Bomb
We have come far from that first bomb dropped by hand over the Italian colony of Libya. In the case of Tokyo—then constructed almost totally out of highly flammable materials—a single raid carrying incendiary bombs and napalm that began just after midnight on March 10, 1945, proved capable of incinerating or killing at least 90,000 people, possibly many more, from such a height that the dead could not be seen (though the stench of burning flesh carried up to the planes). The first American planes to arrive over the city, writes historian Michael Sherry, “carved out an X of flames across one of the world’s most densely packed residential districts; followers fed and broadened it for some three hours thereafter.”
What descended from the skies, as James Carroll recounts it in his book House of War , was “1,665 tons of pure fire…the most efficient and deliberate act of arson in history. The consequent firestorm obliterated fifteen square miles, which included both residential and industrial areas. Fires raged for four days.” It was the bonfire of bonfires, and not a single American plane was shot down.
On August 6, 1945, all the power of that vast air armada was again reduced to a single bomb, “Little Boy,” dropped near a single bridge in a single city, Hiroshima, which in a single moment of a sort never before experienced on the planet did what it had taken three hundred B-29s and many hours to do to Tokyo. In those two cities—as well as Dresden and other German and Japanese cities subjected to “strategic bombing”—the dead (perhaps 900,000 in Japan and 600,000 in Germany) were invariably
preponderantly civilian, and far too distant to be seen by plane crews often dropping their bomb loads in the dark of night, giving the scene below the look of hell on earth.
So 1911: one plane, one bomb. 1945: one plane, one bomb—but this time at least 120,000 dead, possibly many more. Two bookmarks less than four decades apart on the first chapter of a history of the invention of a new kind of warfare, a new kind of barbarism that, by now, is the way we expect war to be made, a way that no longer strikes us as barbaric at all. This
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