How The Air Raid Changed The Rules Of Warfare | Total War | Timeline

Hi everybody and welcome to this documentary on Timeline. My name's Dan Snow and I want to tell you about History Hit TV. It's like the Netflix for history. Hundreds of exclusive documentaries and interviews with the world's best historians. We've got an exclusive offer available to fans of Timeline. If you go to History Hit TV you can either follow the information below this video or just google History Hit TV and use the code Timeline you get a special introductory offer. Go and check it out. In the meantime enjoy this video. Total war is all-encompassing. A war without boundary or limit. In the Second World War massive armies advanced confronting whole populations with impossible choices. The manufacture of weapons transformed industry and the workforce. Area bombing campaigns reduced cities to rubble. Sieges doomed populations to starvation. Racial policies sponsored campaigns of genocide. At the heart of this conflict were ordinary people reveal both the best and worst of humanity. a firestorm raged through the German city of Hamburg. The heat was so intense that some people caught outside sunk into the molten asphalt or were sucked into the fire and incinerated. The firestorm was the first of its kind created by allied area bombing. It was not the last. Over the course of the war allied bombing policy shifted from one of avoiding attacks on civilian targets to an area bombing strategy designed in the words of Britain's bomber command to unhouse civilians and destroy the war-making capacity of an enemy nation. Making the morale of the people a viable target. Acts which U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt once said sickened the hearts of civilized man and woman soon enough became allied policy. The Second World War was not the first time civilians had been targeted in bombing raids. There was a huge change in the way in which policies towards civilians were implemented by the different powers. What's often called a process of commutative radicalization occurred in the policies of almost all the major belligerents in the war. To some degree though a lot of the groundwork for that thinking had been laid before the war's opening rather than occurring during the war itself. For aerial bombing for example the large-scale bombing of civilians by the allied powers senior policymakers have been calling for that kind of strategy since the end of World War One. During the First World War when people saw those zeppelins coming over intending to drop bombs on their cities they realized that war was no longer somewhere else it was now being brought straight to your front door and in the Second World War you know we see that on a much larger scale. In the interwar years the fear of the bomber grew as nations across the world refined their policies. So-called area policing of villages in Iraq in the 1920s by the British, the Japanese bombing of Shanghai and Chongqing, and the bombing of Gernika in the Spanish Civil War demonstrated to the world the destructive power and devastating consequences of aerial warfare. As Stanley Baldwin said to parliament in the mid-1930s the bomber will always get through and this belief was really held more as a matter of faith than on the basis of hard evidence but at the time it was thought that because bombers could not be stopped the offense in particular against civilian populations who were thought to have weaker morale and be the vulnerable point of modern war economies seemed like it would be likely to be an effective strategy. The bomber was increasingly seen as more than a threat it was viewed as potentially a war-winning weapon. Fear of the bomber, hope for the transformative power of the bomber was really very important particularly in Britain which invested so much in the ability of the bomber to deliver a victory in war relatively cheaply. Both sides recognized the potential area bombing had to sap the morale of an enemy's population. If a nation could be bought to surrender through aerial bombing alone the cost of fighting another war in the trenches would be averted. When the war began Britain had no stated intention of targeting civilians in aerial raids. Assurances had been given to President Franklin D Roosevelt that civilian populations and unfortified cities would not be targeted. The British also feared retaliation. Any air attack on German civilians might invite terror from above on their own population. The British were acutely aware of their vulnerability. This vulnerability became even more evident in bomber command's early operations. Small daylight raids carried out during the phoney war against German warships proved fatal for many crews. On the 18th of December 1939 24 Wellingtons flew over Wilhelms Harbour. Half were shot down revealing weak points in the aircraft and the perils of daylight raids. Now very quickly the British who are trying to bomb German industrial targets by day they find that daylight bombing is just too costly. The first large attack on German soil occurred on the night of the 11th of May 1940. Each speck of light a blazing German building easy enough to realize the catastrophe the concentrated chaos that is overwhelming the city below. The perspective on bombing civilians began to shift a few days after this attack. The Luftwaffe attack on the Dutch port city of Rotterdam on the 14th of May 1940 killed 900 civilians and destroyed much of the old city. German attempts to abort the attack when it became clear the Dutch were preparing to surrender failed. The British war cabinet considered this an atrocity and authorized bombing raids in the Ruhr. Industrial and transport targets were the focus of the raid and the bombers were instructed to avoid civilian casualties. But the lines were becoming blurred. The strategic bombing campaign arises originally as a strategy of desperation almost. Britain essentially stands alone with the support of the Commonwealth. All of its European allies have gone. The United Kingdom wants the support of the United States in the war. He wants to draw them in to the war. It needs to demonstrate that it is still a viable ally that is still fighting. So it needs to take the war to the Germans. Relentless British air raids over urban and rural targets in Germany between May and September 1940 forced civilians into shelters. The civilian casualties were not high but the bombing was unpredictable and fostered desire among the German population for retaliatory strikes against British cities. The German bombing campaign when it came was more than retaliation. More broadly the attacks were designed to weaken British morale and British defenses in preparation for an invasion. The first Luftwaffe bombs were unintentionally released over civilian targets in London on August the 24th 1940. Britain retaliated sending bombers over Berlin. Here are some of the lads who have actually been over Berlin recently. They do not drop their bombs at random. The aerial warfare escalated and raid by raid, decision by decision, civilians moved into the firing line. People in their homes became inevitable collateral damage and then with the advent of area bombing they became legitimate targets. The British strategic bombing campaign against Germany began in 1940 and continued throughout the war in Europe. Later the United States Air Force joined the British efforts conducting daylight raids over Germany as well as occupied Europe and Italy. The campaign is estimated to have inflicted approximately 1 million fatal casualties on Germany. To the American airmen Britain was a huge aircraft carrier anchored off the flank of Europe. Very quickly they began to play their part in a bombing offensive against Germany which increased in volume every month. From the British perspective the aerial warfare undertaken by the German air force between July and October 1940 is known as the Battle of Britain. The campaign between September 1940 and May 1941 is called the Blitz. For Germany this was one campaign. They called it the England War. The England War was a fight for air supremacy to secure the way for the planned German land invasion of Britain. Germany had hoped Britain would agree to peace terms following the fall of France. When this did not eventuate planning began for Operation Sea Lion. Air superiority was paramount. They were going to come by water so obviously if you've got landing craft and you have a viable air force that is going to attack it. They weren't going to take that risk they had to knock out the air force. For the United Kingdom the Battle of Britain was the vital defensive battle of the war. Between July and October 1940 the men of fighter command those Churchill called the few defended the skies above Britain against the Luftwaffe. Among the crews were men from across the Commonwealth and others from occupied Europe. American pilots were also among those who joined the fray. Even though you think of it as British it really was an international force because you had Australia for instance we had 30 or so pilots. You had Poles, Czechs who had come from fallen Europe. You even had five Americans flying in there a couple of Jamaicans. It was an international force designed dedicated to defending Britain. These are a few of the American fighter pilots based on Britain now engaged in some of the greatest air battles the world has yet seen. Every kill is chalked up. Magnificent work is being done all honor to the men who are doing it. In addition to fighter command bomber command crews also flew operations in defense against a German invasion. They were ordered to target the invasion fleet being assembled attacking ships barges and ports in occupied Europe. Ten percent of barges and other vessels which had been assembled were destroyed by bomber command. Coastal command carried out anti-invasion patrols gathered intelligence on German positions and bombed German shipping and industrial targets on occasion. The Luftwaffe attacked the channel convoys the southeast coast and installations there. They wanted to knock out the aircraft industry, radar, major aerodromes. If the aerodromes are out the air force obviously is going to be in a lot of trouble. But they had a weakness. The Luftwaffe lacked heavy bombers and the limited operational range of the fighters meant they could stay over their targets for only a few minutes. It made for a difficult campaign. The defense against these attacks involved men and women on the ground as well as in the air. Hundreds of thousands of women worked in the auxiliary territorial service, the women's auxiliary air force or the women's royal naval service. Among their varied roles were some which directly contributed to air defense. Say the bombs are coming over and the army are using radar to plot where the bombs are coming. They can then target a bomb to try and knock them out before they drop the bomb on the plane. And the women did all the plotting and everything for that but because of the taboo on women being involved in combat they weren't allowed to press the button which fired the gun. So the man had to do that. The air defense network was able to rapidly use information on raids collected by the observer corps to direct fighters. Ground crews ensured aircraft were maintained and repaired as quickly as possible. Fighting above home soil meant the British could rescue downed airmen and repair aircraft which the Germans could not. Searchlight operators lit the night sky exposing approaching aircraft. In the factories men and women worked to ensure production continued. This was total war not only because civilians were being specifically targeted in the raids but because they were actively mobilized against them. The Battle of Britain was a decisive defensive victory. The Luftwaffe was unable to defeat the RAF and secure the air supremacy needed for the planned invasion to proceed. The German air force was losing pilots and aircraft faster than it could replace them. British aircraft factories were outproducing German factories. The Germans lacked the heavy bombers they needed. On the 19th of September 1940 Hitler postponed Operation Sea Lion indefinitely. The Luftwaffe turned its attention to London and other cities in what the British called the Blitz. Between September 1940 and May 1941 people in London and other British cities endured relentless bombing. The fear of the air of which Stanley Baldwin had warned in the decade became a feature of everyday life. London is a good case in point because it's so big. Back in 1934 I think it was Winston Churchill described London as this huge this tremendous fat cow all tied up waiting to be attacked by a beast of prey. So London because it was a capital city because it was full of iconic buildings such as the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace, St Paul's Cathedral was a deliberate target for the Luftwaffe and it suffered very badly. The destruction of civilian morale was not the sole objective of the German air attacks. Military and industrial targets remained important. This was also an economic war. A blockade focused on destroying ports and blocking the delivery of US supplies. 141 of the 171 major German attacks between August 1940 and June 1941 in British ports. The intent of the bombing campaign was of little consequence to those who lay in the path of the bombs and intent did not always align with outcome. The attack on Coventry in November 1940 which drew much sympathy from the still neutral United States was aimed at a cluster of factories but also hit workers residential areas. Over 500 tons of explosives fell on the city. Incendiary bombs set Coventry alight. St Michael's which had been built in the 12th century and designated a cathedral in 1918 was gutted. Coventry was so badly damaged in the course of just a relatively short bombing campaign that the Germans actually coined a term for it. Coventration I believe it's pronounced or Coventration which basically means the rapid destruction of an entire city center through bombing. The cathedral spire and the front remain. The rest is rubble but all that the cathedral represented and the spirit of this centuries-old city lives on. Back in London night after night German aircraft released their bombs. Houses turned to rubble. People sought shelter in the underground stations. There they waited out the attacks. Waited to see if their homes had survived the blasts. Between August 1940 and June 1941 London endured 79 major night raids. There were a few nights when the weather and various other adverse conditions meant that Luftwaffe didn't come but broadly speaking London suffered one of the longest continuous bombing campaigns in the 20th century. But it was not the only city to endure the raids. Liverpool, Bristol, Southampton, Glasgow, Manchester and Belfast were among the cities which suffered multiple night raids. An estimated 43,000 civilians were killed, 139,000 wounded. Public morale wavered under the strain but it did not break. By September 1941 Churchill was forced to concede that it is very disputable whether bombing by itself will be a decisive factor in the present war. The government compiled home intelligence weekly reports on morale because it was very keen to sort of take the temperature read the thermometer of morale during air raids in their aftermath and it's clear that you know some people did panic some people were upset. There were episodes of what was called trekking where people would leave the city of a night and go out to stay with relatives in the countryside or in the far-flung suburbs of the capital city. They didn't want to be in the east end of London when the docks were being bombed effectively. So morale broadly speaking remained intact but there are examples of where it wavered and fluctuated. In May 1941 Germany turned its attention toward Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. It could not fight on two fronts. As Germany shifted focus Britain's bombing war also began to change. The concept that's come in recent times of what we call supreme emergency is this idea that if a state is faced with a really terrible situation if they have been the victim of aggression they're about to lose a war and the consequences of losing that war would be absolutely terrible that in those sort of circumstances they're actually justified in throwing away some of the usual rules of war. Not that it's excusable not that it's understandable that they do these things but it's actually the right thing to do. In July 1941 Bomber Command received a new directive one which specifically included reference to destroying the morale of the civilian population as a whole, industrial workers in particular. Sir Arthur Harris, Bomber Harris as he came to be known, took charge of Bomber Command in February 1942. He believed in the effectiveness of area bombing and soon put the instruction on targeting the civilian population into effect. There are a lot of people who say that bombing can never win a war. Well my answer to that is that it has never been tried yet and we shall see. But there was more to area bombing than just catching strategic targets. Simply bombing cities to terrorize the population also became a feature and these included bombing raids on Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg targets which had limited military value but were sought out for area bombing to carry out that duty of terrorizing the population. In March Harris sent the bombers over the city of Lübeck. Incendiary bombs set the old medieval timber buildings alight. An estimated 1,000 people lost their lives. The bombs destroyed the cultural heart of the city. They also terrified the people on the ground. Britain was targeting morale. Harris accused the Third Reich of laboring under what he called the childish delusion that they could bomb other people but that no one would bomb them. There's a strange dichotomy that Britain had endured the Blitz and the Blitz was seen as actually drawing the British people together and uniting them in defiance and yet two years later it was assumed that an even heavier form of bombing campaign on Germany would break their morale. The evidence for this was quite simply non-existent. It was based on pre-war theories which took a rather dim view of the civilian populations of nations and thought they would be terrorized and they would hate these stresses and strains area bombing placed on them. Three raids in April 1942 destroyed 70 percent of Rostock, another old German trading city. Both cities had military or strategic targets. But they were also places of cultural and historic significance. Both had been founded in the 12th century and were Hanseatic cities. Both bombing raids provided insight into the effectiveness of incendiary bombing. The Luftwaffe retaliate Exeter and York in the so-called Beidecker raids. Raids which targeted cities of cultural significance. Cities that appeared in the Beidecker tourist guide. As the war escalated, as bombing raids stretched beyond military and industrial targets, total war destroyed the cultural and historic hearts of cities. But the factories and the nearby homes where the workers lived remained important targets. Most of those workers, it was known that they lived in areas reasonably close to these factories so we'll attack these civilian areas that are close to the factories knowing that we're likely to be actually doing significant damage to the factory workers. The use of incendiary bombs escalated as the bomber command campaign wore on. The thousand bomber raid over Cologne in May 1942 used a mixture of incendiary and high explosive bombs. The operational order for the first 1000 bomber raid said simply, object to destroy the city of Cologne. The British thought that it was pointless to try and target factories or marshalling yards at that point in the war. One simply had to hit cities. The raid destroyed eight square miles of the city. 45,000 people were made homeless in one night. The gas, water, electricity and transport of Cologne was severely disrupted. When the storm bursts over Germany, they will look back to the days of Lubeck and Rostock and Cologne. As a man caught in the blasts of a hurricane will look back to the gentle zephyrs of last summer. Civilian deaths were not the only measure of the impact of total war. Destruction and displacement also served to demonstrate that the battle lines were now irrevocably blurred. The efforts of bomber command were not confined to Germany. In 1942, as fighting intensified in North Africa, bomber command focused on targets in Italy, including Genoa, Turin and Milan. The Allied bombing of the monastery atop Monte Cassino in 1944 is an example of how civilians were caught in the crossfire of total war. Both sides had promised the Pope that the sacred building would be protected. But the promise did not hold. Now the Germans said it's a Benedictine monastery, it's a lovely old building. But the Allies believed that the Germans were using it as an observation post, and maybe they were. But the fact is that on the 15th of February, the US Air Force came over and destroyed the monastery to no effect, because they turned in a pile of rubble that the German paratroops were able to defend superbly. The destruction of the monastery had no real significance. I mean, it's a terrible moral blot on the Allies' respect for cultural integrity. But it's a massive cost for a relatively minor obstacle. Some 2,000 civilians from Cassino had been sheltering in the vicinity of the abbey. 230 were killed. The bombing occurred in the context of a larger battle and was not specifically aimed at civilians or the culturally significant monastery. It is nonetheless an example of the devastation caused when boundaries between battlefield and homefront are obliterated. In 1943, the air war over Europe escalated considerably. The terror of firestorms became a reality. Operation Gomorrah, a series of six raids on Hamburg between July and August 1943, was a combined Royal Air Force and United States Air Force effort. Large portions of the city were destroyed, and some 45,000 people lost their lives. The night of the 27th of July was particularly destructive. The combination of the heat and low humidity fanned the flames into a firestorm that engulfed the city and sent burning human bodies whirling into the air. 900,000 people were made homeless. 22 square kilometers were destroyed, creating almost 43 million cubic meters of rubble. 42,000 people were killed in four nights between the 24th of July and the 3rd of August. By February 1945, the bomber offensive had reached its peak. But by 1944 and 1945, the rate of bombing of Germany and other occupied territories by the RAF and the United States Air Force was stupendous. It was on a much, much larger scale than the bombing even of 1942 and 1943. There was massive overkill by the Allies by the end of the Second World War. At the Yalta Conference on the 4th of February 1945, the Soviets requested assistance in the form of Allied air attacks on communication centers, suggesting Berlin as a potential target. Attacks on communication centers would impede German supply and reinforcement of their forces as the Soviets pressed on with their offensive, which was closing on the German border. Auschwitz had been liberated on January 27th. Allied planners ultimately chose Dresden, which contained important industrial and transportation targets. Between the 13th and 14th of February 1945, close to 3,000 RAF and U.S. bombers carried out night and day raids over Dresden. By this time, with the Allies advancing on Germany, refugees were among those sheltering in the town. A firestorm engulfed the city. Dresden was a beautiful city, admired for its architecture and art. It was known as the Florence of the Elbe, and then it was rubble. Tens of thousands of people lost their lives, and a once beautiful city was reduced to ash and rubble for arguably little military gain. While the massive material strength of the Allies was pounding German cities, Germany was placing its faith in wonder weapons. MV-2 rockets, the Begeltungswaffe, revenge weapons. These weapons severely tested British morale. After May 1941, when the Germans turned their attention to Soviet Russia, there was a kind of decline in public anxiety about air raids. But it all comes back again in 1944 to 1945, when you have the so-called vengeance weapons being launched from Nazi-occupied Europe against London and other British cities. The terror of these weapons lay in their unpredictability, the apparent randomness of the attacks. The distinctive buzzing sound of the V-1 earned it the name buzz bomb, or doodle bugs, as they were commonly known. The V-2 weapons climbed to the edge of space before returning to earth at supersonic speeds. The V-2 was an incredibly fast missile, it's the birth of the rocket effectively. And when that started smashing into London, killing many people, destroying very large buildings, the government was almost in denial at the start of that. And it was only because it was obvious something awful was happening, that the government was forced to admit that London was again under attack. In the face of area bombing over Germany, the revenge weapons served a different purpose than the earlier blitz. Terror was now a clear aim. Civilian morale, a target. An added cruelty of the revenge weapons were their construction. Slave labourers were forced to work on the construction of the weapons. An estimated 20,000 died in the process. The creations of the weapons also drew in scientists. One of whom, Wernher von Braun, made a major contribution to the United States space program in the decades after the war. Over 10,000 flying bombs were launched over the English coast. Close to 4,000 of those were shot down before reaching their target. Some 2,400 made it to London. The rocket attacks were not confined to Britain. Antwerp was also targeted. The offensive ended in March 1945 as the Allied advance overran the launch sites. Bombs began and ended the war in the United States. The aerial bombardment of Pearl Harbor in December 1941 drew the US into the war. As everybody knows, America's reaction to Pearl Harbor was instantaneous. Gone were doubts and hesitations. There began one of the most colossal war efforts in history. Detonating Little Boy and Fat Man over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 brought it to a close. These two bombing attacks illustrate the evolution of aerial warfare in a time of total war. The aerial attack on Pearl Place on the morning of December 7th, 1941 shocked the American public. It was done in the understanding that in the long term the Americans had the capacity to build up sufficient military power to create a terrible threat to Japan. But it was done in the hope that Japan could achieve sufficient success that the Americans would feel it wasn't worthwhile going on. America's preference for neutrality was dissolved by the attack. 49 civilians were killed, but they were not the intended target. The some 360 Japanese planes which flew over Oahu that day aimed their attack on the US Pacific Fleet. The destruction was considerable. Numerous ships were capsized, sunk, or destroyed, as were some 180 aircraft. The attack accounted for more than 3,400 US military casualties, including more than 2,300 killed. This was aerial warfare aimed at destroying the military capacity of an enemy nation. The operation was a partial tactical success with the caveat that the wrong targets were attacked. It was a strategic failure of the worst order. The nature of that attack was the thing most calculated to create in the United States a collective will to respond in a way that I don't think anything else would have. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy. The United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. Since the unprovoked and dastardly attack, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire. No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory. By the time the U.S.P. of Hiroshima and Nagasaki occurred, aerial warfare had become a different beast altogether. The bombing of these two cities represented the ultimate application of area bombing. The billions in civilian morale had by this point become legitimate, indeed the only targets. In its bombing campaign over Japan, the United States Air Force shared its pre-war policy, shifting from precision to area bombing. There were a number of reasons for this. The weather over Japan, particularly cloud cover and high winds, made high-altitude precision bombing impossible. The Americans come into the campaign and they think, yes, the bomber will always get through. We can fly through to our targets. We have the northern bomb site, which is a very precise, high-technology piece of kit for its day. That will allow us to put bombs on the target and not go in for any of this area bombing stuff. Now, the Americans very quickly find that they can't bomb as accurately, and in many senses, they essentially revert to an area bombing campaign of sorts as well. The B-29 bombers were better suited to carrying higher bomb loads at lower altitudes. The industrial infrastructure of Japan was also spread out with feeder factories located in urban areas some distance from the main factories. Paper houses made Japanese cities vulnerable. Using incendiary bombs, the bombers created great fires that spread across cities, reaching the dispersed industrial targets. It also targeted civilian morale. The firebombing of Tokyo and other major cities was carried out in the hope of forcing Japan to surrender. However, and over the course of the war, the antipathy toward Japan grew to the point that few in the U.S. objected to the kind of civilian destruction which accompanied area bombing. This message to the warlords of Japan we have not forgotten, and our B-29s will remind you again and again and again. The Japanese, in my opinion, will never crack. They will never surrender. They have got to be beaten until they know they are beaten. And then there was fear. Fear that the war would continue, that Japan would refuse to surrender. Fear of the U.S. military casualties which might occur as the result of a land campaign in Japan. In October 1943, American intelligence reported on the vulnerability of the Japanese cities to incendiary attack. The fate of the civilian population was factored into this research. The destruction of industry and military establishments would be the direct effects of such an attack. But the study acknowledged that indirect effects would include casualties among workers, damage to transportation facilities, damage to public utilities, diversion of resources to reconstruction, and lowered Japanese morale. American military planners had to make a decision. Some historians believe the decisions taken were unavoidable. Confronted by the expectation of enormous casualty figures if the battle was carried to Japan's home islands, the military planners considered drastic action to force the surrender. Others argue that by this stage the Allies were not facing a condition of supreme emergency. When you're talking about the U.S. bombing Japan, particularly with widespread use of incendiary bombs in bombing Japanese civilians, I really think you're talking about a very different sort of argument. You can perhaps make a supreme emergency argument about Britain engaging in area bombing or terror bombing of civilians in 1940, 1941. When you're talking about bombing Japan in 1945, those arguments just don't apply. You can't say that the U.S. and its allies were about to lose World War II. That was obviously not the case. So it's impossible to make a supreme emergency argument for that sort of bombing. I do think that what you're talking about is this idea, well, this is what they called a total war. Everything is considered to be acceptable at this point. The United States had the resources to execute a total war against Japan. There were few restrictions on the extent to which they could carry out bombing raids. The Allies had, by the end of the war, an incredible capacity to deliver ordnance on a global scale. They had seen this as the means to victory. They were in a position to bomb really without opposition, or not very much opposition by them. And of course, they wanted to bring the war to a close as quickly as possible and deployed all these resources. In 1945, B-29s stalked the skies of Japan at night. One night in particular has become infamous. The night of the 9th of March, 1945. The oil-gelled and gasoline-gelled bombs dropped that night were designed to set the city ablaze. This they did. Some 300 bombers dropped more than 2,000 tons of incendiaries over Tokyo. The wind fanned a firestorm beyond all previous imagining. Estimates of the civilian deaths ranged from 80 to 100,000, with tens of thousands more injured. 16 square miles of the city were destroyed. It was an unparalleled level of aerial destruction. Worse was to follow. The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the 6th and 9th of August, 1945, was the ultimate expression of total war. The kind of weapon was not designed to make a distinction between a factory and a high school. Between a factory worker contributing to the war effort and a child on their way to school. President Truman weighed the cost of a land campaign against the use of the weapons. He considered the potential lives lost in both scenarios and determined that the atomic weapons were the lesser of two evils. At 9.15, the bomb is dropped. The aircraft banks away at high speed. The fighting to take control of the small islands of Okinawa and Iwo Jima had been intense and costly. These were relatively small locations. To conquer the Japanese mainland was estimated to cost the American army at least half a million dead, never mind the wounded and missing, and that's not incorporating the Allied contribution. There was little stomach to carry out this type of land campaign which could grind on for years and would certainly cost millions of casualties, both Allied and Japanese. The atomic bombs seemed to offer a way out of this military conundrum. You could defeat Japan at a stroke without any need to actually land on their beaches and fight their way inland. But the decision was not unanimous. We actually know now, for example, Eisenhower was actually against the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The particular scientists who created the bombs actually wrote to Truman and asked him not to drop the bombs. We know from Truman's diaries, his letters to his wife, his conversations with Churchill, that there was no real military justification. It was more a political one. President Truman did not make his decision in a political vacuum. In using the bombs to destroy Japan's ability to wage war, he also delivered a warning to potential future opponents. The three Allies, although they were united to defeat the Axis, were likely to become rivals in a post-war world. Britain was in decline. America felt it had little to fear from Britain, but the Soviet Union was in the ascendance and would become America's next great foe, potentially. By dropping the atomic bomb, the United States sent a very clear message to Stalin and the Soviet Union that the United States was in possession of a new and terrible weapon and was prepared to use it against its enemies. A short time ago, an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima and destroyed its usefulness to the enemy. That bomb has more power than 20,000 tons of TNT. 70,000 people were killed instantly when the bomb fell over Hiroshima. The total of deaths had risen to 100,000 by the end of the year. Between 35,000 and 40,000 were killed in Nagasaki a few days later. In the decades that have followed, many have questioned the morality of dropping these bombs. It's very, very difficult to make an argument saying that the dropping of the first bomb was necessary. I think it's impossible to make an argument that the second bomb was militarily necessary in the terms of World War II. Japan surrendered on the 14th of August. For many in allied nations, the dropping of the atomic bombs brought relief. They entered the war, saved the lives of prisoners of the Japanese and military personnel who may have been killed in a land campaign. The bombs brought total victory. For some, their cost was worth it. Others, including some scientists, feared the future. If there is another world war, this civilization may go under. We need to ask ourselves whether we're doing all we can to avert that. We need, I think, to learn to understand the realities of life abroad, not so much in terms of slogans as in terms of the lives of men. The dropping of the atomic bombs, the ultimate expression of total war, created a new kind of war. Decades removed from the aerial warfare of the Second World War, historians and commentators seek to understand how the war shifted the moral compass of the world. Actions which seemed unthinkable before the war slowly but surely became policy. Beneath the leaders making policy and the bombers carrying it out were the civilians who lay in the path of the bombs. Cities engulfed in the darkness of enforced blackouts, night after night. People forced to shelter underground for hours or days. People buried beneath rubble. People incinerated in firestorms or suffocated in shelters. Total war, by its very nature, obliterates moral boundaries. Scientific and industrial progress creates ever more sophisticated weapons of destruction. In total war, the question of morality becomes secondary to the means which will achieve victory. The story of aerial warfare campaigns in Europe, Asia and the Pacific, show that faced with defeat, faced with a perceived unstoppable enemy, decisions which are morally repugnant in a time of peace will often be made in a total war.