Moreover, it seemed that one of Brodie’s main assumptions in The Absolute Weapon was now unraveling—the notion that superiority in atomic weapons offered no strategic advantage. Brodie read articles in The New York Times by military correspondent Hanson Baldwin, and heard corroborating reports from some military friends, that the materials for making atom bombs might be even scarcer than was previously thought. There was no way for an outsider to know this for sure; the size of the atomic stockpile was among the most highly classified bits of data in government files. But it was known that only eight bombs had been tested since the bombing of Nagasaki, and it was now widely rumored that uranium ores were extremely scarce.
Clearly, a three-to-one superiority in atomic bombs would not have much meaning if each side had thousands of bombs, enough of them to blow up the other’s major cities and then some. But, Brodie began to ask himself, what if each side had only hundreds of bombs? Then a three-to-one margin might have significance. Moreover, this margin, if it did exist in the near future, would no doubt favor the United States, which certainly could manufacture far better airplanes and missiles than the Soviet Union, and which would still be producing bombs when the Soviets only started to produce their first.
Given the possibility of Soviet aggression, the bomb assumed enlarged importance in American policy. And given a supposed condition of even greater atomic scarcity than previously imagined, the question of how to use the bomb, if it came to that—which targets to strike, in what order, for precisely what desired effects—suddenly emerged, at least in Bernard Brodie’s mind, as a vexingly pertinent problem.
At the same time, Brodie realized that virtually nobody in any position of responsibility seemed to be thinking along these same lines. In 1947, under the auspices of the Library of Congress, he conducted a survey of military thinking on the bomb, reading the official literature and interviewing officers in the Navy and the War Department. The level of thinking, he discovered, was shockingly shallow. One War Department paper referred to the need for “a significant number of bombs,” defined as the number that would “provide an important military capability.” Yet nowhere had anyone given much thought to figuring out what “a significant number” or “an important military capability” might mean. Certainly much would depend, in assessing these matters, on how the weapons were used; but to evade the issue of numbers was to miss the whole point, for the number available would in large part govern the way in which they could be used.
“What we need to know,” wrote Brodie, “is: ‘How many bombs will do what?’” And, significantly, “the ‘what’ must be reckoned in overall strategic results rather than merely acres destroyed.” Under the new political and technical circumstances, indiscriminate bombing would not be enough.
Brodie had only the faintest glimmerings of an answer to all these questions, but he figured the best way to focus on the problem would be to undertake a comprehensive study of the effects of strategic bombing in World War II and, from that, produce an analysis that might have relevance for the latest phase of the new atomic age. Sometime in 1949, Brodie decided to write a book on the subject and to call it Strategy of Air Power.
Brodie carefully studied the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, a multivolume report on the effects of the bombing on the German and Japanese economies, war machines and civilian morale, the product of a massive research effort undertaken just after the war by a group of economists, among them John Kenneth Galbraith, George Ball, Paul Nitze, Burton Klein and Henry Alexander. Brodie also held lengthy conversations with General Orvil Anderson, commander of the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, and Carl Kaysen, a young economist who during the war had helped pick European bombing targets while working in a London-based unit of the OSS known as the Economic Objectives Unit.
An intense controversy had already surrounded the strategic bombing campaign, with detractors and advocates mustering various statistics from the enormous body of available data to prove that the bombing had either been decisive or a miserable failure. One thing was clear, however: the bombing, especially of Germany, had not been nearly so crucial as proponents of “air power” had predicted before the war. In the 1920s and 1930s, air corps training schools in Britain and the United States had become enthralled by the theories of Italian Brigadier General Giulio Douhet and American General Billy Mitchell, visionaries who saw air power as the decisive vehicle of future wars, superseding and rendering marginal or superfluous the clashes of armies on the ground, flying above and beyond those brutal skirmishes to strike directly at the heart of the enemy’s industrial strength and its civilian morale, without which national leaders could no longer wage war.
At the start of the war, the British Royal Air Force went after the “vital nerve centers” of the German economy, but that meant flying in daylight in order to see the targets. As a result, German fighter pilots and antiaircraft gunners could see clearly the British bombers and shoot them out of the sky. Attrition was terrible. The RAF started flying at night, but could barely find the right city, much less individual factories. So they made a virtue of necessity and proclaimed—along Douhet’s lines—that the main target of attack was the “morale” of the German people, that the massive bombing of their towns, houses and workplaces would accomplish that goal. Nearly one-fifth of German houses were destroyed or heavily damaged, 300,000 civilians were killed and 780,000 wounded; but this “area bombing” had virtually no effect on the German war effort.
The U.S. Army Air Forces stuck with a doctrine of “precision bombing” against particular targets, but met with only slightly better success. One problem was that the pilots could not drop bombs very accurately, owing to bad weather, industrial haze, deliberate smoke screens, antiaircraft barrage, simple incompetence, the occasional unreliability of weapons or some combination of these factors. Only 20 percent of bombs aimed at precision targets fell within the “target area,” that is, within 1,000 feet of the target.
Moreover, the German economy had a tremendous capacity for expansion. Hitler went into the war with great optimism, feeling it unnecessary to gear up for an all-out war economy and sacrifice the production even of such luxury items as lace. As a result, the German industrial economy was extremely resilient. Damage could readily be repaired, losses replaced, new factories dispersed. Bombers went directly after the German aircraft-frame industry, tank and truck plants, and the various industries that supported these war supplies—steel, oil, rubber, ball-bearing plants and the like. Nevertheless, in 1944, the peak year of the Allied bombing effort, production of all German military hardware exceeded—in some instances, far exceeded—the output of previous war years when the bombing was not so intense.
Brodie saw that bombing, at least toward the very end of the war, did knock out two vital German industries—liquid fuel and chemicals—as well as the transportation services. But he also saw that those results came too late to matter much. The Russian Army had begun its counterattack from the east, and the other Allied forces had broken out west of Saint-Lô. By the time the bombing really began to be felt, “the Battle of the Bulge was a thing of the past and the Allied armies were well into Germany.” In short, strategic bombing played its greatest role not as some cosmically independent force from above, but as a highly useful adjunct to the war primarily being fought—as all other wars of the past had been—below on the ground.