Sergei Loznitsa’s new documentary asks if Allied bombing in World War II deserves another thought
Gustav Jönsson
More than 300,000 German civilians were killed by Allied strategic bombing in World War II. It was thought that it would break the German economy, but when U.S. economists surveyed its material consequences, they found, to their surprise, that it had impeded German industry only very little. Strategic bombing was, in the words of J.K. Galbraith, “perhaps the greatest miscalculation of the war.” The fact that little was gained by it should compound our horror, though, in the scope of the war and the emotions at play, it rarely does.
Almost the only words spoken in Sergei Loznitsa’s documentary about this bombing of civilians, The Natural History of Destruction, are these: Over archival footage of the Combined Bomber Offensive, Loznitsa plays a recording of Winston Churchill telling the Germans that if they don’t want to be killed by the Royal Air Force, they should move into the fields. Then, Arthur Harris, head of Bomber Command, tells the camera that the war can be won by bombing on its own. Next, there’s the voice of Joseph Goebbels vowing to exact “counterterror” while the screen shows us the pulverized streets of some unnamed German town.
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I recently went to a screening of The Natural History of Destruction in Bloomsbury. During the Q&A session, Loznitsa claimed his movie raises the question of whether the bombing of civilians is ever justifiable. It raises the question all right, but it can’t make its case without enumerating some basic premises, which requires words. Staring at pictures of burnt corpses gets us nowhere. It reminds us that war is a tragedy, but the essence of tragedy is the clash of rights — in this case, the rights of German civilians versus the moral imperative to liberate Europe. The Natural History of Destruction doesn’t even begin to resolve that conflict. And I can’t help feeling that there is something intellectually vacuous in Loznitsa’s equation of silence with subtlety. For sure, language can close both minds and hearts, but it can just as well open them, while silence can be either subtle or simplistic.
This documentary has little in common with ordinary World War II documentaries: There’s no brisk narration of battles or politics and no map of occupied Europe colored in ominous red. Instead, we’re shown footage of men constructing engines, machines shaping hulls, and women inspecting guns on the factory line. The tension builds slowly until the bombers set out on their raids, releasing their payloads over rows of tenements. It reaches its eerie peak in the closing shots of bombed-out cityscapes while string instruments play a danse macabre.
W.G. Sebald, in the essay collection that gives Loznitsa’s movie its name, criticized German postwar writers for not treating the bombing of their cities with requisite moral seriousness. When I spoke to Loznitsa, he told me that his work has little in common with Sebald’s, but I suspect that his sparse yet surreal style is meant to produce that very gravitas. Explanatory narration, he said, tells the viewer what to believe — it closes our minds. He could have added that it can close our hearts, too. Death, once properly labeled, becomes a mere statistic that can be put out of mind. It’s this, I think, Loznitsa seeks to resist.
Of course, it is possible to condemn something merely by showing images of it. Loznitsa’s previous movie State Funeral consists entirely of successive propaganda shots of Stalin’s funeral. It is silent throughout except for the occasional, leaden speech by party officials. There is something to be said for Loznitsa’s taciturn shots: the grotesque personality cult, the masochistic praise, and the incessant hagiography — it indicts itself. Though I think Loznitsa rather spoils the effect by telling viewers, before the credits roll, that Stalin was a mass murderer, as if anyone who had sat through the whole thing could doubt it, or as if that would’ve changed the mind of a Stalinist.
But that style fails The Natural History of Destruction. Unless one takes the view that killing civilians is never legitimate, the issue is really whether it was worth the cost: If it was required to win the war, few would say it was not. The whole controversy thus hinges on whether Bomber Command helped the Soviet Union break the Wehrmacht.
But The Natural History of Destruction, preoccupied entirely by the bombing of Germany and Britain, is suspended in a historical vacuum. There is no mention of the war’s most important theater, the Eastern Front, where tens of thousands of Soviet civilians were killed by the Luftwaffe. Sebald, in fact, makes a point of saying that it is myopic to focus solely on the German victims, for one can only consider the morality of Western area bombing by reference to the Eastern Front.
As the Soviet Union fought Nazi Germany in the east, Stalin urged the Allies to open up a so-called Second Front in the west. In August 1942, Churchill traveled to Moscow, telling Stalin the liberation of France had to be postponed. Stalin, the minutes record, grew restless until Churchill promised that British and American bombers would incinerate German towns.
The strongest case for bombing civilians rested on how it distorted German military strategy. The war was won in the east, and Allied bombing facilitated it: Crucial equipment, including fighters and anti-aircraft guns, were pulled from the east to protect the Reich; the production of front-line bombers had to be reduced markedly; nearly 900,000 people were required to staff the German anti-aircraft service, and it consumed one-fifth of all ammunition and half the production of the electronics industry.
Yet Germany would’ve had to fight for air supremacy even if there had been no area bombing. German leaders, when they were interrogated, said unanimously they had been concerned by raids on transport links and oil reserves, not residential sites. Had the Allies developed long-range fighters instead of heavy bombers, they could have struck those very targets. In fact, once ground troops landed in France, the heavy bombers proved counterproductive, holding up the advance by pulverizing streets. And it was in these closing moments of the war, when terror bombing had no rationale whatsoever, that most civilians were killed. The clinching, tragic irony is that these objections were raised at the time by the other military branches, whose leaders believed bombers should support ground troops, prompting Harris to intensify area bombing, hoping in vain that it’d win the war.
Did Goebbels lie when he spoke of counterterror? It is often said that since the Germans started terror bombing, they couldn’t complain once they were subjected to it. Thomas Mann gave voice to that view on U.S. radio broadcasts. And after British raids on Cologne and Essen, George Orwell said the following on the BBC: “In 1940, when the Germans were bombing Britain, they did not expect retaliation on a very heavy scale, and therefore were not afraid to boast in their propaganda about the slaughter of civilians which they were bringing about and the terror which their raids aroused.” He prefaced this by reassuring his listeners that British bombing was “not delivered against the civilian population.” But of course, it was, and even during the Blitz, the Germans hadn’t resorted to terror bombing.
Later, Orwell made a better case in his Tribune column. He pointed out, in contrast to the British propaganda line of his BBC speech, that it was British policy to kill civilians. “Why,” he asked, “is it worse to kill civilians than soldiers?” After all, he argued, “Every time a German submarine goes to the bottom, about fifty young men of fine physique and good nerves are suffocated. Yet people who would hold up their hands at the very words ‘civilian bombing’ will repeat with satisfaction such phrases as ‘We are winning the Battle of the Atlantic.’”
He was right, of course, that the life of a soldier is worth as much as the life of a civilian. But he simply took for granted that killing civilians hastened victory over the enemy. Defeating the Nazis meant crushing the German military, not the Germans themselves. Thus the immorality of terror bombing was grounded not in the special sanctity of civilian life but in its inefficacy. Had it worked, it would’ve been no less bad than bombing the Wehrmacht. As Mann puts it in Doktor Faustus, there’s “something we fear more than German defeat, and that is German victory.” But the thinking that goes along with warmaking is harder to capture in a documentary than the destruction — and hard to imagine at peace.
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Gustav Jönsson is a Swedish freelance writer based in London.