Revisiting 'Fire and Fury'

In 1940, though his country was reeling from the Battle of Britain, Churchill resisted demands to carpetbomb Nazi Germany. "[E]ven if all the towns in Germany were rendered uninhabitable, it does not follow that the military control would be weakened," he wrote to Royal Air Force Chief of Air Staff Charles Portal. But Churchill's attitude shifted as the war dragged on. He and senior military leaders, such as bombing campaign head Arthur Harris, argued often over the relative virtues of "area bombing," designed to flatten cities, and "precision bombing," which focused on eliminating Germany's oil and transport resources.

Harris lobbied hard for area bombing; others, including the Americans who had joined the battle by 1942, resisted. Regardless, as Hansen explains, precision bombing was often a misnomer. Nascent radar technology and poor weather often resulted in less-than-pinpoint accuracy, a problem that ultimately helped halt any effort to free Auschwitz by air. "Why, the idea!" President Franklin Roosevelt reportedly said. "They'll say we bombed these people."

Harris possessed few such reservations when it came to German cities, and Hansen isn't shy about asserting that Harris had plenty of blood on his hands -- both Allied and German. Hansen's research shows that area bombing did little to stop the Nazis, while attacks on oil fields, had they been more consistent, would have hastened the end of the German war machine and spared the lives of thousands of Allies killed in battle. Nazi minister of war production Albert Speer would relate Nazi fears of precision raids after the war ended, but Allied leaders had plenty of evidence regarding the futility of area bombing well before 1945, when the Allies destroyed Dresden. "Area bombing not only failed to win the war, but it probably prolonged it," Hansen writes.

Of course, "Fire and Fury" won't be the final word on that point. But Hansen builds a compelling case, and his descriptions of the devastation of German cities, drawn from interviews with survivors of the attacks, offer a visceral counterweight to the chilly machinations of the campaign leaders. His grisly imagery of fires and corpses makes clear that, too often, attempts at precision were often heartbreakingly imprecise.

Mark Athitakis, a book reviewer based in Washington, D.C., blogs at markathitakis.com.