peter robinson
to take aim. Empson’s method is to declare the fact in flatly prosaic rhymes and
thenpass on. It is as if the occasion cannot bear the weight of its own desperate
meaninglessness.^14
We might further distinguish between the hapless contributions of blunderers to
the totalizing of warfare and the decided policy of bombing enemy towns, as in the
January 1945 decision to switch from the high-altitude precision bombing of Japan
to night-time area bombing with incendiaries and anti-personnel weapons. In the
1937 raid on Guernica there was no reconnaissance flight to identify targets, and
the heavy bomb loads including incendiaries ruled out even attempted precision
targeting. Here the profession of arms, and the conscription of civilians into the
armed forces, further complicate the picture.The price paid by the French civilians
of Normandy in the bombardments prior to the landings on 6 June 1944 that
would liberate their graves were also practical measures to reduce casualties among
the invading armies.^15 One justification of the use of the atomic bombs on 6 and 9
August 1945 was to forestall the losses to the invading forces predicted on the basis
of the battle for Okinawa. The history of warfare in the last century shows a decided
tendency to protect military personnel at the tacit expense of civilians. Arthur
‘Bomber’ Harris’s campaign against the German cities took place at night so as to
reduce losses among RAF aircrews. They were to aim their bombs at areas which
pathfinder flares had marked out also by being dropped in darkness. The American
8th Airforce flew daylight raids against specified targets of military significance
for high-altitude precision bombing. Before the development of long-range fighter
escorts, they suffered heavy losses. There appear, as a consequence, to be many
more poems about the American flyers.
In a total war where distinctions between combatants and non-combatants are
set aside, the ability to stand off the target so as to preserve the safety of your own
side produces the shift from the soldier as the focus of war, and its pity, to the
civilians. The logical development of the German losses sustained in the Battle of
Britain was the V1 flying bomb and the V2 rocket. In two of the most notorious
sorties of the mid-century—those againstGuernica and Hiroshima—there was
no loss of life among aircrews. Theodor Adorno’s analysis of the disappearance of
‘strategy’ with the methods of the blitzkrieg coincides with the development of the
(^14) For an emotive attempt to evoke significantly the bombing of civilians by the Japanese, see
W. H. Auden, ‘In Time of War’, sonnets XIV and XV, inThe English Auden: Poems, Essays, and
Dramatic Writings 1927–1939, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber, 1977), 256–7. Auden was a
major in the US Army, serving with the MoraleDivision of the Strategic Bombing Survey in Germany
during 1945. ‘We asked them if they minded being bombed. We went to a city which lay in ruins and
asked if it had been hit,’ he recalled in 1963. See Humphrey Carpenter,W. H. Auden: A Biography
(London: Allen & Unwin, 1981), 335.
(^15) ‘Between 15,000 and 20,000 French civilians were killed, mainly as a result of Allied bombing.’
See
at 10,000, of which 2,500 were killed.