Mass bombardment should've been abandoned a long ago as a war strategy

During World War II, Sir Maurice Hanley, secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence (CID), feared a widespread psychological breakdown in British cities in case of German bombings. Thousands of troops were to be drafted to control an expected exodus from London and to prevent panic at railway stations. Some reports suggested that London’s population will “regress to a state of infantile dependency" and will refuse to leave the safety of underground bomb shelters. Expecting an epidemic of psychiatric casualties, specialist hospitals termed ‘Neurosis Centres’ were opened on the outskirts of London.

On 7 September 1940, Hitler started his nation’s ruthless bombing of London to break the British will to fight. Over the next few months, German bomber aircraft dropped more than 80,000 bombs on London. A million buildings were destroyed. More than 40,000 people lost their lives. Entire neighbourhoods were destroyed. In retaliation, Churchill ordered the bombing of German cities. When it finally ended, German towns had ten times more casualties. Most of urban Germany was a heap of smouldering rubble. How did ordinary folks react to the destruction all around them?

Frederick Lindermann, scientific adviser to Churchill, send a team of psychiatrists to Birmingham and Hull, two cities that had taken the heaviest toll during the German blitz. The team interviewed hundreds of people affected by the bombings. The conclusion of the team was printed on the title page of their report: “ There is no evidence of breakdown of morale." After the war, a team of economists studied the effects of bombing on German cities. After their investigation, the team concluded that civilian bombings were a fiasco. In fact, they appeared to have strengthened Germany’s war-time economy, thereby prolonging the war. One American economist confessed, “We were encountering one of the greatest, perhaps the greatest miscalculation of the war."

Most interestingly, the behaviour of survivors was the same in German cities as in London. After bombing raids, people would help each other out, extinguish fires and rescue victims from the rubble. So, bombings actually helped build stronger bonds among locals. There were shopkeepers who posted signs in front of their wrecked shopfronts that said “More Open Than Usual." But military planners of the time failed to understand these vagaries of human behaviour.

Thanks to brain plasticity, we humans are adept at making behavioural and emotional adjustments to what is happening in our environment. Whether it is a foul smell or loud noises around us, our brains adjust to those stimuli very quickly. This adaptation process of the brain affects how humans perceive risks too. The feeling of risk that we associate with a dangerous task will be high when we do that task for the first time. But as we indulge in that task more often, the sense of risk attached to that task reduces. This explains why it is often experienced workers who meet with accidents at the workplace. It is because of this inherent adaptation ability of the brain that residents of a city under continual bomb attacks get inured and ‘numb’ to bombardment.

During World War II, Hitler, Churchill and the military establishment did not want to accept this reality about human behaviour. Latter-day bomb-mongers too did not want to accept this truth. In Vietnam, US forces dropped about three times as many bombs as they dropped in all of World War II. This time, the failure of the bombs to make any impact on the local population was even more stark. Despite its failure to make much of an impact on the local population, why do politicians continue to favour war strategies of bombing?

For politicians, often all that matters is winning the next election. Bombings and the destruction caused in enemy territory can be used as highly visible showpieces of their ‘decisive’ leadership style. As it happens, such ‘decisive actions’ sometimes do help their chances of electoral victory. The war in Iraq helped George W. Bush win a second term, while the war in Afghanistan helped Barrack Obama win a second term.

The real impact of these bombings on ordinary citizens was best captured by the report of Wing Commander Kelly , the air attache in Shanghai when Nanking was attacked by Japanese forces during World War II. He reported that “Bombings were materially incapable of affecting the will to resist or of producing panic. Even when continued for weeks. It merely produces a strong feeling of hatred, which indirectly strengthens the defences." This feeling of hatred aroused in victims of bombings mentioned in that report is often taken advantage of by opportunistic extremist leaders to mould future extremists. The humiliation imposed on Germany by victors of World War I after it had ended (think Versailles) became a fertile ground for Adolf Hitler to ignite fires that led to World War II.

Those involved in the Gaza conflict should remember a truth from history: The impact of bombs on human lives is not as straightforward as it looks.