Command and Control

attacked the Spanish city of Guernica, killing a few hundred civilians: The Basque government claimed that almost one third of the city’s five thousand inhabitants were killed by the attack. The actual number was mostly likely two to three hundred. But most of Guernica’s buildings were destroyed, and the aim of the attack was to terrorize civilians. See Jörg Diehl, “Hitler’s Destruction of Guernica: Practicing Blietzkrieg in Basque Country,” Der Spiegel, April 26, 2007.

bombed and invaded… Nanking… killing many thousands: More than seventy-five years later, the number of people killed in Nanking remains a controversial subject. Chinese scholars now assert that between three and four hundred thousand civilians were massacred while Japanese nationalists claim that those estimates are absurd and that no war crimes were committed. For a fine, aptly titled introduction to the controversy, see Bob Todashi Wakabayashi, “The Messiness of Historical Reality,” in Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, ed., The Nanking Atrocity: Complicating the Picture (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), pp. 3–28.

“The ruthless bombing from the air”: Quoted in Hulen, “Roosevelt in Plea.”

“The immediate aim is, therefore, twofold”: Quoted in Richard R. Muller, “The Orgins of MAD: A Short History of City-Busting,” in Henry D. Sokolski, ed., Getting MAD: Nuclear Mutual Assured Destruction, Its Origins and Practice (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, 2004), p. 34.

The first “firestorm”: The historian Jörg Friedrich has written a masterful account of the British effort to destroy Germany with fire. His chapters on the weaponry and the strategies used to kill civilians are especially haunting. For the destruction of Hamburg and the desire to create firestorms, see Jorg Friedrich, The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940–1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), pp. 90–100; and another fine, unsettling book — Keith Lowe, Inferno: The Fiery Destruction of Hamburg (New York: Scribner, 2007).

killed about forty thousand: Cited in Lowe, Inferno, p. 276.

attack on Dresden, where perhaps twenty thousand civilians died: Long a source of debate, estimates of the death toll in Dresden have ranged from about thirty-five thousand to about half a million. In 2008 a panel of historians concluded the actual number was between eighteen and twenty-five thousand. Cited in Kate Connolly, “International Panel Rethinks Death Toll from Dresden Raids,” Guardian (London), October 3, 2008.

“de-housing”: Quoted in Sokolski, Getting MAD, p. 34.

daytime “precision” bombing: The American bombing strategy, inspired by the futility of trench warfare during the First World War, sought to avoid unnecessary casualties and to destroy only military targets — a goal more easily achieved in theory than in reality. For the high-minded motives behind the strategy, see Mark Clodfelter, Beneficial Bombing: The Progressive Foundations of American Air Power,1917–1945 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), pp. 1–66.

the Norden bombsight: For a fascinating account of this “technological wonder,” a top secret invention that cost a fortune and never fulfilled the lofty aims of its inventor, see Stephen L. McFarland, America’s Pursuit of Precision Bombing, 1910–1945 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995).

forced as many as two hundred thousand Korean women: The number of Korean women used as sex slaves by the Japanese will never be precisely known. Like the number of Chinese civilians killed in Nanking, it has long been a source of controversy, with Japanese nationalists claiming the actual figure was low. Two hundred thousand is a widely used estimate. For a fine discussion of the issue, see You-me Park, “Compensation to Fit the Crime: Conceptualizing a Just Paradigm of Reparation for Korean ‘Comfort Women,’” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, Vol. 30, No. 2, 2010, pp. 204–13. The estimate is cited on page 206.