Recent incidents of civilian casualties resulting from air strikes in Syria, Yemen, and Afghanistan have brought the spotlight back onto air power strategy and targeting in times of conflict. In this cross-post from ASPI’s blog The Strategist, Andrew Davies reminds the reader that, although these incidents may rightly be condemned, history provides a cautionary tale of how the ethics of liberal democracies can give way to perceived strategic requirements when they perceive that there ‘back is to the wall’.
There’s been a slew of criticism recently of Russian and Saudi bombing of civilian areas during Middle East conflicts. And there’s evidence that the Russian bombing campaign in particular isn’t going out of its way to avoid destruction of civilian targets, with a predictable loss of life. If we can take Russian supplied videos of bombing missions over Syria at face value, the delivery of a stick of unguided ‘gravity bombs’ is a long way from precision targeting of targets identified by intelligence as terrorist related.
In contrast, it hasn’t been unusual for missions flown by the US and its allies to return with unreleased precision weapons because targets couldn’t be reliably identified. Even with recent more permissive rules of engagement, weapons release is authorised only against IS or its support elements.
That’s not to say that western air strikes haven’t also hit civilian targets in both Iraq/Syria and Afghanistan, killing non-combatants in the process. And in at least one incident, when a Doctors without Borders hospital in Kunduz was attacked by a USAF gunship, the litany of errors involved in the coordination of the attack doesn’t inspire confidence in the supporting decision making processes.
That’s not to draw a moral equivalence between the Russian and coalition activities. Hitting the wrong target with precision weaponry, however tragic the outcome, is clearly less reckless and less dismissive of the established norms of warfare than delivering unguided weaponry into civilian areas. But the level of restraint shown by western forces in recent conflicts hasn’t always been the case. And it’s salutary to ponder the approach taken in the strategic bombing offensive during WW2, if only to remind ourselves how even a principled society can shift from the higher moral ground.
I was taken down this line of thought by a remark made to me by an aviation writer friend recently, that the only bomber in production in Britain by 1944 should have been the De Havilland Mosquito. We’d been talking about the cost effectiveness of weapons delivery at the time, and he pointed out that the twin-engined Mosquito could deliver a significant tonnage of bombs more accurately and with fewer losses per ton of bombs delivered than the larger (and thus more resource intensive) four-engined Lancasters and Halifaxes that formed the bulk of the RAF’s Bomber Command. As well, the Mosquito had a crew of two, versus seven in the ‘heavies’.
He was right, as the RAF’s own data (in a 1944 paper Note on the employment of the Mosquito aircraft in the strategic bomber offensive, reprinted in this book) shows:
‘Weight for weight, the small losses at present being incurred by Mosquito bombers give them an outstanding advantage over the heavy bomber. Mosquitoes dropped 203 tons of bombs per aircraft missing… the figure for the heavy bomber was 70 tons. [In terms of] aircrew missing per tons dropped [the advantage is ten to one]’.
The Mosquito also had superior availability due to lower maintenance requirements and could fly twice as many sorties per month per aircraft. They were also capable of higher precision than the heavy bombers—which is why Mosquitoes were often used as ‘pathfinders’, laying flares to guide the other aircraft to the target.
![The precision achieved by the Mosquito made it ideally suited for challenging targets such as Ameins Prison, the POW Camp targeted during Operation Jericho. This image, taken from an accompanying reconnaissance aircraft, shows the strike Mosquito with bomb bays upon. [Image Credit: Imperial War Museum]](http://centralblue.williamsfoundation.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Operation_Jericho_-_Amiens_Jail_During_Raid_1.jpg)
The relative precision achieved by the Mosquito made it ideally suited for challenging targets such as Amiens Prison, the POW Camp targeted during Operation Jericho. This image, taken from an accompanying reconnaissance aircraft (also a Mosquito), shows the strike Mosquito with bomb bays open. [Image Credit: Imperial War Museum]
‘The Mosquito is not at present capable of carrying a useful load of incendiary bombs. Up to 70% of the damage in area attacks is caused by fire and the attack of cities by [high explosives] alone would normally be unprofitable.’
In other words, the Mosquito was less useful when the aim was to raze a city to the ground, killing and displacing its civilian population, rather than directly attacking military targets and industrial plants producing weapons. Britain started WW2 believing that bombing civilians was wrong. But in the first years of the war British bombers struggled to find German cities, let alone conduct strikes against industrial areas within them. So the strategic bombing campaign evolved into a campaign to level German cities, destroying industrial capacity in the process and, by killing a great many people, to break the will of the German people to resist. While there was a big effect on industrial output, civilians paid a high price. The aptly named 1943 Operation Gomorrah created a firestorm that killed 40,000 people in Hamburg, and as late as February 1945 another firestorm killed 30,000 people in Dresden.
Physicist Freeman Dyson, who worked for Bomber Command in operations analysis, describes how far the British moral compass had swung (video interview here):
‘The Germans had good air raid shelters and warning systems and did what they were told. As a result, only a few thousand people were killed in a typical major attack. But when there was a firestorm, people were asphyxiated or roasted inside their shelters, and the number killed was more than 10 times greater. Every time Bomber Command attacked a city, we were trying to raise a firestorm…’
So in opting against a Mosquito-based force, Bomber Command effectively opted for the widespread destruction of civilian areas over a more focused approach of attacking war-supporting industrial targets, even when the technical means to do so had emerged.
That all happened in a time of total war against an iniquitous enemy, and while we might think we’re better than that now (and I think we’re right to criticise the Russian approach in Syria), we don’t know what might happen in a ‘backs to the wall’ war. The lessons of history tell us that we need to be on guard, because it’s possible to slip into a regime where the proscriptions against abhorrent behaviour give way.
Andrew Davies is senior analyst for defence capability and director of research at ASPI. This post first appeared on APSI’s blog The Strategist on 14 Oct 16
A very interesting read thanks Andrew. I’d like to offer a few comments, more by way of discussion than any claim to provide definitive answers – this is a topic worthy of a thesis.
The Mosquito and the Lancaster (taking the latter as my representative heavy bomber) were two of the great combat aircraft of World War II, but they were very different in the missions they were allocated, and I’m not sure a comparison can be taken too far. Let me start with two critical, related issues: survivability, and mission profile.
It’s a fact that Mosquito crews had a better chance of surviving a tour than their heavy bomber counterparts. As far as bombing missions were concerned this can be attributed in part to the Mosquito’s ability to operate at high altitude and very low altitude, both of which were likely to be less dangerous than the heavy bomber’s medium-level attack altitude (albeit still dangerous). The Mosquito’s high speed and manoeuvrability made it particularly well-suited to very low-level operations, which facilitated greater bombing accuracy and thus distorts comparisons. Both profiles tended to involve relatively small numbers of aircraft.
Heavy bombers, in contrast, generally attacked from medium altitudes of 15,000 to 25,000 feet, in streams of hundreds of aircraft, in order to achieve the concentration of force – that is, the weight of bombs in a given period – best suited to the “de-housing” (anti-city, anti-civilian) strategy against strongly defended targets. There’s no reason to believe that Mosquito crews would have had a better survival rate had they had to fly the same profile.
Moreover, a Lancaster typically could carry a load of around 14,000 lbs of high explosives and incendiaries, whereas a Mosquito was limited to around 4000 lbs. To state the obvious, that means three times as many Mosquitoes would have been needed to achieve the same concentration of force as the heavies.
And in that mission profile, the Mosquito’s accuracy would not have been superior to the heavy bombers. Both aircraft types used visual bomb sights and/or primitive radars which could not properly compensate for wind variations between the bomb release height and the target.
It’s also the case that, as the allies gained air supremacy, Lancaster crews increasingly were used with some success on “precision” raids against targets such as viaducts, tunnels, canals, and V-rockets, dropping single bombs of 12,000, 14,000 and 22,000 lbs weight, something far beyond the Mosquito’s capability.
Regarding training requirements, plainly an aircraft with seven crew members is going to consume more resources than one with only two. It should be noted, though, that the Lancaster and the Mosquito both had only one pilot, the most important and resource-intensive aircrew member to recruit and to train, so any cost/losses/etc comparison for crew numbers is not linear.
A similar point can be made in relation to aircraft manufacture. Once a production line is up and running, it’s not a simple matter to switch workers, materials, jigs, tools, and so on, from one aircraft type to another, noting also in this instance that the Mosquito was constructed mainly from wood and the Lancaster from metal.
I should offer a final observation, on the “de-housing” strategy. The three key principles governing the legal use of force in war are military necessity, proportionality, and distinction (between combatants and civilians). World War II was a war of national survival against a profoundly evil regime that, among other things, was conducting genocide. At what stage do civilians supporting that regime either directly (by their involvement in arms production, providing transport and administrative services, growing food for armies, paying taxes, and so on) or indirectly (by acquiescing to the regime) become culpable? That’s not a judgment or an answer, it’s a question.
Some interesting observations which could be taken further, although I think Alan has summed up well most of the pertinent differences between RAF Mosquito and Lancaster operations. I would only add, as a general point, most of the RAF Mosquito squadrons were manned by far more experienced aviators than those crewing the Lancaster squadrons.
Although there were exceptions, such as the Dams Raid, the sinking of the Tirpitz and the ‘Tall Boy’ raids, the bulk of the Lancaster squadrons were manned by ‘first tourists’ from the Empire Air Training Scheme. Their tour was 30 missions and their survival odds were not good, about one chance in four especially as the Luftwaffe night fighter force gained proficiency. On the other hand, the Mosquito and the nature of its operations, such as ‘Pathfinder’ operations and precision low level raids, demanded more experienced crews. In short a much higher percentage of Mosquito squadrons could be considered as ‘elite’ squadrons manned by very experienced combat crews.
I think also it is relevant to add the Mosquito’s high speed at altitude made it a very difficult target for the Luftwaffe night fighters – slower radar equipped Junkers Ju 88 and Messerschmitt Bf 110 fighters – to intercept; and at night, it was these night fighters that caused such carnage among the RAF ‘heavies’. The Mosquito was also made mostly from wood and its radar signature, like the later jet Vampire, would be much less than the four-engine Lancaster.
So was the Mosquito one of the first ‘industrial age’ stealth aircraft?