The renowned physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson spent the war years in the RAF’s Bomber Command, as recounted in his 1979 memoir, Disturbing the Universe. He describes his frustrations with military bureaucracy in the drawn-out struggle to get them to build bombers with larger escape hatches. These were absolutely critical to crews trying to get out of their planes after being hit. Unfortunately, “The bigger hatch became standard only when the war was almost over and the crews who might have been saved by it were mostly dead.”
But he holds the greatest contempt for the senior officers’ reliance on the doctrine of strategic bombing, which he calls “the root of the evil” at Bomber Command. This doctrine “declared that the only way to win wars or to prevent wars was to rain down death and destruction upon enemy countries from the sky.” This was particularly appealing since it avoided a repetition of the frightful trench warfare of the prior war. But in the case of World War II, “strategic bombing neither deterred the war nor won it.”
“Bomber Command was an early example of the new evil that science and technology have added to the old evils of soldering. Technology has made evil anonymous…Evil is organized bureaucratically so that no individual is responsible for what happens”
“Neither the boy in the Lancaster aiming his bombs…nor the operations officer shuffling papers at squadron headquarters, nor I sitting in my little office calculating probabilities, had any feeling of responsibility. None of us saw the people we killed. None of us particularly cared.”
Dyson also recounts his evolution as he retreats step by step from one moral position to another, starting as a follower of Ghandi, to recognizing the need to fight Hitler but remaining opposed to bombing, to accepting bombing was necessary but not bombing cities indiscriminately, to accepting even this was necessary to end the war.
In the end, he recognized that the bombing wasn’t really helping to win the war. But he saw what he had lost in the process. “I had surrendered one moral principal after another, and in the end it was all for nothing.”