In a series of lectures given in Zurich, on the subject of how or why German literature did not deal adequately with the topic of allied bombings of cities; W.G. Sebald while pointing out the strategic irrationality of these bombings inserted few lines on the extent to which they were inevitable. A strategy targeting mainly civilian populations was opted for by Churchill, despite some opposition and lack of prerequisites in 1941. Moreover it was sustained instead of selective attacks on targets such as factories making ball-bearings, oil and fuel installations, railway junctions and the main transport arteries which would soon have, in the words of Albert Speer paralyzed the entire system of production. By spring of 1944 Sebald states, the critics had pointed out that the morale of the population was unbroken while industrial production was “impaired only marginally”.
Why then this strategy? The determinism one can trace in Sebald’s account has two phases. It is presented as the irreversible momentum of production, for a strategy preferred to alternatives. Phase one being the choice (decision-making bias) and phase two, the impossibility of a revision (cumulative causation in a system).
In reference to the historian A.J.P Taylor, Sebald gives a picture of the latter phase as:
“…an enterprise of the material and organizational dimensions of the bombing offensive, which …swallowed one third of the entire British production for war material, had such a momentum of its own that short-term corrections in course and restrictions were more or less ruled out, especially when, after three years of intensive expansion of factories and production plants, that enterprise had reached the peak of its development. Once the material was manufactured, simply letting the aircraft and their valuable freight stand idle on the airfields of eastern England ran counter to any healthy economic instinct”
Yet, Sir Arthur Harris commander-in-chief of Bomber Command was not sacked despite his “inflexible support” for a strategy that was not working. A peculiar hold on Churchill is mentioned and the following as to why his position was unassailable.
“His plan for successive devastating strikes, which he followed uncompromisingly to the end, was overwhelmingly simple in its logic, and by comparison any real strategic alternatives such as disabling the fuel supply were bound to look like mere diversionary tactics the war in the air was pure and undisguised.”
Here Daniel Kahneman’s work on biases in situations of conflict while not a study of crude options (with a simple logic) versus more decisive complicated strategies, seems to provide indirect support for the tone of inevitability in Sebald’s account. The following talk given in the Center for Study of Rationality titled “"Biased Biases: Do Cognitive Biases Give an Advantage to Hawks over Doves” lists predictable errors that favor one category of competing counsel over another. That is, if such a division of alternatives into two broad categories were possible. Outside the scope of situations tested and detailed by Kahneman his use of labels such as “hawks” and “doves” broadens the signification. Hence abuse of the sort indulged in this piece.
The alternatives documented by Sebald may then be considered as instances of these categories, in relative terms not as types but as degrees. One of which can be labeled more hawkish as it was “in perfect sympathy with the innermost principle of every war, which is to aim for as wholesale an annihilation of the enemy with his dwellings, his history, and his natural environment as can be possibly achieved”
Kahneman’s conclusion is not that hawkish advisors are necessarily wrong only that they are likely to be more persuasive than they deserve to be. Adding to biases the accumulated potential of all the capital, labor and intelligence which will then go into a certain plan, it becomes easy to agree with Alexander Kluge’s idea which Sebald quotes:
“…systematic destruction arising from the development of the means and modes of industrial production hardly seems to justify the principal of hope”.
In the lectures an interview is referred to with; Brigadier Fredrick L. Anderson of U.S. Eight Army Air Force, where he is asked the question “weather hoisting a white flag made from six sheets on the tower of St. Martin’s in good time might have prevented the bombing of the city”. In response “he points out that the bombs they had brought were, after all, “expensive items”. “in practice they couldn’t have been dropped over mountains or open country after so much labor had gone into making them at home”
The psychological determinism which may affect the choice of tactics at an earlier stage in the conflict is then overtaken by the techno-economic determinism of the war industry. The biases in turn at later stages can affect the interpretation of the outcome. The tendency therefore is not to consider revisions in tactics and onwards.
When a system’s mechanism is remotely dialectical it’s difficult to resist the temptation not to import more obfuscation. Thankfully Sebald does the kind job of telling us that Alexander Kluge captioned a photograph of a ruined city in one of his works with the following quotation from Marx.
“We see how the history of industry and the objective existence of industry have become the open book of human consciousness, human psychology perceived in sensory terms …”
This all is too easy and deliberate, decision making histories can never be reduced to an account of competing alternatives. But bias plus the momentum of production leave little elbow room to suggest "a natural history of destruction" which is really the summary of technical, organizational and political prerequisites for its unfolding.
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