(air raid siren wails)
(suspenseful music)
(planes hum overhead)
This is the story of a world
crumbling beneath bombs.
A world where the sky became threatening.
Where terror descended upon cities.
On the ground, death struck randomly,
transforming men into timid animals.
In the sky, a feeling of omnipotence.
World War II saw the birth of a hideous idea.
From the insane notion that by bombing civilian populations,
one could gain victory more quickly.
Against a backdrop of total war, hatred and excess,
(explosion booms)
came an extraordinary mobilization of wealth and brain power
in the service of this new form of combat.
It was the time of the sorcerer's apprentice.
Pointless massacres.
Fury.
Blunders.
The responsibility of Allied bombers has long
cast a shadow over this shadow.
Yet it raises an essential question.
What is the purpose of bombing civilians?
(gong rings)
(melancholic orchestral music)
(air raid siren wails)
1939.
When World War II broke out, the memory of the German
bombing of Guernica was fresh in everyone's mind.
The inhabitants of the cities of Europe
knew that this time the threat would come from the sky,
and that they would be the target.
The American President Franklin Roosevelt
immediately called on the waring parties to spare civilians.
A commitment that was not honored.
After having spread fear during their lightning conquest of
Europe, German bombers crushed English cities beneath bombs.
It was the Blitz.
But the Luftwaffe did not get the expected victory.
On the contrary, solidarity, combativeness,
the country resisted.
And the English now had a thirst for vengeance.
(soldiers cheer)
Despite the failure of German aviation,
the strategy of bombing cities found renewed interest.
It was the British physicist Frederick Lindemann
who gave it the certainty of science.
This program for the annihilation of German cities
was enthusiastically approved by Churchill,
who entrusted its execution to Air Marshall Arthur Harris,
a man with no qualms.
There are a lot of people who say
that bombing can never win a war.
Well, my answer to that is that it has never been tried yet.
The raids from Bomber Command increased.
They committed hundreds of planes.
But in vain, for they were no more than pin pricks
compared to the might of the Reich.
But the struggle for power initiated by the British
had just begun.
On the night of July 28th, 1943,
British Bomber Command launched one of its largest raids
against Hamburg, the country's second-largest city.
The pilots recounted how they had left behind an enormous
inferno whose glow they could still see 300 kilometers away.
(thunder rumbles) (dark atmospheric music)
In one night, 350,000 homes were destroyed.
The working-class neighborhood of Hammerbrook
was totally demolished.
There were 40,000 deaths.
I saw roofs lift off into the sky.
Bodies caught fire like tow.
The asphalt was boiling.
I saw two women trapped in the tar.
They looked like flies stuck in the burning wax of a candle.
The air in the shelters had become unbreathable
for lack of oxygen.
This inhabitant was miraculously able to escape
the blazing fire.
He was six years old.
900,000 people left the city.
With whatever they were able to save in their suitcases,
a toy, a jewel, sometimes the burnt remains of a loved one.
The same words were on everyone's lips.
Apocalypse.
The end of the world.
After Hamburg, Hitler settled for a terse phrase.
"Put this back up again."
Two months later, the city had regained
most of its production capacity.
Just like the cities of the Ruhr.
Each time, the machines were repaired.
Factories moved.
And dead workers replaced like soldiers on the battlefield.
(air raid siren wails)
As for German morale,
it was clearly affected by these incessant attacks.
But what weight does the morale of civilians have
in a dictatorship?
For here, the terror caused by the bombs competed
with an even larger terror.
That of the regime.
Goebbels' henchmen hounded anyone
who showed the least sign of defeatism.
You could be put to death for listening to enemy radio,
stealing a piece of bread found in the rubble,
or letting slip a criticism.
For all these reasons,
the presumed triumphs of Bomber Command were doomed
to be nothing more than pointless carnage.
The English had been bombing Germany for over 18 months.
Harris's stubbornness had already cost the lives
of more than 20,000 pilots.
Much later, statistics would show that at the time,
it was more dangerous to be aboard a bomber
than to live in a bombed city.
Despite the losses, despite the victory that did not come,
Harris was able to convince everyone that he had
never been closer to his goal.
In London, faith in the power of bombers
took on an almost mystical dimension.
Spectacular ceremonies were organized
to raise funds from the public.
In the eyes of public opinion,
bombers embodied a tremendous hope.
Wings for victory.
Bomber Command now increased attacks against Berlin.
Their goal, to sever Germany's head.
(chatter in German)
The Marshall prophesied.
It will cost us between 400, 500 aircraft.
It will cost Germany the war.
This insane strategy would be called
into question not by Churchill, but by the Americans.
In Casablanca, President Roosevelt reaffirmed that the war
would be won on the ground.
Bombers would not be able to do it alone.
There was no way of avoiding a landing in France.
This was a stinging rejection for Marshall Harris.
But there was something more humiliating.
The Americans took pride in giving him a lesson in bombing.
(jaunty harmonica music)
It was out of the question to massacre civilians.
They asserted that it was more effective
to precision-bomb the Reich's strategic industries.
They lined up B-17s for these surgical strikes.
Gigantic bombers that they dubbed Flying Fortresses
said to be invincible.
(suspenseful music)
Yet, their secret weapon could fit into a bag.
It was so valuable that pilots had orders to keep it
in a safe between missions.
It was a bombsight, the Norden.
A precious piece of technology.
During tests, it was able to hit targets with a precision
of 30 meters on the ground,
from an altitude of 8,000 meters.
To strike accurately, all the while keeping pilots
beyond the range of German cannons.
In short, a clean war.
But reality would shake their certainties.
In Germany, bad weather incessantly required
delaying attacks.
In concrete terms, the Norden could be used
only one or two days per month.
And in broad daylight,
the Flying Fortresses proved to be easy prey.
(gun fires)
(explosion booms)
In just three months, the 8th Air Force lost
358 brand new bombers.
General Arnold, Chief of the Air Corps, was dismayed.
At that rate, the very existence
of the American fleet was threatened.
Newcomers to bombing warfare,
the Americans had botched their entrance.
It was not in Germany that they would demonstrate
their effectiveness.
In July, 1943, the war entered a new phase.
The landing of Allied troops in Sicily
launched the reconquest by land.
Ground forces expected support from bombers.
For the US Air Force, this was a second chance.
Italy seemed better adapted.
Its skies were poorly defended.
(suspenseful music)
But Italy was like a china shop.
The least factory was located near
an architectural treasure.
Who would these victors be if, in the name of liberty,
they destroyed the cradle of western civilization?
To prevent errors, the American General Staff classified
cities according to their heritage value.
Category C, Sienna, Pisa, Bologna and 21 other cities.
Category B, 19 cities including Parma, Pavia, Montepulciano.
Category A, Rome, Venice, Florence.
Crews were given detailed maps of the 160 most noteworthy
cities indicating the buildings to avoid.
Believing that all necessary precautions had been taken,
the American command authorized every bombing raid.
No city was spared.
Not even Rome.
A Category A city.
Which combined the status of architectural treasure
and center of Christianity.
(civilians scream)
(bell tolls)
The attack of July the 19th, 1943,
targeted the capital's train stations and air bases.
Bombs went astray and fell on residential neighborhoods.
There were 1,500 casualties.
The Americans had to face the facts.
Precision bombing was not keeping its promises.
In this war of reconquest,
responsibility would have to be taken for collateral damage.
Can one sacrifice this church to destroy a barracks?
How many civilian deaths for an armament factory?
(somber string music)
It was a time of sensitive decisions.
The civilians of countries occupied by the Nazis
lived through this terrible experience.
In France, inaccurate Allied bombs
caused nearly 60,000 deaths.
12,000 deaths in Belgium.
9,000 in Holland.
And tens of millions of people were marked forever.
Collateral victims of this new form of warfare.
(somber string music)
The means that were implemented seemed disproportionate.
Bridges, switch yards, crossroads.
The bombing was meant to insure a successful landing,
and the troops' rapid progression.
During the early months of 1944, France and Belgium
would become the most bombed countries in the world.
The allies may have dropped millions of tracks
to justify these operations,
but from the ground, their strategy was quite simply
incomprehensible.
How could one accept that the destruction of a switch yard
would cost the lives of 1,000 civilians?
Why did the allies impose such sacrifices on the people?
Churchill himself worried about the consequences
of such a strategy.
However, his hesitations were swept aside by the supreme
commander of the Allied powers, Dwight Eisenhower.
(bombs whistle)
(explosions boom)
The decisions would remain the same.
Nothing should slow the reconquest.
By the end of the summer of 1944,
the allies had liberated most of French territory.
Leaving behind them joy, but also sadness and bitterness.
What a bizarre liberation for the inhabitants
of these dead cities.
The fate of these friendly populations gives an idea
of what the allies had in store for their enemies.
(suspenseful music)
In the fury of the final battles,
bombers would break all of their records.
And it will be the Americans' turn
to abandon their final moral restraints.
In late 1944, the reconquest was stuck.
The allies had already lost 300,000 men.
Nothing was going as planned.
(rocket engine roars)
Three years after the end of the Blitz,
German bombs once again fell on England.
It was the start of a new era.
Enter the famous weapon of vengeance promised by Goebbels.
These flying bombs did not need a pilot to guide them.
They were fired from the ground.
They were the first missiles in history.
(rocket engine roars)
V-2s could reach a speed of 5,700 kilometers an hour
and cross the English Channel in less than five minutes.
Too fast for anyone to sound the alarm.
(explosion booms)
But in England, the experience of the Blitz
had done its work.
The instincts returned,
and with them, fatalism.
Earlier in the war,
people stopped sending their children to school.
Now, it's as if being bombed by the Germans
was one of the hazards of life,
like being run over by a motorcar.
But the hundreds of rockets,
impossible to stop, raised a specter.
What if the Germans, with their backs against the wall,
equipped these fearsome missiles with chemical payloads?
Before the cameras, the allies made threats.
If by chance their enemies launched a chemical attack,
the counter-attack would in proportion.
[Newsreel Narrator] You're looking at 70,000 drums of
mustard gas, which is just a part of what we're holding for
the day when the Japs or Germans want to start something.
This unbearable fear
ended up convincing the allies.
They urgently needed to be done with Germany.
Renouncing all of their principles, American chiefs of staff
decided to strike a spectacular blow to German morale
by crushing Berlin under a shower of bombs.
But the commander of the US 8th Air Force, James Doolittle,
refused to comply.
In a memo addressed to his superior, General Carl Spats,
he wrote.
This attack would violate the basic
American principal of precision bombing of targets
of strictly military significance.
Spats left him no choice.
His response was an order.
Hit the center of the city.
(bombs whistle)
(explosions boom)
Harris was thrilled, he had finally won over
the American General Staff to his cause.
The raid of February the 6th, 1945,
left nearly 3,000 dead and 100,000 homeless.
This American raid did not bend the Nazi machine
any more than English bombing.
It simply prompted Hitler to have this terrifying thought.
"Even the most idiotic person today understands
"that his house will never be rebuilt if we do not win."
(marching footsteps thud)
The bombs sharpen some people's fanaticism.
Propaganda images of the Volkssturm popular militia
tried to have people believe in a great and sudden surge.
In reality, for civilians defeat had become a certainty.
They had to try to survive will awaiting the end.
There was only one place where you were truly safe.
Beneath the iron steel and concrete shell of bunkers.
It was like Noah's Ark.
Some had 20,000 places.
By squeezing people in, they could hold 30,000.
Needless to say, the overwhelming majority of Germans
had to manage without.
(gun fires)
During the last four months of the war,
Germany was bombed without interruption.
During the day by the Americans,
at night by the British.
(suspenseful music)
The allies were opposed by practically no fighters
or anti-aircraft defenses.
The sky was theirs.
They operated without suffering any losses.
The strategy developed in London a few years earlier
increasingly resembled vengeance, or punishment.
The pilots became agents of a horrendous war.
Enlisted in the Bomber Command, the Frenchman Jouloix
had sensed it two years earlier.
We had become, with a calm spirit,
the movers of death.
Industrial butchers.
The elite of destruction.
(explosions boom) (dramatic string music)
In February, 1945, as the allies made progress
on both fronts, only a few rare cities were spared.
In Dresden, a rumor claimed that this was because
Churchill's great-aunt lived there.
In reality, the city quite simply
had no strategic importance.
It would be bombed, nonetheless.
The reason was terrifying.
Dresden was the administrative center managing the influx
of refugees fleeing the Soviet advance.
By striking this crammed city, the allies were sure
to disrupt the entire east of the country.
(suspenseful tones)
On February the 14th, two waves of American and British
heavy bombers struck the city.
The next day, a new attack.
1,300 bombers in all.
We know today that there were 25,000 casualties.
But a terrifying number was circulating at the time.
250,000.
Allied General Staff could not hold back the news.
Churchill began to wonder.
What if he went from the hero of the Blitz,
to the executioner of Dresden?
He wrote.
The destruction of Dresden remains
a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing.
Harris had just lost
the Prime Minister's support.
Yet, for all that,
he didn't receive the order to interrupt the bombing.
That would continue until the end of the war.
(fire crackles) (somber atmospheric music)
German cities had become unreal.
Two million people still lived in Berlin.
Hurried ghosts who, like ants,
carried around the remains of their homes.
Leaving, but for where?
To join the crowds of the homeless?
And risk losing the little one had here?
Or any hope of finding one's loved ones.
(somber string music)
German civilians were trapped.
Like the animals in the Berlin zoo,
who refused to leave their cages torn open by bombs.
The bombings stopped only with the Red Army's final attack.
(artillery booms)
Stalin had never believed in the effectiveness of bombers.
He'd chosen to conduct his war on the ground.
It cost the lives of millions of soldiers,
but he was winning.
Street by street.
On April the 30th, Hitler committed suicide in his bunker.
On May the 8th, Germany surrendered.
While Soviet troops triumphed,
the English and Americans discovered the scale
of the destruction caused by their bombers.
400-million cubic-meters of rubble.
And the stunning information revealed
by the interrogation of Nazi leaders,
not only had German production not dropped,
but it had even increased until the end of the war.
Only intensified attacks against transportation
and oil and gas facilities could have truly hurt them.
What if all of this had been for nothing?
Seven-million homeless.
350,000 German civilians killed by bombs.
Twice as many wounded.
Whom collective memory would not know how to deal with.
Could one be both victim and aggressor?
(somber piano music) (muffled cheers)
During the celebration,
Churchill did not say a word about Bomber Command,
or the 50,000 pilots who had died on missions.
Forgetting that he himself had initiated
and supported this strategy,
he allowed Marshall Harris to take full responsibility.
(suspenseful music)
It was in the Pacific that the Americans were supposed
to have won victory thanks to bombs.
The story is familiar.
(explosion booms)
The atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
supposedly prompted Japan's surrender,
and saved the lives of a million GIs.
This story had no relation to reality.
It was cleverly written during the last act of the war.
Autumn, 1944.
The atomic bomb was still in the panning stages.
But there was already no doubt regarding the outcome
of the war with Japan.
This was thanks to the US Navy.
Which had subjected the island to a blockade
it could not resist for long.
It was now exploring the possibility of a landing.
But it was the bombers that would retake center stage.
For never before had the promoters of bombing
been so powerful.
They formed a kind of lobby.
In the General Staff, they were nicknamed the Bomber Mafia.
From prestigious military academies to the halls of power,
these zealous officers were promoting the new weapon.
They were supported by a gigantic military industrial
complex which, in late 1944, employed hundreds of thousands
of people and took up, on its own,
a third of the defense budget.
B-29 super fortresses.
New generation of bombs.
Such as this flammable mixture of gasoline and gelled rubber
that flows and sticks to objects and people.
Napalm.
Known for its massive use during the Vietnam War,
napalm was invented in 1942.
The product was tested on a US base in Utah.
Where army engineers had built replicas of German
and Japanese neighborhoods.
Paying as close attention to detail as possible.
In terms of destruction, the napalm's yield
surpassed all expectations.
It was four times more destructive
on the wooden homes of Japan.
In January 1945, 3,000 tons of napalm were delivered
to the island of Tinian, which had recently been taken
from the Japanese.
In a few weeks, the Americans had built
the world's largest airport there.
Japan was now within range of the B-29.
The new head of the 21st Bomber Command, Curtis LeMay,
decided to wreak havoc on the country.
Taking advantage of the anti-Japanese racism
that held sway in the US,
LeMay was able to push bombing to its ultimate limits.
(plane engines roar)
In Japan, people knew that catastrophe was imminent.
Led into a war that it did not have the means to fight,
the country was on its last legs.
But, entrenched in his palace, the emperor was not disposed
to yielding his throne in order for hostilities to stop.
In newspapers that, for lack of paper, were only
a single page, he offered a sole model to his people.
Kamikazes.
Who, when unable to win, chose how to lose.
Enemy reconnaissance planes crisscross the skies.
A French journalist in Tokyo, Robert Guillain,
witnessed what he described as "an unbearable wait."
March 9th.
Spring has burst forth by surprise.
But good weather during this time of raids,
far from bringing joy, causes anxiety.
Even more worrisome is the wind,
which from morning blows forth, swelling into gusts.
Throughout the city, everyone has the same thought.
If they came in a wind like this, it would be terrible.
Indeed, here they come.
334 B-29s.
1,700 tons of napalm and 100,000 casualties.
Which made the bombing of Tokyo
the most deadly in the history of humanity.
Ishikawa Koyo, a police photographer,
was one of the survivors of the Firestorm.
My hands trembled,
and I could only press the shutter button weakly.
In a corner that people apparently thought
offered shelter from the flames,
the victims had fallen on top of one another
to form a mountain of corpse.
These napalm bombings were overshadowed
by the atomic bomb.
Yet they would inflict on Japan
twice as much damage as in Germany,
in only six months.
For LeMay had undertaken the methodical destruction
of Japanese cities.
The only respite came when napalm was out of stock.
By May, every city of more than 300,000 inhabitants
had been razed.
(explosions boom)
A new list was drawn up and soon it was cities
with less than 100,000 inhabitants that would be targeted.
The archipelago's 66 major urban areas would be destroyed.
Where 21-million Japanese lived.
Hundreds of thousands of deaths.
And still no victory.
Would everyone have to be killed?
Exactly as in Germany,
bombs had no impact on the regime's determination.
But beginning in June, 1945,
the worsening military situation forced him to think.
The Americans had just set foot on the archipelago
but seizing the island of Okinawa.
Japan's imperial diplomacy would propose opening
negotiations for an end to the hostilities,
with a condition, keeping the emperor on his throne.
The outcome of the war was in the hands of the new
American President, Harry Truman, who became Head of State
with the death of Franklin Roosevelt.
But Truman refused to start negotiations.
For at the same moment,
scientists from the Manhattan Project were about to give
birth to a new bomb of incalculable power.
(explosion booms)
On July the 16th, 1945,
on their testing grounds in New Mexico,
they exploded the world's first atomic bomb, Trinity.
The prodigious invention immediately slipped
through the scientists' fingers.
The physicist Robert Oppenheimer passed it over
to the military in the person of General Leslie groves,
the true director of the project.
Two bombs set out for the base at Tinian.
Despite protests from many scientists, the military
ruled out the possibility of a demonstration of force.
No warning, no deterrents.
To reach its full effectiveness,
the bomb must really destroy and kill.
When the Allied Potsdam Conference began,
President Truman knew he had the ultimate weapon.
"No one had ever spoken to me with such a tone,"
observed the Soviet representative.
In discussions with the Japanese, Truman proved inflexible.
The diplomatic approach was swept aside.
Why negotiate when you have the atomic bomb?
(dramatic orchestral music)
On August the 6th, 1945,
at eight hours, sixteen minutes and two seconds,
a single B-29 dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
"My God, what have we done?"
Said the co-pilot Robert Lewis at the time.
In Allied capitals, the atomic bomb, with its 80,000 deaths,
was given a triumphant welcome.
The front page of The Daily News read,
"Atomic bomb hit, a city vanished."
Eight years earlier, the bombing of Guernica had irritated
Hitler and shocked public opinion across the globe.
No one was shocked any more.
Albert Camus raised one of the rare opposing voices.
Our technological civilization
has just reached its final degree of savagery.
Governments must choose definitely between hell and reason.
Truman had chosen.
He immediately sent the emperor an ultimatum.
If they do not now accept our terms,
they may expect a rain of ruin from the air
the like of which has never been seen on this earth.
It was out of the question to have the victory
stolen by Stalin, who had just successfully launched
a blistering attack against the Japanese army in Manchuria.
Just three days after Hiroshima,
Truman ordered the bombing of Nagasaki.
This second bomb caused 70,000 more deaths.
The time had come for the victors
to impose their version of history.
What really mattered was to ensure that Japan would
surrender beneath American bombs, not Soviet troops.
Reconsidering the point that had caused
all negotiations to fail, the Americans authorized
the emperor to remain on the throne.
In exchange, Hirohito declared in a message to the nation,
that it was indeed the atomic bombs
that had made any resistance futile.
What he forgot to point out was that, before this,
he had allowed hundreds of thousands of his people
to be burned by napalm.
The emperor had got what he wanted,
now Japan could surrender.
But, the ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
were not quite like the others.
The Americans quickly discovered something
they were not expecting.
Radioactivity.
Which acts like a poison.
Contaminating and killing slowly.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki represent a pitiless indictment
against the victors.
The army's observations would be classified top-secret.
To shield against moral condemnation, the American
General Staff developed the notion of necessary evil.
Leslie Groves, the head of the Manhattan Project,
formally presented the official story before the Senate.
The atomic bomb made it impossible for the Japanese
to continue the war, despite their determination
to fight to the bitter end.
And in that fighting, they would have taken with them
tens of thousands of Americans.
The trick worked.
The idea set in that the bomb had saved human lives.
(somber string music)
Because victory was attributed to them, atomic bombs
ended up justifying all of the bombing during the war.
A million civilians killed.
Three times that number wounded.
At least 15-million homeless.
(dramatic orchestral music)
Pondering this strange victory,
the head of American Bombers, Curtis LeMay,
personally observed years later, "if we'd lost the war,
"we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals."
This immense and horrible war was, for bombers,
a time of complete transgression.
Their ultimate impact may have been both terrible
and debatable, but for them,
World War II was a consecration.
The race for power, aerial domination.
The bombers' shadow now hovers over the world.
Remote warfare, scalpel-like precision.
Technological progress has produced new promises,
or rather, new illusions.
(explosion booms)
And beneath the bombs still lies the same terror.
(moody orchestral music)