Thursday, January 24, 2019

The Bomber Will Always Get Through

B-17 Flying Fortresses from the 398th Bombardment Group flying a bombing mission to Neumünster, Germany, on 13 April 1945.
 A few thoughts on a topic which came up the other day. I have been reading about warfare since I was knee high to a grenadier. I've learned over the years to take a lot of things with a grain of salt. But the accolades gathered by the proponents of strategic bombardment have always troubled me somewhat. I'm a fighter guy, I never cared for the bomber Mafia, even though the progeny all attended elementary school at a place named for one of the bomber's biggest champions.

That being said, here's what I think, supported by some evidence, some, perhaps a lot, is my opinion, guided by study and observation...
I think it is well also for the man in the street to realise that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through. The only defence is in offence, which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves… If the conscience of the young men should ever come to feel, with regard to this one instrument [bombing] that it is evil and should go, the thing will be done; but if they do not feel like that – well, as I say, the future is in their hands. But when the next war comes, and European civilisation is wiped out, as it will be, and by no force more than that force, then do not let them lay blame on the old men. Let them remember that they, principally, or they alone, are responsible for the terrors that have fallen upon the earth. - Stanley Baldwin, 10 November 1932 (Source)
When I was a kid, I learned that the 8th Air Force was a major factor in the defeat of Nazi Germany and that one of the reasons the Germans lost the war is that they had no strategic bombers.

Formation of German He-111 bombers during the Battle of Britain.
The truth of the matter lies somewhere between those two statements.

The German Air Force (Luftwaffe) was essentially built from the ground up as the Germans were barred from possessing an air force by the Versailles Treaty of 1919. When the Germans began to rearm, in direct violation of the Treat of Versailles (one of those "scraps of paper" that dictators deride and liberal politicians think is Holy Writ), they built the Luftwaffe for one purpose and one purpose alone, to provide support for the German army.

The twin-engined bombers would range behind the lines destroying supply depots, front line airbases, and other infrastructure targets. The goal being to disrupt the enemy army's logistical tail and to suppress the enemy air force to give the Luftwaffe free rein at the front.

Single engine dive bombers would act as flying artillery to provide direct support to German army ground units.

Fighter aircraft were used to protect the bombers and to engage targets of opportunity on the ground once air superiority was attained. Also, to engage any enemy fighters which managed to get airborne, which was rare in the early days of the war.

Once the enemy air forces were destroyed, usually on the ground in the first few days of the offensive, the Germans were free to concentrate their attacks on the enemy army. These air attacks along with tanks on the ground making wide ranging pincer attacks would eventually surround and destroy large elements of the enemy's ground forces. With the enemy military defeated and large swaths of ground seized by the German army, the enemy government would capitulate.

As happened in Poland, in Denmark, in Norway, in Belgium, in the Netherlands, and then in France. However this model did not work in two instances: Britain and the Soviet Union.

The islands of the United Kingdom are separated from the continent of Europe by the English Channel which is a formidable military obstacle. You couldn't seize bridges over it (and there were no tunnels under it in 1940), therefore the German army had no means to come to grips with the British forces which survived after Dunkirk.

So if one part of the tactical battle model can't be used (the army) that leaves the air forces. What can they do by themselves? The Germans figured that if they could suppress the Royal Air Force to the point where the Germans had air superiority over the Channel, well then the army could jump on their fleet of improvised barges and cross the Channel. Then the army supplemented by their flying artillery could go to work. Of course, the Luftwaffe would need to fight off that pesky (and large) Royal Navy as well. The German navy was minuscule compared to the British Home Fleet, those naval units dedicated to control of the seas around Britain.

The Germans discovered that destroying an air force and its infrastructure from the air (without their own army putting pressure on that air force as well) was no easy proposition, especially with aircraft designed for short range attacks. They would also be going up against an enemy that was expecting them, no chance of anything beyond a tactical surprise (like what time of day and the direction of the attack). The Germans had a tactical air force, not a strategic air force designed for long range attacks against an enemy not immediately to one's front.

They failed to destroy the RAF, so they started bombing cities. The first attack was a mistake, the second was deliberate in response to an RAF raid on a German city (which was in response to the mistaken dropping of bombs on London).

In the Soviet Union the problem was one of scale. The German military worked very well in the smaller confines of Western Europe (anything west of Russia in this context). Countries smaller than, or roughly the same size as, Germany, were fairly "easy meat" for the well-trained German military machine. (There was a lot of re-training necessary after the attack on Poland, where the Germans took unexpectedly heavy casualties from the tough Polish army.)

But the Soviet Union was huge, stretching along a front of eight hundred miles from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea and covering eleven time zones from the border with what used to be Poland* to Siberia. While much of the Red Army was in the forward zone facing the Germans and their allies (Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary), there were a lot more further away, out of range of the Luftwaffe.

When the Germans attacked they did destroy most of the Red Air Force in the west on the ground (destroying many obsolete machines), they also killed and captured literally hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers. But they couldn't quite get around them deep enough to cut them all off. Enough fell back to keep the fight going. The Luftwaffe swarmed through the skies, but many of their best crews had been lost over England the year before. They had nothing to reach deep into Soviet Russia to try and stem the rising tide of Soviet reinforcements and destroy Soviet infrastructure.

But even had they had the reach, what good would it have done?

Hard to say, but if we look at the western Allies, the British and the Americans, we see lots and lots of four-engine bombers, capable of reaching deep into Germany, eventually. But not until they had fighter aircraft capable of going the distance with the bombers.

In the '20s and '30s bomber designs were such that the pundits of many air forces thought that the bomber was unstoppable as the current crop of fighter aircraft couldn't attain the speed of the bombers, nor the altitude. Well of course fighter design caught up and most fighters were far faster than bombers and could attain the same altitudes.

So machine guns were added to the bombers, as many as ten .50-caliber gun emplacements in a B-17 (at least three of which mounted dual .50s - upper, belly, and tail emplacements - later a fourth in a "chin" turret). Surely with a group of bombers in a tight formation enemy fighters would be unable to get into the dense bomber formations.

Yet they did. Prior to receiving fighter escorts bomber formations suffered losses at an unsustainable rate (16% in 1942-43), soon there wouldn't be enough bombers to carry bombs deep into Germany (or even into France for that matter). It was statistically impossible in those years for a crew to survive the 25 missions required to complete a tour of duty.

Eventually though, long range fighter aircraft (specifically the P-51) were available in sufficient numbers to escort American daylight bombers all the way to their targets and then home again. The British never did develop a long range fighter along the same lines as the P-51, primarily because they were committed to bombing Germany at night.

British bombing was directed at area targets such as industrial areas, which were nearly always situated near towns and cities. British bombing was, in reality, directed at German civilians. They couldn't bomb in large, coordinated formations due to the primitive navigation aids available at the time. Rather the British bombers came in a stream of individual aircraft, one after the other.

Pathfinder bombers would go in first to mark the target and were equipped with state of the art navigation equipment to do so. Unfortunately, state of the art wasn't very good at the time. The pathfinders could find a city but had trouble pinpointing factories and the like.

So the pathfinders would drop their special incendiary target markers and the following bombers would try to drop their bombs on those markers. Later bombers in the stream would drop on the fires started by the earlier drops. It was all very random in reality.

The Americans were determined to perform precision, daylight raids over Germany. Initial raids didn't have much luck as the defending fighters and anti-aircraft cannon took a heavy toll of the attackers. Once the P-51 came into action, bomber casualties did drop but were still heavy enough to cause some concern in Allied command circles. But not among the bomber generals themselves, being thoroughly steeped in the theories of Douhet, Mitchell, and others. The bomber would always get through, right?

Well, enough did get through to kill thousands of civilians and military personnel in the target areas. In addition, the Germans had to expend a lot of resources to defend the Fatherland from the attacks. Personnel manning radar networks, fighters, searchlights, and fighter aircraft (both day and night fighters) consumed resources that could have been better employed in Russia, and later France.

Albert Speer (Hitler's Minister of Armaments and War Production from 1942 onward) claimed after the war that Allied bombing did indeed disrupt German production. However, due to his efforts German production actually increased until the second half of 1944, which coincides with the Allied landings in Normandy. Now a ground army would also increase the pressure on the German military.

My point in all this is that the strategic bombing of Germany, the thought that airpower alone could end the war was a chimera. It took the efforts of land, naval, and air forces to defeat Nazi Germany (with the Soviet Union doing the bulk of the heavy lifting for most of the war on the ground).

One could also argue that the indiscriminate bombing of civilians (deliberately at night, perhaps unintentionally by day) did not break the will of the Germans to continue fighting. No more so than the Luftwaffe's terror bombing of British cities after 1940 induced the British to quit.

Remember this sentence from that Baldwin quote above?
The only defence is in offence, which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves.
Absolutely ineffective for either side. The very thought of intentionally killing civilians was (and remains) anathema to many.

What about Japan you might ask? Didn't the bombings by B-29s (to include the atomic bombs) convince the Japanese to surrender without having to invade Japan itself?

Yes, but only after the Navy had pretty much cut Japan off from all their sources of oil and other imported war materials. Only after the Marine Corps, the Army, the Army Air Forces, and Navy had captured numerous islands on the way to Japan. The Japanese Navy and merchant marine was mostly on the bottom of the sea by 1945.

With all this power closing in on Japan, the Japanese were cornered. Once the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki occurred, the Japanese leadership (prodded by the emperor) realized that they only had two choices: surrender or in all likelihood cease to exist as a nation.

While it is true that air and sea power obviated the need to invade the Japanese home islands, that was only after most of the territory the Japanese had conquered earlier in the war had been liberated, again by combined land, sea, and air power.

Combined arms was, and still is, the answer in warfare. No single arm can conquer an enemy.

My conclusion is that the indiscriminate killing of civilians was neither necessary nor strictly legal. (Various conventions and treaties governing armed conflict were in place before World War II but were rather weak, in my opinion, when it came to aerial warfare. See here.) The bombing of tactical targets, that is strictly military targets, was, in conjunction with ground forces a necessary and useful form of combat.

One might even argue that the bombing of French rail networks prior to the Normandy invasion was absolutely justified in military terms, regardless of the death and suffering inflicted on the French civilian population. Those deaths were not intentional, the deaths of Spanish, Polish, British, Chinese, Russian, German, and Japanese civilians in most cases of strategic bombing were intentional (again, in my opinion) and could have been avoided. Would the war have lasted longer? Possibly, but who can say with any certainty?

I am still conflicted over the use of strategic bombing in World War II. I can see its usefulness in some contexts, I can see that in many instances it comes very close to what I would consider to be "war crimes." (That bit is in quotes because war itself is a crime. On the gripping hand, if you don't want your population slaughtered, don't attack other nations.)

Remember this piece of that opening Baldwin quote?
If the conscience of the young men should ever come to feel, with regard to this one instrument [bombing] that it is evil and should go, the thing will be done; but if they do not feel like that – well, as I say, the future is in their hands. But when the next war comes, and European civilisation is wiped out, as it will be, and by no force more than that force, then do not let them lay blame on the old men. (Emphasis mine.)
Pardon my French, but bullshit, the young can only do as they are told in warfare, or they suffer the consequences. It is always the old men, the captains of industry, the government officials, and the flag officers who make these decisions. (The young do commit war crimes as well, but typically in the heat of battle.)

War crimes trials are seldom held for the victors. After all, who would hold a victorious nation responsible? The defeated?

Tough questions. What say you?

And yes, be nice.**

Ruins of Guernica (1937)
(Source)





* In the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, the Germans got the western half of Poland, the Soviets got the eastern half, once the Germans had pretty much done all of the fighting. The Reds marched in as the Poles were on the ropes, not down yet, not quite out, the Soviets stabbed them in the back.

** Which I add in light of a certain brouhaha which occurred in the comments recently, which were subsequently deleted. Heat of passion and all that, but I'm sure some of you saw that.

80 comments:

  1. I'm going to reference your earlier post on 16JAN19 called, "Criminals or Soldiers?" http://oldafsarge.blogspot.com/2019/01/criminals-or-soldiers.html

    I read the 19 JAN post, opened the comment window, started thinking, thought some more, closed the window, thought some more, and repeated this process a couple of times during that day. I didn't comment and I continued to think about war crimes and civilian deaths off and on for a few days after the post.

    You summed my thoughts up very well towards the end of today's post when you said, "....I can see that in many instances it comes very close to what I would consider to be "war crimes." (That bit is in quotes because war itself is a crime. On the gripping hand, if you don't want your population slaughtered, don't attack other nations.)"
    And yes, war crimes trials are never held for the victors.

    Another extremely well written post that has increased my knowledge, made me think, and made me question (or at least think about) some of my long held beliefs.
    I didn't say I changed some, or all, or part of my beliefs. I'm only saying that once in a while I need to question the basic belief structure and see if those beliefs meet the true or false test. And I do understand that almost nothing passes the pure truth or pure falsehood test.

    The hat tip to Dr. Pournelle is very appropriate.

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    1. Thanks John, this is something I've spent a lot of time thinking about for a number of years. I seldom hold those at the tip of the spear responsible for actions in wartime. For the most part, they're just trying to stay alive. I always hold the leaders responsible.

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  2. Demonstrating why I received a "D" in the only Philosophy class taken at University.......... I won't start anything but if you do, you won't like the way I end it. History is indeed written the victors and those the victors allow to live.

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    1. It's awfully hard to take a dispassionate look at subjects like this.

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  3. Arthur Harris' justification, " It takes 25 months to build a factory, it takes 25 years to make a machinist ", has always disturbed me. As has the firebombing of Tokyo. Hamburg was an accident, but to do Dresden, just to see it could be recreated is very close to a war crime, if, indeed, it doesn't go well beyond.

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    1. In my book, Harris was a war criminal.

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    2. Harris had a serious negative stiff one for the Germans. No doubt about it.

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    3. Well to be fair, the Germans didn't like him either. 😊

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  4. If you’re willing to drop a couple bucks, the “Hardcore History” podcast episode on the topic is worth it. I listened to it a couple years ago when it was in the “free” rotation, but unfortunately that’s not the case anymore. Or if it is, I can’t find it.

    Basically, “How the F did the decision-makers arrive at the point where incinerating entire cities seemed like the ‘right’ thing to do?”

    https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-42-blitz-logical-insanity/

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    1. Interesting, but I think I know the answer, they didn't know what else to do. They'd built all those bombers, which the generals said they needed, so they had to use them. But I'll have a look.

      (Shades of Zumwalt and LCS.)

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    2. Having re-listened to it, it’s probably not going to give you a lot that you didn’t know, it’s mostly about the context of the decisions.

      Also, he’s pretty up-front in his belief that these things were self-evident war crimes, but that the entire war was basically one giant war crime.

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    3. But you have to cut some people a bit of slack, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan had to be defeated, some of the means used could be construed as criminal, but were perhaps necessary. Strategic bombing? I'm still conflicted about that. Deliberately killing women and children can't be justified in my book, ever.

      The Any Mouse comment below bugs me, couldn't even put a name to his dreck. For what it's worth (IMHO) , LeMay was wrong, as was Sherman.

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    4. At least LeMay could legitimately use the excuse that a lot of manufacturing did occur in little shops all over Japanese cities, so trying to wipe out manufacturing by carpet bombing and fire bombing the cities. Barely.

      At least we mostly tried to actually precision bomb at the beginning...

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    5. Once Japan ran out of raw materials and we had recaptured all those islands, it was only a matter of time.

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    6. Really the only thing in our defense was that the Germans and Japanese turned to terror-bombing first. The technology simply wasn't there for anything else to be done. While it was true the bomber would always get through, it was an open question of whether they could get through time and time again. Until we fielded fighters that could escort them all the way, they could get through with losses high enough to bring an end to the campaign after a few missions. The air strategists of the '20s were futurists with dreams of sugar-plum H-bombs dancing in their heads.

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  5. War crimes... crimes means rules.... I was reading a thing that talked of a Roman who took a town, turned to a slave dealer next to him and sold all 52,000 human beings in that town to the slave dealer.
    Rules? We have them & that's good for as long as we win but life in general...not so much.

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    1. No matter what, there are always rules. Not necessarily written down, but there are always rules.

      If one side refuses to take prisoners, the other side will soon stop doing that as well. In the early months of the Civil War there were prisoner exchanges and outright releasing of POWs on parole. Parole meant you couldn't take up arms again for a certain period. The South (who always lacked the human resources of the North) would send paroled men to garrison duty, which would release those who had been on garrison duty for duty at the front. After a while the North realized they were assisting the South with their manpower problems so they shut down that system.

      There are always rules.

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    2. Not everyone plays by the rules. Japan didn't sign the Geneva Convention of 1929. Sow the whirlwind, reap it.

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  6. I have recently read DOWNFALL by Richard Frank (https://smile.amazon.com/Downfall-End-Imperial-Japanese-Empire/dp/0141001461/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1548338946&sr=1-3&keywords=downfall and HELL TO PAY by D. M. Giangreco (https://smile.amazon.com/Hell-Pay-Operation-DOWNFALL-1945-1947/dp/1682471659/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1548339192&sr=1-1&keywords=hell+to+pay) which both study in significant depth the Pacific War final acts, and the expectations on both sides for OLYMPIC and CORONET. It is hard to disagree with Sherman, war is hell.

    On the issue of strategic bombing I can only say that I am absolutely in awe of the men of the Eighth Air Force in World War II. Marines take a back seat to no one, but I can only imagine those men, awakening each day and knowing that they were headed back into the belly of the beast. The rule was that IF you survived twenty five missions you could rotate home. Not many did. And the casualties were so high that the Eighth Air Force suffered more killed in action that the entire Marine Corps in World War II. Strategic bombing did not win that war, but the men who served deserve nothing but our respect.

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    1. I concur, I am in awe of the airmen who went into Germany (and Japan) mission after mission. They did their jobs. Even if the generals didn't. It was a brutal business.

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    2. Concur Sarge, especially in the PTO when the Japanese considered their own captured men to be dead to their society, let alone how they treated enemy POWs. Aircrew in the two theaters had different requirements to meet before being sent home. Not easy for me to visualize what they went through when I'm sitting in a safe, warm home. Well, shot my mouth off enough, not usually this verbose........ :)

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    3. It's all good Nylon12, feel free to be verbose. I like it.

      I have trouble imagining what it was like to fly in an unarmored aircraft, at altitude where the temperature alone can kill you, with enemy aircraft darting in, AAA bursting all around. Hell, it was possible to get killed by the gunners in another bomber. Hell, sheer Hell.

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  7. Never understood the problem with "indiscriminate bombing of civilians" guilt trip.

    Just who do you think was making all the war materials for the military?

    Not in uniform, perhaps, but certainly contributing heavily to provide military materials and capability to the actual people doing the fighting.

    Did I miss something? I still think Gen LeMay had the right of it: "Kill enough of them, they quit fighting". or perhaps better put by Sherman:

    "Every attempt to make war easy and safe will result in humiliation and disaster." --Gen. William T. Sherman

    "If the people raise a great howl against my barbarity and cruelty, I will answer that war is war, and not popularity seeking" - William Tecumseh Sherman


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    1. And you have just justified every single terrorist attack on the United States.

      That's why.

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    2. Not so sure Sarge,

      Personally, I'd be just as happy to go full isolationist :-).

      I just got through reading "Sword and Scimitar". In the case of the muzzies, they have been waging war of conquest on anyone and everyone forever now. Makes hitler, mao, pol pot, etc. look like pikers. Somehow that history seems to be either ignored or suppressed.

      Not sure what they answer is other than to just roll over for whatever "good" that might bring.

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  8. Thanks Sarge. Don't know if this is spreading your way but.... 5AM 19F, at 6AM 16F, at 9AM 6F, at 9:45AM 4F, minus 5 by 3PM?, minus 10F by tomorrow morning forecast? Last night's parade to kickoff the Winter Carnival was cancelled because of temps and winds, 30 to 40 MPH. Stay tuned to this station for continuing updates........

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    1. Actually we're in for a spell of warm weather (50 degrees or so) and rain for today, seasonable temps (30 to 40) for the next few days before we're supposed to go back into the "deep freeze" next week. (Well, 20, not exactly that cold for New England.)

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  9. My views were shaped by my father, a CBI veteran, and several uncles. All were enlisted. None had much good to say about their leadership. One, Navy, had four Purple Hearts. One was in the Aleutian invasions which he described as a Cluster****. To a man, none felt any quilt about what happened to the civilian populations.

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    1. Out of sight, out of mind.

      Doesn't make it moral.

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  10. Well, quite a moral quandry you have given us.

    On one hand, yes the purposeful targeting of civilians was, and is, a moral crime of the highest grade. And that includes the US's "precision daylight raids" where "oops, we missed 95% of the target, sucks to be them" hitting civilian targets.

    On the other hand, all those resources forced to spend time defending airspace back in the rear is a valuable thing. Just look at the draw of resources that Japan did after the Mitchell raid. Something we as a nation only really partially experienced, with increases in many coastal artillery units and some ADA assets around big cities, but for the most part our oceans were our defense (good thing Mexico didn't decide to get uppity again in '41.)

    Killing civilians bad. Tying up assets good. Answer: Total War sucks rocks. Sucks so bad that as a nation we have rejected that premise (except for defensive purposes - Mutual Assured Destruction) since WWII. Which means we take correspondingly higher casualties because we haven't steamrollered a country from air. (No, we really did not ever unleash total air war upon either Korea, Vietnam or Iraq/Afghanistan.)

    We could, we can, we won't, until some enemy does something so heinous and so shocking that even the leftists are shocked to their core and THEY demand blood everywhere.

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    1. Pretty good summary Beans. Sums up the way I feel about it.

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    2. We could, we can, we won't.

      Well done, sir.

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    3. "We could, we can, we won't"
      And this is where I stopped trying to finesse this. I would add...
      ", But we shouldn't categorically rule it out."
      Sometimes, the enemy is so horrible, that they must be destroyed or what good there is in the world is destroyed.

      Yep. Attila the Hun is a Saint, compared to me.

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    4. I don't suppose you can ever categorically rule it out, heck, can't rule anything out.

      It would still keep me up nights.

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    5. I think we could add "Unless you make us" to that, but that opens up a whole 'nother topic.....

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  11. My old Military History professor, Carl Boyd would famously say: "You can't surrender to an airplane." Troops were needed to take and hold the ground. The bombers just made it easier. I understand that the Iraqis did try though.

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    1. Smart man that Professor Boyd.

      Bombers are excellent against enemy troops.

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    2. Also exclellent against your *own* troops. (e.g Operation Cobra)

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    3. actually at least one German U-boot did surrender to coastal command aircraft...
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Graph#Capture
      the real story is much more fun than hollywood crap

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    4. Now that is one heck of a story, and you're right, better than Hollywood!

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  12. "** Which I add in light of a certain brouhaha which occurred in the comments recently, which were subsequently deleted. Heat of passion and all that, but I'm sure some of you saw that."

    As I am pretty certain that I was involved/instigated that comment; I shall not comment on this post.

    Paul L. Quandt

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    1. Ah, so you did see that.

      Not a problem on my end, sometimes people believe very strongly about things. I'm just presenting my view here, YMMV.

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  13. 'Ah, so you did see that."

    Yes I did.

    "Not a problem on my end,..."

    That being the case, I will say that some of the books that I have read over the years lead me to disagree with some of the statements of your post. As you are presenting your view of those things, I shall not write other than what I did in the previous sentence.

    Paul


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    1. Oh yes, I've read lots of stuff on this topic, arguments for it's effectiveness and arguments against. All I can do is come to a conclusion based on all of that.

      I think we can agree to disagree.

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  14. Ok...I've said it before when this discussion has occurred. The Air Force did not win WWII, nor did the US Military, nor did the Allied Military. The Axis powers were defeated by the combined Military, Economic, Industrial, Diplomatic and, yes, Moral might of the Allies. Were difficult decisions made that had horrible consequences? Undoubtedly. Hindsight is always 20/20, and time travel is impossible. As Beans said, we have learned from those mistakes, perhaps too well.

    I've been rewriting the next few paragraphs many, many times today and can't get them refined to the point where people wouldn't believe that Attila the Hun wasn't a Saint compared to me. So I'll just shut up and color.

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    1. Well said, juvat.

      And remember, you were Air Force, we don't eat the crayons. Semper Fi!

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  15. Fascinating post, Sarge, and one near to me.

    I always wanted to be a fighter pilot. I badgered my Dad for a Steve Canyon helmet incessantly until he caved and brought one home. But I learned to respect the Bomber Guys as well, and have come to greatly admire General LeMay over the years. You have to admit, LeMay "Did Bombers" pretty well.

    BUT....I've always doubted the "Air Power alone can win a war" ideology. The only way that can happen is if the Air Power turns 100% of your enemies stuff to dust. And then you'll still need some boots-on-the-ground to hold what you took, regardless of it's value.

    And even though Dear Old Dad was in the SeaBees, and was all over the South Pacific, I didn't really appreciate the role of the Navy (except for carriers, of course!) in WWII until I started hanging out on the Iowa and reading all the books I could find on WWII in the South Pacific.

    Yep, you really need all three branches of the armed forces to even have a chance at winning a war.

    I have to admit I never thought of the "war crimes" aspect of strategic vs. tactical bombing. It's a sticky question to which I have no answer.

    And you're right about the outcome of any trials. It's the same with who gets to write the 'accepted' history.

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    1. Yes, the victors write the history. You're right though, a very sticky question.

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  16. I tend to subscribe to a Sun Tzu-like attitude (or is it Clausewitz?) about war (and war crimes). War is hell and you must take it to its limits if that's what your government has chosen to do. How you kill them, how brutal it is, should be irrelevant. Anything less is half-assed war and your people will die. The persistence of radiation or indiscriminate nature of chem/bio weps keep those instruments of war out of the acceptable lane though. As for war-crimes? ROE is far too restrictive, and while civilians are off limits, as are captured prisoners, if either steps out of that lane and into the combat role, they should be killed on the battlefield- which is wherever they choose to conduct their battle.

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    1. Nuke bombing in WWII is a tough one based on what I wrote above. I'd say that as horrible as it was, it actually saved lives- both US and Japanese. Fortunately, our conventional weps are far more surgical and precise now, so that we can easily rely on them without the need to go nuclear.

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    2. Tuna 1: Clausewitz probably. You're right about the civvies needing to "stay in their lane."

      If the ROE are too restrictive, it might be because the civilian leadership isn't that committed to the fight. A whole 'nother problem I need to cogitate on.

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    3. As much as I hate the idea of the atomic attacks on Japan, they were necessary. Probably the only way to wake up the Japanese leadership to the fact that the war was lost. Actually saved many lives in the long run. But still...

      War is cruelty and probably will never change.

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    4. No probably about it. Were your outcomes moral, and did you achieve them? WW Ii I think we did.

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    5. WWII, I've heard it called the last "good" war. Clear objectives, clear who the enemy was, and it was absolutely necessary to defeat that enemy.

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    6. “It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell.”
      ― William Tecumseh Sherman

      To put it properly. The only way to ameliorate its effects is to put an end it as quickly as possible.

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    7. True, but you miss the point regarding the killing of civilians.

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  17. Don't actually disagree with your post. I will point out that the truly negative (and stupid) move by the air power fanatics was denial of long range air to the Atlantic ASW role. That cost us huge casualties and loss of material; and could have been quite easily remedied by an allocation of a fairly modest number of long range aircraft (especially Liberators) to the MPA role. Such allocation was fought bitterly by both RAF Bomber Command and USAAF. That cost us dearly.

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    1. Logistis is finite. One of the immutable laws of war. Were it not, victory would be instantaneous.

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    2. Cap'n - Agree, a bad decision which cost many lives.

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    3. Juvat - True, but those bombers were ill-used over Germany, I think anyway. Too many lives lost bombing cities, too many lives lost to U-Boats.

      But yeah, logistics are limited.

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    4. The way we bombed factories with bombs designed to destroy overhead driveshafts to machines was wrong-headed. Blowing apart roofs did little to destroy machine tools. Destroying oil refineries mostly meant burning up a lot of pipe that under wartime conditions meant a couple of weeks out of commission. Most rail yards were repaired within a few days. We never could make up our mind on the priority target. Tactically and operationally, rail yards were important. Strategically (in Germany), coal gasification plants were important. Electrical plants and productions facilities were probably the longest lead-time facilities we could have hit.

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    5. Though by spring 1945, an over-abundance of German war production was sitting in yards waiting to shipped ... somewhere. Even though critical parts were suffering sabotage, and even perfectly-made armor plate was sub-standard due to shortages of molybdenum, chromium, vansdium, and other metals.

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    6. Larry @12:13 - Rail yards were very important. Bombing the French rail network caused a lot of problems for the Germans when D-Day occurred, it was the reason the Das Reich panzer division took so long to reach the front. That and air attacks along the way.

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    7. Larry @12:16 - Sabotage hurt the Germans as did the shortages of critical materials as you cite. Good points.

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    8. multitudes of forced labor from all over Europe were quite laoth to make for Germans highest quality weapons...
      and Polish resistance managed to get soem invaluable intel from them...

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  18. RAF started the war by dropping leaflets over Germany, and few valiant, doomed attempts at bombing Kriegsmarine bases.
    It took Warsaw, Rotterdam, London and Coventry to teach allies to indiscriminately bomb cities.
    In the end, terror effect on the population usually only hardened resistance, while economic impact was slow.
    But in the realities of total war, every weapon in the arsenal was to be used.

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    1. The British were the ones indiscriminately bombing cities, the technology of the time didn't allow precision bombing at night.

      It was even hard during the day!

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    2. add overestimating the Norden bombsight ability to put bombs precisely to the list of bomber strategists errors...
      between usual Northern Europe overcast, smokes from fires and intentional smokescreens, daylight bombing was only marginally better
      bombs aimed at shipyard in my home city fell all over the city
      I wonder if low-level Moaquito and/or Lightning raids aimed at pinpoint targets like fuel refineries and artificial fuel factories could have made better results for lesser losses than heavy bombers?

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  19. errors of pre-war boming doctrine:
    -underestimating fighters performance
    -not factoring in radar
    -overestimating defesive gunenry of bombers
    good thing Germans didnt get mass produced jet fighters, VT fuse or made operational SAMs before the end was nearing anyway
    and lessons on limits of strategic bombing continued to Korea and Vietnam

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  20. It is silly to think that the bombing of civilian centers will cause civilians to petition their government for a peace. Doesn't happen. Instead the civilians consider themselves part of the war and work all the harder to supply their military. A single bombing raid on Berlin, 22 November 1943, killed 2,000 Berliners and rendered 175,000 homeless. The very next day another 1000 were killed and and another 100,000 rendered homeless. If a thousand bombers are flying over your city day after day and night after night your real estate values, not to mention your life expectancy, are going to be in the crapper. Berlin was mostly rubble after those raids. This might be disconcerting, demoralizing, even depressing. Yet the civilians fought on. The Siege of Leningrad. The civilians used sawdust to make bread. They licked wallpaper paste for calories. They stacked the dead next to the streets like we'd put the trash bin out for pickup. And they never, ever, stopped the arms factories in that city. A relative of mine joined the Hitler Youth in 1944 at age 15. Reason? They got food. He didn't care about Hitler or the Reich or even Berlin. He fought because he wanted to eat. No, civilian revolt is wishful thinking. What you can do is destroy the supply chain and fortifications. Destroy the factories (hard to do at that time, but it was the goal), make transport of materials and finished products difficult by destroying railways and roads, force them to spend resources on keeping the civilians and city protected (every AA gunner and gun is one less artilleryman and gun at the front, and the Army loves itself some artillery). Those guns defending Berlin weren't shooting at allied tanks and troops in France or Russia, which may be justification enough. More importantly every bomb that falls on the capital city makes the work of the infantryman taking that city easier, and reduces the ability of the government and military leadership in that city to exercise command and control (traditionally the taking of the capital ends hostilities, mainly because of the loss of C3). We would do well to consider how difficult such a decision must be, and perhaps to thank God we no longer have to make such decisions.

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    1. Well said, Dan!

      My father was part of the Berlin occupation forces from 1946 to 1949. He has photos of Berlin and the rubble you speak of, it was a mess.

      Very good points all around.

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