The bombing of Germany, from the book entitled, The Bombers and the Bombed, by Richard Overly.: On December 29, 1940, Germany dropped 100,000 bombs on the city of London. When London survived the blitz, the Bomber Command developed a new motto: Strike Hard, Strike Sure. Unlike the Luftwaffe (the German air force), The RAF (the Royal Air Force) would equip itself with a fleet of purpose-built strategic bombers, meaning that the first wave of bombs were built to destroy residential structures, followed by incendiaries to light the fires, and them more explosives to kill and injure fire crews. Then larger bombs would disrupt water and electrical distribution lines, as well as demolish factories.. The British Bomber Command intended on destroying 104 German cities, ranging from the metropolis of Berlin to the little town of Wittenberg, with the goal of killing 900,000 civilians, injuring 1,000,000 and leaving 25,000,000 people homeless. (In actuality, allied bombs killed at least 350,000 German civilians, 60,000 Italians, 53,000 French and 8,000 Dutch.) The American Air Force joined the British Royal Air Force in the autumn of 1943, and soon determined that the limits of high altitude bombing necessitated the obliteration of entire cities. Although fascist Italy, imperial Japan, and Nazi Germany had initiated terror bombing in the (late) 1930s, it was the democracies, not the dictatorships, that made long range attacks on the enemy home front a central instrument of war. Between 1040 and 1941, the German Luftwaffe (Air Force) concentrated on the Eastern European front, while dropping 57,000 tons ob high explosives and incendiaries on Britain, while the British and the Americans dropped over 1.6 million tons on Germany. Richard Overy, the author of The Bombers and the Bombed, and who also wrote Goering: The Iron Man (1984), and Interrogations: The Nazi Elite in Allied Hands, 1945 (2001) asserts that British bombing culminated in the indiscriminate devastation of Europes urban fabric late in the war, a rage of destruction symbolized by the firestorm that consumed the city of Dresden on February 13, 1945. The U.S. Air Force made a crucial contribution towards the end of the war by shooting the Luftwaffe out of the air in the spring of 1944, and targeting Germanys synthetic fuel plants. In spite of all the bombing by the British and the Americans, Richard Overy thinks that their bombing efforts were a failure, because the German armaments production didnt collapse after 1942, but rose to new heights by mid-1944. He credits the so-called armaments miracle to Albert Speer, Hitlers armaments minister and architectural impresario. However, allied efforts had been diverted to France, ahead of D-Day, and with the full weight of strategic air power renewed once more on Germany, from mid-1944, the Third Reichs productive system was rapidly destroyed. Once the balance of force shifted to the allies, it did so ...irrevocably. By the summer of 1944 German air defenses were in tatters, allied loss rates had plummeted, and the devastation wrought by the bombers was unprecedented. The disconnect between apparently wanton destruction and the supposed ineffectiveness of the bombers is the cornerstone of the moral critique of bombing that began to be voiced in the 1940s, and that has recently been revived by German historians such as Joerg Friedrich, in his dramatic book, The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940-1945, and by A.C. Grayling, in Among the Dead Cities. The question that Mr. Overly wishes to provoke is why this bloody, but ineffective campaign was continued at such great cost. It was, he seems to be suggestion, another instance of military folly, an aerial rerun of the attritional trench warfare of World War 1.
Posted on: Sat, 22 Mar 2014 03:16:10 +0000
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