Thank you XN923 – the intent of this thread is to discuss the intent of the campaign (which I note was then called the Combined Bomber Offensive – three words each with meaning you’ll note). An effect of this thread has been, as is too often the case, to stray towards the moral issues at hand.
I repeat my exhortation to all contributors to read Ashe’s analysis (Alertken’s recent post above). There is much more to it than the paragraph I excerpted. Explicitly he discusses the issues, of war at large and of the CBO in particular, arising in the targeting of morale, aiming for negative morale in the target and positive in those effecting the attack. He thoroughly discusses the vagaries of +ve/-ve morale in both parties and argues (to my mind conclusively) that the primary intent of the CBO was to influence morale. Other aspects were useful additional benefits. It is in my opinion the most thoughtful and incisive analysis I’ve read on this topic.
If we go right back to the Dambusters raid that kicked off this thread – we see the positive morale benefits of a daring, precision raid, and the intention that the damage to industrial capacity, to workers and their families, to the German population witnessing such daring competence, should have negative morale consequences to the defenders. That this didn’t occur is understandable – the attack was far from severe enough.
This last point is Ashe’s observation in the excerpt above – unless one strays perilously close to the point of overkill, it’s hard to significantly dent the defender’s morale. And as James noted above, this was both the intent and the effect of the atom bomb raids.
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