James, despite the length of your missives, I’m greatly enjoying reading every bit of this thread. European nations seem to place greater emphasis on the study of the past, for many different reasons… here in the US, we seem to delight in plowing under or glossing over what has gone before us. The budgetary struggles of the Smithsonian and other museums are testament to this. In fact, British comedian Eddie Izzard called this out in one of his more hilarious bits, making fun of our predisposition to fawn over structures that were FIFTY YEARS OLD!!! 🙂
Getting back to the topic at hand, I wholeheartedly agree that in order for us to have any kind of realistic understanding of what the Combined Bombing Offensive was intended to do, we absolutely must first examine it in the light of conventional wisdom at the time. I won’t be able to expound on it nearly as well as James and others, but I do want to throw the name Douhet into the mix. Many books and articles I’ve read from the 40s and early 50s that reference the bombing campaign mention Douhet’s theories about bombing being the key to winning the war. Now, I’ll fully admit I’ve not read a first-hand copy of what he had to say, but it’s my understanding that his principles were based on terrorizing the population and relying on that subsequent paralysis to bring a halt to armed conflict… bomb them into submission, in other words.
Douhet’s theories were formulated in the years immediately following WWI, which introduced the spectre of aerial bombardment to terrified people across the continent. I would dare say he took the Zeppelin raids on England far too seriously, perhaps relying on the breathless prose of contemporary papers for his opinion of how much impact the bombing raids actually had on the English populace. The raids were a shock, of course… nothing like it had ever happened before, “death from above” was strictly Biblical in their experience. Did the raids lead to a mass exodus from London or a sudden urge to capitulate, though? No, nothing of the sort took place.
But postwar writings by men such as Douhet gained favor with war-weary military planners and leaders across Europe… they wanted a way to win a war without the appallingly high personnel losses experienced in the last conflict, and Douhet’s theories provided them with that possibility. Is it any wonder, then, that the bomber fleet concept was embraced so wholeheartedly by those nations which could afford it (Germany, France, and England)?
Lynn
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