Literary corner...The Command of the Air

[larry marak]

Tactical bombing was very effective on the battlefield, strategic not so much...

Indeed Germany mastered the art of tactical bombing, their air/ground coordination was probably not surpassed during the second world war. However they did not develop the strategic bombing arm. The British and Americans did, and after many bloody years of poorly using it, they had turned it into an overwhelming success by war's end. Bombing never succeeded in causeing a morale collapse, but it did utterly destroy the industrial base, both in Germany and in Japan.

Wags have said that the U.K. would have been far better off in terms of productive competitiveness if its industrial structure had had to be rebuilt in 1945.