Literary corner...The Command of the Air

[larry marak]

I'm currently reading General Giulio Douhet's the Command of the Air, the 1942 translation by the U.S. Army Airforce (available on the web). He had both 20-20 hindsight on the causes of the deadlock in WWI (Infantry Attacks) and the shape of things to come (PG). He is best known as the advocate of the bomber as the decisive weapon of warfare "the bomber will always get through" but his insights into how successful campaigns in WW2 would need to be conducted are gripping. No better description of the essence of lightning war than "There is no doubt now that half of the destruction wrought by the war would have been enough {to end it} if it had been accomplished in three months instead of four years. A quarter of it would have been sufficient if it had been wrought in eight days". His book emphasised total war on the civilian population, and was carefully studied by Bomber Command and the Army Airforce and was applied systematically by both forces throughout the war. He believed that chemical and bacteriological warfare would be the dominant payload of the next war, and his fatal flaw was his underestimation of fighter interception of bombers. A great and Nostradamian read of a book finished in 1922.

[Dean_P]

I'm currently reading General Giulio Douhet's the Command of the Air, the 1942 translation by the U.S. Army Airforce (available on the web). He had both 20-20 hindsight on the causes of the deadlock in WWI (Infantry Attacks) and the shape of things to come (PG). He is best known as the advocate of the bomber as the decisive weapon of warfare "the bomber will always get through" but his insights into how successful campaigns in WW2 would need to be conducted are gripping. No better description of the essence of lightning war than "There is no doubt now that half of the destruction wrought by the war would have been enough {to end it} if it had been accomplished in three months instead of four years. A quarter of it would have been sufficient if it had been wrought in eight days". His book emphasised total war on the civilian population, and was carefully studied by Bomber Command and the Army Airforce and was applied systematically by both forces throughout the war. He believed that chemical and bacteriological warfare would be the dominant payload of the next war, and his fatal flaw was his underestimation of fighter interception of bombers. A great and Nostradamian read of a book finished in 1922.

I recently read Liddel Hart's "History of the Second World War" and he is very critical of the adoption of "the bomber will always get through" as a truism by the allies. Many years ago (before I really got into reading histories), I read a book about "Bomber Harris" which as I remember wasn't very flattering in that respect either. Tactical bombing was very effective on the battlefield, strategic not so much...

[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.

[JoeBuckeye]

Don't forget the Germans diverted massive resources into building up their air defenses to try to stop the allied bombers. This included pulling air units from the eastern front to defend the Reich.

[Shad]

You guys reminded me of this little story I ran across on Wikipedia a few weeks back:

Work of the American Operation Alsos teams, in November 1944, uncovered leads which took them to a company in Paris that handled rare earths and had been taken over by the Auergesellschaft. This, combined with information gathered in the same month through an Alsos team in Strasbourg, confirmed that the Oranienburg plant was involved in the production of uranium and thorium metals. Since the plant was to be in the future Soviet zone of occupation and the Russian troops would get there before the Allies, General Leslie Groves, commander of the Manhattan Project, recommended to General George Marshall that the plant be destroyed by aerial bombardment, in order to deny its uranium production equipment to the Russians. On 15 March 1945, 612 B-17 Flying Fortress bombers of the Eighth Air Force dropped 1,506 tons of high-explosive and 178 tons of incendiary bombs on the plant. Riehl visited the site with the Russians and said that the facility was mostly destroyed. Riehl also recalled long after the war that the Russians knew precisely why the Americans had bombed the facility — the attack had been directed at them rather than the Germans.

Emphasis mine.

Honestly, I find it impossible to visualize what such an attack must have looked like. That number of planes simply boggles the mind.