Talk:Strategic bombing

From the article:

For instance, the Stratgic bombing survey? conducted by the United States after World War II determined that German industrial production had risen every year of the war despite strategic bombing. Although designed to "break the enemy's will", the opposite often happens.

I'd really like to see some backup of this claim. -- ansible

I wrote this short piece while working on Dr. Strangelove. Of course, it is considerably more complicated than that. It appears that German production went up every year of the war until late 1944-45 despite strategic bombing. In part, this was because the Germans did not seriously ramp up production until 1942, or so. That is, they were well under capacity until after the invasion of Russia. Still, production in most sectors continued to rise. There was a great deal of difference from industry to industry. The collapse in 1945 was so total that it is difficult to know what portion to attribute to the bombing and what to other factors. I will edit the piece a little to reflect this further research, and also link the survey itself.

The stuff about morale holds up pretty well.

Even when I beef up the article a little, this will still be only a stub, which is all I intended to provide. Others are welcome to continue. Ortolan88 19:22 Aug 6, 2002 (PDT)

Of course, I've got to wonder what would have happened to German production figures if there had been no strategic bombing at all during WWII. Would it have gone up even higher? The Allies won the war by vastly out-producing the Axis countries. Consider tank warfare in the European theater.

The German Tiger was quite superior to the American Sherman and the USSR T-34 tanks. I've seen 5 to 1 kill ratios vs. the Sherman quoted a couple times. The thing was that the the Allies were producing 10x as many tanks by 1944. If the Germans had something close to parity in numbers, they would have pushed the Allies back out of continental Europe.

These are not exact figures, BTW, don't quote me on it.

At any rate, this article is going to need to address such points, namely that there isn't as much scientific evidence as we'd like.

I happen to agree with you on the morale bit, however.

Just wanted to give y'all something to chew on. - 2002/9/11, Ansible

The low rate of German production up to 1942 is probably more meaningful than any growth after 1942. How weird is it that they really didn't seem to take the war seriously, even after their dopey invasion of the Soviet Union?

Adding these links here for convenience of me and Ansible and anyone else interested:

• Strategic bombing survey -- umbrella stub
• Strategic bombing survey (Europe) -- pretensions of being more than a stub
• Strategic bombing survey (Pacific War) -- stub
• Strategic bombing survey (Atomic attacks) -- stub
• Bombing of Dresden in World War II -- includes stuff about David Irving's lying inflation of casualty figures and Kurt Vonnegut's personal involvement.

Obviously plenty remains to be done. Ortolan88 16:11 Sep 12, 2002 (UTC)

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The following period is grammatically difficult: "Because of the controversial nature of deliberating [deliberately?] bombing civilian targets, the United States military has in more recent wars attempted to minimize the negative publicity associate [associated?] with such bombing campaigns."
S.

The edit I just did is a little sloppy: I must try to get back to it and replace broad assertions with the exact figures (e.g., the actual proportion of British bombs that fell outside the five mile "on target" limit), and also tighten it up a little, probably cutting the length of the section I added a little. But not tonight.

On the Gulf War, I removed "although in fact civilian casualties were high during the bombing campaign of that war". Before this statement goes back in it needs to say "high" by what standard of comparison. Tannin

Excuse me while I bend the rule about "no debate" a little to respond to some comments in this talk page. Ansible doubts that German industrial production rose despite strategic bombing. This is an abundantly well-established fact: sources are leigon. Second, the suggestion that "the Allies won the war by vastly out-producing the Axis". Well, if you ignore the Soviet Union, perhaps so. It would be equally true (and equally misleading) to say that "The Soviet Union won the war by replacing casualties faster than the Axis", or "The Alies won the war by developing better technology than the Axis" (Radar, the Mustang, the Lancaster, the proximity fuse, and so on) or "Hitler lost the war by failing to organise his scientific and industrial effort effectively". And so on. Single explanations are rarely very useful. And on tanks, the German tanks were indeed superior to the Sherman and the Churchill, but were by no means superior to the rugged, effective, powerful T-34 and the IS1/IS2.

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Some military strategists believe that strategic bombing has become more effective and less likely to cause civilian casualties with the advent of precision guided munitions. The effectiveness of strategic bombing is without question -- it was used in Kosovo to force the capitulation of the Serbian army (without using any ground forces). Chadloder 11:57 Jan 24, 2003 (UTC)

Yes, Chadloder. Kosovo seems to me to have signalled an entirely new period in air warfare, and (for the first time in history) strategic bombing has more-or-less entirely lived up to the claims of its proponents. Tannin

I added quite a large expansion/re-write just now. I need to come back and relate it more directly to the topic, and flesh out more stuff, esp the American role in WW2, the Asian campaigns in the mid 20th century (Malaya, Vietnam), other prominent pre-war theorists like Mitchell and Douhet. Lots of work still to do! But I'm going to take a break from it for a few hours. If anyone feels like taking any of this on in the meantime, or just adding links and tidying up my new text, go right ahead! Tannin 00:07 Jan 26, 2003 (UTC)

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I like what you've added, although I think the original 1st paragraph was a little bit more concise. "Strategic bombing is a ..." is better than "Strategic bombing aims to ...". I just finished "Waging Modern War" by Gen. Wesley Clark, he talks a lot about the process of waging (and justifying) the Kosovo strategic bombing campaign, including why certain decisions were made and what the results were. I also want to read about the other side of the conflict, I hear that Kosovo: War and Revenge by Tim Judah is a good place to start. Chadloder 01:15 Jan 26, 2003 (UTC)

Tim Judah hardly represents the 'other side', for one he supported the bombing. Maybe you should try "Strategy of Deception" by Paul Virilio. --Igor 3:45, Sep 22, 2003 (UTC)

Yes. I had huge difficulties writing that opening para, and I'm not happy with it either. The original one, however, had its own problems. It said, essentially, "strategic bombing is a strategy of bombing". Not much help. The trouble is, there are two conficting goals here. On the one hand, we are supposed to put "strategic bombing" on the first line of the entry. On the other hand, SB is a difficult concept to understand at the best of times, and it really only makes sense to define it in terms of what it is not - i.e., strategic bombing is bombing that is not tactical bombing, and (arguably) not bombing that is just mindless city destruction either - that last is not so much a strategy as it is an admission that all our strategies have failed and we don't know what else to do. Maybe it's time to try a dictionary definition instead?

On the Kosovo lessons, Chadloder, it sounds as though you are the best equipped among us to write that up. I mostly just try to get my mind around the period 1789 to 1945 and am weak on modern history/current events. I gather that Blimpguy is going to do a little bit on the Zepplin raids in WW1 (the first true strategic bombing). It looks as though this entry is going to get rather too long and will need to be spilt up eventually. Worry about that when the time comes, I guess. Tannin

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The article is much improved over my skimpy beginning (which still lurks here and there in the new article), but the paragraphs are way too long but quite easy to break up. I just did so, but got tromped by an edit conflict and retreated. If they remain long as they are, great oceans of type being hard on the reader, I will break them up later. Ortolan88

OK, I'm going to get tromped on this one, so I won't put up a fight, but just for the record, I firmly believe that paragraphs should contain meaning - "one thought, one paragraph".

Yes, it is acceptable to break really long paras up to provide the eye with some rest, but this modern madness for ultra-short paras makes it very difficult to follow any but the simplest of discussions. Paragraph breaks provide text with structure. Having too many is just as bad as not having any - either way, the reader is left with no typographical hints to help her organise the message in her mind.

A much better way to make text readable (which doesn't work on paper but works great here) is to sprinkle links here and there through it. Provided they are not so overdone as to be distracting, the visual anchor points of coloured links help the reader keep her place or flick back to double-check on a previous point - which is also easier to find, both because the links help make each paragraph look distinctive, and because without all those space-hogging paragraph breaks there is a good deal more text on the screen and she doesn't have to go scrolling around looking for things.

But that's just for the record. I'm fully aware that in this semi-illiterate TV network age, few of the people who can still read agree with me. (I don't call being able to decipher a tabloid headline "reading", by the way.) Just hand me my walking frame and my slippers, officer, and I'll come quietly. Tannin

Why not wait until I ruin it to complain? All I did, and will do again, is read along in a paragraph until I found a second topic sentence and inserted two cr/lfs. Nothing more. Books can have long paragraphs. Newspaper articles should have very short ones. Online encyclopedias fall somewhere in between, but it is a matter of eye fatigue, visual span, support of page scanning, etc., and not the simplemindedness of the reader or the wickedness of the age. Another thing that helps in this regard is regular crossheads. Ortolan88

Fair enough. Tannin

"Although designed to "break the enemy's will", the opposite often happens. The British did not crumble under the German Blitz and other air raids early in the war. German workers continued to work throughout the war and food and other basic supplies were available throughout."

Shouldn't that be "British workers continued..." ? Omegatron 06:43, 26 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Tactical and Strategic Bombing

There seems to be some amount of confusion in this article between tactical and strategic bombing. If someone else wants to go through it, they're welcome to, but the article needs to be cleaned up and better definied. Stargoat 12:12, 15 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Image:TrangBang.jpg

I don't think we can make a case for fair use for the Pulitzer Prize winning photo by Nick Ut with AP of Kim Phuc running from bombs. Ut's life was on the line and AP paid to have him there. They are entitled to whatever royalties they can get unless they have released the photo to the public domain. Further, [1] (http://www.vwam.com/vets/myth.html) says VNAF did the bombing, not the U.S. -- ke4roh 17:44, Jul 13, 2004 (UTC)

This photograph is obviously fair use. It's all over the Internet, hosted by multiple news agencies and universities. Furthermore, if you were to read the article, you would see if doesn't say that the US did the bombing. The photograph alone was enough the point. Stargoat 21:29, 13 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Please see follow-up at Image_talk:TrangBang.jpg.

Or rather Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Image:TrangBang.jpg -Joseph 20:01, 2004 Aug 7 (UTC)

Israeli strategic bombing during six day war and yom kippur war

Neither this article nor any of the referenced articles seem to contain information on this. Can somebody please add a reference of some sort. I would be interested in learning more about this. --Jsolinsky 20:37, 29 May 2005 (UTC)