Bombing

As early as January 1941, U. S. Army Air Forces representatives in London, England, began conferring with their Royal Air Force counterparts about the possibility of waging large-scale strategic bombing campaigns against Nazi Germany in the World War II European theater. By that time British nighttime strategic bombing against German industrial targets involved area bombing of cities and industrial sectors to displace workers and the urban populations living there. The Americans, however, objected to such practices on a moral basis, preferring instead to use daylight precision raids against specific factories, which would cut down on collateral damage to civilians. The unexpected onset ofwar with Japan in December 1941 and the U. S. entry into World War II complicated American war planning, so it was not until August 17, 1943, that a force of 12 Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses, based in England, successfully struck the German marshaling yards of Sotteville-les-Rouen, France, and returned unscathed. The strategic campaign against the German heartland had commenced in earnest on August 13, 1943, when the U. S. Eighth Air Force massed two air groups to strike the aircraft factory at Regensburg and the critical ball bearing plant at Schweinfurt. Nearly 400 heavily armed B-17s were committed to combat, and they scored relatively good results, but tenacious resistance from German fighter and antiaircraft defenses knocked 60 of the giant bombers from the sky. A similar raid against Schweinfurt on October 14, 1943, brought the loss of another 60 aircraft. Given this staggering attrition, General Carl Spaatz suspended deep raids into Germany over the ensuing four months until large numbers of North American P-51

Mustang escort fighters, which could accompany bomber streams to Berlin and back, were deployed. Large-scale bombing resumed in January 1944, and this time Americans targeted oil production and transportation centers and urban areas, with crippling results to the defenders. By the time Germany surrendered in May 1945, large swaths of its industrial sector had been laid to waste by concerted British and American bombing, its air force was largely grounded due to lack of fuel, and its transportation net was almost completely shattered.

Operational conditions in the World War II Pacific THEATER represented new challenges in technology and logistics. Because of the vast distances involved, American strategic bombing of Japan did not materialize until August 1944, when a group of new Boeing B-29 Superfortresses flew from bases deep in China and hit the Yawata steel plants. Results from high-altitude bombing proved disappointing, largely because the Americans were unaware that a 200-mile-per-hour jet stream was directing their bombs off target. Sustained bombing efforts could not commence until the fall of the Mariana Islands in November 1944, which brought the B-29s much closer to their target. However, results from high altitude still proved unimpressive until a new commander, General Curtis E. LeMay, ordered his aircraft stripped of armament and sent in at low altitude, at night, with incendiary bombs. Results proved devastating, and the Tokyo raid of March 9-10, 1945, devastated large sections of the city, killing upwards of a half-million people. The tactic proved all the more devastating as Japanese housing construction was preponderantly of highly flammable wood. The Americans then enacted a sustained bombing effort of Japanese cities until the end of the war, although the Imperial government stubbornly refused to surrender. President Harry S. Truman, fearful of the casualties arising from a land invasion of the home islands, ordered two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, and Japanese authorities finally capitulated and ended the war.

On November 3, 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the United States Strategic Bombing Survey to analyze the aerial campaigns against Germany and Japan. Roosevelt, mindful of future developments, wanted to evaluate AIR PoWER as a component of military strategy and its role in future national defense planning. The scientifically collated results suggested that, while the bombing campaign gutted oil production, halted submarine production, and made decisive inroads on ammunition and truck procurement, it was hardly the panacea that aerial advocates had envisioned. Moreover, while bombing did make significant contributions to the fall of Germany and Japan, it was not decisive in and of itself and cannot be isolated from the general collapse of either nation.

Further reading: Tami D. Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare: The Evolution of British and American Ideas about Strategic Bombing, 1914-1945 (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 2002); Herman Knell, To Destroy a City: Strategic Bombing and Its Human Consequences (Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2003).

—John C. Fredriksen