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@@shaider1982 NO, 'we' don't need a parasite making money with Bismark's work. Reaction youtuber are parasites that often make more money with a little bit of blah blah than the one who made the original video. One youtuber spends days, weeks or even months on a 40 minute video and a reaction youtuber does a 50 minute video or stream in which he talked full 8 minutes and gets 3 times the views/watchtime... 🤢🤮
US Navy and US Air force politics has ensured that the US Army doesn't have good SAM systems or long range SAM systems and that is SRBM missiles are very limited.
Another book of interest to this subject was published in 1910: HG Wells' "The War in the Air". It postulates a (then future) war in which airships are able to travel long distances and devastate 'enemy' cities with aerial bombardments. But while they are able to do this, and destroy centres of industry, they are of course unable to carry the massive number of troops required to occupy these 'conquered' territories. The result, rather than victory for any side, is a complete collapse of organised civilisation, all authority collapses, and the novel ends positively with common people rebuilding society from the ground up. Possibly not one of his best known novels, but I thoroughly recommend it.
Combine that with Ian Castle's trilogy: Zeppelin Onslaught: The Forgotten Blitz 1914-1915 Zeppelin Inferno: The Forgotten Blitz 1916 (3rd book covering 1917 yet to be published)
@@vascoespañol : Arguably, the ground force being multiplied in the case of the Nagasaki atomic bomb strike was the Soviet army invading Japanese occupied Manchuria.
Strategic Effect =/= Strategic Victory A very good summation of the difference between airpowers' long range strategic effects and its inability to create a strategic victory. Gonna steal this differentiation now. Excellent work Chris.
We easily could have wiped out both Germany and Japan solely with strategic bombing. They would have ran out of population long before we ran out of bombs.
I used to wonder how factories in WW2 could often return to production so quickly after being bombed. Now that I'm older and know more about industrial machines, it doesn't surprise me that many of these machines are such heavy metal beasts that they can be bombed but still be easily fixable.
Of course, many bombs simply missed their targets. The few bombs that did strike the target were too light to penetrate the plants' concrete roofs. Incendiary bombs were countered by fire breaks constructed around industrial facilities. Today's bombs are engineered to be much more accurate and punch through thick concrete - for example, see photos of the aircraft hangars in Iraq.
I bet using area denial weapons would render those industrial machines useless for a good while without destroying them. Drop bombs filled with anthrax spores onto a factory and let's see how willing the workers are to return to work lol.
@@SansSentiments most of the V1 and V2 rockets missed their intended targets but yes that coild have created a mess. A lot of resources would have been sucked into decontamination efforts in Britain. But the response by the allies would have been worse. The brits did a good job at locating and destroying German chemical weapon sites. The relentless British bombing made it difficult for the Germans to mass produce and store large amounts of chemicals like tabun.
@@SansSentiments and the British had a larger bioweapons program they extensively tested anthrax munitions. The Germans focused more on chemicals agents like tabun and sarin
The issue of strategic bombing has always been and will always be the supposition that given enough casualties the enemy will be forced into the surrender. This ignores that in many cases, influxes of casualties, especially seeming wanton disregard for life, can embolden an enemy into continued fighting. Even in the ideal situation of an unwilling populace and forceful dictatorship, strategic bombing is just not a good strategy for defeating an enemy. It only ever makes sense as an auxiliary to attritional warfare.
@@Batmans_Pet_Goldfish In that case youre not doing "classic" strategic bombing. Military strategies are about what you are doign to achieve what kind affect after all.
I would argue that the issue of strategic bombing isn't that it can embolden the enemy. The issue is that the level of civilian casualties actually necessary to force an enemy state to surrender is so high as to constitute a genocide (if it's even possible in the first place). In other words, if you want your strategic bombing campaign to work, you'd better be ready to kill almost everyone. That's kind of a hard sell to civilians and soldiers who want to see themselves as good-guy liberators. It also means that strategic bombing has no range of escalation. You're either not bombing at all, or you have to jump straight to Exterminatus. Because the middle-ground is just a waste of time and resources, and may even be counter-productive.
@TBot Alpha No people suffering a genocide have ever surrendered. This makes no sense. When the enemy is supposedly trying to wipe you out, the only reasonable response is to fight tooth and nail and do so viciously. Make the enemy pay dearly for their crimes to make them stop.
@@bloodfiredrake7259 well, who talked about surrendering, only feasible way of a pure victory through airpower is to devastate the enemy population on such a scale that enemy will simply have not enough civilians to conscript into army or maintain war industry, this obviously requires enough disregard of human life to make putin look like a nobel winning human rights activist.
It seems that one thing is certain: strategic bombing opened up a possibility of a terrifying level of unbridled mass destruction, nigtmarish escalation of warfare with unimaginable levels of indiscriminate killing and maiming, largely blurring the distinction between combatants and non-combatants, a ghastly image of a war with no prospect of ending in any meaningful victory, which always remains outside of reach and in its place only a vicious circle of war of utter destruction, extermination, attrition and death remains: airborne genocide. With the introduction of nuclear weapons, all of this was elevated to an insane level of global overkill: a situation in which there could be no one to sue for peace or to make peace with or to claim strategic victory for that matter. In the case of asymmetric destruction, in which one party has been able to inflict disproportionately more damage, casualties and degradation of military forces on the other (a historical example approaching this situation would be Japan at the end of WWII), one might argue that a result with a deceiving appearance of a "strategic victory" is possible (assuming no third parties aiding and abetting the losing side): even though the losing side cannot be coerced to admit defeat, the war of destruction/eradication would continue and would result in an annihilation of a nation's military, economic, cultural and demographic capacities. For the sake of clarity, we might call this "strategic suppression of a beligerent", but such an euphemism cannot hide the ugly truth: this could only be wanton destruction as an end in itself and no one can justify such evil.
You know, its kinda funny, how WW2 truly ended with nukes (though it wasnt nukes that defeated Japan). But the true and long lasting victory of America, and the allies, was that they managed to turn Japan, just as Germany, into an ally.
War should be about the unrestricted total destruction of the enemy. Western complacency will be the death of us all one of these days. >For the sake of clarity, we might call this "strategic suppression of a beligerent", but such an euphemism cannot hide the ugly truth Genocide should always be an option.
It would be somewhat interesting to take the various prognostications about the tonnage of bombs required to induce an enemy to surrender and convert that to the equivalent length of an artillery bombardment with the common artillery of the day. Yes, there's the issue that the artillery would first have to fight its way into range of the targets -- but especially some of the interwar theorists I suspect have anticipated tonnages so low that they are, in effect, saying 'a brisk 5 minutes of shelling their major cities is all it'd take to end the war'.
That's been my beef with Douhet. Something like 50 tons TNT on an enemy capitol. Most people were still thinking about Gas being involved, which heightens the investment in the doctrine.
@@mikhailiagacesa3406 : To put Douhet in context, research the psychological effect of the German Zeppelin night bombing of London during WW1, and the Gotha night bombing later in the war.
G'day, Yay Team ! Not only but also, He spelled it with an "O". Whereas, clearly, the term is actually, "Independant Air FARCE..." Let us call a Shovel a Metal-bladed, wooden-handled Digging-Implement ; which if used Commercially, For Hire & Reward, are known as "Idiot-Sticks" Acknowledging the capabilities and accuity of the person swinging it. Air FARCE, it IS, Indeed. Such is life. ;-p Ciao !
@@WarblesOnALot The true "idiot stick" is a rock bar, a tall heavy rod with a pointy end; you lift it up and drop it on rocks or hard dirt to break the surface. Shovels, by comparison, take much skill and dexterity. "Rock bar" is the local name; I imagine it has quite a few variations.
@@grizwoldphantasia5005 G'day, Thanks for that. Your Rock Bar is what we in Oz call a Crow Bar... I have no idea why they are called that. Crow Bars exclusively for Rock Breaking have Pointy ends and straight Handles. Those for Fence-Construction, Post-Hole Digging and Railway-Line Fettling have a 2-inch-wide Edge on the End of an 8-inch long Wedge-profile Chisel-Blade at one end of a 6-foot Shaft an inch in diameter featuring a Flat-ended 3-inch "Mushroom" Head an inch thick at the other end - for Ramming Earth or Cutting Dirt/Rocks, OR levering Sleepers and Rails into position. Crow Bars are NOT Idiot-Sticks.. I was quoting Robert Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" Copyright 1976 (?). A Science Fiction Classic, featuring a character , Lazarus Long, Who states, "There were times when I Took a Job working an Idiot-Stick...; that's A wooden handle with a metal blade At one end and an Idiot Working the Handle...." It's in, 'The Notebooks of Lazarus Long". Just(ifiably ?) sayin', Have a good one... Stay safe. ;-p Ciao !
I still think a whole lot of people in the comments have missed the main and crucial point presente almost at the start of the video. No one is saying that strategic bombing is useless, the point is that strategic bombing doesn't win wars by itself. Some people in the comments seem to think that the video is saying that the bombing of Germany or Japan had no effect, but what it is saying is that it wasn't gonna win the war.
That's as redundant of a statement as: "soldiers cant win wars on their own. They need tanks and planes too" Like no shit, you can't win wars solely by bombing people.
Oh boy! As someone who's been involved in primary research on this subject, I'm happy to see one of my favourite channels covering it :) I think to me, the most interesting area that is worth studying is not so much whether strategic bombing failed or not, but the rhetorical walls built around the myth of the bomber. Things like the infamous Cherwell paper - despite having been proven so wrong even by their contemporaries - have kept their power; personalities like Harris or LeMay are still lionized to this day. Especially when you go into any popular history platform, they'll still have their fans, decades after they died (unrepentant of their doctrines to the end). It's interesting to note, too, that at least among historians - I've never heard any of the critics of strategic bombing suggest that it was somehow unimportant, inconsequential, not worth studying. Far from. It's a subject that deserves a lot of attention. But not the sort of worship and reverence it seems to get from some quarters. I'm a bit worried that whenever the Spielberg-produced "The Mighty Eighth" comes out, however it interprets that part of the war, we'll have a whole new explosion of rage from the voices who, unfortunately, still believe that strategic bombing worked (or works).
I would differentiate between targeting key industry & infrastructure in like bridges, port installations, powerplants, oil &heavy industry on the one side and on the other side civilian population centers. Destruction or Suppression of Industry and Infrastructure clearly can be a deciding factor in done cost-effective, while attacking population centers can strengthen the resolve of the enemy, breaks the Hague Convention and is harder to do in a cost effective manner. The suppression of German oil refineries clearly had great effect in WW2 even though they still produced till the end (with 80+% less throughput).
@@leonfa259 there is a serious argument to be made that strategic bombing of refineries was ineffective, when you consider the sheer number of planes and number of bombs that it took to keep even 1 refinery at 20%. Imagine if that productive capacity had gone to tactical bombing instead.
@@jacksonmagas9698 It kept the Luftwaffe down and strongly decreased the Heeres mobility and combat power. Bombing accuracy was abysmal back then. It shouldn't be forgotten that the first 50% of capacity went pretty quickly, with the first large mission.
@@FlameQwert For, bridges, refineries and key factories it can still be cost effective. In war nothing is cheap, to shot a plane down by flak took it's weight in ammunition, per day the UDSSR lost on average 75 tanks and 6.500 solideres. A refinery is a target worth billions or tens of billions in today's money, and is essential for the opposing sides war effort. The scale of war is hard to imagine or comprehend.
I think it is important to also realize that even with the over-touted Norden bombsight there really was little accuracy at hitting specific targets like a military factory, especially at night which was safer for the airplanes but without our current IR tech also highly inaccurate. Even through Vietnam we just didn't have the abilities we have today with GPS and CCD/IR type electronics tech, cruise missiles, etc, to do anything other than what in Vietnam would be considered "carpet bombing". "Quantity has a quality all its own" is true in some ways, it just might not be in a way that wins you anything meaningful in the longer term.
There were issues with it,and only the leading aircraft made some effort in using it. When it dropped the bombload, so did everyone else behind it. With the spread of the typical large formations of bombers and the attitude they were flying the "precession" bombing was in practice area bombing. Drop enough kaboom in an area and statically some of it will be likely to hit a target within that area
I once read an interesting article published in 1999, called "Kosovo: The Limits of Air Power", following NATO's strategic air campaign in Yugoslavia, and how it failed to stop the JNA from committing genocides across the unraveling country. After the Gulf war, it was theorised by airpower advocates that strategic bombing defeated the Iraqis, effectively omitting the contribution of the ground campaign, what was also omitting was the air campaign prior to Desert Storm, coalition air forces tried to use strategic bombing using precision guided bombs, it was believed that technology had progress so far, there was no longer a need for ground troops, however, the air campaign was a letdown, and it was in Yugoslavia this lesson was learned the hard way. Just like in Iraq, the air forces targeted military installations, weapons factories, and government buildings, but failed to bomb the JNA, which was deployed in the field away from strategic value targets, thus left them unopposed to carry out ethnic cleansing. NATO put all of its hopes on airpower, thinking a ground offensive would be unnecessary, because Serb forces would give up since their assets were destroyed, it didn't work, as the Serb ground troops were left intact, and it was the civilian population that paid the price for this failure. The article argued that if NATO sent ground troops to the Balkans, it would have done more to prevent JNA ethnic cleansing, the airpower advocates argued strategic bombing would prevent a blood land campaign, unfortunately, it was the civilians who paid this bloody price, overwhelmed and outgunned by a genocidal enemy.
Let’s just acknowledge what Kosovo was Bill Clinton trying to gain in the polls while not committing ground troops in a disastrous way following the terrible blunder in Somalia (Black Hawk Down) . The Slavs do not look favorably upon this period. There was a lot of propaganda by Clinton Administration to villainize genocide in Europe while turning a blind eye to Rwanda.
@@The_Modeling_Underdog you do know that is UNPROFOR and not NATO right? Those two are completely different thing and even than they are not completely useless, they did manage to protect some civilians from time to time like in the siege of Gorazde and Zepa
@@The_Modeling_Underdog Not NATO but the individual countries that were part of it and regardless of that command of the dutch forces was still under UNPROFOR and not NATO. Still NATO should've sent an actual ground force to support the air campaign and differently from the comment above I would really hesitate to call the air campaign unsuccessful. It could've been more successful sure but it wasn't a failure.
Airpower may not win wars by itself, but it can facilitate that goal by disrupting the enemy's production, transportation, and energy infrastructure through the process of attrition. In the end though, wars are won by boots on the ground. not by planes in the air. The Second World War in Europe was only over when the Soviets and their Western Allies were able to walk over Germany. With Allied troops occupying Berlin defeat was an inescapable fact nobody could deny.
@@doodlebug1820 The war was won in two weeks. It is not the army's fault that the politicians could not realize the victory in creating a modern society.
Bernard I think you may enjoy a TED Talk from 11 years ago by Malcolm Gladwell, about the Norden Bombsight. While he's obviously not an academic on military science, I think he has an interesting philosophical point that the issue with air bombing isn't whether we can hit a target, but actually finding said target and whether or not bombs ought to be used at all. I think the latter point ties in very well with you briefly mentioning that warfare is, afterall, an extension of politics (as I believe Clausewitz said). My mother's uncle was a civilian contractor on the Ho-Chi Minh Road during the Vietnam War. He drove a truck for the PLA and was in Laos when the US decided to flatten the country. A bomb exploded in front of his truck but miraculously, the engine block caught the blast and shrapnel so he lived. He quit after that and went back home to Shanghai.
I would also say that much of the ineffectiveness of strategic bombing for destroying the enemy's ability to fight (as opposed to their willingness to fight) came from the lack of precision guided weapons. Destroying one factory could only be guaranteed by a massive raid of hundreds of bombers, with all the attendant losses to enemy air defenses. This greatly reduced the cost/benefit ratio of strategic bombing. But once you get to the point where a few strike aircraft can take out the same factory by using precision bombs (or it can be done remotely by missiles), I think it makes strategic attacks (on industrial base, on fuel supplies, etc.) much, much more viable.
When you can sent strike craft after strategic infrastructure to do the bombing, you are either are mopping up a low tech adversary or your proper adversary is already fubar since you obviously have air superiority. either way, its sealclubbing.
The Atom Bomb didn‘t deliver strategic victory, either. The Japanese leadership was going to offer terms before they dropped and they had no viable defense against an invasion. The biggest additional factor was the Soviet Invasion of Manchuria (which wiped out most of what remained of the Japanese army in a week). The war-winning effect of the Atomic Bombs is kind of a sacred cow for American published opinion, which is understandable given the implications but this does not change the reality.
Lol of course it was the destruction of the mainland army that scared the Japanese fighting to the last, not the weapons being more powerful than anything that had come before.
@@ВладиславВладислав-и4ю yes, because it was their last Army and they were scared shitless about a communist invasion of Japan; this isn‘t some big speculation, either, all their internal and embassy correspondence from the time confirms this, so it‘s actually kind of silly to deny it. But of course, the Americans continue to because anything else would make them look bad.
@@raylast3873 That's why the Japanese surrendered to the Americans to be under American occupation, not because they were afraid of the Soviet army. So tell the truth, not your red fiction.
WW2 - the Axis bombing campaign didn't stop Britain, and the Allied bombing campaign didn't stop Germany. The central idea (destroying your enemy's ability to produce munitions in its factories, combined with a demoralising terror) just never worked, though it clearly did have an effect on the Axis' ability to prolong the war. Ultimately, it took ground troops (Russian) to bring it all to an end. A greater tonnage of bombs was dropped on Vietnam than in the whole of WW2, and still didn't produce the theoretical result. Yet the theory still persisted - thanks for such a well-reasoned look into 'why'.
The problem with the early airpower theorists is that they believed bombing enemy cities would be a short cut to victory. They ignored the fact that in order to achieve victory one has to destroy the enemy's armed forces first. Douhet and his compatriots felt that once the enemy's civilian population were subjected to terror bombing, they would force their government to make peace. They ignored the idea that this form of bombing might have the opposite effect to the one intended. When it was found that terror bombing actual drove people into arms of their government, they did not change their strategy to conform to this new reality, but threw good money after bad by doubling down on a strategy that was failing miserably.
In a way, some things we bombed did not further the effect, but also worsened the fighting in ways. It sort of hardened the German defensive when we were bombing innocent cities by now every man and child civilian that could hold a gun also joined the fight just to try to fight the Allies off and live because they feared they would be victims of the US bombers next. Destroying all those cities also did not help but actually hindered the ground forces due to the rubble
@@NRProductionss with what oil the germans were meant to run tanks or planes? After 1941 they couldn't even do an offensive with more than half of army group
In the case of German cities in late WW2, many of the workers who were working in factories, maintaining their war machine (which was killing millions each year), lived in those cities near industrial areas. It raises a very interesting question regarding who is and isn't a civilian in that regard. German cities were basically war-extending cogs for the German machine. There comes a point where you have to take a balanced view of what that actually means. That whole war was hell on Earth and trying to end it as quickly as possible was a valid stance, however we may personally feel 80 years later with our modern outlook.
This channel is so good. The most important period for me is June through December 1950 during the Korean war. It was the first campaign of the USAF (FEAF) and in only a few months of lobbying they were able to shift US doctrine from precision military targeting into carpet firebombing of civilians. The wiki article 'Bombing of North Korea' is a sobering but excellent overview. And as this video explained, it impacted US doctrine for 25 years until the exit from Vietnam.
In Korea they had just under 100 B-29’s. Unlike the bombing campaign against the Japanese home islands many personnel at Kadena and Tokyo were experienced veterans. They did hit their targets. Centers of patterns within 180’ and 220’ of center of target. They just ran out of targets in a few months. Bombing gravel runways and rail yards, with 50% of bombs time delay. Bombing the third or fifth replacement pontoon bridge on the Yalu. So the planners sent them against the cities. Magnesium based rods by the hundreds of thousands. Closely built Asian towns and cities, largely built of wood. I’ll add. Of course there were many low hours personnel. A whole raft of Air Force 2nd Lieutenant co-pilots, just out of the Army or Naval academies flew. I mean there were adequate numbers of experienced pilots, bombardiers, and navigators to be core of the lead crews.
The "potential" of bombardment is what deters attack and wins a war. The Allies had to wait until the Luftwaffe was reduced to a manageable level before their landing craft could dare crossing the channel to the beaches of Normandy. The bombing by the Allies of German targets in Germany accomplished two critical goals to meet this end. They forced aircraft manufacturing underground or to be scattered as well as hampered the transportation of manufacturing materials. It also lured war planes Germany otherwise would have had available on D-Day out of their protected areas and into the air where the Allies increasingly superior aircraft could shoot them down. That being said, it's hard to justify much of the intentional taking of civilian lives. My analysis is that Churchill was not well advised on the effect toward winning the war civilian deaths would play. Given Churchill's regular and copious alcohol consumption, perhaps he made the decisions on targeting civilians when he was soused. But other times (maybe during a sober moment) he expressed regret upon seeing the reports of civilians killed).
in short,it's basically long-range airborne artillery and psychological warfare, to aid in shelling targets relatively precisely at ranges that is impossible to hit with either landbased artillery or the main battery of any big gun battleship
That was timely for me. I just recently read The Battle of the Atlantic by Jonathan Dimbleby. He argues that victory in the Atlantic was delayed because Bomber Command refused to devote long range bombers to what they saw as a defensive role of protecting vital convoys. They continually argued that the bombing campaign by itself could defeat the Axis, and that resources taken away from it would only delay that final victory. They were supported in that view by Churchill, who, even if he wasn't completely convinced, could point to the bombing campaign as an alternative to the Second Front that the Soviets so desperately wanted. It took a long time for them to be convinced to release bombers for any other purpose. While the author mentions other innovations as important, he considers the decision to finally devote air resources to convoy protection as being the turning point of the Battle of the Atlantic. In making his argument, though, I think he perhaps goes a bit further than necessary in his disdain for the bombing campaign. Obviously, it couldn't achieve strategic victory as some believed, but did it have strategic effect (as you say)? How important was it to the victory on the ground? Did it have value to the war effort, or was it nothing more than an attempt to terrorize the enemy and vent the Allies' anger at them for starting the war?
I suspect the bombing campaign on Germany was a bit of both. There was certainly a strategic effect, but it came at a high cost, and was certainly partially venting anger at Germany, though not entirely. I think the reality in WW2 though, was that this level of bombing had never really been tried before, so at the time they probably didn’t have the full picture. Some examples of strategic effects was destruction of specialised factories(I.e. special glue factories, steelworks(e.g. shortage of effective alloys for aero engines, tanks etc… was contributed to by air bombing) etc…, mass waste of resources for a country that was fairly limited in this regard, mass usage of anti-air guns that could’ve been used in Eastern Europe, North Africa, Italy, France etc… and thousands of men to crew them, along with airmen and aircraft tied up defending Germany. So yeah there were definitely some, but the hopes of some in bomber command that it would knock out Germany was incorrect.
The cost of the bombing campaign was huge, but people always overlook the toll it took on Germany aside from just making craters. Vast amounts of resources were spent in response to it - night fighters, flak towers, submarine pens, underground factories, as well as the increasingly desperate attempts at creating the Wunderwaffe that would stop the tide of bombers. Politically it shattered the average citizen's belief of an unstoppable, indestructible Germany, and was an endless source of embarassment for Hitler and the Luftwaffe command.
Germany's power grid was much more vulnerable than realized. One estimate is that if just 1% of the bombs dropped on German industry had instead been dropped on power plants German industry would have collapsed.
@@puff7145 An endless source of embarrassment that never changed their mind. They clearly believed the war was winnable up till the end - foolish lies they told themselves? Doesn't matter, they were going to fight to the end. The other stuff you mention sounds impactful but clearly, given how long the bombing campaign continued, it was not going to end the war. Hell, it didn't even stop them from working and fighting. So the question becomes, do all the resources (material and human) spent on adapting to _strategic bombing_ change how the war was ultimately won? Boots on the ground, in the streets. Maybe? I don't think so, once the Allies landed in France and Russia joined the effort. It's hard to imagine all of those resources being enough to prevent the inevitable outcome... because here's the thing: Team-Hitler wasn't ever going to surrender, no truce was possible. When faced with defeat, he chose death.
After seeing this video discuss strategic effect, I remember something a veteran officer from my country's army mentioned when commenting on the Ukrainian war last year regarding Russia targeting civilians in Ukraine. He said how it was something not unexpected despite the media buzz surrounding it that painted it as a shocking crime. He said that it was something normal that most armies are trained to do and will never stop considering simply out of humanitarian grounds due to logical utility. Targeting civilians is often done for the purpose of demoralizing the enemy, which Russia did when they faced harsh resistance from the Ukrainians. Shock and Awe in Iraq also had similar goals in mind with strikes on civilians being deliberate.
End of the day you haven't won a war until you have infantry in their cities. Even they navy as a whole serves this purpose by ensuring safe transport if men, equipment and supplies while limiting the enemies access to those same things. They remain a separate branch because of the different expertise required to preform their job, same as the airforce. "Moral" bombing was and remains a useless waste of resources. To actually succeed at strategic bombing you need to hit targets of strategic value like factories, railroads, fuel refineries and equipment depots. Dropping bombs on civilian houses is pointless unless your goal is just to piss people off. While the airforce has every reason to be its own branch in modern times any actual study shows they were born much too early for any role beyond recon and interception.
People say that bombing Germany and Japan into submission didn't work and that it only strengthened their resolve to resist... yet the Allies faced no German or Japanese insurgency. After that, more precise bombing was adopted where targets were selected more discriminately and cities were no longer simply bombed into rubble. And the U.S. has faced more and more determined insurgencies as they became more discriminate in bombing. I think the idea that bombing your enemy into rubble doesn't work is a lie. I think it's a lie we tell ourselves because we just don't want to do it. We don't want to repeat the firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo or the atom bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki because those were atrocious and horrifying things. We don't want to do those things to win, so we tell ourselves not only that it isn't necessary to win, but that it doesn't work, despite the fact that the only war where it was truly practiced led to the unconditional surrender of the enemies. I think if you're justified in fighting a war, you shouldn't hesitate to reduce the enemy cities to rubble. Make the people at home unable to leave bomb shelters and, importantly, make the troops fear for the life of their women and children at home. Make them know that their abject misery would end if they surrender. That worked the one time it was really tried, and it would work again. If you aren't willing to do that to win, you probably shouldn't be fighting that war. For the record, I think most recent wars haven't been worth fighting at all and to have taken such an approach would've been atrocious.
Bombing in Germany was so disruptive to their war efforts. When you follow German military procurement, so many projects were slowed down or stopped dead by bombing.
It was disruptive to some extend. But the war was won by the red army on the ground far far away from the allied bomberspam. I would even say, after stalingrad, there was no need for the allies to even do the invasion and bombing campaign.
The claim in the video is *not* that it wasn't effective or that it didn't have an impact but rather _it didn't end the war._ I think he could have made that point better but the distinction was there. Would any of those projects have changed the ultimate outcome of the war? Once the war machine of the United States, UK and Russia was rolling it's hard to imagine any German project that turns the tide of the war after D-Day.
@@aperson325 after stalingrad? naw man, after stalingrad the somewhat hardened red army traded significantly better than the squishy draftees from the west.
@@augmentifyofficialbut they still would have ended the war. The poor bloody infantry are what end wars, unless America wanted to nuke Germany repeatedly like they did Japan that is. Nukes can definitely end wars but all conventional strategic bombing does is make fighting harder for the people getting bombed
I think one of the most important things, at least for western nations, is that we have grown reluctant to pour manpower into the meatgrinder. We view our troops as far less expandable than in times prior. Bombing (with stealth, or electronic jamming, or after the air defenses of the enemy have been knocked out) allows us to hit without retaliation. From there we can soften up the enemy for the ground offensive. Also, while Germany in WW2 may have continued to produce machines of war, it would be weird if the bombing had not impacted Germany's capacity to do so. And Germany eventually pulled a lot of air defense from the frontlines back to the homeland. With current day hardware, we can target production facilities far better.
I wasn't aware that strategic bombing doctrine was ever intended to be able to win a war purely on its own, but even if that was the belief among some it clearly wasn't taken seriously by Allied command as evidenced by the fact that the Allies pursued conventional military operations against the axis alongside the strategic bombing campaigns. There was no point in the war where the Allies simply sat back, bombed Germany or Japan, and waited to see if they surrendered; the Allies were consistently planning or actively engaging in ground and naval operations against the Axis throughout the war (excluding maybe during the phony war, but there wasn't much strategic bombing going on then either). They wouldn't have bothered doing this if they really believed it wasn't necessary because strategic bombing would solve the problem by itself. So even if there was this silly idea that strategic bombing was more than just a single weapon among many meant to contribute towards an eventual combined arms victory, this theory never seems to have been put into practice.
You are correct. I'm astounded that anyone who calls his channel military avaition history can be so misinformed about this topic. He appears to misunderstand whatever research he has done and has reached his own conclusions. I couldn't even watch the rest of the video after seeing him state his erroneous premise at the beginning. No credibility after that.
@@gort8203 he’s not correct lmao. I mean he might be but surely the point is that some within air forces in WW2 some believed/hoped that strategic bombing alone could win a war, but were of course wrong, not that allied strategy was dictated based on this.
@@imperialinquisition6006 A dreamy-eyed individual or two that was not directly involved might have hoped that, but they were not in charge, and the allied strategy most certain was not based on that hope. The clearly stated goal of the combined bomber offensive was to destroy Luftwaffe so as to enable a land invasion of Europe. Nobody fighting the war believed bombing alone would force a surrender. This video makes nothing beyond a lame straw man argument. BTW, just as a point of logic, you can't say a strategy that was never actually tried was wrong. Should I be LMAO at that?
Perhaps the Vietnam war is better example of an attempt to use air power alone to force the opponent into concessions without seriously threatening a land invasion of the heartland of the opponents regime.
Operations in war become more effective with more efficient execution of combined arms. Strategic operations are a combination of air, land sea, space, and technology, combining all of these in effective combinations, which is always a learning process, including failure (not reaching the goal or objective). In the end, it is occupation of a space, or place, by Armed Forces members (Soldier, Sailor, Guardsman, Marine, Airman, Guardian), or “boots on the ground.” Strategic air bombing is only a single component, either deciding or supporting. The video is insightful. Thanks
It depends what you are bombing. Factories can be placed almost anywhere, can have redundancy and be concealed or disguised relatively easily. Shipyards and oil refineries and ammunition depots are better targets. There are fewer of them, there are fewer places that they can practically be located, and they are harder to conceal.
Everybody understands that it doesn't work, but we still using it as punishment. I don't think anybody in the top military leadership has any doubt about it. You don't rise that high in the ranks if you are stupid. But admitting it, is a different thing. All sides trying to pose as the 'good guys' and as such you shouldn't punish indiscriminately. Even if still do.
It is often the only way that a civilian population can get some degree of satisfaction in the pursuit of retribution-forget the strategic goals. Being unable to strike back directly reflects back upon one’s own military and sense of powerlessness.
Strategic bombing was created in a period of time where there was no actual capability for strategic bombing to exist. In WW2 we didn’t even know what a jet stream was. Thus there’s a huge flag on this claim in general. Now a days we can drop a bomb from high altitude with precision either under 12 ft. That’s insane to even fathom. So I’m the modern age, strategic bombing COULD force a nation to surrender. If your civilian buildings are standing, but the factories are rubble, the food sources are holes in the ground. That’s extremely effective in pulling off a surrender. But we’ve NEVER had the technology to actually try it in a conflict. Malcolm Gladwell explains it beautifully in his book ‘The Bomber Mafia’. I very much suggest the read.
Strategic Bombing by itself does not win wars...No one in the USAF believes that anymore (and they haven't for a long time). But, it is important to note that while documents like USSBS at the end of WW2 demonstrated that bombing did not halt or even slow some German wartime production (aircraft numbers etc.) the CBO did force the Luftwaffe to fight a grinding battle of attrition it could not win in the skies over Germany attempting to stop the bomber streams and their escorting fighters. In addition, the CBO did put sufficient strain on elements of the system in Germany (transportation infrastructure/fuel refining etc.) that Germany ended up having to devote resources attempting to solve problems the Reich otherwise would not have had to do, and such cumulative effects did contribute to ending the Reich.
You can easily find some quotes about the futility and evil intention behind 'strategic' bombing from a guy called Freeman Dyson who worked for British Bomber Command during WWII
A related idea, for ever soldier who is KIA who is most responsible. a. The enemy soldier who pulled the trigger. b. They enemy civilian working in the factory which produced the bullet.
if you look at what was happening to german industry by the American bombing campaign you will see that bombing does work. first, the bombing caused the germans to pull fighter units away from the front line leaving the ground troops naked and unable to move on the western front. the eastern front was a far different war, soviet use of air power was as a tactical ground support force. second, the loss of the ability to build the weapons of war and to transport them, and needed supplies to where they were needed. the destruction of bridges, marshalling yards, and locomotives and rolling stock had a biggger affect upon the germans than the destruction of the factories. the American bombing campaign had as its main objective the destruction of the Luftwaffe. Attacking targets that would force the germans to respond and come up and engage the USAAF. when the Luftwaffe was broken, during big week, the USAAF could range at will over german territory.
An example left out of the video was Germany's failure to bomb the Brits into submission. At first the Germans concentrated on British air facilities but then switched to cities, an strategic blunder. In short, a society cannot be bombed into submission because the misery inflicted on it makes the people hate and fear the bombing nations and fight harder to evade the occupation of enemy troops upon surrender.
the fact that you stopped to talk about bibliography in the middle of the video really says a lot about the quality of your channel (even if it was a plug). great video as always!
Endlessly bombing by itself was never thought to win a war, it was simply one more front by which to apply pressure on the enemies military and civilian centers. It was to show the civilians that their military couldn't protect them or win, and it was to destroy, hinder and otherwise obstruct military functionality. It achieved all these things EXACTLY as it was expected to. let me tell you, few nations on earth if war was to break out right now, wouldn't bomb the shit out of cities, military bases and any other visible target with no regard for rules of engagement. It is only a small few nations with the twisted idea that real war can be clean that would avoid using every tool at their disposal to disrupt the enemy in any way possible. More importantly i think that it would be more effective now then it was then, people are a lot softer, a lot less able to deal with discomfort.
@@jg3000 This is in fact a baldfaced lie told to us by those who wish wars to be fought "cleanly" It's far more true that overt brutality and merciless tactics are more effective then hearts and minds campaign. Example. We won't WWII with brutality. We lost all subsequent wars with hearts and minds tactics. This is undeniable. You cannot change hearts and minds the way they wish you to think you can. Religious or nationalistic hardliners, or heavily indoctrinated populations would rather die to the last man women and child then change their minds. Only by breaking them totally can you get a call for peace. Talk is irrelevant, only force achieves meaningful results. besides if you can be convinced that we are fighting "Clean wars" these days its easier to sell war as a solution. I prefer to see war waged as an ultimately bloody and last resort affair to prevent it from becoming more accepted. Fewer, bloodier wars are the real way to save lives, the faster you break the enemy the sooner the war stops. Look at the middles eastern conflicts the USA undertook, Long seemingly endless, damn near 2 generations were born during that war. Imagine if we had simply fought to win, the war would have been over in a couple years at most but it was prolonged, claimed to be a "Clean" war but in the end there is no such thing. People practically cheered for war in the middles east, it was a patriotic war. People need to wake up to the fact that war is not clean, it never will be and the most merciful thing for the world is to wage it to win and win fast, that means strategic implementation of excessive violence. Your free to disagree, your free to take a moral standing, i don't at the end of the day really think either of us has any effect on what will be.
An independent Air Force is justified in terms of defence. Having a branch dedicated to preserving sovereign airspace makes sense in the same way you have a Navy to protect waters rather than have it rolled into the Army. For tactical or transport purposes it serves better to have the other branches have their own air units or Air Force on long term secondment (trained by the Air Force, but operating alongside Army or Navy units). For strategic or operational purposes an Air Force can work well (destroy key factories or blow up bridges to delay an enemy army). Ultimately though, if the defence of airspace falls to other branches it firstly becomes a secondary concern and secondly leads to disputes or buck-passing over where each branch takes responsibility.
Bombing cities should be illegal. It's the indiscriminate killing of civilians, a war crime that's ignored. We keep talking about things like nukes when we talk about atrocities, yet fire bombs in WW2 caused way more civilian casualties.
One thing worth noting is where the majority of personnel came from that piloted aircraft. Early pilots came from disbanded units that lost their place in the line of battle during WW1. Others were looking alternative lines of advancement, a similar thing happened with the German submarines. After WW1 they had their "branch" but needed to distinguish themselves against the established "clubs". Prestige, promotions, and power are on the line a theme you see in many war memoirs and only tempered once the cost is experienced by their writers. Air Power though seems to be immune to that cost. IT boils down to the leaders of the time needing to justify their existence so they promise the moon and consider landing among the stars a success. The only real benefit that history has shown by having a independent air force is budgeting. The army will always spend the bulk of it's money on ground equipment, the navy on sea equipment if the airforce had it's home among either of those branches it would be making due with the scraps, just ask marines how the department of the navy treats them. With the ballistic missile tests and space race the air force became a cash cow thanks to the blank checks it could write at the time. It's need for specialized equipment soon ensured that entire industries and companies sprang up with the sole purpose of supplying their demands and with that we have the birth of the military industrial complex. You look at all the traditional suppliers you'll find they were civilian companies that also did military contract but most airforce suppliers by the 80 solely supply the military and depend on the military for their continued existence.
The atom bomb didn't force a surrender. From what I've read it seems the japanese military which had until that point been unassailable in japanese politics froze up with indecision and infighting over their response. This gave the emperor an opening to take back power from the military and order them to cease fighting. They never actually surrendered. There was even a failed coup by the hardliners who wanted to continue the war shortly after the emperors order went out.
Modern proponents of strategic bombing seem to rely heavily on a popular belief that the atomic bombs were decisive in ending WW2 in the Pacific, but this wasn't the case. There is a lot of evidence to show that the USSR's entry into the war on August 9th 1945 had a greater effect on Japan's decision to surrender than the atomic bombs. This is based on official documents that became declassified or otherwise made available in the USA, Japan, and Russia in the 1990s. Strategic bombing has never been the primary cause of victory in a war. Thank you for making this video.
Perhaps the most important part of air superiority is not bombing the enemy into submission, it is just keeping their planes on the ground so they don't bomb you.
I've never heard this claim before but it surely seems self-evident. Strategic bombing didn't end the war, I'm not even sure it helped end the war. That didn't happen until there were boots on the ground in Germany. Doesn't mean a separate Navy and Air Force aren't needed but it certainly calls into question the vast amount of resources expended to support the strategic bombing campaign day and night. No one capitulated. And the people killed were almost always the "replaceables" not the leadership, not the elites but rather the people who had no power to stop the war, even if they wanted to. Fascinating.
Also the initial goal of the US 8th Air Force bombing of Germany (43-44) was not the destruction of the German “war machine”. The goal was to destroy the Luftwaffe. Unless the capability of the Luftwaffe was removed, the invasion of France would not occur. Unfortunately the planners thought the heavily armed B-17s and B-24s could accomplish this by themselves (initial stocks of long range fuel tanks for the P-47 were not even shipped to England as they were thought to be unnecessary). This was quickly shown to be wrong (for example, if those tanks had been available, then P-47s could have provided escort on the infamous Schweinfurt raids). So then daylight bombing became the bait, and the escort fighters (primarily the P-47), systematically destroyed the defending German fighters (and more importantly, the experienced pilots). Any destruction of German industry was an added benefit.
Although I've heard/read of this (somewhere, long ago) before as well, I believe the 'exact' (or, full) story of the decision to withhold early drop-tank employment/shipment for the P-47 is a bit murky (or, quite possibly, unrevealed/classified). Could you [possibly] site any available source of reference towards your claims? (Thanks, in advance.)
In a Clausewitz sense, the idea of strategic victory is to do things (basically, to wage war) that compel the enemy to do our will. The term "strategic effects" is misleading, if not dangerous, because one might think that aerial-delivered effects can be strategic. No, most aerial effects are tactical, even if they are long range and deep strike. Few air raids or alpha strikes deliver anything approaching strategic results (cf, the marginally effective slog of Vietnam Linebacker), absent some key hit that knocks out what Clausewitz would call the enemy's "center of gravity" (again, cf, Linebacker II -- the "eleven days of Christmas" -- or mining Haiphong Harbor). On a good day -- or more likely, a good few weeks or month(s) -- air power can deliver operational effects; see the first phase, 40 days or so, of Desert Shield, 1991. And in the case of operational air power, it must be combined with ground or naval power to deliver true victory, meaning to seize and hold territory.
Well it did work with The Netherlands in WW2. After tough battles in the center of our country for a few days, where the Germans had a really hard time actually making progress, they bombed our port city of Rotterdam into oblivion. Since we were a small nation that could put up some resistance but lacked the resources to defend our homes against total destruction, the Dutch government capitulated saving our historic cities and the lives of our people from an inevitable doom. We could have never lasted and seeing as they were prepared to bomb the living sh*t out of our civilian infrastructure, knowing we could do nothing about it, the choice was a logical and just one. Strategic bombing does work, but it depends on the context of the conflict (manpower, technology, defensive capabilities, etc) and should always (and I think this should be obvious) be part of a larger combined arms operation.
Hi Christoph, superb video, well researched and in-depth analysis. I really liked you ruse of image / infographics to drive your point home. I think there's still a perception that air power alone wins wars. Just thinking, in the RAF example, as longer range light bombers became available (thinking Mosquito in particular) along with better precision bombing options, do you think greater concentration on targeted rather than area/population bombing might have been a more effective strategy? Potentially, this could have minimised crew casualties. Thanks again, Owen
This is not completely true. Bombing cities worked with Serbia, to make them leave Kosovo. The trick is not to target and kill the civilian population, which increases grieves, but target instead the infrastructures that their living standard depend on, such as electricity, transportation, water, etc. This way, the civilian population apply pressure to their government, as they prefer to abandon a remote piece of land for the return of their living standard.
Something I actually encountered while researching a presentation for my Airman Leadership School's history presentation; the bombing was ridiculously unimpressive in winning WW2. Not that I could SAY that in the presentation, but finding that we wasted tons of young men bombing civilians to no real effect was... disheartening.
Bombing the crap out of Hanoi and Haiphong brought the NV to the negotiating table posthaste. NV didn't like it much when their sanctuaries in Laos and Cambodia were bombed either. So, it's not as black and white as some would believe.
@@tremedar War is nothing but an extension of diplomacy. As such, when America failed to enforce its interests on the region it lost and NV won. At the end of the day communism spread to Laos and Cambodia (the latter of wich was, ironically , supported by the US)
Dear Mr. Bergs, According to the title, I do miss one book in your list of recommendations: "Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War" by Robert A. Pape, 1996. If you want I send it to you. Do you (or third party) have a PO box? To sum up the content: Strategic bombing doesn't work, and coercion has become more difficult in general for several reasons. Best regards,
This is like saying "fighter aircraft don't win wars so we don't need them". Artillery won't win wars, but infantry without artillery isn't going to be as effective. Tanks don't win wars, but the allies learned in Operation Market Garden that tanks without infantry are just sitting ducks. No one weapons system wins wars.
There are two coupled simple technical factors involved: if you want something to be destroyed, you have to actually hit it. And you want it to stay destroyed, so you have to hit it hard so it cannot be easily repaired. Russia claims to have hit that Patriot battery, but I bet it is patched up in no time because it was only hit by shrapnel. A direct hit is another story. Simply put: until the early 70's, accuracy was so poor that it was just luck to actually destroy something permanently. It was even so poor that atomic bombs missed frequently - Nagasaki was a miss and Crossroads Able was too - you are painting your target ship bright orange that you couldn't miss it - and it easily survives the hit because it missed. So in a cynical way you can say that the development of the H-bombs was the simplest solution to that problem - with a blast radius of dozens of kilometers, accuracy doesn't matter anymore. It finally changed with the development of the JDAM bomb and the first precision missiles to deliver tactical nukes inside a radius of 50 meters.
Strategic bombing is the equivalent of trying to defeat wasps by beating their nest with a baseball bat. Sure, you will probably kill a lot of wasps, but in the long run all it does is just piss them off and harden their resolve to kill you.
I agree with the premise and there is a significant issue in such forms of Bombing, civilian casualties which make the opponent want to oppose you more, but I would argue the issue in Vietnam was not bombing enough actual targets and instantly. That was a half-assed war. Furthermore what about the doctrine the U.S. adopted after Vietnam, Air was a huge aspect of it increasing contact to miles in-depth. Of course air was setting the stage for troops in Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom.
Needless to say, the Germans sure thought strategic bombing was a threat to them due to the amount of anti-aircraft artillery set to counter the strategic bombers.
Yes and no It was certainly no problem to the german industry. It actually helped because it forced Germany to restructure and simplify a lot of industrial processes and most importantly get rid of a lot of beurocracy that slowed it down significantly. The only strategic bomibng with any effect was the bombing of fuel storages and fuel plants spring 1944 onwards, which was like less then 1% of strategic bombing commited. The reason why the germans went so heavy into AA in germany is rather simple actually: It was easy and they could do it Using AA batteries in your homeland is significantly more efficent and less ressource intensive then dragging them to Slaingrad and back. You literally have the factories for guns and ammo a few hours away, food is locally anyway and you dont need to employ soldiers for it, everyone can use an AA canon with instructions. And for the germans it was significantly more advantages to fight the allied air forces over germany then on the frontline, because the allied advantage in number was for msot of the war significantly smaller over germany then at the direct frontline for various reasons. Then there is the obvious moral/propaganda aspect for the civilians whos cities get bombed wanting to see something being done to defend/avenge them for obvious reasons. Generally speaking, it is very complicated. But take North Vietnam as an exmaple, they had basically no AA for most of the war and carried on with little issues. The propably wasnt a single spott there taht wasnt at least bombed once during the war. Germany suffered significantly more from losing access to certain ressources in occupied territory then to strategic bombing, something regularily being ignored when talking about the issue. Especially from 1943 onwards the german industry suffered from a chronic lack of certain ressources that was really crippling.
You might have got the bombing concept a little bit wrong here. In WW2 they were trying to use bombing to destroy strategic targets, which were the things that enabled the enemy to make war. Factories, power stations, dams, fuel refineries, railways etc. (as well as the weapons themselves) For instance the Nazis had planes they were not able to fly, and tanks they were not able to drive because of fuel shortages. The problem with bombing was that it was not accurate and precise, sort of hit or miss. Then there was the city carpet bombing which was more about destroying morale and the will to make war. You can debate the ethics of that, but is there any ethics in the nature of war itself? Today's destruction from above has a different delivery method, and most times much more accurate. If they know the location of the strategic target they can usually hit it. For instance Ukraine does not have the means to create weapons of war, and if they did Russia has destroyed these long ago. The only way that Ukraine can continue war, is if someone else produces the weapons for them. But what when there are no more weapons of war available? Whose weapons stockpiles are going to run out first? Be destroyed by the opposition? Call it bombing, or destruction from above, but that is the objective. An army can't fight without food or weapons, and if they only have rifles that is not going to work against rockets. Among other things war is about attrition, and arial destruction causes that.
The only exception I can think of was in the 1990s when Serbia was committing genocide in the Balkans. Clinton started attacking Serbian forces by air; and many people, including myself, argued that you couldn't win war without boots on the ground. And then Milosevic gave up. So you never know.
There should also be the discussion of wether the resources the opponent spends defending against strategic bombing is valuable enough to justify the strategic bombing this will create political pressure to defend a non combat critical area
It's important to mention the way the allied bomber commanders stuck with the bombing of civilian targets: Contrary to their often-stated justifications, they knew that civilians under sustained terroristic aerial bombing doesn't make the populations turn against their governments. It makes them pull together. They knew that it wasn't hampering their production of war materiel. Production in both Germany and Japan went up steadily, until the allies took out their major fuel production and supply. It was known that fuel was their main limiting factor, yet the allies barely sent 8% of sorties after fuel, while thousands of sorties were going to cities, for years. We didn't really concentrate on their fuel until late fall of '44 in Europe, and late spring of '45 in Japan, and in both cases it was the end of their ability to put up a meaningful fight. Air power applied against strategic targets definitely can be quickly decisive, but only if it's used as such, and not blown away against terroristic striking of the civilian populations as primary targets.
So really what we've found is that winning requires teamwork and effective attacks from all theaters of war: Air, Land, Sea Guess that's why the Marines win so much-
The most notable exception is the war against Japan, the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima resulted in a prompt unconditional surrender to Allied forces.
I disagree. Total war is one thing which can bring a country to her knees, it worked against the Confederacy and it worked against Japan. Strategic bombing to help do this was part of that total war against Japan. Besides Japan though, strategic bombing has not been let off of the leash to the point of total war, which is when it is at the zenith of its effectiveness.
the assumption here is that the cost of investing into and carrying out SB to conduct total war pays off better than the alternative. the confederacy broke because its armies were also defeated in the field, and that the total war March was a comparatively cost-efficient (in terms of resources denied+morale effect Versus percentage of Union power invested) method. (Partly this could be that the Confederate war was conducted at the behest of an entrenched elite and only a part of its "local population" so the effect of marching through land and freeing slaves has an outsized impact on the willingness to continue the war)
Examining the Gulf War and Iraqi Freedom you find numerous cases where air power was expended at great risk and even greater (material) costs with often dubious results, when a company or battalion of armored vehicles (especially tanks) would have more than sufficed while being more cost effective in the end.
The USSR also tried bombing the Mujahideen into submission which did about as much as throwing dust at them. It only further turned the average Afghan against them and the puppet communist regime. The Soviet bombing campaign was indiscriminate and merciless. They considered any village not under their control to be under Mujahideen control and bombed them. When the Soviet began their withdrawal, in order to prop up their puppets in Kabul, they begin another wave of indiscriminate bombings of all villages not under the control of the communists. To put it simply, by the end of their involvement, the Soviets had bombed every single village in Afghanistan.
Effectively strategical bombing, also if it didn't stopped Axis' production, severely afflicted Germany's war machine, about 50% of their guns' production was of AA gun's, a LOT of fighters had to defend Reich 's territories, plus the destruction of vitali factories retarded either the rocket programma and the introduction of jet fighters. Don't forget also railways ' damages, that compromised the reforniments of vital materiale and the fatal distruction of syntethic oil's factories. Naturally, either in Korea and Vietnam the problem was that the enemy 's industrial capacity was principally in Russia, so the SAC couldn't destroy them, and the enemy wasn't worried by human losses!
I assumed that bombing everything related to fuel refining would eventually lead to immobility V.S. air superiority, after that the air force is directed to attack all enemy ground units, land forces would be required to find and stirr up the enemy so air power could be directed to attack their coordinates. I did hear about Iraqi units surrendering to air power alone
In ww2. Without the strategic bombing campaign it's certaij military production would have been higher than what it was. But perhaps more importantly, it exhausted the Luftwaffe over Germany so by d-day it was unable to provide effective battle support. And air power is a big part of why Germany lost in the western front.
"Without the strategic bombing campaign it's certaij military production would have been higher than what it was." Try to understand opportunity costs: A few hundred bombers in anti U-boot missions would have had a much higher impact for the Brits, more tank deliveries to the SU too. In 1942/43 thousands of bombers were wasted over Germany without real effect.
@Olaf Kunert the real effect was the attrition impact on the Luftwaffe which made a real different at the front line in terms of air superiority allowing dday to be a success.
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KOSOVO and the Serbian defeat had happened only due to ait strikes and bombing to win, you might check the history of 1999 or so again
There is exactly 1 time in history that it has worked, and the last 80 years have been virtually dedicated to ensuring it never happens again.
Today’s subject: the Air Force isn’t as effective as is claimed. First a word from our sponsor, the Navy.
I was thinking of the same thing. We need a USAF vet (i.e. Mover) react to this.
The Navy, AKA the second largest Air Force.
@@shaider1982 NO, 'we' don't need a parasite making money with Bismark's work. Reaction youtuber are parasites that often make more money with a little bit of blah blah than the one who made the original video. One youtuber spends days, weeks or even months on a 40 minute video and a reaction youtuber does a 50 minute video or stream in which he talked full 8 minutes and gets 3 times the views/watchtime... 🤢🤮
@@westrim EDIT: US Navy ~2,600 aircraft, the US Air Force has ~5,200
US Navy and US Air force politics has ensured that the US Army doesn't have good SAM systems or long range SAM systems and that is SRBM missiles are very limited.
the U.S. Naval Institute as a sponsor for the video is definitely a circumstance
I suppose they're trying to get even for having Mahan's ideas of winning a war through sea power discredited😅
Navy be bombing cities too. Wasn't shock and awe carried out using ships? And Gaza was bombed using ships in the Hamas Fatah civil war.
Is the use of atom bombs on Japanese cities a war crime?
Japanese Service interrivalary at its peak
"Soldiers cant win a Naval War, ships can!"
Another book of interest to this subject was published in 1910: HG Wells' "The War in the Air".
It postulates a (then future) war in which airships are able to travel long distances and devastate 'enemy' cities with aerial bombardments. But while they are able to do this, and destroy centres of industry, they are of course unable to carry the massive number of troops required to occupy these 'conquered' territories. The result, rather than victory for any side, is a complete collapse of organised civilisation, all authority collapses, and the novel ends positively with common people rebuilding society from the ground up. Possibly not one of his best known novels, but I thoroughly recommend it.
Combine that with Ian Castle's trilogy:
Zeppelin Onslaught: The Forgotten Blitz 1914-1915
Zeppelin Inferno: The Forgotten Blitz 1916
(3rd book covering 1917 yet to be published)
@@timonsolus They fact or fiction? I'll have a go at your recommendation either way.
@@unclenogbad1509 : Fact. They provide detailed descriptions of all the Zeppelin raids on the UK in WW1.
@@timonsolus OK, thx. Thinking about it after your last post, I realised how little known that air war is. Definitely worth looking up.
Wells was frakin' genious through and through.
So, basically a force multiplier that HELPS you achieve your strategic goal, but is not the sole provider.
Exactly
100 times 0, is still 0.
There needs to be some ground forces that you force multiply.
@@christopherg2347 ASk in Nagasaki
@@vascoespañol That was a one time gig
@@vascoespañol : Arguably, the ground force being multiplied in the case of the Nagasaki atomic bomb strike was the Soviet army invading Japanese occupied Manchuria.
Strategic Effect =/= Strategic Victory
A very good summation of the difference between airpowers' long range strategic effects and its inability to create a strategic victory.
Gonna steal this differentiation now.
Excellent work Chris.
We easily could have wiped out both Germany and Japan solely with strategic bombing. They would have ran out of population long before we ran out of bombs.
"Air bombing doesn't win wars"
"Payed for by the naval institute press"
probably just a coincidence but I found it funny lmao
Japanese Service interrivalary at its peak
"Soldiers cant win a Naval War, ships can!"
I used to wonder how factories in WW2 could often return to production so quickly after being bombed. Now that I'm older and know more about industrial machines, it doesn't surprise me that many of these machines are such heavy metal beasts that they can be bombed but still be easily fixable.
Of course, many bombs simply missed their targets. The few bombs that did strike the target were too light to penetrate the plants' concrete roofs. Incendiary bombs were countered by fire breaks constructed around industrial facilities. Today's bombs are engineered to be much more accurate and punch through thick concrete - for example, see photos of the aircraft hangars in Iraq.
I bet using area denial weapons would render those industrial machines useless for a good while without destroying them. Drop bombs filled with anthrax spores onto a factory and let's see how willing the workers are to return to work lol.
@@joshuaortiz2031 Imagine what the effect the V1s and V2s would have had, if 1 in 10 would have carried bioweapons.
@@SansSentiments most of the V1 and V2 rockets missed their intended targets but yes that coild have created a mess. A lot of resources would have been sucked into decontamination efforts in Britain. But the response by the allies would have been worse. The brits did a good job at locating and destroying German chemical weapon sites. The relentless British bombing made it difficult for the Germans to mass produce and store large amounts of chemicals like tabun.
@@SansSentiments and the British had a larger bioweapons program they extensively tested anthrax munitions. The Germans focused more on chemicals agents like tabun and sarin
The issue of strategic bombing has always been and will always be the supposition that given enough casualties the enemy will be forced into the surrender. This ignores that in many cases, influxes of casualties, especially seeming wanton disregard for life, can embolden an enemy into continued fighting. Even in the ideal situation of an unwilling populace and forceful dictatorship, strategic bombing is just not a good strategy for defeating an enemy. It only ever makes sense as an auxiliary to attritional warfare.
That's assuming that strategic bombing is intended to be used for that end, and not other reasons.
@@Batmans_Pet_Goldfish In that case youre not doing "classic" strategic bombing. Military strategies are about what you are doign to achieve what kind affect after all.
I would argue that the issue of strategic bombing isn't that it can embolden the enemy. The issue is that the level of civilian casualties actually necessary to force an enemy state to surrender is so high as to constitute a genocide (if it's even possible in the first place). In other words, if you want your strategic bombing campaign to work, you'd better be ready to kill almost everyone.
That's kind of a hard sell to civilians and soldiers who want to see themselves as good-guy liberators. It also means that strategic bombing has no range of escalation. You're either not bombing at all, or you have to jump straight to Exterminatus. Because the middle-ground is just a waste of time and resources, and may even be counter-productive.
@TBot Alpha No people suffering a genocide have ever surrendered. This makes no sense. When the enemy is supposedly trying to wipe you out, the only reasonable response is to fight tooth and nail and do so viciously. Make the enemy pay dearly for their crimes to make them stop.
@@bloodfiredrake7259 well, who talked about surrendering, only feasible way of a pure victory through airpower is to devastate the enemy population on such a scale that enemy will simply have not enough civilians to conscript into army or maintain war industry, this obviously requires enough disregard of human life to make putin look like a nobel winning human rights activist.
I laughed at the Dr. Strangelove icon you added regarding the shift toward nuclear deterrence as they gained independence.
I smiled. Is Bernard in there, somewhere?
Major Kong
@@mikhailiagacesa3406 My thoughts exactly
Purity of Essence
@@NoNameAtAll2 Have you heard of something called fluoridation? Fluoridation of water?
It seems that one thing is certain: strategic bombing opened up a possibility of a terrifying level of unbridled mass destruction, nigtmarish escalation of warfare with unimaginable levels of indiscriminate killing and maiming, largely blurring the distinction between combatants and non-combatants, a ghastly image of a war with no prospect of ending in any meaningful victory, which always remains outside of reach and in its place only a vicious circle of war of utter destruction, extermination, attrition and death remains: airborne genocide. With the introduction of nuclear weapons, all of this was elevated to an insane level of global overkill: a situation in which there could be no one to sue for peace or to make peace with or to claim strategic victory for that matter. In the case of asymmetric destruction, in which one party has been able to inflict disproportionately more damage, casualties and degradation of military forces on the other (a historical example approaching this situation would be Japan at the end of WWII), one might argue that a result with a deceiving appearance of a "strategic victory" is possible (assuming no third parties aiding and abetting the losing side): even though the losing side cannot be coerced to admit defeat, the war of destruction/eradication would continue and would result in an annihilation of a nation's military, economic, cultural and demographic capacities. For the sake of clarity, we might call this "strategic suppression of a beligerent", but such an euphemism cannot hide the ugly truth: this could only be wanton destruction as an end in itself and no one can justify such evil.
Colorfully illustrated. I just hope future belligerents take note.
You know, its kinda funny, how WW2 truly ended with nukes (though it wasnt nukes that defeated Japan).
But the true and long lasting victory of America, and the allies, was that they managed to turn Japan, just as Germany, into an ally.
War should be about the unrestricted total destruction of the enemy. Western complacency will be the death of us all one of these days.
>For the sake of clarity, we might call this "strategic suppression of a beligerent", but such an euphemism cannot hide the ugly truth
Genocide should always be an option.
That's uncannily close to describing the Israel-Palestine situation.
@@KaiHenningsen How? That’s nowhere close to the same
I like how the books presented by Chris has page markers. He really delved into those during his research.
If you need to "sell" the idea to taxpayers, the bifurcation of "win/lose" is more convincing than the nuance of "degrades the economy".
It would be somewhat interesting to take the various prognostications about the tonnage of bombs required to induce an enemy to surrender and convert that to the equivalent length of an artillery bombardment with the common artillery of the day. Yes, there's the issue that the artillery would first have to fight its way into range of the targets -- but especially some of the interwar theorists I suspect have anticipated tonnages so low that they are, in effect, saying 'a brisk 5 minutes of shelling their major cities is all it'd take to end the war'.
That's been my beef with Douhet. Something like 50 tons TNT on an enemy capitol. Most people were still thinking about Gas being involved, which heightens the investment in the doctrine.
@@mikhailiagacesa3406 : To put Douhet in context, research the psychological effect of the German Zeppelin night bombing of London during WW1, and the Gotha night bombing later in the war.
@@timonsolus I have. Is there something I missed?
@@mikhailiagacesa3406 : No, I was just putting that out there for people who hadn’t researched Douhet.
@@timonsolus I apologize.
Oh dear .... laying the blame on independent air forces trying to justify their independence ... you said the quiet part out loud! Oh dear oh my :)
I know, how dare I
G'day,
Yay Team !
Not only but also,
He spelled it with an
"O".
Whereas, clearly, the term is actually,
"Independant Air
FARCE..."
Let us call a Shovel a
Metal-bladed, wooden-handled
Digging-Implement ; which if used
Commercially,
For Hire & Reward, are known as
"Idiot-Sticks"
Acknowledging the capabilities and accuity of the person swinging it.
Air
FARCE,
it
IS,
Indeed.
Such is life.
;-p
Ciao !
@@WarblesOnALot The true "idiot stick" is a rock bar, a tall heavy rod with a pointy end; you lift it up and drop it on rocks or hard dirt to break the surface. Shovels, by comparison, take much skill and dexterity.
"Rock bar" is the local name; I imagine it has quite a few variations.
@@grizwoldphantasia5005
G'day,
Thanks for that.
Your Rock Bar is what we in Oz call a
Crow Bar...
I have no idea why they are called that.
Crow Bars exclusively for Rock Breaking have Pointy ends and straight Handles.
Those for Fence-Construction, Post-Hole Digging and Railway-Line Fettling have a 2-inch-wide Edge on the End of an 8-inch long Wedge-profile Chisel-Blade at one end of a 6-foot Shaft an inch in diameter featuring a Flat-ended 3-inch "Mushroom" Head an inch thick at the other end - for Ramming Earth or Cutting Dirt/Rocks, OR levering Sleepers and Rails into position.
Crow Bars are
NOT
Idiot-Sticks..
I was quoting
Robert Heinlein's
"Time Enough For Love"
Copyright 1976 (?).
A
Science Fiction Classic, featuring a character ,
Lazarus Long,
Who states,
"There were times when I
Took a Job working an
Idiot-Stick...; that's
A wooden handle with a metal blade
At one end and an
Idiot
Working the
Handle...."
It's in,
'The Notebooks of
Lazarus Long".
Just(ifiably ?) sayin',
Have a good one...
Stay safe.
;-p
Ciao !
I still think a whole lot of people in the comments have missed the main and crucial point presente almost at the start of the video. No one is saying that strategic bombing is useless, the point is that strategic bombing doesn't win wars by itself. Some people in the comments seem to think that the video is saying that the bombing of Germany or Japan had no effect, but what it is saying is that it wasn't gonna win the war.
That's as redundant of a statement as: "soldiers cant win wars on their own. They need tanks and planes too"
Like no shit, you can't win wars solely by bombing people.
Oh boy! As someone who's been involved in primary research on this subject, I'm happy to see one of my favourite channels covering it :)
I think to me, the most interesting area that is worth studying is not so much whether strategic bombing failed or not, but the rhetorical walls built around the myth of the bomber. Things like the infamous Cherwell paper - despite having been proven so wrong even by their contemporaries - have kept their power; personalities like Harris or LeMay are still lionized to this day. Especially when you go into any popular history platform, they'll still have their fans, decades after they died (unrepentant of their doctrines to the end).
It's interesting to note, too, that at least among historians - I've never heard any of the critics of strategic bombing suggest that it was somehow unimportant, inconsequential, not worth studying. Far from. It's a subject that deserves a lot of attention. But not the sort of worship and reverence it seems to get from some quarters.
I'm a bit worried that whenever the Spielberg-produced "The Mighty Eighth" comes out, however it interprets that part of the war, we'll have a whole new explosion of rage from the voices who, unfortunately, still believe that strategic bombing worked (or works).
I would differentiate between targeting key industry & infrastructure in like bridges, port installations, powerplants, oil &heavy industry on the one side and on the other side civilian population centers. Destruction or Suppression of Industry and Infrastructure clearly can be a deciding factor in done cost-effective, while attacking population centers can strengthen the resolve of the enemy, breaks the Hague Convention and is harder to do in a cost effective manner. The suppression of German oil refineries clearly had great effect in WW2 even though they still produced till the end (with 80+% less throughput).
@@leonfa259 there is a serious argument to be made that strategic bombing of refineries was ineffective, when you consider the sheer number of planes and number of bombs that it took to keep even 1 refinery at 20%. Imagine if that productive capacity had gone to tactical bombing instead.
@@jacksonmagas9698 It kept the Luftwaffe down and strongly decreased the Heeres mobility and combat power. Bombing accuracy was abysmal back then.
It shouldn't be forgotten that the first 50% of capacity went pretty quickly, with the first large mission.
@@leonfa259 in which case why invest the resources in strategic bombing at all with such low efficiency?
@@FlameQwert For, bridges, refineries and key factories it can still be cost effective. In war nothing is cheap, to shot a plane down by flak took it's weight in ammunition, per day the UDSSR lost on average 75 tanks and 6.500 solideres. A refinery is a target worth billions or tens of billions in today's money, and is essential for the opposing sides war effort. The scale of war is hard to imagine or comprehend.
I think it is important to also realize that even with the over-touted Norden bombsight there really was little accuracy at hitting specific targets like a military factory, especially at night which was safer for the airplanes but without our current IR tech also highly inaccurate. Even through Vietnam we just didn't have the abilities we have today with GPS and CCD/IR type electronics tech, cruise missiles, etc, to do anything other than what in Vietnam would be considered "carpet bombing".
"Quantity has a quality all its own" is true in some ways, it just might not be in a way that wins you anything meaningful in the longer term.
There were issues with it,and only the leading aircraft made some effort in using it. When it dropped the bombload, so did everyone else behind it. With the spread of the typical large formations of bombers and the attitude they were flying the "precession" bombing was in practice area bombing. Drop enough kaboom in an area and statically some of it will be likely to hit a target within that area
I once read an interesting article published in 1999, called "Kosovo: The Limits of Air Power", following NATO's strategic air campaign in Yugoslavia, and how it failed to stop the JNA from committing genocides across the unraveling country. After the Gulf war, it was theorised by airpower advocates that strategic bombing defeated the Iraqis, effectively omitting the contribution of the ground campaign, what was also omitting was the air campaign prior to Desert Storm, coalition air forces tried to use strategic bombing using precision guided bombs, it was believed that technology had progress so far, there was no longer a need for ground troops, however, the air campaign was a letdown, and it was in Yugoslavia this lesson was learned the hard way. Just like in Iraq, the air forces targeted military installations, weapons factories, and government buildings, but failed to bomb the JNA, which was deployed in the field away from strategic value targets, thus left them unopposed to carry out ethnic cleansing. NATO put all of its hopes on airpower, thinking a ground offensive would be unnecessary, because Serb forces would give up since their assets were destroyed, it didn't work, as the Serb ground troops were left intact, and it was the civilian population that paid the price for this failure. The article argued that if NATO sent ground troops to the Balkans, it would have done more to prevent JNA ethnic cleansing, the airpower advocates argued strategic bombing would prevent a blood land campaign, unfortunately, it was the civilians who paid this bloody price, overwhelmed and outgunned by a genocidal enemy.
Let’s just acknowledge what Kosovo was Bill Clinton trying to gain in the polls while not committing ground troops in a disastrous way following the terrible blunder in Somalia (Black Hawk Down) .
The Slavs do not look favorably upon this period. There was a lot of propaganda by Clinton Administration to villainize genocide in Europe while turning a blind eye to Rwanda.
NATO sent troops. They didn't stop the Srebrenica massacre, for example, because the Brass shat on the peacekeepers request to intervene.
@@The_Modeling_Underdog you do know that is UNPROFOR and not NATO right? Those two are completely different thing and even than they are not completely useless, they did manage to protect some civilians from time to time like in the siege of Gorazde and Zepa
@@biscuit4705 Do you know NATO provided the troops for UNPROFOR, right? I didin't say they were the same thing. Agreed on Gorazde and Zepa.
@@The_Modeling_Underdog Not NATO but the individual countries that were part of it and regardless of that command of the dutch forces was still under UNPROFOR and not NATO. Still NATO should've sent an actual ground force to support the air campaign and differently from the comment above I would really hesitate to call the air campaign unsuccessful. It could've been more successful sure but it wasn't a failure.
Airpower may not win wars by itself, but it can facilitate that goal by disrupting the enemy's production, transportation, and energy infrastructure through the process of attrition. In the end though, wars are won by boots on the ground. not by planes in the air. The Second World War in Europe was only over when the Soviets and their Western Allies were able to walk over Germany. With Allied troops occupying Berlin defeat was an inescapable fact nobody could deny.
@@doodlebug1820 When the boots left, the war was lost. No one left who wanted to fight.
@@doodlebug1820 The war was won in two weeks. It is not the army's fault that the politicians could not realize the victory in creating a modern society.
Bernard I think you may enjoy a TED Talk from 11 years ago by Malcolm Gladwell, about the Norden Bombsight. While he's obviously not an academic on military science, I think he has an interesting philosophical point that the issue with air bombing isn't whether we can hit a target, but actually finding said target and whether or not bombs ought to be used at all. I think the latter point ties in very well with you briefly mentioning that warfare is, afterall, an extension of politics (as I believe Clausewitz said).
My mother's uncle was a civilian contractor on the Ho-Chi Minh Road during the Vietnam War. He drove a truck for the PLA and was in Laos when the US decided to flatten the country. A bomb exploded in front of his truck but miraculously, the engine block caught the blast and shrapnel so he lived. He quit after that and went back home to Shanghai.
I would also say that much of the ineffectiveness of strategic bombing for destroying the enemy's ability to fight (as opposed to their willingness to fight) came from the lack of precision guided weapons. Destroying one factory could only be guaranteed by a massive raid of hundreds of bombers, with all the attendant losses to enemy air defenses. This greatly reduced the cost/benefit ratio of strategic bombing. But once you get to the point where a few strike aircraft can take out the same factory by using precision bombs (or it can be done remotely by missiles), I think it makes strategic attacks (on industrial base, on fuel supplies, etc.) much, much more viable.
When you can sent strike craft after strategic infrastructure to do the bombing, you are either are mopping up a low tech adversary or your proper adversary is already fubar since you obviously have air superiority.
either way, its sealclubbing.
During WWII the allies weren't aiming for factories - they were aiming for civilians
The Atom Bomb didn‘t deliver strategic victory, either. The Japanese leadership was going to offer terms before they dropped and they had no viable defense against an invasion.
The biggest additional factor was the Soviet Invasion of Manchuria (which wiped out most of what remained of the Japanese army in a week).
The war-winning effect of the Atomic Bombs is kind of a sacred cow for American published opinion, which is understandable given the implications but this does not change the reality.
Lol of course it was the destruction of the mainland army that scared the Japanese fighting to the last, not the weapons being more powerful than anything that had come before.
@@ВладиславВладислав-и4ю yes, because it was their last Army and they were scared shitless about a communist invasion of Japan; this isn‘t some big speculation, either, all their internal and embassy correspondence from the time confirms this, so it‘s actually kind of silly to deny it.
But of course, the Americans continue to because anything else would make them look bad.
@@raylast3873 That's why the Japanese surrendered to the Americans to be under American occupation, not because they were afraid of the Soviet army. So tell the truth, not your red fiction.
WW2 - the Axis bombing campaign didn't stop Britain, and the Allied bombing campaign didn't stop Germany. The central idea (destroying your enemy's ability to produce munitions in its factories, combined with a demoralising terror) just never worked, though it clearly did have an effect on the Axis' ability to prolong the war. Ultimately, it took ground troops (Russian) to bring it all to an end. A greater tonnage of bombs was dropped on Vietnam than in the whole of WW2, and still didn't produce the theoretical result. Yet the theory still persisted - thanks for such a well-reasoned look into 'why'.
The problem with the early airpower theorists is that they believed bombing enemy cities would be a short cut to victory. They ignored the fact that in order to achieve victory one has to destroy the enemy's armed forces first. Douhet and his compatriots felt that once the enemy's civilian population were subjected to terror bombing, they would force their government to make peace. They ignored the idea that this form of bombing might have the opposite effect to the one intended. When it was found that terror bombing actual drove people into arms of their government, they did not change their strategy to conform to this new reality, but threw good money after bad by doubling down on a strategy that was failing miserably.
In a way, some things we bombed did not further the effect, but also worsened the fighting in ways. It sort of hardened the German defensive when we were bombing innocent cities by now every man and child civilian that could hold a gun also joined the fight just to try to fight the Allies off and live because they feared they would be victims of the US bombers next. Destroying all those cities also did not help but actually hindered the ground forces due to the rubble
What "innocent" cities?
@@jacobdewey2053 okay tough guy
50% of german war production was focussed solely on the air war. Compare that to 8% on tanks for example. It made a huge difference.
@@NRProductionss with what oil the germans were meant to run tanks or planes? After 1941 they couldn't even do an offensive with more than half of army group
Just imagine if an American city (if you are American) was bombed and civilians/women/children were targeted and killed.
I think it's simple enough.
In the case of German cities in late WW2, many of the workers who were working in factories, maintaining their war machine (which was killing millions each year), lived in those cities near industrial areas. It raises a very interesting question regarding who is and isn't a civilian in that regard.
German cities were basically war-extending cogs for the German machine. There comes a point where you have to take a balanced view of what that actually means. That whole war was hell on Earth and trying to end it as quickly as possible was a valid stance, however we may personally feel 80 years later with our modern outlook.
This channel is so good. The most important period for me is June through December 1950 during the Korean war. It was the first campaign of the USAF (FEAF) and in only a few months of lobbying they were able to shift US doctrine from precision military targeting into carpet firebombing of civilians. The wiki article 'Bombing of North Korea' is a sobering but excellent overview. And as this video explained, it impacted US doctrine for 25 years until the exit from Vietnam.
In Korea they had just under 100 B-29’s. Unlike the bombing campaign against the Japanese home islands many personnel at Kadena and Tokyo were experienced veterans. They did hit their targets. Centers of patterns within 180’ and 220’ of center of target. They just ran out of targets in a few months. Bombing gravel runways and rail yards, with 50% of bombs time delay. Bombing the third or fifth replacement pontoon bridge on the Yalu. So the planners sent them against the cities. Magnesium based rods by the hundreds of thousands. Closely built Asian towns and cities, largely built of wood.
I’ll add. Of course there were many low hours personnel. A whole raft of Air Force 2nd Lieutenant co-pilots, just out of the Army or Naval academies flew. I mean there were adequate numbers of experienced pilots, bombardiers, and navigators to be core of the lead crews.
Neither will a naval blockade. But both are crucial to helping the ground pounders win faster.
The "potential" of bombardment is what deters attack and wins a war. The Allies had to wait until the Luftwaffe was reduced to a manageable level before their landing craft could dare crossing the channel to the beaches of Normandy. The bombing by the Allies of German targets in Germany accomplished two critical goals to meet this end. They forced aircraft manufacturing underground or to be scattered as well as hampered the transportation of manufacturing materials. It also lured war planes Germany otherwise would have had available on D-Day out of their protected areas and into the air where the Allies increasingly superior aircraft could shoot them down. That being said, it's hard to justify much of the intentional taking of civilian lives. My analysis is that Churchill was not well advised on the effect toward winning the war civilian deaths would play. Given Churchill's regular and copious alcohol consumption, perhaps he made the decisions on targeting civilians when he was soused. But other times (maybe during a sober moment) he expressed regret upon seeing the reports of civilians killed).
I love airplanes in almost every single aspect but this is one of the only things that makes me hate them with a passion at the same time
in short,it's basically long-range airborne artillery and psychological warfare,
to aid in shelling targets relatively precisely at ranges that is impossible to hit with either landbased artillery or the main battery of any big gun battleship
That was timely for me. I just recently read The Battle of the Atlantic by Jonathan Dimbleby. He argues that victory in the Atlantic was delayed because Bomber Command refused to devote long range bombers to what they saw as a defensive role of protecting vital convoys. They continually argued that the bombing campaign by itself could defeat the Axis, and that resources taken away from it would only delay that final victory. They were supported in that view by Churchill, who, even if he wasn't completely convinced, could point to the bombing campaign as an alternative to the Second Front that the Soviets so desperately wanted. It took a long time for them to be convinced to release bombers for any other purpose.
While the author mentions other innovations as important, he considers the decision to finally devote air resources to convoy protection as being the turning point of the Battle of the Atlantic. In making his argument, though, I think he perhaps goes a bit further than necessary in his disdain for the bombing campaign. Obviously, it couldn't achieve strategic victory as some believed, but did it have strategic effect (as you say)? How important was it to the victory on the ground? Did it have value to the war effort, or was it nothing more than an attempt to terrorize the enemy and vent the Allies' anger at them for starting the war?
I suspect the bombing campaign on Germany was a bit of both. There was certainly a strategic effect, but it came at a high cost, and was certainly partially venting anger at Germany, though not entirely. I think the reality in WW2 though, was that this level of bombing had never really been tried before, so at the time they probably didn’t have the full picture. Some examples of strategic effects was destruction of specialised factories(I.e. special glue factories, steelworks(e.g. shortage of effective alloys for aero engines, tanks etc… was contributed to by air bombing) etc…, mass waste of resources for a country that was fairly limited in this regard, mass usage of anti-air guns that could’ve been used in Eastern Europe, North Africa, Italy, France etc… and thousands of men to crew them, along with airmen and aircraft tied up defending Germany. So yeah there were definitely some, but the hopes of some in bomber command that it would knock out Germany was incorrect.
I agree with you.
The cost of the bombing campaign was huge, but people always overlook the toll it took on Germany aside from just making craters. Vast amounts of resources were spent in response to it - night fighters, flak towers, submarine pens, underground factories, as well as the increasingly desperate attempts at creating the Wunderwaffe that would stop the tide of bombers. Politically it shattered the average citizen's belief of an unstoppable, indestructible Germany, and was an endless source of embarassment for Hitler and the Luftwaffe command.
Germany's power grid was much more vulnerable than realized. One estimate is that if just 1% of the bombs dropped on German industry had instead been dropped on power plants German industry would have collapsed.
@@puff7145 An endless source of embarrassment that never changed their mind. They clearly believed the war was winnable up till the end - foolish lies they told themselves? Doesn't matter, they were going to fight to the end.
The other stuff you mention sounds impactful but clearly, given how long the bombing campaign continued, it was not going to end the war. Hell, it didn't even stop them from working and fighting.
So the question becomes, do all the resources (material and human) spent on adapting to _strategic bombing_ change how the war was ultimately won? Boots on the ground, in the streets. Maybe? I don't think so, once the Allies landed in France and Russia joined the effort. It's hard to imagine all of those resources being enough to prevent the inevitable outcome... because here's the thing: Team-Hitler wasn't ever going to surrender, no truce was possible. When faced with defeat, he chose death.
„Do not be too proud of the technologic terror you‘ve created.“
After seeing this video discuss strategic effect, I remember something a veteran officer from my country's army mentioned when commenting on the Ukrainian war last year regarding Russia targeting civilians in Ukraine. He said how it was something not unexpected despite the media buzz surrounding it that painted it as a shocking crime. He said that it was something normal that most armies are trained to do and will never stop considering simply out of humanitarian grounds due to logical utility. Targeting civilians is often done for the purpose of demoralizing the enemy, which Russia did when they faced harsh resistance from the Ukrainians. Shock and Awe in Iraq also had similar goals in mind with strikes on civilians being deliberate.
End of the day you haven't won a war until you have infantry in their cities. Even they navy as a whole serves this purpose by ensuring safe transport if men, equipment and supplies while limiting the enemies access to those same things. They remain a separate branch because of the different expertise required to preform their job, same as the airforce. "Moral" bombing was and remains a useless waste of resources. To actually succeed at strategic bombing you need to hit targets of strategic value like factories, railroads, fuel refineries and equipment depots. Dropping bombs on civilian houses is pointless unless your goal is just to piss people off. While the airforce has every reason to be its own branch in modern times any actual study shows they were born much too early for any role beyond recon and interception.
People say that bombing Germany and Japan into submission didn't work and that it only strengthened their resolve to resist... yet the Allies faced no German or Japanese insurgency. After that, more precise bombing was adopted where targets were selected more discriminately and cities were no longer simply bombed into rubble. And the U.S. has faced more and more determined insurgencies as they became more discriminate in bombing.
I think the idea that bombing your enemy into rubble doesn't work is a lie. I think it's a lie we tell ourselves because we just don't want to do it. We don't want to repeat the firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo or the atom bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki because those were atrocious and horrifying things. We don't want to do those things to win, so we tell ourselves not only that it isn't necessary to win, but that it doesn't work, despite the fact that the only war where it was truly practiced led to the unconditional surrender of the enemies.
I think if you're justified in fighting a war, you shouldn't hesitate to reduce the enemy cities to rubble. Make the people at home unable to leave bomb shelters and, importantly, make the troops fear for the life of their women and children at home. Make them know that their abject misery would end if they surrender. That worked the one time it was really tried, and it would work again. If you aren't willing to do that to win, you probably shouldn't be fighting that war. For the record, I think most recent wars haven't been worth fighting at all and to have taken such an approach would've been atrocious.
Bombing in Germany was so disruptive to their war efforts. When you follow German military procurement, so many projects were slowed down or stopped dead by bombing.
It was disruptive to some extend. But the war was won by the red army on the ground far far away from the allied bomberspam. I would even say, after stalingrad, there was no need for the allies to even do the invasion and bombing campaign.
The claim in the video is *not* that it wasn't effective or that it didn't have an impact but rather _it didn't end the war._ I think he could have made that point better but the distinction was there.
Would any of those projects have changed the ultimate outcome of the war? Once the war machine of the United States, UK and Russia was rolling it's hard to imagine any German project that turns the tide of the war after D-Day.
@@SansSentiments and how many more Soviets would die? Another 15 million?
@@aperson325 after stalingrad? naw man, after stalingrad the somewhat hardened red army traded significantly better than the squishy draftees from the west.
@@augmentifyofficialbut they still would have ended the war. The poor bloody infantry are what end wars, unless America wanted to nuke Germany repeatedly like they did Japan that is.
Nukes can definitely end wars but all conventional strategic bombing does is make fighting harder for the people getting bombed
I think one of the most important things, at least for western nations, is that we have grown reluctant to pour manpower into the meatgrinder. We view our troops as far less expandable than in times prior. Bombing (with stealth, or electronic jamming, or after the air defenses of the enemy have been knocked out) allows us to hit without retaliation. From there we can soften up the enemy for the ground offensive.
Also, while Germany in WW2 may have continued to produce machines of war, it would be weird if the bombing had not impacted Germany's capacity to do so. And Germany eventually pulled a lot of air defense from the frontlines back to the homeland. With current day hardware, we can target production facilities far better.
I wasn't aware that strategic bombing doctrine was ever intended to be able to win a war purely on its own, but even if that was the belief among some it clearly wasn't taken seriously by Allied command as evidenced by the fact that the Allies pursued conventional military operations against the axis alongside the strategic bombing campaigns. There was no point in the war where the Allies simply sat back, bombed Germany or Japan, and waited to see if they surrendered; the Allies were consistently planning or actively engaging in ground and naval operations against the Axis throughout the war (excluding maybe during the phony war, but there wasn't much strategic bombing going on then either). They wouldn't have bothered doing this if they really believed it wasn't necessary because strategic bombing would solve the problem by itself. So even if there was this silly idea that strategic bombing was more than just a single weapon among many meant to contribute towards an eventual combined arms victory, this theory never seems to have been put into practice.
You are correct. I'm astounded that anyone who calls his channel military avaition history can be so misinformed about this topic. He appears to misunderstand whatever research he has done and has reached his own conclusions. I couldn't even watch the rest of the video after seeing him state his erroneous premise at the beginning. No credibility after that.
@@gort8203 he’s not correct lmao. I mean he might be but surely the point is that some within air forces in WW2 some believed/hoped that strategic bombing alone could win a war, but were of course wrong, not that allied strategy was dictated based on this.
@@imperialinquisition6006 A dreamy-eyed individual or two that was not directly involved might have hoped that, but they were not in charge, and the allied strategy most certain was not based on that hope. The clearly stated goal of the combined bomber offensive was to destroy Luftwaffe so as to enable a land invasion of Europe. Nobody fighting the war believed bombing alone would force a surrender. This video makes nothing beyond a lame straw man argument.
BTW, just as a point of logic, you can't say a strategy that was never actually tried was wrong. Should I be LMAO at that?
Harris definitely believed Germany could be defeated by bombing alone.
Perhaps the Vietnam war is better example of an attempt to use air power alone to force the opponent into concessions without seriously threatening a land invasion of the heartland of the opponents regime.
Operations in war become more effective with more efficient execution of combined arms. Strategic operations are a combination of air, land sea, space, and technology, combining all of these in effective combinations, which is always a learning process, including failure (not reaching the goal or objective). In the end, it is occupation of a space, or place, by Armed Forces members (Soldier, Sailor, Guardsman, Marine, Airman, Guardian), or “boots on the ground.” Strategic air bombing is only a single component, either deciding or supporting. The video is insightful. Thanks
This is the sort of nuanced insight that I come here for. Bravo!
It depends what you are bombing. Factories can be placed almost anywhere, can have redundancy and be concealed or disguised relatively easily.
Shipyards and oil refineries and ammunition depots are better targets. There are fewer of them, there are fewer places that they can practically be located, and they are harder to conceal.
Everybody understands that it doesn't work, but we still using it as punishment. I don't think anybody in the top military leadership has any doubt about it. You don't rise that high in the ranks if you are stupid. But admitting it, is a different thing. All sides trying to pose as the 'good guys' and as such you shouldn't punish indiscriminately. Even if still do.
It is often the only way that a civilian population can get some degree of satisfaction in the pursuit of retribution-forget the strategic goals. Being unable to strike back directly reflects back upon one’s own military and sense of powerlessness.
It does work in as far as making things difficult for the opposition
Who is 'we' in this case?
@@JustAnotherBigby
Mankind. Everybody.
@@marrs1013 I guess I feel as resistant to collective guilt as I am to collective punishment.
i know the air force and navy have their own rivalry but damn this is something else
Now we just have to convince the Air Force to “sponsor” videos about how ‘the navy is not as effective as we thought.’
If there is indeed a God, I wouldn’t want to face Him/Her when I die if I had firebombed a city full of civilians.
When you get a shiny new hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
So basically wings can be in the air, and props in the sea, but it's boots on the ground that gets peace treaties signed.
Strategic bombing was created in a period of time where there was no actual capability for strategic bombing to exist. In WW2 we didn’t even know what a jet stream was. Thus there’s a huge flag on this claim in general. Now a days we can drop a bomb from high altitude with precision either under 12 ft. That’s insane to even fathom. So I’m the modern age, strategic bombing COULD force a nation to surrender. If your civilian buildings are standing, but the factories are rubble, the food sources are holes in the ground. That’s extremely effective in pulling off a surrender. But we’ve NEVER had the technology to actually try it in a conflict. Malcolm Gladwell explains it beautifully in his book ‘The Bomber Mafia’. I very much suggest the read.
Strategic Bombing by itself does not win wars...No one in the USAF believes that anymore (and they haven't for a long time). But, it is important to note that while documents like USSBS at the end of WW2 demonstrated that bombing did not halt or even slow some German wartime production (aircraft numbers etc.) the CBO did force the Luftwaffe to fight a grinding battle of attrition it could not win in the skies over Germany attempting to stop the bomber streams and their escorting fighters. In addition, the CBO did put sufficient strain on elements of the system in Germany (transportation infrastructure/fuel refining etc.) that Germany ended up having to devote resources attempting to solve problems the Reich otherwise would not have had to do, and such cumulative effects did contribute to ending the Reich.
One could argue that the delay to the introduction of the type XXI U-Boat from the bombing of Hamburg did in fact play a big part in winning the war.
You can easily find some quotes about the futility and evil intention behind 'strategic' bombing from a guy called Freeman Dyson who worked for British Bomber Command during WWII
You have Just added your name to the AAF Enemies list in the Shrine to the God Emperor Billy Mitchell
A related idea, for ever soldier who is KIA who is most responsible. a. The enemy soldier who pulled the trigger. b. They enemy civilian working in the factory which produced the bullet.
if you look at what was happening to german industry by the American bombing campaign you will see that bombing does work. first, the bombing caused the germans to pull fighter units away from the front line leaving the ground troops naked and unable to move on the western front. the eastern front was a far different war, soviet use of air power was as a tactical ground support force. second, the loss of the ability to build the weapons of war and to transport them, and needed supplies to where they were needed. the destruction of bridges, marshalling yards, and locomotives and rolling stock had a biggger affect upon the germans than the destruction of the factories. the American bombing campaign had as its main objective the destruction of the Luftwaffe. Attacking targets that would force the germans to respond and come up and engage the USAAF. when the Luftwaffe was broken, during big week, the USAAF could range at will over german territory.
An example left out of the video was Germany's failure to bomb the Brits into submission. At first the Germans concentrated on British air facilities but then switched to cities, an strategic blunder. In short, a society cannot be bombed into submission because the misery inflicted on it makes the people hate and fear the bombing nations and fight harder to evade the occupation of enemy troops upon surrender.
the fact that you stopped to talk about bibliography in the middle of the video really says a lot about the quality of your channel (even if it was a plug). great video as always!
Thank you!
Endlessly bombing by itself was never thought to win a war, it was simply one more front by which to apply pressure on the enemies military and civilian centers. It was to show the civilians that their military couldn't protect them or win, and it was to destroy, hinder and otherwise obstruct military functionality. It achieved all these things EXACTLY as it was expected to.
let me tell you, few nations on earth if war was to break out right now, wouldn't bomb the shit out of cities, military bases and any other visible target with no regard for rules of engagement. It is only a small few nations with the twisted idea that real war can be clean that would avoid using every tool at their disposal to disrupt the enemy in any way possible.
More importantly i think that it would be more effective now then it was then, people are a lot softer, a lot less able to deal with discomfort.
They typically found people would fight harder after being bombed.
@@jg3000 This is in fact a baldfaced lie told to us by those who wish wars to be fought "cleanly" It's far more true that overt brutality and merciless tactics are more effective then hearts and minds campaign.
Example. We won't WWII with brutality.
We lost all subsequent wars with hearts and minds tactics. This is undeniable.
You cannot change hearts and minds the way they wish you to think you can. Religious or nationalistic hardliners, or heavily indoctrinated populations would rather die to the last man women and child then change their minds. Only by breaking them totally can you get a call for peace. Talk is irrelevant, only force achieves meaningful results.
besides if you can be convinced that we are fighting "Clean wars" these days its easier to sell war as a solution. I prefer to see war waged as an ultimately bloody and last resort affair to prevent it from becoming more accepted. Fewer, bloodier wars are the real way to save lives, the faster you break the enemy the sooner the war stops.
Look at the middles eastern conflicts the USA undertook, Long seemingly endless, damn near 2 generations were born during that war. Imagine if we had simply fought to win, the war would have been over in a couple years at most but it was prolonged, claimed to be a "Clean" war but in the end there is no such thing. People practically cheered for war in the middles east, it was a patriotic war.
People need to wake up to the fact that war is not clean, it never will be and the most merciful thing for the world is to wage it to win and win fast, that means strategic implementation of excessive violence.
Your free to disagree, your free to take a moral standing, i don't at the end of the day really think either of us has any effect on what will be.
An independent Air Force is justified in terms of defence. Having a branch dedicated to preserving sovereign airspace makes sense in the same way you have a Navy to protect waters rather than have it rolled into the Army. For tactical or transport purposes it serves better to have the other branches have their own air units or Air Force on long term secondment (trained by the Air Force, but operating alongside Army or Navy units). For strategic or operational purposes an Air Force can work well (destroy key factories or blow up bridges to delay an enemy army). Ultimately though, if the defence of airspace falls to other branches it firstly becomes a secondary concern and secondly leads to disputes or buck-passing over where each branch takes responsibility.
Bombing cities should be illegal. It's the indiscriminate killing of civilians, a war crime that's ignored. We keep talking about things like nukes when we talk about atrocities, yet fire bombs in WW2 caused way more civilian casualties.
Not really what I want or like to hear, but good to hear it from you. Nice work, nice analysis.
One thing worth noting is where the majority of personnel came from that piloted aircraft. Early pilots came from disbanded units that lost their place in the line of battle during WW1. Others were looking alternative lines of advancement, a similar thing happened with the German submarines.
After WW1 they had their "branch" but needed to distinguish themselves against the established "clubs". Prestige, promotions, and power are on the line a theme you see in many war memoirs and only tempered once the cost is experienced by their writers. Air Power though seems to be immune to that cost.
IT boils down to the leaders of the time needing to justify their existence so they promise the moon and consider landing among the stars a success. The only real benefit that history has shown by having a independent air force is budgeting. The army will always spend the bulk of it's money on ground equipment, the navy on sea equipment if the airforce had it's home among either of those branches it would be making due with the scraps, just ask marines how the department of the navy treats them.
With the ballistic missile tests and space race the air force became a cash cow thanks to the blank checks it could write at the time. It's need for specialized equipment soon ensured that entire industries and companies sprang up with the sole purpose of supplying their demands and with that we have the birth of the military industrial complex. You look at all the traditional suppliers you'll find they were civilian companies that also did military contract but most airforce suppliers by the 80 solely supply the military and depend on the military for their continued existence.
The atom bomb didn't force a surrender. From what I've read it seems the japanese military which had until that point been unassailable in japanese politics froze up with indecision and infighting over their response. This gave the emperor an opening to take back power from the military and order them to cease fighting. They never actually surrendered. There was even a failed coup by the hardliners who wanted to continue the war shortly after the emperors order went out.
Modern proponents of strategic bombing seem to rely heavily on a popular belief that the atomic bombs were decisive in ending WW2 in the Pacific, but this wasn't the case. There is a lot of evidence to show that the USSR's entry into the war on August 9th 1945 had a greater effect on Japan's decision to surrender than the atomic bombs. This is based on official documents that became declassified or otherwise made available in the USA, Japan, and Russia in the 1990s. Strategic bombing has never been the primary cause of victory in a war. Thank you for making this video.
Perhaps the most important part of air superiority is not bombing the enemy into submission, it is just keeping their planes on the ground so they don't bomb you.
And their factories and power grid in shambles.
I've never heard this claim before but it surely seems self-evident. Strategic bombing didn't end the war, I'm not even sure it helped end the war. That didn't happen until there were boots on the ground in Germany. Doesn't mean a separate Navy and Air Force aren't needed but it certainly calls into question the vast amount of resources expended to support the strategic bombing campaign day and night. No one capitulated.
And the people killed were almost always the "replaceables" not the leadership, not the elites but rather the people who had no power to stop the war, even if they wanted to. Fascinating.
How else would you suggest destroying the enemy's ability to produce weapons?
Also the initial goal of the US 8th Air Force bombing of Germany (43-44) was not the destruction of the German “war machine”. The goal was to destroy the Luftwaffe. Unless the capability of the Luftwaffe was removed, the invasion of France would not occur. Unfortunately the planners thought the heavily armed B-17s and B-24s could accomplish this by themselves (initial stocks of long range fuel tanks for the P-47 were not even shipped to England as they were thought to be unnecessary). This was quickly shown to be wrong (for example, if those tanks had been available, then P-47s could have provided escort on the infamous Schweinfurt raids).
So then daylight bombing became the bait, and the escort fighters (primarily the P-47), systematically destroyed the defending German fighters (and more importantly, the experienced pilots). Any destruction of German industry was an added benefit.
Although I've heard/read of this (somewhere, long ago) before as well, I believe the 'exact' (or, full) story of the decision to withhold early drop-tank employment/shipment for the P-47 is a bit murky (or, quite possibly, unrevealed/classified). Could you [possibly] site any available source of reference towards your claims? (Thanks, in advance.)
Think you should also not forget the use of missiles starting with Congreve. This became larger using the V1 and V2 and continuous i Ukraine today.
In a Clausewitz sense, the idea of strategic victory is to do things (basically, to wage war) that compel the enemy to do our will. The term "strategic effects" is misleading, if not dangerous, because one might think that aerial-delivered effects can be strategic. No, most aerial effects are tactical, even if they are long range and deep strike. Few air raids or alpha strikes deliver anything approaching strategic results (cf, the marginally effective slog of Vietnam Linebacker), absent some key hit that knocks out what Clausewitz would call the enemy's "center of gravity" (again, cf, Linebacker II -- the "eleven days of Christmas" -- or mining Haiphong Harbor). On a good day -- or more likely, a good few weeks or month(s) -- air power can deliver operational effects; see the first phase, 40 days or so, of Desert Shield, 1991. And in the case of operational air power, it must be combined with ground or naval power to deliver true victory, meaning to seize and hold territory.
Well it did work with The Netherlands in WW2. After tough battles in the center of our country for a few days, where the Germans had a really hard time actually making progress, they bombed our port city of Rotterdam into oblivion. Since we were a small nation that could put up some resistance but lacked the resources to defend our homes against total destruction, the Dutch government capitulated saving our historic cities and the lives of our people from an inevitable doom. We could have never lasted and seeing as they were prepared to bomb the living sh*t out of our civilian infrastructure, knowing we could do nothing about it, the choice was a logical and just one. Strategic bombing does work, but it depends on the context of the conflict (manpower, technology, defensive capabilities, etc) and should always (and I think this should be obvious) be part of a larger combined arms operation.
Hi Christoph, superb video, well researched and in-depth analysis. I really liked you ruse of image / infographics to drive your point home. I think there's still a perception that air power alone wins wars. Just thinking, in the RAF example, as longer range light bombers became available (thinking Mosquito in particular) along with better precision bombing options, do you think greater concentration on targeted rather than area/population bombing might have been a more effective strategy? Potentially, this could have minimised crew casualties. Thanks again, Owen
Military Industrial Complex!
This is not completely true.
Bombing cities worked with Serbia, to make them leave Kosovo.
The trick is not to target and kill the civilian population, which increases grieves,
but target instead the infrastructures that their living standard depend on,
such as electricity, transportation, water, etc.
This way, the civilian population apply pressure to their government,
as they prefer to abandon a remote piece of land for the return of their living standard.
Something I actually encountered while researching a presentation for my Airman Leadership School's history presentation; the bombing was ridiculously unimpressive in winning WW2.
Not that I could SAY that in the presentation, but finding that we wasted tons of young men bombing civilians to no real effect was... disheartening.
Bombing the crap out of Hanoi and Haiphong brought the NV to the negotiating table posthaste. NV didn't like it much when their sanctuaries in Laos and Cambodia were bombed either. So, it's not as black and white as some would believe.
Strategic effect
Lol, as if they didn’t win that war?
North Vietnam won that war, my dude.
@@tiberiuskirk2593 No it did not. It went back on the peace treaty they signed and conquered a now alone South Vietnam.
@@tremedar War is nothing but an extension of diplomacy. As such, when America failed to enforce its interests on the region it lost and NV won.
At the end of the day communism spread to Laos and Cambodia (the latter of wich was, ironically , supported by the US)
Dear Mr. Bergs,
According to the title, I do miss one book in your list of recommendations: "Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War" by Robert A. Pape, 1996. If you want I send it to you. Do you (or third party) have a PO box?
To sum up the content: Strategic bombing doesn't work, and coercion has become more difficult in general for several reasons.
Best regards,
This is like saying "fighter aircraft don't win wars so we don't need them". Artillery won't win wars, but infantry without artillery isn't going to be as effective. Tanks don't win wars, but the allies learned in Operation Market Garden that tanks without infantry are just sitting ducks. No one weapons system wins wars.
There are two coupled simple technical factors involved: if you want something to be destroyed, you have to actually hit it. And you want it to stay destroyed, so you have to hit it hard so it cannot be easily repaired. Russia claims to have hit that Patriot battery, but I bet it is patched up in no time because it was only hit by shrapnel. A direct hit is another story.
Simply put: until the early 70's, accuracy was so poor that it was just luck to actually destroy something permanently. It was even so poor that atomic bombs missed frequently - Nagasaki was a miss and Crossroads Able was too - you are painting your target ship bright orange that you couldn't miss it - and it easily survives the hit because it missed.
So in a cynical way you can say that the development of the H-bombs was the simplest solution to that problem - with a blast radius of dozens of kilometers, accuracy doesn't matter anymore. It finally changed with the development of the JDAM bomb and the first precision missiles to deliver tactical nukes inside a radius of 50 meters.
Strategic bombing is the equivalent of trying to defeat wasps by beating their nest with a baseball bat. Sure, you will probably kill a lot of wasps, but in the long run all it does is just piss them off and harden their resolve to kill you.
I agree with the premise and there is a significant issue in such forms of Bombing, civilian casualties which make the opponent want to oppose you more, but I would argue the issue in Vietnam was not bombing enough actual targets and instantly. That was a half-assed war. Furthermore what about the doctrine the U.S. adopted after Vietnam, Air was a huge aspect of it increasing contact to miles in-depth. Of course air was setting the stage for troops in Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom.
Needless to say, the Germans sure thought strategic bombing was a threat to them due to the amount of anti-aircraft artillery set to counter the strategic bombers.
daily bombardmemt from thousands of bombers against a non existent luftwaffe tends to have a fear effect
Yes and no
It was certainly no problem to the german industry. It actually helped because it forced Germany to restructure and simplify a lot of industrial processes and most importantly get rid of a lot of beurocracy that slowed it down significantly. The only strategic bomibng with any effect was the bombing of fuel storages and fuel plants spring 1944 onwards, which was like less then 1% of strategic bombing commited.
The reason why the germans went so heavy into AA in germany is rather simple actually: It was easy and they could do it
Using AA batteries in your homeland is significantly more efficent and less ressource intensive then dragging them to Slaingrad and back. You literally have the factories for guns and ammo a few hours away, food is locally anyway and you dont need to employ soldiers for it, everyone can use an AA canon with instructions.
And for the germans it was significantly more advantages to fight the allied air forces over germany then on the frontline, because the allied advantage in number was for msot of the war significantly smaller over germany then at the direct frontline for various reasons.
Then there is the obvious moral/propaganda aspect for the civilians whos cities get bombed wanting to see something being done to defend/avenge them for obvious reasons.
Generally speaking, it is very complicated. But take North Vietnam as an exmaple, they had basically no AA for most of the war and carried on with little issues. The propably wasnt a single spott there taht wasnt at least bombed once during the war.
Germany suffered significantly more from losing access to certain ressources in occupied territory then to strategic bombing, something regularily being ignored when talking about the issue. Especially from 1943 onwards the german industry suffered from a chronic lack of certain ressources that was really crippling.
You're not going to just do nothing when you are being bombed, of course they build up passive and active defense.
@@laisphinto6372 That nonexistent Luftwaffe shot down a hell of a lot of British, American and Canadian bombers.
@@abrahamdozer6273 yeah thats the purpose of Flak
You might have got the bombing concept a little bit wrong here. In WW2 they were trying to use bombing to destroy strategic targets, which were the things that enabled the enemy to make war. Factories, power stations, dams, fuel refineries, railways etc. (as well as the weapons themselves) For instance the Nazis had planes they were not able to fly, and tanks they were not able to drive because of fuel shortages. The problem with bombing was that it was not accurate and precise, sort of hit or miss. Then there was the city carpet bombing which was more about destroying morale and the will to make war. You can debate the ethics of that, but is there any ethics in the nature of war itself? Today's destruction from above has a different delivery method, and most times much more accurate. If they know the location of the strategic target they can usually hit it. For instance Ukraine does not have the means to create weapons of war, and if they did Russia has destroyed these long ago. The only way that Ukraine can continue war, is if someone else produces the weapons for them. But what when there are no more weapons of war available? Whose weapons stockpiles are going to run out first? Be destroyed by the opposition? Call it bombing, or destruction from above, but that is the objective. An army can't fight without food or weapons, and if they only have rifles that is not going to work against rockets. Among other things war is about attrition, and arial destruction causes that.
The only exception I can think of was in the 1990s when Serbia was committing genocide in the Balkans. Clinton started attacking Serbian forces by air; and many people, including myself, argued that you couldn't win war without boots on the ground. And then Milosevic gave up. So you never know.
There should also be the discussion of wether the resources the opponent spends defending against strategic bombing is valuable enough to justify the strategic bombing this will create political pressure to defend a non combat critical area
Cheers from the Pacific West coast of Canada.
It's important to mention the way the allied bomber commanders stuck with the bombing of civilian targets:
Contrary to their often-stated justifications, they knew that civilians under sustained terroristic aerial bombing doesn't make the populations turn against their governments. It makes them pull together.
They knew that it wasn't hampering their production of war materiel. Production in both Germany and Japan went up steadily, until the allies took out their major fuel production and supply.
It was known that fuel was their main limiting factor, yet the allies barely sent 8% of sorties after fuel, while thousands of sorties were going to cities, for years.
We didn't really concentrate on their fuel until late fall of '44 in Europe, and late spring of '45 in Japan, and in both cases it was the end of their ability to put up a meaningful fight.
Air power applied against strategic targets definitely can be quickly decisive, but only if it's used as such, and not blown away against terroristic striking of the civilian populations as primary targets.
The Desert Storm land war lasted 4 days. That wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for the air campaign prior.
So really what we've found is that winning requires teamwork and effective attacks from all theaters of war: Air, Land, Sea
Guess that's why the Marines win so much-
It'd take lots of loitering munitions and loitering chemical weapons targeted at agricultural plants to do the work.
In short, I'm with Curtis LeMay
The most notable exception is the war against Japan, the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima resulted in a prompt unconditional surrender to Allied forces.
I disagree. Total war is one thing which can bring a country to her knees, it worked against the Confederacy and it worked against Japan. Strategic bombing to help do this was part of that total war against Japan. Besides Japan though, strategic bombing has not been let off of the leash to the point of total war, which is when it is at the zenith of its effectiveness.
the assumption here is that the cost of investing into and carrying out SB to conduct total war pays off better than the alternative.
the confederacy broke because its armies were also defeated in the field, and that the total war March was a comparatively cost-efficient (in terms of resources denied+morale effect Versus percentage of Union power invested) method.
(Partly this could be that the Confederate war was conducted at the behest of an entrenched elite and only a part of its "local population" so the effect of marching through land and freeing slaves has an outsized impact on the willingness to continue the war)
What about the operation "Allied Force" in Yugoslavia?
Examining the Gulf War and Iraqi Freedom you find numerous cases where air power was expended at great risk and even greater (material) costs with often dubious results, when a company or battalion of armored vehicles (especially tanks) would have more than sufficed while being more cost effective in the end.
The USSR also tried bombing the Mujahideen into submission which did about as much as throwing dust at them. It only further turned the average Afghan against them and the puppet communist regime. The Soviet bombing campaign was indiscriminate and merciless. They considered any village not under their control to be under Mujahideen control and bombed them. When the Soviet began their withdrawal, in order to prop up their puppets in Kabul, they begin another wave of indiscriminate bombings of all villages not under the control of the communists. To put it simply, by the end of their involvement, the Soviets had bombed every single village in Afghanistan.
Effectively strategical bombing, also if it didn't stopped Axis' production, severely afflicted Germany's war machine, about 50% of their guns' production was of AA gun's, a LOT of fighters had to defend Reich 's territories, plus the destruction of vitali factories retarded either the rocket programma and the introduction of jet fighters. Don't forget also railways ' damages, that compromised the reforniments of vital materiale and the fatal distruction of syntethic oil's factories. Naturally, either in Korea and Vietnam the problem was that the enemy 's industrial capacity was principally in Russia, so the SAC couldn't destroy them, and the enemy wasn't worried by human losses!
Wouldn't Vietnam and Korea make more compelling case studies for this argument?
Yes.
I assumed that bombing everything related to fuel refining would eventually lead to immobility V.S. air superiority, after that the air force is directed to attack all enemy ground units, land forces would be required to find and stirr up the enemy so air power could be directed to attack their coordinates. I did hear about Iraqi units surrendering to air power alone
In ww2. Without the strategic bombing campaign it's certaij military production would have been higher than what it was. But perhaps more importantly, it exhausted the Luftwaffe over Germany so by d-day it was unable to provide effective battle support. And air power is a big part of why Germany lost in the western front.
And what did that achieve? Allowing Stalin to enslave half of Europe
"Without the strategic bombing campaign it's certaij military production would have been higher than what it was."
Try to understand opportunity costs: A few hundred bombers in anti U-boot missions would have had a much higher impact for the Brits, more tank deliveries to the SU too. In 1942/43 thousands of bombers were wasted over Germany without real effect.
@Olaf Kunert the real effect was the attrition impact on the Luftwaffe which made a real different at the front line in terms of air superiority allowing dday to be a success.
@@mornnb The real effect was the murder of over 500,000 German civilians
One of the biggest war crimes in all of human history
I've said the same for years. Just a little bit of historical knowledge and it becomes very apparent.