Strategic bombing
Strategic bombing is a 20th century military strategy in which bombers attack civilian targets such as factories, railroads, communications facilities, and oil fields rather than attacking enemy troops.
Strategic bombing is intended to interfere with the enemy's ability to wage war without the attacker's having to commit large numbers of ground troops with resulting casualties. Almost inevitably this also means attacking cities and civilians in general. Consequences in terms of civilian casualties, civilian terror, and enemy morale are inevitable. These potentially distasteful aspects are generally minimized in the attacker's propaganda. Notably, civilian morale has often been seen to strengthen during air raids. Even bombing entire cities (carpet bombing) with no regard to particular industrial installations might well be termed strategic bombing by an attacker, since enemy resources are undoubtedly diverted to maintaining the civic infrastructure by such tasks as firefighting, rehousing and feeding the homeless, demolition and rebuilding.
The first major use of strategic bombing was by Germany's Luftwaffe in 1940, bombing British cities including London, Liverpool, Bristol, Belfast, Cardiff, and Coventry. The main aim was to destroy ports and other industrial installations. Bombing at night reduced losses to fighters and anti-aircraft guns, but also meant gross inaccuracy in targeting, leading to large numbers of civilian casualties.
Britain retaliated with its own night bombing campaign, which built up slowly from tiny beginings in 1941 to truly massive strength by the end of the war. The effects of strategic bombing were very poorly understood at the time and grossly overrated. Particularly in the first two years of so of the campaign, few understood just how little damage was caused and how rapidly the Germans were able to replace lost production - despite the obvious lessons to be learned from England's own survival of the Blitz.
Mid-way through the air war, it slowly began to be realised that the campaign was having very little effect. Despite an ever-increasing tonnage of bombs despatched, the inaccuracy of delivery was such that any bomb falling within five miles of the target was deemed a "hit" for statistical purposes, and even by this standard, many bombs missed.
These problems were dealt with in two ways: first the precision targeting of vital facilities (oil production in particular) was abandoned in favour of "area bombing" - a euphemisim for simply aiming at entire cities in the hope of killing workers, destroying homes, and breaking civilian morale. Secondly, efforts were made to improve accuracy by crew training, electronic aids, and the creation of a "pathfinder" force to mark targets for the main force.
A very large proportion of the industrial production of the United Kingdom was harnessed to the task of creating a vast fleet of heavy bombers - so much so that other vital areas of war production were under-resourced, notably the development of effective tanks and above all the provision of long-range aircraft to safeguard Atlantic shipping from submarine attack. Until fairly late in the war - about 1944 - the effect on German production was remarkably small and nowhere near enough to justify the colossal diversion of scarce British resources. The effect on German allocation of forces, however, gradually became significant: every extra anti-aircraft battery and night fighter squadron was one less to fight Russian forces on the Eastern Front.
Mid-way through the war, the United States Army Air Force arrived to begin its own strategic bombing campaign, which was conducted in daylight. The American heavy bombers carried much smaller payloads than British aircraft (because of the need for defensive armament) but were generally able to deliver them somewhat more accurately. USAAF leaders firmly held to the claim that they were conducting "precision" bombing of military targets for much of the war, and energetically refuted claims that they were simply bombing cities. In reality, the day bombing was "precision bombing" only in the sense that most bombs fell somewhere in or near the desired city, whereas the night bombing campaign rarely achieved even that. Nevertheless, the sheer tonnage of explosive delivered by day and by night was eventually sufficient to cause widespread damage.
The twin campaigns - the US by day, the Commonwealth by night - built up into massive bombing of German industrial areas, notably the Ruhr, followed by attacks directly on cities such as Hamburg and the more often-criticized bombing of Dresden.
Despite its popularity with the military and politicians, the strategy has been criticized on practical grounds because it does not always work reliably, and on moral grounds because of the large civilian casualties that result from this activity.
For instance, the Strategic bombing survey conducted by the United States after World War II determined that German industrial production in aircraft, steel, armor, and other sectors had risen during the war despite strategic bombing. The attack on oil was more successful and contributed to the general collapse of Germany in 1945. That collapse in 1945 was so total that the survey concluded it was impossible to know what portion to attribute to the bombing and what to other factors.
Although designed to "break the enemy's will", the opposite often happens. The British did not crumble under the German Blitz and other air raids early in the war. German workers continued to work throughout the war and food and other basic supplies were available throughout.
Because of the controversial nature of deliberately bombing civilian targets, the United States military has in more recent wars attempted to minimize negative publicity. During the Gulf War, for example, US weapons were touted for their precision which reduced civilian casualties. The use of language in describing such bombing campaigns during that war was also altered for propaganda reasons; thus the term collateral damage was used as a vague, less sinister sounding, term to describe the loss of life that resulted from strategic bombing.
Among the most controversial instances of strategic bombing are:
- World War II
- German attacks in the Battle of Britain
- Allied attacks on Berlin and Dresden
- US firebombing of Tokyo
- US atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
- Vietnam war
- Bombing of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, B-52s against bicycles and trucks
- US bombing of Hanoi
- US bombing of Cambodia
- Gulf War
- Strategic bombing of civilian targets in Iraq
- Kosovo War