The Killing Fields II

Trey Smith

Air weapons, as the Germans refer to them, have always been oversold. Their effectiveness has never been established. The military impact of air raids has been the subject of decades of controversy. In World War II, RAF Bomber Command destroyed a significant portion of Nazi Germany’s industry, many German cities including Cologne and Dresden, and caused the deaths of up to 600,000 civilians. The stated aim of the offensive was to break the morale of the German working class and it failed miserably.

The indiscriminate nature of the bombing, the heavy civilian casualties and damage stiffened German resistance. Even the effect of Bomber Command’s attacks on industrial production was not major, as little as 3% in some years. This lack of success is generally admitted even though Bomber Command was undeniably massively destructive. Many believe that the bombing of Dresden, when the war was essentially over and which killed 25,000 people, symbolizes the ruthlessness and pointlessness of bombing campaigns. Numerous people, including military officials alive at the time, also questioned the need to atom bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki since it was obvious that Japan had been completely defeated by then. The goal of those bombings was merely the utter destruction of two cities and more than 150,000 civilian lives. Although never admitted, the goal was merely retribution.

The American bombing of Hanoi during the Vietnamese War was similarly ineffective. As with the people of London during the Blitz in World War II, the more America bombed the North, the more the resolve of the people grew. More to the point, the two bombing campaigns against the North resulted from the realization that the war was not being won, and they failed to have any notable effect on the war’s progress. Olof Palme, the Prime Minister of Sweden, compared the bombing to a number of historical atrocities including the bombing of Guernica, the massacres of Oradour-sur-Glane, Babi Yar, Katyn, Lidice, and Sharpeville, and the extermination of Jews and other groups at Treblinka.
~ from Retributive Warfare: Mistaking Killing and Revenge for Justice by John Kozy ~

The idea of "targeted destruction" through bombs dropped from the sky seems like something of an oxymoron to me these days. Flying tens of thousands of feet high in the air, bombardiers only have a vague idea of where the bombs will land. Wind, temperature, speed and angle of the plane play huge roles in how the bombs will drop through the air and, if merely one of the computations re these variables is a tad bit off, the "target" might be missed by a considerable amount.

Growing up watching war movies, the propaganda instilled in them worked on my brainwashed mind. Americans bomber crews were like sharpshooters. What was specifically targeted is what we hit. Sure, any particular bomb might be a few feet or yards off target, but we struck near the bull's eye almost every time!

As I matured, I began to realize that this idealization of the sanitization of war was poppycock. American fliers were no more or less precise than anyone else. Massive bombing campaigns weren't about precision at all; they were means to terrorize the residents and citizens of the designated "enemy." It wasn't really all that damn important of the precise landing spot of bombs; as long as they fell within a generalized area, everything was hunky dory!

What difference does it really make if the bombs land on a munitions factory OR in the neighborhood of the working class folks who work at the factory? Either way you severely limit or cripple production. If you destroy the factory, the people will be sent to work at a different facility, but if you kill the factory workers themselves...