Comments on: The wind vs. the whirlwind

By: Airminded · Tuesday, 17 September 1940

Airminded · Tuesday, 17 September 1940 — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 10:27:08 +0000

[...] Why, yes. Yes, it can. [...]

By: JDK

JDK — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 08:33:41 +0000

I'd just like to add that this is a fascinating discussion (like many on Brett's blog!) which has developed my understanding of the history and people in question - one of the best things about the interweb...

By: Brett Holman

Brett Holman — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 05:56:39 +0000

Good questions, particularly the last one. A lot of transportation and oil targets would have been in working class suburbs anyway. Not all, though -- the aiming point of the hugely successful raid on the Dortmund-Ems canal on 23/24 September 1944 was near the town of Ladbergen, which today has a population of 6400 and is some distance from a big city (Münster).

By: Dan

Dan — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 08:22:30 +0000

Hmmm, others here are more expert than me, but is the ability to bomb targets in France precisely over the summer the same as being able to bomb targets in Germany precisely over the winter? How long does it take Bomber Command to get navigational aid stations set up in France? I'm not saying Harris was right, just that his preferences might be explicable. And had he been less blunt about what he was doing and claimed precision bombing only over the winter of 1944-45, would the experience of German cities actually have been much different?

By: Chris Williams

Chris Williams — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 20:21:51 +0000

Yes - it's always struck me that by May 1944, it was obvious that Bomber Command could hit a target smaller than a city, owing to the fact that they'd been doing just that for SACEUR. So how come they went back to business as usual after that? The Luftwaffe was essentially defeated, thus the difference between France and Germany was less important than it had been in 1943 - though the RAF might not necessarily have realised this. The bombing argument mutated several times during the war, didn't it? On the one side, there's a shifting cast of characters saying "Don't do area bombing because . . .", inserting a number of different reasons, many convincing. On the other is Harris, saying "No, I shall do area bombing unless you order me to stop". When ordered to stop - temporarily in the Spring and early summer of 1944, permanently in April 1944 - he did. Thus if we're going to play a blame game, Portal, not Harris, needs to be in the dock.

By: Ross

Ross — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 11:09:59 +0000

Allan raises an important point there. By 44 Bomber Command was quite an impressive weapon system with regards to accuracy. There is an entry in Leigh-Mallory's diary during the the Normandy Campaign where he and Portal laugh over the earlier protestations of Harris over his inaibility to provide such accurate bombing of these types of targets.

By: Alan Allport

Alan Allport — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 22:21:07 +0000

Those who are unenthusiastic about purchasing the Despatch (translation: cheapskates like me) may wish to know that Cox's comments can be read via Google Books.

I agree that his argument does ameliorate to some extent the criticism of Harris in late 1944 (though Cox notes that in his view attacks against oil could have been stepped up by at least twenty five per cent during that period, which is not nothing).

What strikes me is the way in which Harris seems to have come to misunderstand the weapon system at his disposal in those last months of the war. He remained skeptical about the ability of Bomber Command to perform precision attacks long after it had become obvious that advances in tactics and technology had enabled it to do so. The Butt Report was ancient history by late 1944, but his fixation on area bombing caused him to seriously underestimate the transformed abilities and equipment of his own men.

By: Chris Williams

Chris Williams — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 20:17:13 +0000

Mmm, statistics and graphs . . . mmmm. ....

By: Dan

Dan — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 07:28:57 +0000

My memory was, for once, right - Sebastian Cox's arguments about Harris and targeting in 1944-45 are in his introduction to Harris' Despatch on War Operations: 23rd February to 8th May 1945 (London, Frank Cass, 1995). A hideously expensive book, so probably one to look up in the library rather than purchase, unless you are a statistics and graphs nut (a classification that surely excludes anyone who would comment here...)

By: Jakob

Jakob — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 15:03:30 +0000

Brett: Good point about the wartime/peacetime distinction, but I suspect this line becomes much more blurred after 1945. The rise of nuclear strategy and the Cold War, along with the acceptance of methods like OR (and new, related, ones such as game theory,) mean that more of this kind of planning happens in peacetime.

With the growth of the military-industrial-academic complex, these analyses are not performed solely by members of the armed forces or by civil servants any more; It is after all a RAND theorist who writes On Thermonuclear War and comes up with the term 'Megadeath.'

These are just musings, partly inspired by an essay I wrote for my Masters last year. In suggesting the topic, my supervisor pointed out that there had been analyses of the Holocaust as the dark side of modernity, but there was no comparable studies of the projects of liberal democracy, such as the Manhattan project or the Strategic Air Offensive.*

[*] although there are studies of Oppenheimer and Los Alamos that discuss some of the bureaucratic structures that inhibited questioning of the project's purpose; I used some of them to make my argument.