Quote:
Originally Posted by Sailor Steve
"The ultimate aim of an attack on a town area is to break the morale of the population which occupies it. To ensure this, we must achieve two things: first, we must make the town physically uninhabitable and, secondly, we must make the people conscious of constant personal danger. The immediate aim, is therefore, twofold, namely, to produce (i) destruction and (ii) fear of death."
- Sir Arthur Travers Harris, Despatch On War Operations, 23rd February 1942 to 8th May 1945
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Hurray for 'bomber' Harris again!
The theory that area bombings could work towards undermining the countries's morale to keep the war going only proved valid after in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and still, in a country that was, by then, almost entirely defeated - and even so, only when the US acheived the means of a super-weapon that must have caused as much as a fuss as the 'death-star' in Alderan. Other then that, even the massive raids with B-29s (the american equivalent to the English massive populational raid doctrine) wasn't doing the trick.
After the war, Churchill would admit publicly that the emphasis in this kind of war was a waste of resources.
Now, the american approach - precision bombing - was far more reasonable, although numbers prove that it did not do much of a difference. Most factories could resume production in little time.
The only worth-mentioning effort from the british towards high-tech precision bombing was the 'bouncing bombs', not only the dam-buster raids but the Tirpitz raid. Now that's an epic use of modern air warfare! Still, the dam buster raid proved as unnefective as any other kind of raid, as the destruction caused by the floods and lack of electricity was only a fraction of what they were going for, and mostly everything was repaired in short time.