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DID IT WORK?
Carroll Quigley, the American geopolitics professor, in his 1348 page book ‘Tragedy And Hope – A History Of The World In Our Time’ concludes that strategic bombing was not, as the Irish Times concluded a number of years ago in a review of Frederick Taylor’s book, in the case of Dresden, a “masterstroke” that “went horribly right,” but actually a great failure in military terms:
“ the strategic bombing of Germany was mishandled from the beginning until almost the end of the war. Correctly, such strategic bombing should have been based on careful analysis of the German war economy to pick out the one or two critical items which were essential to the war effort. These items were probably ball bearings, aviation fuels, and chemicals, all of them essential and all of them concentrated. After the war German general Gotthard Heinrici said that the war would have ended the year earlier if the allied bombing had been concentrated on ammonia plants. Whether this is correct or not, the fact remains that strategic bombing was largely a failure, and was so from poor choice of targets and from long intervals between repeated attacks. Relentless daily bombardment, with heavy fighter escort, day after day, in spite of losses, with absolute refusal to be distracted to area or city bombing because of losses or shifting ideas might have made a weighty contribution to the defeat of Germany and shortened the war substantially. As it was, the contribution by strategic bombing to the defeat of Germany was relatively incidental, in spite of the terrible losses suffered in the effort.
“Indiscriminate bombing of urban areas… was justified with the wholly mistaken arguments that civilian morale was a German weak point and that the destruction of workers housing would break this morale. The evidence shows that the German war effort was not weakened in any way by lowering of civilian morale, in spite of the horrors heaped upon it… the British effort to break German civilian morale by area night bombing was an almost complete failure. In fact, one of the inspiring and amazing events of the war was the unflinching spirit under unbearable attack shown by ordinary working people in industrial cities. ” (pp.800-2.)
But was the extermination of the German working class a purely military matter? Perhaps it was a kind of racial cleansing motivated by the Social Darwinism in England that had seen the Naval Blockade of 1914-19 as an instrument designed to “degenerate the German racial stock” (as one Imperialist publication put it in the infamous article, The Huns of 1940 [P.W.Wille: 'The Huns of 1940', Weekly Dispatch, 8 September 1918]) by destroying infants and producing sub-normal human specimens from the wombs of starving German women. The Royal Navy had not degenerated the German racial stock sufficiently in 1918-9 to disable the Hun by 1940, so a large proportion of the German masses needed to be eradicated by the Royal Air Force when the opportunity presented itself from 1942-45, before the Russians won the War. Perhaps that was what it was all about – casual genocide.
Attacking German workers, destroying their morale, and also hopefully provoking them to revolt against their leaders was a widely held notion among the British military circles prior to the Great War – only then it was planned that the Royal Navy would do it through sea blockade. Trenchard took the Naval blockade strategy that England had planned against Germany from 1903, had used against the civilian population between 1914 and 1919, and applied it to air warfare, for the next war on Germany.