The Strategic Bombing Debate: The Second World War and Vietnam

The assertion that strategic bombing is not effective has been made repeatedly for the past thirty years. Furthermore, the objections to it as an immoral method of waging war have, if anything, been registered more frequently. If, then, strategic bombing is both immoral and militarily ineffective, why did Great Britain and the United States persist in their ever-increasing bombing offensive against Germany during the second world war? One must ask, too, why such a clear emphasis was given to the continued development of a long-range strategic bomber force in this nation's military posture from the end of the second world war until the present. Were the strategic bombing campaigns against Germany and Japan unproductive military efforts? Did searching and objective immediate post-war assessments come to this conclusion? Further, could American and British industrial and military resources, used to mount these strategic bombing offensives, have been better utilized? In short, were the strategic bomber offensives justifiable contributions to victory when compared with the effort expended in their prosecution? Because of the limitations of space, this essay will not attempt to answer all of these questions. Instead, it will address itself specifically to just two of them; they are: Were the bombing offensives of the second world war decisive contributions to the defeat of Germany and Japan? And, further, did the experience in Vietnam invalidate existing non-nuclear strategic bombing doctrine? Certainly the youngest of the US armed services, the Air Force, received the largest share of military appropriations during the Eisenhower years. The Air Force, during this same period, allocated more funds to its long-range bomber force the Strategic Air Command -