Strategic bombing: The British, American, and German experiences

Abstract

Throughout the twentieth century, fundamental changes in how wars between nations are fought have been influenced by a variety of political, technological, geostrategic, and cultural factors that have been largely external to military services and organizations. For instance, technological changes affecting the weapons and other tools employed in military operations have usually been part of the external environment in which peacetime military innovation occurred, not indigenous to military organizations themselves. Of all the military innovations during the years 1918–1939, strategic bombing was particularly influenced by these kinds of external factors. There are a number of reasons why this should be so; among other factors the rapid development of aviation technology as well as the catastrophic impact of World War I on Western civilization exercised a crucial impact on the minds of airmen, politicians, and ordinary citizens alike. Such societal and intellectual influences in turn influenced development of the doctrines and conceptions with which military organizations approached the question of strategic bombing. Much of air power's appeal to military and political leaders lay in its potential to combine physical destruction with the reach and speed to overfly intervening oceans, plains, rivers, and mountains and focus that destructive power against the vital centers of the enemy nation in a matter of hours. Above all, this sort of strategic use of air power seemed to offer an escape from another terrible war of attrition on the ground.