In my country up here there are those individuals who villify
anything military and who have lately published theses that question
the usefulness and condemn the morality of Allied strategic bombing
in World War Two, belittling the Canadian, British and American bomber
crews in the process.
Granted! The late RAF Air-Marshal Bomber Harris and the USAAF General
Curtis Lemay were not the most appealing of characters with their
sanguine attitudes toward German and Japanese civilians, but they
did get the job done.
And yes, tragically, over 500,000 German civilians perished in the bombings,
and hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians as well.

Those critics of the Allied strategic bombing campaign in WW2 argue
that the strategic bombing of Germany did little to shorten the war,
and yet those critics do not say [hypothetically] how much the war could
have been shortened in Europe if human and material resources for
the allied strategic bombing forces had been diverted elsewhere.
As far as the critics condemning the morality of indiscriminate
bombing by Allied aircraft of German targets, both industrial and residential,
resulting in the tragic losses of large numbers German civilians, the critics
ignore the technological limitations in the years 1940-45.
Air-Marshal Harris had to do with with primitive radio, radar and vacuum-tube
technology; there were no such things as transistors, microcircuits, lasers,
or GPS systems available to his scientists to allow for Gulf War Era
"Smart Bombs" in those bygone years.
The RAF Bomber Command, and the USAAF, had to make do with gravity bombs, OBOE,
aircraft photo-reconnaisance, primitive radar bombsights for nighttime, and Norton bombsights [not always effective]
for daytime. Furthermore, the Germans tended to build their industrial facilities next to residential areas
and Raoul can testify that even in summer the Northern European night and day skies are not
always sunny and free of cloudy overcast. Large civilian casualties were unavoidable in such circumstances.

But what about the effectiveness of those strategic bombing raids, the critics ask?
The critics deny the effectiveness of strategic bombing by the Allies without offering any
reliable evidence.
Those critics forget or ignore these facts:

(1) Tens of thousands of versatile 88 antitank/artillery guns used by the Wehrmacht were removed from or denied to the Russian front and denied to the western front [Normandy, etc.] because those guns were needed by the
German civil defence to combat RAF & USAAF bombers. How many tens of thousands of Soviet T-34 tanks could
have been destroyed by those 88's diverted to reinforce German antiaircraft batteries? How many thousands
of American Shermans and British Churchills would have been destroyed had those 88's been made available
to the SS and Wehrmacht?...My view is that if that had been the case, the fighting in the European theater of war
would have continued until August, 1945.

(2) The destruction of German residential areas by firebombs and explosives forced the Germans to repeatedly
divert hundreds of thousands of workers to the tasks of repairing railroad lines, canals, roads clearing rubble and rescuing survivors, etc.

(3) Will admittedly the Germans were very efficient in speedily repairing and restoring factory machinery and electrical power supply after bombing raids, critics ignore the cumulative effect of such required repairs
reducing production time.

(4) The strategic bombing raids on the Nazi's synthetic-gasoline production facilties did effectively
reduce and limit the mobility of the Wehrmacht and the effectivess of the Luftwaffe.

Raise a toast to those brave Allied bomber crews.

Jacob