- Thread starter
- #161
well said!It is a "cliche" since the Germans never invested nor beheld a Strategic Bombing Doctrine - nor force - (it died out upon Hitler objecting to it, and Gen. Wevers death in IIRC 1936), unlike e.g. Britain. And the inventor of the Strategic Bombing Doctrine was an Italian - aka Gulio Douhet.
And it was also him who served as commander of the Aeronautical Battalion, Italy's first aviation unit (also the first to practice aerial bombardment, in Libya also against civilian targets during Italy’s war with Turkey, 1911–12). That was even before WW I.
Largely because of his efforts, the three-engine Caproni bomber was ready for use by the time Italy entered World War I.
Entente aircraft of WW I, had bombed German houses and killed civilians in the Strasbourg region - as retaliation the Germans used the Zeppelin to bomb e.g. London.
Legion Condor was under the supreme command by Franco and the Spanish Nationalists - they ordered the attack onto e.g. Guernica (wildly exaggerated reports) to support their land offensive towards Guernica, and not Legion Condor’s chief of staff, Oberstleutnant Wolfram von Richthofen.
The Luftwaffe was the first (during the Poland attack) to also intentionally bomb cities (aka, industrial and logistic targets - determined to be "legal" targets) during WW2, thus logically causing casualties amongst civilians. The final Luftwaffe air-raids onto e.g. Warsaw in 1939 beheld the exact same doctrine as the bombing raids by the British and the USAAF - flatten the cities industrial and logistical abilities (legal), and thereby kill as many civilians as possible, to demoralize the population and the respective government.
Same goes for Dresden - one can be dead sure that there where "military supporting" industries in Dresden. Even a bicycle workshop or one punching holes into leather belts for the Wehrmacht, - independent of Dresden's huge railway hub, would therefore "legalize" the bombing attack. If it was "necessary" is another topic. And again the same applies towards them nukes, tested over Japan.