SavannahMann
Platinum Member
- Nov 16, 2016
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The one biggest hurdle to really understanding history is that it is in the past. We know what the result will be. We know what the actions we are studying will lead to.
For this subject, it takes a lot more than a handful of quotes to support your theory. It takes going back to before the First World War. When science fiction writers were telling stories about huge aircraft, Dirigables, or Zepplins if you like, floated over the world and rained down death and destruction. The idea that these aircraft would rule the air, and the ground below, with impunity was fixed in the minds of the populace as World War One ground on. Especially after Paris was bombed, and England.
After the First World War, Air advocates imagined the next war, and they saw airplanes which were just getting started as the First War took off, playing a major part. They imagined the war ending in a few days, or perhaps hours, because of air power. Their plan, and remember these were the people who shaped air theory, was to bomb with high explosive, incendiary, and then poison gas. You destroyed the buildings, set them ablaze, and killed the people who were trying to respond and fight the fire and save the wounded.
It was an American who argued we should not ban aircraft from war during the various conventions to set down the international laws of war. The argument was that the future would bring more precision, and that precision would make it possible to target factories, bases, and other military targets to prevent the war from grinding on in an endless meat grinder fashion.
You always fear the boogeyman you know. For the leaders of World War II, that boogeyman was not bombs, it was trench warfare. The endless slog through the fields, where tens of thousands of lives would be spent to gain a few inches, or yards, only to have them bought back by the enemy for a similar cost. Anything was preferable to that. The war in the Trenches was so predictable that you could sit down and figure out how many men you would lose today, tomorrow, next week, next month. Like planning your bills out, you could get pretty accurate estimates about what the future held, and it was horrible.
The technology for the precision bombing that the various powers wanted to practice, just didn't exist. Half of the bombs might land within a couple miles of the target. That was with hundreds of bombers in the air. They just could not hit pinpoint targets.
But they had the bombers, and the famous Norton bomb sight. It wasn't really any better than any other bombsight, but it was our best. It was high mechanical engineering that tried to factor in the variables, and did not consider a vast majority of those variables, and the bombs being dropped were not exactly designed to be precision instruments.
It was like dropping a penny from the top of the Empire State Building and expecting to hit the awning of the building across the street from you. Eventually, if you tossed enough pennies, you would probably hit it.
One of the things they used to estimate the damage that the Atomic Bomb would create was the explosion of a munitions ship. The amount of destruction, the amount of force contained in one bomb, would be equal to the entire load of bombs in that one ship.
So the thing they want to avoid at all costs is Trench Warfare, the statement slogs of the First World War. Anything was preferable to that. The lack of precision meant that for the entire war, everyone had been bombing cities, and villages. Finally the bomb was viewed as a more powerful bomb, but another bomb for all intents.
Dan Carlin talks about much of this in his Hardcore History series, the podcast of Logical Insanity covers this in much more detail.
Now, there were no laws prohibiting it. There was no international agreement other than a vague belief that "of course you try and minimize civilian casualties" sort of thing. Of course we will, we aren't barbarians. But what is a military target?
In Vietnam, it was a road junction, or a patch of jungle that might be used to store weapons. A suspected truck park. That was more than twenty years later.
The acceptable military targets went from the factories, which they couldn't hit without saturating the entire area with bombs, to the workers houses, which were generally speaking located near the factories. The factory might be standing, but without those trained workers, the enemy can't make the war materials they need.
Then it became any line of communication. Rail lines, roads, road junctions, any place where these came together, which inevitably was cities.
So bombing cities was perfectly acceptable. Now, you are a planner for World War II. Your job is to maximize the damage of our bombings to hamper the war effort of the enemy. You have planes, but so do they. You don't really have command of the sky, they have anti aircraft guns that shoot down your bombers, they have planes that shoot down your bombers. You know your people are going to be firing and trying to avoid being shot down while dropping their own bombs. You know you can't hit a precision target, but you have to do something to stop the launch of the V-1 and V-2 weapons. Every enemy you kill is one less that can work against you.
You turn to firebombing, because the results are better. Terrible word isn't it? Better. Better for you means worse for them. But hey, they started this war, and if they didn't want to be bombed, they should not have started the war. They could end it by surrendering. They could end it tomorrow. They could end it any time they choose.
Dan Carlin describes this as Logical Insanity. The answer is logical, the question is insane, the situation is insane. That is the best way I've ever heard it described.
In the end, we had to learn. Like children who do not have any idea what "hot" is until they feel it, we had to touch the pot of boiling water, and get burned. We had to see it was't just another bomb. We had to see it wasn't just a more powerful bomb. It was far more than that. We had to get burned.
I could write about this all day, the chain of events that led us to Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. The beliefs, the ideals, the practical reality that we were in. In time, our technology caught up to our vision. In time, the sort of pinpoint accuracy that we wanted in World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and a dozen other places, finally was achievable.
Yes it was horrible, but was it any more horrible than Tokyo Firebombed? It is interesting if you think about it, that none of the enemy architects of their bombing policies were prosecuted after the war for those bombings? The reason? Simple. We didn't have any rules for it yet.
We had ten thousand years of experience fighting on the ground. When armies were armed with big sticks with rocks tied to the. We had a couple thousand years of fighting at sea, where men fought ships against their enemies. We had developed rules for that kind of fighting. We had an idea of what was right, and what was wrong. We didn't have that with the bombings. We hadn't had the time to consider it, we had not had the experience yet. Hindenburg was not prosecuted for the bombing of Country, the firebombing of London, or anything like that.
For this subject, it takes a lot more than a handful of quotes to support your theory. It takes going back to before the First World War. When science fiction writers were telling stories about huge aircraft, Dirigables, or Zepplins if you like, floated over the world and rained down death and destruction. The idea that these aircraft would rule the air, and the ground below, with impunity was fixed in the minds of the populace as World War One ground on. Especially after Paris was bombed, and England.
After the First World War, Air advocates imagined the next war, and they saw airplanes which were just getting started as the First War took off, playing a major part. They imagined the war ending in a few days, or perhaps hours, because of air power. Their plan, and remember these were the people who shaped air theory, was to bomb with high explosive, incendiary, and then poison gas. You destroyed the buildings, set them ablaze, and killed the people who were trying to respond and fight the fire and save the wounded.
It was an American who argued we should not ban aircraft from war during the various conventions to set down the international laws of war. The argument was that the future would bring more precision, and that precision would make it possible to target factories, bases, and other military targets to prevent the war from grinding on in an endless meat grinder fashion.
You always fear the boogeyman you know. For the leaders of World War II, that boogeyman was not bombs, it was trench warfare. The endless slog through the fields, where tens of thousands of lives would be spent to gain a few inches, or yards, only to have them bought back by the enemy for a similar cost. Anything was preferable to that. The war in the Trenches was so predictable that you could sit down and figure out how many men you would lose today, tomorrow, next week, next month. Like planning your bills out, you could get pretty accurate estimates about what the future held, and it was horrible.
The technology for the precision bombing that the various powers wanted to practice, just didn't exist. Half of the bombs might land within a couple miles of the target. That was with hundreds of bombers in the air. They just could not hit pinpoint targets.
But they had the bombers, and the famous Norton bomb sight. It wasn't really any better than any other bombsight, but it was our best. It was high mechanical engineering that tried to factor in the variables, and did not consider a vast majority of those variables, and the bombs being dropped were not exactly designed to be precision instruments.
It was like dropping a penny from the top of the Empire State Building and expecting to hit the awning of the building across the street from you. Eventually, if you tossed enough pennies, you would probably hit it.
One of the things they used to estimate the damage that the Atomic Bomb would create was the explosion of a munitions ship. The amount of destruction, the amount of force contained in one bomb, would be equal to the entire load of bombs in that one ship.
So the thing they want to avoid at all costs is Trench Warfare, the statement slogs of the First World War. Anything was preferable to that. The lack of precision meant that for the entire war, everyone had been bombing cities, and villages. Finally the bomb was viewed as a more powerful bomb, but another bomb for all intents.
Dan Carlin talks about much of this in his Hardcore History series, the podcast of Logical Insanity covers this in much more detail.
Now, there were no laws prohibiting it. There was no international agreement other than a vague belief that "of course you try and minimize civilian casualties" sort of thing. Of course we will, we aren't barbarians. But what is a military target?
In Vietnam, it was a road junction, or a patch of jungle that might be used to store weapons. A suspected truck park. That was more than twenty years later.
The acceptable military targets went from the factories, which they couldn't hit without saturating the entire area with bombs, to the workers houses, which were generally speaking located near the factories. The factory might be standing, but without those trained workers, the enemy can't make the war materials they need.
Then it became any line of communication. Rail lines, roads, road junctions, any place where these came together, which inevitably was cities.
So bombing cities was perfectly acceptable. Now, you are a planner for World War II. Your job is to maximize the damage of our bombings to hamper the war effort of the enemy. You have planes, but so do they. You don't really have command of the sky, they have anti aircraft guns that shoot down your bombers, they have planes that shoot down your bombers. You know your people are going to be firing and trying to avoid being shot down while dropping their own bombs. You know you can't hit a precision target, but you have to do something to stop the launch of the V-1 and V-2 weapons. Every enemy you kill is one less that can work against you.
You turn to firebombing, because the results are better. Terrible word isn't it? Better. Better for you means worse for them. But hey, they started this war, and if they didn't want to be bombed, they should not have started the war. They could end it by surrendering. They could end it tomorrow. They could end it any time they choose.
Dan Carlin describes this as Logical Insanity. The answer is logical, the question is insane, the situation is insane. That is the best way I've ever heard it described.
In the end, we had to learn. Like children who do not have any idea what "hot" is until they feel it, we had to touch the pot of boiling water, and get burned. We had to see it was't just another bomb. We had to see it wasn't just a more powerful bomb. It was far more than that. We had to get burned.
I could write about this all day, the chain of events that led us to Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. The beliefs, the ideals, the practical reality that we were in. In time, our technology caught up to our vision. In time, the sort of pinpoint accuracy that we wanted in World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and a dozen other places, finally was achievable.
Yes it was horrible, but was it any more horrible than Tokyo Firebombed? It is interesting if you think about it, that none of the enemy architects of their bombing policies were prosecuted after the war for those bombings? The reason? Simple. We didn't have any rules for it yet.
We had ten thousand years of experience fighting on the ground. When armies were armed with big sticks with rocks tied to the. We had a couple thousand years of fighting at sea, where men fought ships against their enemies. We had developed rules for that kind of fighting. We had an idea of what was right, and what was wrong. We didn't have that with the bombings. We hadn't had the time to consider it, we had not had the experience yet. Hindenburg was not prosecuted for the bombing of Country, the firebombing of London, or anything like that.
