Quote:
Originally posted by Spanky
In the speech I saw Hitchens give, he blasted Chamberlin and reiterated that the Nazis were incredibly evil and needed to be taken out by force, and that we had to demand unconditional surrender. He also said that the bombing of factorys and rail lines was strategically important and vital to the war effort.
The point he was making is that the British, after the Battle of Britain, decided to target civilians partially as pay back and partially for destryoing their moral. His point was that neither rational really justified deliberately targeting civilians. If they are collateral damange, such are the fortunes of war, but specifically targeting them was wrong.
He pointed out that the daylight bombing raids by the Americans in Europe were more strategic and therefor less of a problem. But in Japan LeMay specifically targeted the civilian population.
Hitchens is no surrender Monkey and he made a compelling case.
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Both sides responded to other's attacks on civilian populations by upping the ante. If memory serves, the UK bombed Berlin in 1940 just to strike back during the Battle of Britain, without even really trying to hit military targets. And they did their bombing at night, which made targeting next to impossible. Germany retaliated by bombing civilian areas in London, shifting the focus of the Battle of Britain.
Although the USAF believed it could achieve better targeting than the Brits -- not hard, considering -- the bombsites really weren't that accurate, and even the efforts to hit specific targets -- say a bridge or a factory -- were predicated on "walking" a whole lot of bombs across a wide area on either side of the target.
Both the RAF and the USAF oversold their own accuracy to the leadership, which is hardly an isolated phenomenom.
