Customer Reviews

Bombs, Cities, and Civilians: American Airpower Strategy in World War II

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

According to Crane, Allied air commanders in Europe prioritized accuracy while General LeMay valued the psychological aspects of delibrately targeting civilians. American commanders such as Spaatz advocated precision bombing even if it meant greater causalties. Crane writes that civilian causalties became more acceptable when the Army Airforce began bombing transpotation targets in Europe and thereby incuring greater civilian causalties. Plus both Fifteenth and Eighth airforces began using radar directed bombing practices that were less accurate. General LeMay completely ignored the accuracy doctrine and started to delibrately bomb civilian areas. The aim of LeMay's stragedy was to shock the Japanese to surrender. Crane concludes his book by writing about the mediocre record of strategic bombing since the Second World War. Bombing was ineffective against preindustrilized countries such as North Korea and Vietnam, but was effective in shocking Iraq ground soldiers to surrender in the Gulf War. The only weakness of this book is that Crane ignored close air support doctrine within the airforce. But if one wants to study about the American bombing campaigns this is a highly informative study.

This is not an action-packed blow-by-blow account of battles, it's about U.S. WW II bombing strategy -- the most analytical, insightful, source material based book I've read in my admittedly limited WW II reading. The author is a real scholar -- I'll be passing this book to friends and reading other books by the author.