But the question is, essentially, what if the bombers were used for other purposes. What? The only thing that crosses my mind is infantry support.
You might consider the effects of
this for "what". There's also a political dimension, proven in China: there has to be visible defense & retaliation, to maintain public morale. (This may explain Hitler's mania for V-weaps.) There's also the Sov complaints about no 2d Front, which BC took weight for. Personally, after widespread mining, I like Redbeard's option of using Mossies. A visible retaliation as complement to minelaying?
I have damn little patience with the proposition it was area bombing or nothing, which seems to be the general thrust of the argument here, as usual. IMO, BC's efforts were no different than Haig's at Verdun: throwing forces at fixed targets, where the enemy
knows you're coming, at defenses that are going to be increasingly stronger,
& you know it, for
years at a time. Doing that, when there was any sensible option, & clearly there were a couple, IMO is immoral. Forget the claims of "bombing innocent civilians". Civilians aren't innocent. They're supporting the enemy war effort. Attacks on enemy morale are perfectly legitimate, so comparisons of Harris to Heydrich or Himmler are specious, unjustified, & flat wrong. I'm no fan of Harris, & I think his blind adherence to area bombing to the exclusion of anything else brands him in the same category as MacArthur.
To say "war criminal" is probably accurate, too: knowingly, intentionally, ordering bombing civilians was a crime, IIRC, & Harris did it. (Whether his defense would argue the civlians weren't "undefended", as the Hague Con required, given radar, searchlights, NF, &
flak, is another issue; I'd have argued they were defended.) Let's not forget Portal, Lindemann, & Churchill, the ultimate architects of the policy, would be charged, too--& they'd almost certainly be convicted in any fair trial.
In the two years needed to have the bombing offensive gain momentum a huge number of Divisions and tactical squadrons could have been trained and equipped; I would even think that a main invasion could have been succesful by 1943. It must be remembered that building and running the planes themselves was only part of the cost. The huge infrastructure needed and intense logistics was a huge strain on allied wareffort where tonnage to the last was in short supply. Short of the 60.000 KIA/MIA of Bombercommand the British effort on land in 1944 might have been quite different. Like Churchill not demanding cautious advance in Market Garden.
Take 50% BC casualties, turn them into infantry, plus triple that number in aircrews not needed (2-plc Mossie
versus 10-man Lanc). Then 10-20% more, out of ground support personnel no longer needed. You've now solved UK's summer 1944 infantry crisis. Then take, oh, 50% of Merlins not needed (2 in Mossie
versus 4 Lanc), & turn them over to tanks, or fighters, either or both of which you'll probably be able to build more of, too (more free production Mossie doesn't use). Of course, this presumes German industry isn't at a standstill for lack of coal at the powerplants, since the canals & rivers are
shut due to mining...
Back then, you needed to drop huge bomb tonnages to have an impact.
Really not. Mossie's 4000 pd load on a powerstation could KO electric power over a wide area (& Germany's electric grid lacked the flexibility to transfer it widely, so it'd
stay dark), shut production without bombing factories (let alone houses), at very limited casualties
to either side.
Without strategic bombing, D-Day would've been impossible before the development of the A-bomb. It was thanks to strategic bombing that the Allies obtained air supremacy over western Europe.
Boy, are you wrong here. Most of the success of Neptune was due to tactical bombing of railyards, bridges, so on. And downing thousands of aircraft is tactical, not strategic, effort.
It seems to me a little surprising that some here deny that city bombing was a war crime by saying how effective it was.
Or how needed it was to win the war.
Or even against who it was commited.
A crime is a crime in spite of those factors. In my view, if in war you deliberately target civilians that's a war crime. If you round them up in a street and machine gun them -nazi style- it's a crime, if you put a bomb through his roof while they are sleeping you only change the weapon of choice. And the fact that you don't see their faces..
Don't be ridiculous. The Nazis were rounding up defeated people, or their own citizens. If
Michael Caine's paras had landed in the Merlin engine factory & killed all the workers, would that be a war crime? If Brit commandos did it at the Messerschmitt factory in Berlin, would it be? "if in war you deliberately target civilians that's a war crime"? Civilians contribute to the survival of the regime. They produce weapons & equipment. Attacking civilians producing weapons is perfectly legitimate, & has been since at least 1862, when Springfield rifle production couldn't keep up with demand. It's easier to get new recruits than new weapons, & has been for quite awhile.
Attacking civilian morale, as a way of attacking the enemy regime, is equally legitimate. The Allies' major problem was attacking civilians
without attacking the Nazi government's morale. J.K.Galbraith put it best when he told Bill Buckley once, people prefer a bad government to a bomber overhead. Had the Allies made a point of saying the bombing would stop as soon as the Nazis were gone, something Goebbels (IIRC) feared they'd do, the war could have been over much, much sooner. Had the Allies, from Chamberlain on, made a point of saying the war was against
Nazis, & not against
Germans, the war could have been over much, much sooner. Instead, Chamberlain made it about Germany, & Winston made it "dehousing"....