[nopelynopington]

There's a good book by Malcolm Gladwell called "the bomber mafia" that's all about the airforce doctrine of indiscriminate bombing to break the population and the rebel faction within the airforce who advocated high precision bombing instead. Crippling industry instead of punishing civilians.

They eventually lost out to the former, culminating in horrific napalm raids on Japan that continued even after the atomic bombs were dropped and had more casualties

[jordanb]

Like most Malcom Gladwell works this is confused and sloppy.

The "bomber mafia" (they didn't call themselves this) were prewar strategists who thought you could destroy an enemy's ability to fight by hitting his strategic and tactical assets with bombers.

Basically they thought that bombers would be to the next war what artillery was in WWI.

What ended up happening is level bombing wasn't very precise, it was often hard to identify the correct targets, and modern mechanized war machines were more resilient than expected so bombers ended up not being as decisive as expected.

"Area bombing" or "carpet bombing" and the strategy to "dehouse and demoralize the population" were tactics developed during the war when the earlier tactics weren't working.

[jleyank]

They also thought that citizen's morale would break when a few bombs landed. WW II proved that it's more resilient, or perhaps resignation is stronger than giving up?

[seabass-labrax]

Maybe the Americans were still remembering the first World War, in which the Germans already had low morale by the time the USA joined the conflict. The USA joined in the thick of WWII when the Germans/Axis were doing considerably better. A prevailing (but ahistorical) view among Germans after WWI was that they had surrendered prematurely in 1918, so that might have also led to a cultural disdain towards surrender.

[thunderbird120]

Precision bombing during WW2 was not possible at the required scale. To put a bomb precisely on target back then you needed something like a dive bomber, a tactic which is incompatible with strategic-scale bombing. Even "precise" methods using advanced analog computers like the Norden bombsight could only do so much.

>Under combat conditions the Norden did not achieve its expected precision, yielding an average CEP in 1943 of 1,200 feet (370 m)[1]

This means that 50% of bombs fell within 1,200 feet of the target, which is an absolutely awful accuracy if you're trying to hit anything specific.

This was further compounded during the campaign against Japan by the heavy reliance of Japanese wartime industry on cottage industries which were dispersed almost randomly within Japanese population centers, rather than being located within specialized industrial districts. From a purely strategic standpoint which is only concerned with destroying the enemy's ability to make war, the most effect way to disrupt these kinds of industry with 1945 technology was essentially to burn every building in the city to the ground. Other options were simply ineffective.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norden_bombsight

[daymanstep]

Precision bombing? With WW2 era tech?

In WW2 you were lucky if you managed to hit a city-sized target, never mind an industrial site.

[SapporoChris]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_bombing#World_War_II "These provided impressive accuracy—British post-raid analysis showed that the vast majority of the bombs dropped could be placed within 100 yards (91 m) of the midline of the beam, spread along it a few hundred yards around the target point, even in pitch-dark conditions at a range of several hundred miles. But the systems fatally depended on accurate radio reception, and the British invented the first electronic warfare techniques to successfully counter this weapon in the 'Battle of the Beams' "

I do hope wherever you are from that your cities are larger than a few hundred yards.

[seabass-labrax]

The article you link to is about radio navigation based on ground stations. The USA would have required at least an island near the Japanese mainland on which to establish such a ground station, or perhaps a ship if it could maintain an accurate position based on traditional methods.

Even then, I don't think it would be correct to say that the Americans had no other capabilities for targeted attacks. With air superiority you can do strafing at relatively low risk, which is very accurate. And the USA had also developed rockets by this point, which could drastically improve accuracy when compared to unpropelled bombs. They even used these operationally against Japan before the atomic bomb attacks.

[nopelynopington]

The norden bombsight was a game changing piece of tech that allowed more precision than had been possible.

The RAF tended to carpet bomb at night, but the USAF wanted to precision bomb by day.

It was nowhere near as precise as today's tech but it vastly improved during the course of the war.

Ultimately it didn't work because the theory didn't work. German manufacturing was not disrupted by precision bombing enough to matter

Masters of the air also touches on this, and some of the disastrous missteps during the raids that led to aircraft loss

[jordanb]

The norden bombsite was a incredibly cool and fascinating piece of technology that did not have the operational performance its designers were promising.

Level bombing with dumb bombs was never going to be particularly precise regardless the sophistication of the bombsite because bombs in free fall don't have the momentum of an artillery shell so their trajectory is less dependable.

The norden also had a multitude of parameters that the bombardier had to input quickly and accurately as they were changing during a bombing run under flak barrage.

That being said the real problem with the air war in Germany was target selection. If you want to know more I'd suggest the book The Collapse of the German War Economy

https://uncpress.org/9780807858509/the-collapse-of-the-germa...

[alexey-salmin]

I guess there must be something about cities that attracts bombs then, maybe all these magnets on the fridges in people's homes.

During the bombing of Dresden bombs somehow gravitated towards the city center 2km in diameter, while factories and railway hubs on the outskirts weren't damaged at all.

[dundarious]

The reviewer gets very snippy over style things that likely would not matter to him if the substantive content was different, but I think this review is essential reading along with the book: https://thebaffler.com/latest/narrative-napalm-kulwin

The core of the critique remains on substantive issues.