Rains of Ruin

[Monte Davis]

It has long struck me as one of the nastiest of the 20th century's many
nasty ironies that in the same week of August 1945 when the "rain of ruin"
approach finally became as decisive as its advocates had been claiming, it
began to become (we hope) unthinkable.

Although "carpet bombing" is thrown around by critics, the fact is that
conventional city bombing since 1945 has rarely approached the 1940 Blitz,
let alone the later air campaigns against Germany and Japan. A small handful
of cities like Grozny and Hama have been truly devastated -- but mostly by
artillery and street-level fighting.

In a perverse way, the move to precision-guided munitions is an admission of
what air forces from the 1920s onward never wanted to admit: that bombing
cities could kill a lot of people, but (1) was too inaccurate to do much
good against war production and logistics, and (2) wasn't nearly as
effective at "breaking the enemy's will" as the same effort directed against
the enemy's armed forces. The mystique of the V-2 was not that it was
especially destructive -- and certainly not that it was cost-effective --
but that it was *unstoppable*.

In the long run, I suspect, WWII bombing will be seen as an aberration
growing out of the stalemate on the Western Front in WWI. That had been so
bad that strategists told themselves "we'll leap over the front and strike
at the 'sinews of war.' " Turned out it didn't work very well -- and when
nuclear weapons finally came along to make it potentially effective, they
were *so* effective that we scared ourselves out of it.

So far.