[RodM]

Hi Tony,

as had been pointed out by others, taking extreme and specific examples doesn't provide balance. In the case of Wilhelmshaven, one could equally pick a target such as the oil refinery at Politz and prove via extrapolation that the overall BC SBC was considerably more effective than it really was.

As a New Zealander, I could take a similar (and unfounded) stance as yourself with regard to the British army, since The United Kingdom had a habit of committing the soldiers of my country to ineffective and costly land campaigns (Gallipoli, Passchendaele, Greece, Crete, Singapore). If I looked at these periods in isolation, I'm sure I could produce a theory that the British army and its command should have been disbanded because all it did was provide raw materials and labour to the enemy. I could look at the overall cost of the British army, especially between 1939-45 and find that most of the money was wasted because only a small proportion of the army actually met the enemy in battle during the war, and only a small proportion of those actually defeated the enemy in battle.

As to the breaking of morale, this was policy decision made above the auspices of Bomber Command, and few would disagree that in itself, it was a rather pointless and misguided exercise (based, IMHO, on some rather elitist and frankly quite racist assumptions about 'the Hun'). The fact is that from 1944 onwards, BC was able to significantly move away from solely targeting the enemy's 'morale'. Zuckermann's pronouncement in comparing Vietnam and Germany, while valid to a degree, is actually very misguided because the two cannot be compared. The United States never sought to systematically destroy the cities of North Vietnam in the same manner as had occurred in Germany and Japan.

I don't believe that the true effect of the British SBC can ever be precisely quantified other than to say that the campaign was considerably less effective in the years 1939-43 than in the years 1944-45. In addition, parts of the campaign (such as the area bombing of cities, and by this I mean when the aiming point was clearly the civil heart of a city, not industrial or military areas within a city) cannot be used in isolation to pronounce on the overall effectiveness of the whole campaign, especially in the 1944-45 period, when the SBC of both the British and Americans actually began to have a significant effect.

As Webster/Frankland point out, the USSBS didn't set out to really explore the city area bombing campaign in great detail, and the differences of opinion between both the USSBS and the BBSU highlight some of the assumptions that had to be made in attempting to quantify such a complex issue (by the way, I believe it is no co-incidence that Prof. Zuckermann sought control of the BBSU and then that body just happened to reach a conclusion that vindicated Zuckermann's theories. Thus when individuals or bodies that had a vested interest in the direction of the SBC pronounce on it, one should always ask in terms of what they had to say, "who benefits?").

I doubt that too many people would disagree that had BC been better directed from mid-1944 onwards, the collapse of Germany could have been brought about slightly quicker. This in itself clearly pronounces on the debate as to whether BC should have existed or not in the first place.

Cheers

Rod