Was Allied bombing of Germany Jan - April 1945 a war crime?

Well I read your link - evidently the forward to a much longer narrative. From what it suggests is coming, I see nothing at all that contradicts or even puts a new light on anything at all that I wrote. On the contrary, what is provided tends to confirm the description of the battle and its significant elements that I gave.

The authors appear to go to great lengths to dilute the significance of Admiral Nagumo's decision to arm and launch the (totally unnecessary at that moment) second air strike at Midway Island, or at least put it into a more favorable context. However, they make no suggestion that it did not create the tactical vulnerability that led to their defeat, and they offer no new information on it. Certainly this point is universally accepted by all the historians of the engagement.

The authors explicitly acknowledge the folly of wasting two Japanese carriers (albeit small ones) on the attack in the Aleutians -- a costly enterprise that gained Japan nothing at all, and displaced forces that might have been crucial at Midway -- This was a central element of my argument.

The authors also assert that a greater understanding of the history and origins of the Imperial navy is needed to fully understand the flaws in the Fleet Commander, Yamamoto's plan at Midway. Though they don't elaborate on this point, I suspect their meaning has something to do with the evident fixation of Japanese Naval strategy on crucial, decisive battles - fleet engagements - that determine the outcome of major conflicts. This fixation (or at least persistent tendency) was evident in their strategy throughout the war). I explicitly acknowledged this, suggesting it might be a consequence of their stunning success in 1905 against the Imperial Russian fleet at Tushima, an event that propelled the then new Japanese Navy to international prominence and which produced its first iconic leaders.

Beyond that they suggest that a more detailed understanding of Japanese carrier operations is required to properly understand what took place. They go on to emphasize the incredible string of victories that preceded the engagement at Midway; the operational strain on men and equipment this required; and the then incomparable state of training and material readiness & proficiency of Japanese carrier aviation. All of these points are consistent with my description - indeed most were explicitly stated. What might have been the inferred peculiarly Japanese constraints on carrier operations, I do not know. The facts that carriers of that era could not launch and recover aircraft at the same time; or that a carrier deck configured for the launch of a major strike is "locked" until the aircraft are launched; or that the late decision to rearm the aircraft so positioned with different weapons would extend the period in which the decks were "locked"; or, finally, that in such a configuration their defensive fighter cover could not be refuelled or relaunched -- were common to all carrier operations then - and remain so to a lesser degree today. These are factors, the reality of which I know in far greater detail than any of the historians cited here.

There were many other options available to Admiral Nagumo when he received the not surprising word that resistence at Midway was such that more air strikes (or other bombardment) were needed before the invasion force was put ashore.
(1) He could have simply waited and focused on the anticipated engagement with the U.S. carriers. The victory over them, which was the central goal of the vasat enterprise anyway, would have left him ample time to take care of Midway later, and at his lesiure.
(2) He could have requested that Admiral Yamamoto, then embarked in the large battleship force one hundred or so miles behind him, move forward to escort the invasion force and bombard the island with their huge naval guns (we had nothing with which to counter them).
(3) He could have launched a smaller strike involving (say) only two of his carriers, leaving two and their air wings in reserve for a surpise discovery of the U.S. carriers, should it occur.
Any of these choices would likely have yielded a far better outcome for Japan, possibly including a complete victory. The unwise choice he made involved putting the whole operation and his most valuable forces at risk for, at best trivial, gains. In human terms such errors are quite understandable - their equivalent is the rule, not the exception, in major enterprises of all kinds, military and otherwise.

The Americans, with decidedly inferior forces, played their hand, both strategically and tactically, without error or distraction from the central issues before them, even in the midst of the uncertainty & ambiguities that surround any battle and despite serious tactical setbacks. That they did so is itself unusual. That too proved a decisive factor in the outcome.

Setanta accuses me of a Navy centric or otherwise myopic view of this and other matters. That is a rather flabby basis for the defense of his "dumb luck" thesis. I will confess though to a sentimental attachment here. I was priviledged in the late 1970s to command a carrier attack squadron that had been involved in the Battle of Midway.

In any event I am just back after a too-long business trip back East -- enjoying the comforts of home & napping amidst all the busy preparations about me for the coming holiday.

Setanta is a good guy - very smart and unusually well read & informed. I always read and enjoy his historical digressions, and respect his understanding and interpretations. However, he takes disagreement very badly. Despite this I hold him in high regard and consider him a friend.

Same goes for you Helen.

Merry Christmas to you both.

You don't take disagreement very well either. I have twice quoted and once provided a link to the Navy Historical Center's page on Midway--in which they credit "more than a little luck" for the results. That is just a part of the basis of my remark about the luck involved in the scope of the debacle to First Air Fleet. It's not flabby, unless one resolutely ignores both the argument i have advanced to that effect, and the sources i have quoted an linked. It was not based solely upon your glaring myopia toward any but a "triumphant Navy" scenario in any and all operations.

You have stated that Kenney's Air Force played at best a supplemental role in interdicting Japanese shipping, and that the submarine service had destroyed Japan's ability to supply itself from the East Indies by the end of 1942. I pointed out the unreliability of the American torpedoes, more than once, but you continue to ignore that. I have provided a link to an article on the subject, which provides copious notes and a bibliography. It shows a submarine attempting to attack, and failing to sink or even significantly damage a Japanese oil freight en route from Palau to Truk in mid-1943. There were no significant number of American subs available in the Pacific until mid- to late-1942, and yet you would have us believer that these few subs, using torpedoes shown by their commander to fail 70% of the time, had succeeded by the end of 1942 in destroying Japanese commerce. And upon no evidence at all, you maintain that claim, and a claim that the efforts of Kenney's Southwest Pacific Air Force was "supplemental" to the dismal record of the submarine service in the first 18 months of the war.

You would have us believe that all threat to Australia was over by mid-1942, and that Midway cinched this. This ignores the desperate fighting around Port Moresby until well after the battle of Midway, and the desperate character of the fighting on Guadalcanal at the end of 1942.

It appears that you think that the inconclusive battle of the Coral Sea ended all threat to Australia, and that the battle of Midway ended all threat to everywhere else. If that were so, why did it take more than three years after the battle of Midway to drive the Japanese to the wall, and to convince them to surrender? If, as you claim, American submarines had ended Japanese sea-borne commerce by the end of 1942, how were the Japanese able to continue to fight their ships and their aircraft until well into 1945?

Your narrative for the events in the Pacific war is without foundation, and is a classic "all Navy and nothing but Navy" narrative, which i have seen all too often, and which, sadly, is the received wisdom on the Pacific War, insofar as high school and university survey history texts are concerned. Those who have studied this war carefully, as i have done, know better.

True enough: however, Setanta ole pal, I think you are the champ here.

I don't dispute the suggestion that there was an element of luck in Spruance getting just enough, albiet slightly ambiguous, information on the location of the Japanese carriers to launch his attack on them when he did. However, the vulnerability of the Japanese force at that moment was solely the result of Nagumo's strategic error in committing all of his carriers simultaneously to a second strike on Midway Island, before he had determined the location of the U.S. carriers, which were both the primary objective of the whole operation and the only serious threat to his force. As I noted earlier, he had other, better options readily available to him, any of which would likely have led to a far better result. Hindsight is always clear, but that this was the crucial error in this decisive battle is universally recognized.

Much is written, even in Naval analyses, of the uncertainties involved in the navigation of the U.S. strikes; the deficiencies in the U.S. aerial torpedoes (fusing problems like those in other models and restrictions on the speed and range from the target at which they could be launched) which made the aircraft delivering them sitting ducks and the weapons, if launched, unreliable at best); and other flaws in the execution of our strike. The fortuitous but late arrival of the dive bombers overhead certainly suggests an element of luck, but a more thoughtful consideration of the realities of it all reveals clearly the consistent and persistent focus of all elements of the American force on their central objective in the encounter - a focus that was sustained despite many distractions, and in stark contrast to the Japanese, who employed an unnecessarily complex plan that wasted potentially critical forces on secondary objectives in the Aleutians; never made use of their overwhelming superiority in large surface combatants; and confused primary and secondary objectives during executiuon.

My interpretation of the Pacific War probably is Navy centric as you suggest. However, I don't think it is incorrect. The U.S. government and our media had their own reasons for promoting the myth of MacArthur's skill and heroism (while Kimmel & Short were punished for their pre war laxity). Moreover MacArthur was a skilled and oddly dedicated self-promoter, while Nimits was relatively self-effecing.

I spent most of my professional life in Naval Aviation, serving on carriers from Oriskany to Constellation, JFK, Nimitz, Eisenhower & Carl Vinson. While that probably gives me some bias, it also gives me a basis for better understanding of what was behind Japan's stunning victories with their carrier forces during the first six months of the war; the significance of their strategic & tactical errors at Midway; and the single-minded determination and focus of the U.S. forces there.

I never said or suggested that the Battle of Coral Sea ended the Japanese threat to Australia. What I wrote was that it "blunted" the Japanese advance into the Solomans - something that itself did threaten Australia. The Japanese threat to Australia ended a few weeks later at Midway, where they lost their carrier striking power and with it their ability to extend their empire in the Pacific. In this context it is noteworthy that MacArthur's campaign in New Guinea did not even begin until about three months after Midway - at a time when Japan was on the defensive, struggling to hold on to what they had gained.

After Midway the campaigns in Guadalcanal and New Guinea dained Japanese forces and pushed them further on the defensive, while we still experienced enormous losses, principally of Marines and surface ships. However, the concurrent battle of the Marianas in the central Pacific was far more significant to the final result of the war: the remnants of Japanese naval aviation were wiped out, and we gained the bases at Guam, Saipan, & Tinian which were the logistics jumping off point for the subsequent attacks on Okinawa & Formosa, and the bombing of the Japanese homeland.

I'll concede that the South Asian air campaign using medium bombers at low altitude (bombs & rockets, not torpedoes) was successful in rapidly interdicting deliveries of much needed pertoleum from Indonesia. However, by mid 1943 our submarines were doing that very effectively in the South China Sea.


I think this interpretation is itself "without foundation" - at least you have not provided one.

I have provided quotes and links, O'George--including a link to the Navy Historical Center which (i now quote for the fourth time) states that "more than a little luck" was involved in the Midway victory. I've linked a reputable source for the unreliability of the Mark XIV torpedo, well into 1943, even though you claim American subs had destroyed Japanese merchant shipping by the end of 1942.

If you want me to, it won't be hard to provide the evidence that the Japanese were active on New Guinea, landing troops and supplies, and pushing their lines ever closer to Port Moresby well after the battle of Midway. If you want me to, it won't be hard to provide evidence that the American submarine presence in the Pacific was small, and comprised largely of out-moded models--i've already provided the evidence (and linked it) that our torpedoes failed 70% of the time.

I say your remarks are without foundation because you provide no evidence, you just make statements from authority. I have provided evidence for my position, O'George--where's yours?

Your links amount to quibbles over details unrelated to the central point. The off-hand and out-of-context comment of the Naval Historical center does not trump the insightful, penetrating, and factual)argument I put forward concerning the key errors made by Yamamoto (in the plan itself) and by Nagumo (in executing it) - errors almost universally acknowledged by historians.

Japanese forces in New Guinea could have taken the whole island without seriously threatening Australia. Just like Germany and the English channel, they (after Midway) no longer had the ability to safely transport a large landing force across the intervening waters without local air and naval superiority -- much less sustain it once there.

U.S. fleet submarines are generally rated as among the best anywhere in WWII. The sub launched torpedo fusing problem was largely solved by early 1943 and the tonnage sunk by them more or less speaks for itself. The South Asian air campaign (after 1943) did accelerate the isolation of Japan from her principal sources of petroleum.

Japan was defeated because it no longer could import raw materials to either feed its population or sustain its industrial base. Its remaining surface naval forces were seriously short of fuel and its carrier and naval aviation forces never recovered from the losses at Midway and the Marianas soon after. American air bases on Guam and Tinian. The recovery of the Philippines was done for political purposes and to vindicate MacArthur - otherwise it was simply unnecessary. It was the subsequent taking of Okinawa and later Iwo Jima that gave us nearly uncontested air superiority over the Japanese mainland and doomed them to final defeat.

You are the one who is quibbling. As i have pointed out several times now, i have not disputed the high quality of Navy intelligence work, nor the courage and resourcefulness of Navy aviators. My point is and remains that the scale of the disaster to First Air Fleet was a product of luck--which, if you had bothered to read the material linked at the Navy Historical Center, was the point of their comment about "more than a little luck." And that was my point, as well.



It's good to know you don't intend to rely upon anyone else's opinion of what you have written--which is especially important given how little most of your remarks rely upon actual, historical fact. If the swelling of your ego ever goes down sufficiently, i suggest to you a course of reading on the history of the Second World War in the Pacific which is not simply a paean to the United States Navy.

You state that after Midway, the Japanese no longer had the capability to safely transport a large landing force without local air and naval superiority. That's an interesting contention. The Imperial Army's "South Seas Force" landed two regiments at Gona on the north coast of New Guinea in late July, 1942[/i], more than a month and half after the battle of Midway. (Source from Australia's Defence Ministry) Between August, 1942 and the eventual final defeat of the Imperial Navy in November, 1942, the Japanese committed almost 50,000 Marines and soldiers of the Imperial Army, above and beyond the fewer than 2,000 Japanese troops on the island at the time of the American invasion (c.f. Gordon Rottman, The Japanese Army in World War II: The South Pacific and New Guinea, 1942-43, 2005, Oxford and Newe York). Yet you would have us believe that after the battle of Midway, in June, 1942, the Imperial Navy was no longer capable of conducting and supporting large scale operations.

You claim that the fuse problem was "largely solved by early 1943." Do you even bother to read the material i link here? I'm not going to bother to hunt it down again, but the link i have already provided shows an American submarine commander firing eleven torpedoes at a Japanese tanker en route from Palau to Truk, and failing not only to sink the ship, but failing to even significantly slow it down--in July, 1943. The Mark XIV torpedo didn't have its problems solved--it was replaced altogether with the Mark XVIII, in late 1943. The Southwest Pacific Air Force, under the command Of Major General George Kenney, using principally Mitchell B25 bombers, but also B17 Flying Fortresses, began operations from Port Moresby in mid-1942, and had an immediate and dramatic effect on the delivery of material resources to Japan while the handful of U.S. Navy submarines then available were watching in frustration as their torpedoes failed to sink their targets, or were sent on stunt mission like the raid on Makin Island, or to evacuate people from islands. The threat to New Guinea (and therefore, by extension, to Australia) was not ended until Kenney's air forces, then the 5th USAAF and the RAAF, attacked and destroyed the Japanese convoy whyich was bringing troops from Rabaul to New Guinea in what is known as the battle of the Bismark Sea. Kenney's air forces sank more than a half dozen transports, killing between 3,000 and 4,000 Japanese troops, sand four destroyers and shot down 20 of the 100 fighters the Japanese had sent for air cover from Rabaul--all for the loss of two bombers and three fighters. The Japanese had sent eight transports, as the beginning of their reinforcement of New Guinea--but only 700 or 800 troops made it, a battalion at most. The Japanese abandoned their efforts to reinforce New Guinea--because of Kenney's air forces, not because of the battle of the Coral Sea, nor because of the battle of Midway. Kenney's air forces were able to achieve such a signal victory because they had already perfected their "skip-bombing" technique in continuous attacks on Japanese shipping in the Java Sea--in late 1942. The RAAF was active, of course, from the very beginning of the war, and played a crucial part in the defeat of the Imperial Marines who landed at Milne Bay on New Guinea in late August, 1942, more than two months after Midway.

You just make this **** up as you go along, don't you, George? The more you write here, the more you convince me that you know next to nothing about the war in the Pacific, other than your "all Navy and only the Navy" mantra.

I came too late to edit the underlining error in the previous post.

In fact, it was the defeat of the Japanese on Guadalcanal and New Guinea which ended Japanese offensive operations in the Pacific. The battle of Midway certainly irrevocably damaged the Imperial Navy. But the Japanese continued to move large numbers of troops and supplies in the Southwest Pacific theater until finally defeated at Guadalcanal and in the battle of the Bismark Sea. The latter battle was fought entirely by Kenney's Southwest Pacific air forces.

Bismarck.

Did the Japanese really have a plane named "Helen"? This poor guy didn't fare too well after a close encounter of the first kind with a B-25:

http://www.historicwings.com/features99/bismarcksea/photo-galleries04.html

I almost always forget the "c" in Bismarck.

The Allies (i.e., the Americans) gave code names to all Japanese aircraft--and "Helen" was a bomber, a Nakajima Ki-29 Donryu.

I don't, of course, know what happened in that case, but almost every Japanese airplane suffered from a lack of armor--and the armament of a Mitchell B25 of the later models was formidable, including a 75 mm cannon which was the largest gun ever mounted in an aircraft. It just didn't pay to fly Japanese aircraft in Dubya Dubya Two.

well I've read all the recent posts and informative and interesting they were except for any reference to the air bombardment of Germany in 1945

any chance of a return to subject ?

happy new year to you all

S

And the very same to you and family, Steve

The last 2 posts on the previous page (Setanta's and mine) is the closest we got to WWII bombardment of Germany in your absence - but they're general enough to apply to most cases. Besides, every study ever made of the effects of such bombardments in Germany showed no effect on armaments production. My sources on this are the late economics professors Charles Kindleberger and Ken Galbraith, both of whom produced, or participated in, such studies.

There is a problem with such studies, and that is the lack of context. Furthermore, they were central to a politically polemical movement in the early 1970s which sought to demonstrate that aerial bombardment was ineffective, and that therefore, the bombardment of Hanoi and Haiphong was useless, and more than that, a war crime because of its uselessness.

The use of that argument against the bombardment of Hanoi and Haiphong was an example of people falling for their own straw men. There was a cogent argument against the effectiveness of the bombing, but it was not that the bombing of Germany had shown aerial bombardment to be ineffective. The cogent argument against bombing Hanoi and Haiphong was that the sources of supply for the North Vietnamese was not in Vietnam--it was in China, the Soviet Union and the nations of the Warsaw Pact. The most that bombing Hanoi and Haiphong could accomplish was to hinder the process of getting logistical support to the NVA regiments fighting in South Vietnam. North Vietnam could not be knocked out of the war by the bombing, because it did not produce its own materials of war.

But the argument from the bombardment of Germany was seductive, and so it became the center-piece of the anti-war argument against the bombing of North Vietnam. However, as i have pointed out, the claims about German war production lacked context.

In the summer of 1943, when the USAAF did not yet have a long-range fighter to escort bombers to the target and home again (that would not come until the P51 Mustang was available), a raid was launched, targeting Regensburg (home to Messerschmidt production) and Schweinfurt in Franconia, the latter being the ball- and roller bearing "capital" of Germany. American casualties were especially heavy, as they encountered a force of fighter aircraft which exceeded the bombers in numbers. American strategic "precision" bombing doctrine called for 10% of bombs to be placed withing a thousand yards of ground zero, of the aiming point. In fact, at Schweinfurt, the USAAF managed to put 40% of their bombs in that area, so that despite the heavy losses, the raid put far more ordnance on the target than the minimum of operational doctrine.

One of the problems which the USAAF had, and which skews the findings of studies such as those to which you refer is that neither the RAF nor the USAAF were able to realistically assess the scale of damage from a raid based on aerial reconnaissance photos after the fact. Throughout the Second World War in Europe, the RAF tended to overestimate the effect of their nighttime area bombing, based rather simplistically on the scale of damage to residential neighborhoods; and the USAAF tended to underestimate the scale of the damage to the targets they struck, because they did not understand the context of the effect of their raids. This has meant that much of the data used by those analyzing the bombing of Germany is hopelessly skewed for a lack of the same context.

The USAAF was convinced that the Schweinfurt raid was a disaster, and estimated, rather accurately, that about one third of ball- and roller bearing production facilities had been destroyed in Schweinfurt. Albert Speer, who was the armaments minister for the third reich, visited Schweinfurt the next day, and estimated that two thirds of ball and roller bearing production had been lost for at least two months, if not three. The machine tools to make ball and roller bearings--essential to aircraft, tanks, submarines and a host of other mechanical systems--are very sensitive, and the Germans in the 1940s were producing machinery to tolerances which were greater than those we produce today. Machine tools in factories at Schweinfurt which had not been hit by the bombing were badly damaged by the concussive effects of the bombing, and by the automatic sprinkler systems which came on when temperatures from nearby fires raised the temperatures in the buildings in which those machine tools were located. Speer estimated that from a quarter to half of the machine tools in buildings which were not hit by the bombs were unsalvagable, and those which were would have to be re-calibrated. Additionally, Speer made the very sensible decision to relocate ball and roller bearing production--to disperse it.

So, in fact, by late 1944, Germany was actually producing more ball and roller bearings than it had done in 1943 when the first Schweinfurt raid was launched. But ball and roller bearings aren't of much use if they cannot be delivered to those industries which need them.

Which leads us to the second significant bit of context which those who make the claims about German production miss altogether. Late in 1943, Eisenhower sought, and by early 1944 was given, permission from George Marshall and the Imperial General Staff to take control of all Allied air forces based in England to implement a plan of his staff known as the transportation plan. Essentially, he wanted to divert all aerial bombardment resources, and he also received permission to divert all other air force resources, for an attack on communications--railways, railway marshaling yards, highways, bridges, tunnels, ferries, etc. In The Rommel Papers (edited by Frau Rommel and B. H. Liddell Hart), Rommel states that the pattern of bombing from early 1944 has convinced him that Normandy will be the target of the bombing--despite attacks all over northwest Europe intended to hide the intended invasion site.

The Allies had nothing to worry about, nobody at OKH was listening to Rommel. The Transportation Plan was put into effect in March, 1944, and when, after June, 1944, Allied troops were on the ground in France, it was expanded to include western Germany. Even after Allied air forces were released to resume the strategic bombing of Germany, the transportation net continued to be a prime target. Another crucial factor was the marriage of the North American P51 Mustang with the Rolls Royce Merlin engine. This gave the USAAF a long-range fighter which was now able to perform with the German Messerschmidts and the Focke-Wulfs.

Mustangs would take off long after the bomber groups had taken off and assembled, and would meet the bomber streams at Aachen on the western border of Germany. The Republic P47 Thunderbolt, a nearly indestructible fighter, would escort them that far, and the Mustangs would pick them up, and escort them to the target, then escort them back to Aachen, where the Thunderbolts, now re-fueled and re-armed, would escort the back to England. The Mustangs had plenty of fuel left, often hours worth of flying time, and they would take off to shoot up the German countryside. In his war memoir, Adolf Galland reported that the Mustangs would often hang back, and follow the Germans back to their air bases before attacking. Chuck Yeager (an ace in Mustangs) has said that what the Spitfire could do for 40 minutes, the Mustang could do for eight hours.

So the Mustangs not only made escorted missions to targets as distant as Berlin possible, they also continued the process of completely destroying the German transportation network. "Locomotive busting" was a favorite sport of the Mustang pilots. So the analysis which pronounces that the Allied bombing campaign did not hinder German production misses several key points of context. It ignores that at the time German production hit its zenith, Allied air force resources had been diverted to the transportation plan. It ignores that the effectiveness of bombing missions (and bombing missions from Italy and North Africa continued to hit Austria and Germany while the air forces in England were diverted to Eisenhower's Transportation Plan) lead the Germans to disperse their industrial production facilities in such a manner as to destroy the efficiency which concentration of industrial facilities offers through material economies of scale. It ignores that to achieve that end, the Germans abandoned virtually all civilian industry, and that automobiles, tractors and non-military machine tools of all types were no longer being produced--Germany was starving by 1945. But most of all, it ignores that a dispersed industrial base is of little use if you can't get the production to the end users.

By early 1945, railways were almost inoperative in Germany, and highway traffic was in no position to take up the slack from the constant destruction of the railways and railway and highway bridges (a significant amount of German resources were diverted to an attempt to keep the railways and highways operable, as was essential). At the end of the war, literally thousands of tanks, trucks, aircraft and submarines, in the form of their constituent parts, were sitting around, completely unusable, because they could not be delivered to the points at which they could be assembled. Spare parts could not be shipped to the front line units which needed them.

The claim that German war production was unaffected by the bombing campaign is a naïve analysis which ignores the context of the totality of the system which needs to operate to make the production of war materials effective in supporting the armed forces.

Sorry about that formatting error.

My source is the Iraq Body Count. They made a big effort to publicize their methodology back in 2003, both in media interviews, and on their own website.

I would guess they still have their methodology on their website somewhere. I'll go look it up when I get time (might be a couple hours from now -- just have the time to knock off a few quick posts right now).

No I haven't.






No I haven't.






Yes it is.






Your objections to the report were not very convincing.






Well, it seems a credible source, and doesn't appear to be contradicted by any other credible source.






My criterion is to tell the truth: The firestorm that killed tens of thousands of civilians in Dresden was an act of the UK, not of the US.






Nope. I have provided reputable links.

Since most of the civilian dead were not blown apart by any bomb, but were instead killed by the firestorm, it shouldn't be too hard to tie their deaths to UK bombers if it were needed to do so.

You can continue to tout the 1953 Air Force report if you want, Oralloy, but that will never prove your case. You say that there was no firestorm from the USAAF attack, despite the ordnance mix used, because that report does not say that there was. Well, the report does not say that there was a firestorm from the RAF attack--so by your feeble criterion, there was no firestorm from that raid, either. I see you as nothing more than a conservative, "American can do no wrong" propagandist.

You have no case.

Set,
I agree with your overall argument. However one small note with respect to Hanoi/Haiphong. A great deal of the sources of supply of both military and logistical support did indeed come to North Vietnam via ship through Haiphong - much of it, as you said, from the USSR via China. This included most of the early delivery of the SA-2 missiles & guidance systems to North Vietnam which by 1968 had the most advanced deployed air defense system in the world. The single rail line from China was a target we hit almost daily after the mining of Haiphong authorized by Nixon effectively closed the harbor - the combination was indeed effective in reducing the source of supply. Unfortunately we did it too late to prevent the initial buildup.

Aerial bombing was then very accurate if you defined a "hit" as impact within 1000yds of the target. Thus it worked when large numbers of weapons were dropped on large area targets, though collateral damage was often high. For small, discrete targets, even more accurate dive bombing was often ineffective. The peacetime standard for accuracy in dive bombing on a practice range (with no one shooting at you) was a CEP (circular error probable, or median miss distance) of 100 feet. The rule of thumb for the effects of combat was to double the miss distance. Given that 500lb GP bombs have a destruction radius of about 50 feet, the odds of hitting (say) a small bridge were very small. There was a bridge near Vinh (Than Hua) that had long been a priority target. Unfortunately it was in a fairly narrow ravine and well defended. The area around it looked like the surface of the moon - with the craters of hundreds of bombs that had been aimed at it over many months - but none hit. In the last days of the air war the bridge was dropped on one sortie by an aircraft with a then new laser guided bomb.

The 1000 yd. standard to which i referred was the Army Air Force standard for the Second World War. I have no doubt that the bombing of Haiphong and of other communications targets in North Vietnam was accurate and effective. My point was simply that, to use an expression from MacArthur (i know you're crazy about the boy) North Vietnam's sources of military supply enjoyed "privileged sanctuary," in that they weren't actually in North Vietnam.

It does look like they've changed their methodology a bit, although it looks like the same flaw exists in their new methodology.

This page shows their old methodology:

http://web.archive.org/web/20050719202846/www.iraqbodycount.org/background.htm

Note:



So using their old methodology, if a bogus claim was reported in two media sources, it was counted.



Their current live website says:



http://iraqbodycount.org/about/methods


However, the new methodology seems to still count the media as "good enough" to use as a source:



http://iraqbodycount.org/about/methods/2