Download or read book The Strategic Bombing of Germany 1940 1945 written by Alan Levine and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 1992-07-22 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the only full-scale account of the strategic air offensive against Germany published in the last twenty years, and is the only one that treats the British and the Americans with parity. Much of what Levine writes about British operations will be unfamiliar to American readers. He has stressed the importance of winning air superiority and the role of escort fighters in strategic bombing, and has given more attention to the German side than most writers on air warfare have. Levine gets past a simple account of what we did to them and describes the target systems and German countermeasures in detail, providing exact yet dramatic accounts of the great bomber operations--the Ruhr dams, Ploesti, and Regensburg and Schweinfurt. The book is broad-guaged, touching many matters, from the development of bombing doctrine before the war to the technical development of the Luftwaffe and the RAF, jets and V-weapons, to the role of the heavy bombers in supporting land and sea operations. Levine stresses the impact of bombing on the war, and generally endorses the strategic air campaign as worthwhile and effective. But he concludes that many mistakes were made by the Allies--both the British and the Americans--in tactics, the development of equipment, and in the selection of targets. Levine sees strategic bombing as a powerful tool that was often misused, particularly when the doctrine of area bombing flourished. Scholars, students, and buffs interested in World War II and/or the history of aviation will find this study of great interest.
Download or read book Fire and Fury written by Randall Hansen and published by Anchor Canada. This book was released on 2009-09-15 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Bestseller An enlightening and utterly convincing re-examination of the allied aerial bombing campaign and of civilian German suffering during World War II–an essential addition to our understanding of world history. During the Second World War, Allied air forces dropped nearly two million tons of bombs on Germany, destroying some 60 cities, killing more than half a million German citizens, and leaving 80,000 pilots dead. Much of the bombing was carried out against the expressed demands of the Allied military leadership. Hundreds of thousands of people died needlessly. Focusing on the crucial period from 1942 to 1945, and using a compelling narrative approach, Fire and Fury tells the story of the American and British bombing campaign through the eyes of those involved: military and civilian command in America, Britain, and Germany, aircrew in the sky, and civilians on the ground. Acclaimed historian Randall Hansen shows that the Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command, Arthur Harris, was wedded to an outdated strategy whose success had never been proven; how area bombing not only failed to win the war, it probably prolonged it; and that the US campaign, which was driven by a particularly American fusion of optimism and morality, played an important and largely unrecognized role in delivering Allied victory.
Download or read book To Destroy A City written by Herman Knell and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 2009-06-16 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Herman Knell was nineteen and living in Würtzburg in March of 1945 when hundreds of Allied planes arrived overhead, unleashing a torrent of bombs on the city. Würtzburg's tightly packed medieval housing exploded in a firestorm, killing six thousand people in one night and destroying 92 percent of the city's structures. Despite the fact that Würtzburg had no strategic value, the city emerged from World War II second only to Dresden in material destruction inflicted from the air. The experience led Knell to years of research on the history, development, and effects of the strategy of area bombing.To Destroy a City is the result of the author's long and unrelenting investigation. His analysis of this form of warfare, which reached its zenith during World War II, covers the history and the development of wide-area bombing since 1914, examines its wartime effectiveness and the consequences. But the extra dimension that Knell's book offers is his firsthand experience of the tension, fear, tentative defiance, and, finally, utter catastrophe of being on the receiving end of overwhelming air power. For Americans, who fortunately did not experience bombing during the war, this is essential reading.
Download or read book The Fire written by Jörg Friedrich and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 556 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the final phase of the World War II, the Allies launched a bombing campaign that inflicted unprecedented destruction on Germany. This work attempts to document life under the Allied bombing, and renders the annihilation of cities such as Dresden.
Download or read book The Bombers and the Bombed written by Richard Overy and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2015-04-28 with total page 609 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An essential part of the literature of World War II.” —Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post From acclaimed World War II historian Richard Overy comes this startling new history of the controversial Allied bombing war against Germany and German-occupied Europe. In the fullest account yet of the campaign and its consequences, Overy assesses not just the bombing strategies and pattern of operations, but also how the bombed communities coped with the devastation. This book presents a unique history of the bombing offensive from below as well as from above, and engages with moral questions that still resonate today.
Download or read book The Effects of Strategic Bombing on German Morale written by United States Strategic Bombing Survey and published by . This book was released on 1947 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Military Innovation in the Interwar Period written by Williamson R. Murray and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998-08-13 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of major military innovations in the 1920s and 1930s.
Download or read book The United States Strategic Bombing Survey written by United States Strategic Bombing Survey and published by . This book was released on 1945 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Bombing Berlin written by Karima Darbouze and published by Independently Published. This book was released on 2021-04-15 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In World War II approximately 410,000 German civilians were killed by Allied air raids. From July 1944 to January 1945, an average of 13,536 people was killed every month. In Hamburg alone, about 49,000 civilians were killed by the Allied bombing, and in Berlin about 35,000. During a single attack carried out at night from February 1st to 14th 1945, more than 20,000 civilians were killed in Dresden. But not only cities had fallen victim to the Allies' strategic bombing. The medium-sized town of Nordhausen lost about 20% of its population in one night attack in May 1945, Pfortzheim lost 22%. Numerous cities, medium-sized towns and small towns had been the target of the Royal Air Force (RAF) and the US-Air Force (USAAF), amongst them Karlsruhe, Stuttgart, Essen, Bremen, Wilhelmshaven, Emden, Duisburg, Hamburg, Saarbrucken, Düsseldorf, Osnabrück, Mainz, Lübeck, Münster, Kassel, Cologne, Schweinfurt, Jena, Darmstadt, Krefeld, Leipzig, Dresden, Brunswick, Munich, Magdeburg, Aschersleben, Halberstadt, Chemnitz, Halle, Plauen, Dessau, Potsdam, Erfurt, but also towns like Cailsheim, Freudenstadt and Hildesheim. Historical events are depicted through the narrative of a veteran in the air war and his pilot life and career is described in the book.
Download or read book The Effects of Strategic Bombing on the German War Economy written by United States Strategic Bombing Survey and published by . This book was released on 1945 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Are We Beasts Churchill And The Moral Question Of World War II Area Bombing written by Dr. Christopher C. Harmon and published by Pickle Partners Publishing. This book was released on 2014-08-15 with total page 57 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This historical reassessment of the World War II British bombing campaign notes that though in 1940 Churchill declared that he was waging “a military and not a civilian war” to destroy “military objectives” and not “women and children,” within eighteen months both types of targets would be struck by Bomber Command. The author searches for the reasons in “three contiguous realms” of strategic influence: moral (and legal), political, and military. The study concludes that although for much of the war “area bombing” of cities was a “tragic necessity” meeting the ‘reasonable man’s’ standard of what was decently allowable given the blunt weapons the Allies had” and the evils they faced, nonetheless Allied leaders could have and should have abandoned indiscriminate bombing in the last phases of the conflict, when more precise means were at hand and “Nazi power had been overmatched.”
Download or read book Strategic Bombing by the United States in World War II written by Stewart Halsey Ross and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2015-10-03 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The United States relied heavily on bombing to defeat the Germans and the Japanese in World War II, and air raids were touted as "precision" bombing in American propaganda. But was precision possible over cloud-covered Europe or a darkened Japanese countryside? Could the vaunted Norden optical bombsight in fact "drop bombs into pickle barrels" as advertised? Were the American aircrews well trained and well protected? How good were their airplanes? What were the results of the costly raids? This work sets suppositions against facts surrounding the United States' use of strategic bombing in World War II. Chapters cover the events leading up to World War II; the start of the war; the seers and the planners; the airplanes, bombs, bombsights, and aircrews; the planes Germany used to defend itself against American planes; the five cities (Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki) that experienced the most destruction; and the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey of the damage done by aerial bombing. The book also probes the government's myth-building statements that supported America's view of itself as a uniquely humanitarian nation, and analyzes the role played by interservice rivalry--"battleship admirals" against "bomber generals."
Download or read book The Effects of Strategic Bombing on German Morale written by United States Strategic Bombing Survey and published by . This book was released on 1947 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book How efficient was the Strategic Bombing Offensive of the Allied Forces against Germany from 1939 1945 written by Stefan Trepke and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2005-12-15 with total page 18 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essay from the year 2003 in the subject History of Germany - National Socialism, World War II, grade: 2, University of Westminster (School of Social Science, Humanities & Languages), course: Total War: A Military History of the Second World War 1939-1945, language: English, abstract: The Strategic Bombing Offensive of the Allied Forces was one of the great military operations against Hitler-Germany. Despite of the meaning of the Strategic Bombing Offensive its significance and efficiency to the final victory over Hitler-Germany was always a topic of controversy. This controversy about the significance and efficiency of the Strategic Bombing Offensive to the final victory over Hitler-Germany took not just place under the contemporaries of the Second World War as Winston Churchill and his military advisers. This controversy is still alive, eg in the argumentations of historians as Richard Overy 1 and Noble Frankland 2 . In the following essay will be considered the efforts and results of the Strategic Bombing Offensive from 1939 to 1945. It will be discussed the efficiency of the Allied bombing to conclude finally the significance of the Strategic Bombing Offensive to the victory over Hilter-Germany. For this purpose shall be considered various primary sources as the Butt Report, the Singleton Report and the British and American surveys about the Strategic Bombing Offensive. Beside own points of view, shall be opposed the arguments of Richard Overy and Noble Frankland, the two opinion leaders of this historical subject. The Strategic Bombing Offensive is to understand as the strategic planning’s and operations of the Bomber Command of the Royal Air Force against the Hitler-Germany between 1939 and 1945. Since 1943, the entry of the US 8th Air Force and later the US 25th Air Force in the Strategic Bombing Offensive is this operation as well known as Combined Bombing Offensive. The Strategic Bombing Offensive was "aimed at destroying an enemy’s war capacity through destroying war production" 3 but also aimed w ere the infrastructure and the moral of the German population. The first considerations about a strategic bombing war goes back to the First World War, however this topic went to a real issue in late 1937 when the British Bomber Command got the order to plan the destruction of the economy of its most potential enemy, Hitler-Germany. Despite of this effort, virtually less was done as the war broke out in September 1939. The Bomber Command possessed about 488 light bombers, which did not fulfill the needs. Based on the lack of range and carrying capacity of bombs the demands of a realistic destruction of Germany were not practical. [...]
Download or read book Command Of The Air written by General Giulio Douhet and published by Pickle Partners Publishing. This book was released on 2014-08-15 with total page 620 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the pantheon of air power spokesmen, Giulio Douhet holds center stage. His writings, more often cited than perhaps actually read, appear as excerpts and aphorisms in the writings of numerous other air power spokesmen, advocates-and critics. Though a highly controversial figure, the very controversy that surrounds him offers to us a testimonial of the value and depth of his work, and the need for airmen today to become familiar with his thought. The progressive development of air power to the point where, today, it is more correct to refer to aerospace power has not outdated the notions of Douhet in the slightest In fact, in many ways, the kinds of technological capabilities that we enjoy as a global air power provider attest to the breadth of his vision. Douhet, together with Hugh “Boom” Trenchard of Great Britain and William “Billy” Mitchell of the United States, is justly recognized as one of the three great spokesmen of the early air power era. This reprint is offered in the spirit of continuing the dialogue that Douhet himself so perceptively began with the first edition of this book, published in 1921. Readers may well find much that they disagree with in this book, but also much that is of enduring value. The vital necessity of Douhet’s central vision-that command of the air is all important in modern warfare-has been proven throughout the history of wars in this century, from the fighting over the Somme to the air war over Kuwait and Iraq.
Download or read book Bombing to Win written by Robert A. Pape and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-11 with total page 547 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Iraq to Bosnia to North Korea, the first question in American foreign policy debates is increasingly: Can air power alone do the job? Robert A. Pape provides a systematic answer. Analyzing the results of over thirty air campaigns, including a detailed reconstruction of the Gulf War, he argues that the key to success is attacking the enemy's military strategy, not its economy, people, or leaders. Coercive air power can succeed, but not as cheaply as air enthusiasts would like to believe.Pape examines the air raids on Germany, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq as well as those of Israel versus Egypt, providing details of bombing and governmental decision making. His detailed narratives of the strategic effectiveness of bombing range from the classical cases of World War II to an extraordinary reconstruction of airpower use in the Gulf War, based on recently declassified documents. In this now-classic work of the theory and practice of airpower and its political effects, Robert A. Pape helps military strategists and policy makers judge the purpose of various air strategies, and helps general readers understand the policy debates.
Download or read book Strategy For Defeat The Luftwaffe 1933 1945 Illustrated Edition written by Williamson Murray and published by Pickle Partners Publishing. This book was released on 2015-11-06 with total page 883 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes the Aerial Warfare In Europe During World War II illustrations pack with over 200 maps, plans, and photos. This book is a comprehensive analysis of an air force, the Luftwaffe, in World War II. It follows the Germans from their prewar preparations to their final defeat. There are many disturbing parallels with our current situation. I urge every student of military science to read it carefully. The lessons of the nature of warfare and the application of airpower can provide the guidance to develop our fighting forces and employment concepts to meet the significant challenges we are certain to face in the future.
