>Nathan, I have looked at the thoughts of a number of people on the
>bombing survey. You are right that modern bombing seems more effective.
>
>WW II bombing was mostly directed at military sites; the more recent
>bombings were more directed at civilian infrastructure. Vietnam and
>Korea were intermediate cases -- where irrigation systems were targeted.
Don't forget the classic Workers Vanguard 1991 article on US terror bombing. Here's an excerpt; full text at <http://nuance.dhs.org/lbo-talk/9903/2007.html>.
Doug
----
>Liberals have often sought to distance themselves from the policy of
>strategic bombing, arguing that in any case it is "ineffective" in
>destroying a country's ability to wage war. This is the argument of
>economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who headed the U.S. Strategic Bombing
>Survey in World War II. Galbraith writes that his study showed, "Germany's
>industrial production-weapons and munitions, in particular-continued to
>increase, with no visible halt until nearly the end of the war" (Los
>Angeles Times, 10 February).
>
>What Galbraith leaves unsaid is that the nose dive in production in those
>final months was because of the mass terror bombing campaign which
>deliberately targeted and massacred hundreds of thousands of industrial
>workers.
>
>Colonel Harry Summers Jr., the Vietnam War historian and former professor
>of strategy at the Army War College, was blunter. In a column titled
>"'Collateral Damage' a Familiar, Often Intended, Part of War" (Los Angeles
>Times, 8 February), Summers noted that the deliberate targeting of the
>civilian population in order to break the will to resist "didn't start with
>'We had to destroy the town in order to save it,' the unfortunate remark of
>the young Army officer in the Mekong Delta during the Vietnam war...." The
>carpetbombing of Vietnam only continued the U.S. forces' "scorched earth"
>policy in Korea, the firebombing campaign in Germany and Japan and-the
>A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.