>For those that appreciate horrible irony--the following from a PBS site on
>great art:
>
>"In 1935, German General Erich Ludendorff published Die Totale Krieg (The
>Total War) in which he presented the view that in war, no one is innocent;
>everyone is a combatant and everyone a target, soldier and civilian alike.
>Italian General Giulio Douhet further suggested an enemy's morale could be
>crushed by air-delivered terror. Such theories intrigued Nazi Germany's new
>Fuhrer, but they needed testing. Spain seemed to be the perfect laboratory."
Douhet inspired the U.S. bombing strategy for decades. Having just trashed Workers Vanguard's sectarianism, here's an example what they're good at, from a 1991 article I've posted before:
>The policy of terror bombing civilians in order to undermine the ability to
>wage war was first systematically developed by the Italian general Giulio
>Douhet. His ideas on air war had a decisive influence in shaping American
>military doctrine. Colonel Summers refers to Douhet's 1921 treatise, The
>Command of the Air, reprinted by the U.S. Office of Air Force. History in
>1983, as a "masterwork." And a recent U.S. Air Force publication calls him
>a "prophet of the air" (Thomas Greer, The Development of Air Doctrine in
>the Army Air Arm 1917-1941 [1985]). What they fail to mention is that this
>"prophet" was commissioner of aviation in Mussolini's fascist regime. Here
>is Douhet's strategy for waging air war:
>
>"What civil or military authority could keep order, public services
>functioning, and production going under such a threat'? And even if a
>semblance of order was maintained and some work done, would not the sight
>of a single enemy plane be enough to stampede the population into panic? In
>short, normal life would be impossible in this constant nightmare of
>imminent death and destruction....
>"A complete breakdown of the social structure cannot but take place in a
>country subjected to this kind of merciless pounding from the air. The time
>would soon come when, to put an end to horror and suffering, the people
>themselves, driven by the instinct of self-preservation, would rise up and
>demand an end to the war."
>-quoted in Edward Earle, ed., Makers of Modern Strategy: Military Thought
>from Machiavelli to Hiller (1952)
>
>>From the start, U.S. air commanders embraced Douhet's policy of terror
>bombing as a way to limit their casualties and win wars "on the cheap." His
>ideas were taken up almost word for word - and rendered even more brutal -
>by "Billy" Mitchell, one of the first chiefs of the U.S. air service in the
>'20s. Mitchell wrote that instead of destroying cities it might be
>preferable to eliminate the civilian population with "a few gas bombs."
>Decades later, this same concept was behind the neutron bomb, a
>particularly "dirty" nuclear device designed to maximize deaths through
>radiation and minimize bomb blast damage to structures.
>
>Douhet's doctrine was incorporated in the official Air Force textbook used
>until World War II which, according to Greer's official Air Force history,
>"established national morale and industry as more crucial objectives than
>enemy armies. The easiest and cheapest way to win a war was thought to be
>by air attack upon the enemy's population and production facilities."
>Military historian John Keegan correctly pointed out that this policy
>"depended ultimately upon class bias-the judgment that the latent
>discontents of the proletariat were the Achilles heel of an industrial
>state" (The Second World War [1989]).