On Tue, 17 Sep 2002, Doug Henwood wrote:
> >Did the Nazis deserve Dresden?
>
> Remember, the U.S. had a theory behind that - terror bombing, to
> demoralize the civilian population (that which wasn't killed, that is)
> and foment hatred of the government, a strategy first theorized by a pal
> of Mussolini. It was behind the firebombing of Tokyo too.
Which didn't work, as we all know. Paralleling Galbraith the Elder's pathbreaking official study of the failure of "strategic" bombing (the quickly standardized euphemism for terror bombing -- we're not terrorists, we're strategists!), Paul Fussell summed it up nicely in _The Great War and Modern Memory_, in an aside on WWII and irony: "Air bombardment, which was supposed to shorten the war, prolonged it, by inviting those who were its targets to cast themselves in the role of victim heros, and thus stiffen their resolve."
Michael