From: schuck@fraser.sfu.ca (Bruce Jonathan Schuck)
Subject: Re: Senate Interrogation
Reply-To: Bruce_Schuck@sfu.ca
Organization: Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C., Canada
Distribution: can
Date: Sun, 15 Nov 1992 23:25:47 GMT

John G. Spragge <SPRAGGEJ@QUCDN.QueensU.CA> writes:

>In article <schuck.721855327@sfu.ca>, schuck@fraser.sfu.ca (Bruce Jonathan
>Schuck) says:

>>You can prove what German production would have been without bombing
>>then? I can't. Nobody can. It's all a guess.

>If so, what makes the guess by the producers of "The Valour and the Horror"
>less valid than the "guess" by the members of the Senate or the CBC
>ombudsman?

It wasn't my intention to leave it up to the Senate Committee or the
CBC Ombudsman. All they have proven to me is that a debate about the
assertions made by McKenna is necessary.

> And why bother with history?

History? You claim production went up *because* of allied bombing of
Germany. What does that have to do with history?

>In fact, we do have a good deal of information about the effect of the
>bombing, and the cost to Britain of maintaining bomber command. And
>the evidence suggests that while the night bombing may have affected
>German military production, it probably did not eliminate a third of
>it, whereas supporting bomber command took up about a third of the
>resources Britain devoted to military ends during the later stages
>of the war. So far the facts: on that basis, it seems to me that
>a reasonable person could conclude continuing the night bombing campaign
>in the face of high casualties in the air crews did not make ethical or
>military sense.

But what would Germany have done with that destroyed military production?
Would it have gone into long range bombers to attack Britain? If so,
then the investment in men and resources was worth it. If it would
have went into more U-boats to attack convoys it was probably worth
it, because those convoys were the lifeline for Britain and Russia.
And so on. The miltary production lost would have gone into offensive
weapons. And the military production diverted to defensive weaponrey
would have gone into offensive weapons.

>If you deride that as hindsight, I reply that the benefit of hindsight
>provides a reason for the unbiased study of history: so that having seen
>what social, political and military ideas worked, we can avoid making
>similar mistakes in the future. Letting our wish that a particular
>tactic had or could work get in the way of that learning process makes
>learning from our mistakes impossible.

Fine. Learning from history is excellent. Portraying someone as evil,
such as Harris, because he didn't have those historical lessons is
grossly unfair. 

>>Germany was very close scientifically, but did not commit the massive
>>economic resources necessary for bomb production. That may be they
>>were too busy countering the destruction caused by allied bombing. I
>>can't prove it. Its a guess. Just as your assertions are guesses.

>We can put more than guesses to put into the subject of history.
>I say that German nuclear weapons research made so little progress
>scholars wonder if the physicist in charge deliberately sabotaged it
>because I have read an article on the subject in the New York Times
>review of books. Objective evidence for these things does exist. The
>Allies did capture documents after the war that established the Germans
>did not come close to having the know-how to build nuclear weapons.

My information is that they certainly had the know how, but they
didn't commit the resources. The Manhattan Project was incredibly
expensive and required a massive commitment of money and people. 
Germany didn't commit those resources. For what reason I can't say for
sure. But sertainly more resources would have been available if
Germany had been left unmolested.

>>Tragic blunder? The allies had to fight back somehow. Bombing was one
>>of the few ways open to them.

>Fighting back only works if you can do more damage to the enemy than you
>do to yourself. 

Thats not always true. Britain had limited options to do damage to
Germany. Attacking them by air was one of them. They could have put
men and resources into the army, bout it wasn't going to be able to
attack Europe for years. They were capable of air attacks immediately.

And, fighting back does wonders for civlian morale. What would British
military production been if the workers were being bombed by the
Luftwaffe, and they knew their counterparts in Germany didn't have to
worry about air attacks.

>>The US did not get to Europe until 1942. They had two years of
>>learning from the British experience.

>The US decision to bomb by daylight had nothing to do with British
>experience. 

Nothing? Not a thing? Sure.

>Both air forces came into the war with fixed aircraft
>designs (the Americans designed the B-17 in 1937). Technology dictated
>the strategy. Theory dictated the technology. And have admitted you
>don't know the theory, and you refuse to even try to learn it.

>>You are dense. The estimate is that over 50% of the Iraqi military had
>>fled the front lines by the time of the allied assault. Troops
>>couldn't get to the front lines, transportation was completely
>>disrupted. And the vast majority of bombs dropped by the allies were
>>old iron dumb bombs dropped by B-52's.

>The "estimate"? Well, I can give you two solid facts: first, Iraq did
>not leave Kuwait until the ground assault, 

A lot of soldiers did desert, and most of the officers had left the
front lines by the time of the ground assault.

>and the allied generalship,
>troops, tanks, and tactical aircraft far outclassed the Iraqis in
>every way. 

The Iraqi artillery was better, but nobody fights at their best after
40 days of B-52 strikes.

>The US M-1 tanks and Apache helicopters would have outgunned,
>outshot the Iraqi tanks if not a single bomb had fallen on Baghdad, and

True.

>the intelligent generalship of General Schwartzkopf would have made the
>end run around Saddam's army possible in the complete absence of
>"strategic" bombing.

I disagree. Schwartzkopf himself has made it clear that he delayed the
ground assault until the Iraqi casualty figures were at a certain
point. He certainly wasn't prepared to fight an undamaged Iraqi army,
or an undamaged military industrial complex.

>In any case let me clarify: I do not consider aerial assault per se
>immoral. Bombing the roads, railway yards which directly support
>enemy troops works, as does bombing the troops themselves. Bombing
>civilian populations because you don't have the technical ability
>to hit their military assets seems (on the historical evidence)
>not to work. Destroying cities from the air, even with weapons
>as awesome as the B-52 strato-fortress has never yet by itself won a
>war: not in Vietnam, not in Iraq, not anywhere. 

Of course it can't win a war by itself. But if the military assets are
within cities, then cities had to be targetted. It is easier now to
target just the military assets, but Germany should not have been left
untouched because civilians would die.  Factories were within or near
cities, as were shipyards, and railyards. They shouldn't have been
left unmolested just because civilians might die.

>In order to defeat
>Japan with bombs (even after they had killed a third of a million
>people and rendered many more homeless) the US had to escalate to
>nuclear weapons.

How many factories were destroyed by the strategic bombing of Japan,
how many transportation centres disrupted?

>As for your definition of me as dense: possibly, but you have a
>worse problem: you don't know the subject very well (by your own
>admission), and you refuse to learn. When I press you, you refer to
>history as "guessing". Drawing lessons from history does require
>a certain interpretation, but the facts to base those interpretations
>on do exist. I have quoted the sources I use: you refuse to quote
>any sources but your own evident wish to believe the tactics of
>bomber command worked.

And you have a bigger problem. You have a nice unsubstantiated theory
that bombing helped *increase* German military production with no
evidence offered. Yet, military production increased in countries that
weren't bombed. 

You keep claiming the costs were too high. Yes, costs were high.

But you offer no alternatives except for Britain to have just sat
there and accepted the pounding. Thats not an alternative.



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