Strategic Bombing Campaign Essay

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From 1940 until 1945, the Strategic Bombing Campaign, which was commanded by Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris (Siebert 2011), inflicted substantial damage on Germany’s war capacity in World War Two. This essay aims to evaluate the effectiveness of the Strategic Bombing Offensive in curtailing German power during the global war. Although it has been suggested that the Strategic Bombing Campaign contributed to the ending of World War Two in favour of the Allies, several operational errors of the strategic offensive were made. Primarily, many argue that the lack of precision and accuracy of the bombing aircrafts resulted in the unnecessary use of additional ammunitions (Siebert 2011). In addition, despite the initial strategy of concentrated attacks, …show more content…

Firstly, the Allies’ – particularly the United States and Great Britain – specialist aerial attacks succeeded in destroying significant chemical factories that manufactured liquid fuels indispensable for military operations, such as the production of oil and synthetic rubber (Brakman, Garretsen and Schramm 2003). Also, the Allies targetted the ball-bearing industry in Schweinfurt, as well as the airframe industries of the German Air Force – the Luftwaffe. Other than that, the emphasis on assaulting multiple major cities with incendiary ammunitions gradually eroded the morale of the German populace by a considerable number of deaths as well as the collapse of urban infrastructure. Furthermore, the destruction of the imperative transportation system by the Combined Strategic Targets Committee (CSTC) – especially the dislocation of an extensive network of railways connecting the Ruhr and the rest of Germany – rendered the supplies of essential materials (such as aviation gasoline) and basic sustenance to the German front almost impossible to move (Beetham and Hutson 1998). What is more, having considered the geographical significance of Dresden to the Soviet armies, the region became a target of the Allied area bombing offensive that led to the deaths of approximately 135,000 civilians and a subsequently successful invasion of the Red Army into Berlin (Norton, Kamensky, Sheriff, Blight and Chudacoff

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