Although the Allied effort featured two air forces, two different philosophical concepts and two distinct approaches to the same problem, both organisations were committed essentially to achieve a central objective. In fact, it was very much a common enterprise. All too often the strategic bombing offensive against Germany is regarded as two separate campaigns. There is an important reason for this comparative method. Moreover, it provides the first detailed examination of the sensitive subject called 'Lack of Moral Fibre.' First-hand reflections of combat airmen, published materials, reports and official documents are used to compare the efforts of the U.S. This thesis investigates the unique nature of aerial warfare and the men who participated in it by analysing aircrew selection, reaction to combat, adaptability to stress, morale, leadership, and combat effectiveness. In doing so he provides readers with a statistical basis of analysis that will enable them to form their own judgment as to the validity of the theory of strategic bombing and the intentions of the Anglo-Americans in their use of it. In this study the author examines the employment of strategic bombers by and the target selection of the British Royal Air Force (RAF) and the US Army Air Forces (AAF) in their campaign against Germany in World War II. If, for any number of reasons, that direction of attack proved impractical or insufficient, then strategic bombing theory suggested that an attack on the enemy's will to resist by applying force against the civilian population (i.e., bombing the enemy's principal population centers) might achieve the same end. The strategic bombing theorists posited that destruction of the foe's means of production by aiming bombs almost entirely at manufacturing, service, and distribution facilities would quickly lead to the surrender of its armies at the front when, or even before, they exhausted the supplies remaining in their logistics system. In World War II only multiengine bomber aircraft had the range, payload, and accuracy to accomplish this task. Strategic bombing will succeed either because it has fatally compromised the ability to carry on hostilities or because bombing has broken the will of the people and/or leadership to continue the fight. The theory of strategic air bombardment states that airpower is best used offensively to penetrate an enemy's home territory and disrupt or destroy the economy and means of war production to force the enemy to surrender. The USAF's uncritical approach to its own past has enabled it to declare strategic bombing decisive where it was not (Europe, 1943%5) to claim victory where there was none (Vietnam, 1972) and to neglect those air operations that, indeed, proved indispensable and potentially decisive (tactical air campaigns in the European and Pacific theaters during World War II and in Korea during 19). This system of belief too often has led the keepers of the USAF's institutional memory to dismiss as aberrant, peripheral, and irrelevant anything that fell outside the narrow confines of its strategic concepts. The theology of strategic bombing has influenced every aspect of the Air Force's development since well before World War II. Without the Gospels there would be no pope and without strategic bombing there would be no Air Force. Strategic bombing is as central to the identity of the Air Force as the New Testament is to the Catholic church. Strategic bombing is not mere doctrine to the USAF it is its lifeblood and provides its entire raison d'etre. As a result, the USAF, perhaps more than any other US military service, faces the prospect of losing the foundation upon which it has based its entire institutional identity and even its very existence. The specter of a hostile, expansionist Soviet Union-which, for the last 45 years, has justified the maintenance of a large strategic air force overwhelmingly oriented to the western European theater is fading fast with no similarly immense threat on the immediate horizon to take its place. The United States Air Force of the 199Os faces perhaps the single greatest challenge to its institutional weltanschauung since it became an independent service in 1947.
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