The Aim of Bombing

In modern warfare it's not the soldiers who die - it's the civilians. One of the best examples of this is carpet bombing.

- GUY LEITCH

IN THE BAD OLD DAYS, soldiers used to line up and face the enemy, expecting to be attacked man to man, on foot, or with horses, and later, to mow each other down with machine guns. The soldiers were maimed, bled and died by their thousands on behalf of civilians.

World War 2 changed that as it was the first major war where more civilians died than soldiers. This continues today - at risk of stirring up a hornets' nest - I reckon that the Israel-Hamas war is primarily a massive public relations stunt by Hamas to make their citizens unwilling martyrs and make Israel a pariah. At time of writing (8 April 2024), wiki says that over 34,000 civilians (33,091 Palestinian and 1,410 Israelis) have been killed. In stark contrast, Hamas claims to have lost 6,000 'fighters' while the IDF claims up to 12,000 Hamas combatants killed. The point is, civilian casualties are three to six times higher than soldiers.

The reason I venture into this minefield is that I recently watched the Oppenheimer movie, and am sporadically watching the Netflix series, Masters of the Air, which is a semi-serious attempt to dramatize USAAF B-17 bomber crews who, contrary to claims, indulged in area, and not precision, bombing. Only the leader aimed his bombs, the others released theirs when they saw the leader's bombs drop.

The Oppenheimer movie is about Dr Robert Oppenheimer, who headed the Manhattan project, whose two atomic bombs killed 129,000 -200,000 civilians - and 'just' 10,000 soldiers. The atomic bombs had the desired effect because the cost in human life was just too much, even for the Japanese Emperor.

Which raises the question of whether bombing with conventional high explosive bombs was ever really a useful strategy in the WW2. Hundreds of thousands of civilians died on the ground in horrors such as the RAF's Dreden firestorm and the USAAF's Operation Meetinghouse Tokyo raid.