With the collapse of France in 1940, American (US) and British (UK) leadership became keenly aware that the continued security of their nations required the defeat of the Axis powers, particularly Germany. The Allies chose a strategy utilizing a combination of various military actions, most notably a combined bomber offensive (CBO). The CBO would be carried out through a combination of US daylight precision and UK night area bombing. The purpose of this paper is to show why the Allies chose this strategy and evaluate its success. To accomplish this task, the paper will first describe the events that brought about the conflict and the strategy. Crowl’s Questions are used as a framework to analyze the factors that influence strategy development and adoption and will illustrate why Allied leaders chose this path. This is followed by a detailed description of the campaign. The principles of war (mass, objective, offensive, maneuver, surprise, security, simplicity, unity of command, and economy of force) are accepted as proven methods for employing forces in combat and are used to evaluate the CBO’s effectiveness The paper closes with a summary of the findings and doctrinal implications. The paper will show the Allies adopted US daylight precision and UK night area bombing based on leadership’s belief that it could most effectively reduce Germany’s means of war and hasten its earliest possible defeat. The Allies successfully achieved this objective primarily through adherence to the principles of mass, objective, offensive, and maneuver.

The Allies chose a strategy utilizing a combination of various military actions most notably a combined bomber offensive (CBO) to defeat Germany. The CBO was carried out through a combination of US daylight precision and UK night area bombing. The paper will show why the Allies chose this strategy and evaluate its success.

In the wake of WWII, President Truman established the US Strategic Bombing Survey to determine how effectively strategic air power had been applied during the war. The final study has been used for decades as an objective primary source and a guiding text. Gentile (history, US Military Academy) re-examines this document to reveal how it reflected the American conceptual approach to strategic bombing. He exposes the survey as largely tautological, throwing into question many of the central tenets of American air power philosophy and strategy. He shows how recent problems with bomb damage assessment in the Balkans reinforce his conclusions. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

From Iraq to Bosnia to North Korea, the first question in American foreign policy debates is increasingly: Can air power alone do the job? Robert A. Pape provides a systematic answer. Analyzing the results of over thirty air campaigns, including a detailed reconstruction of the Gulf War, he argues that the key to success is attacking the enemy's military strategy, not its economy, people, or leaders. Coercive air power can succeed, but not as cheaply as air enthusiasts would like to believe.Pape examines the air raids on Germany, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq as well as those of Israel versus Egypt, providing details of bombing and governmental decision making. His detailed narratives of the strategic effectiveness of bombing range from the classical cases of World War II to an extraordinary reconstruction of airpower use in the Gulf War, based on recently declassified documents. In this now-classic work of the theory and practice of airpower and its political effects, Robert A. Pape helps military strategists and policy makers judge the purpose of various air strategies, and helps general readers understand the policy debates.

When large formations of Allied four-engine bombers finally flew over Europe, it marked the beginning of the end for the Third Reich. Their relentless hammering of Germany-totaling more than 1.4 million missions-took out oil refineries, industries, and transportation infrastructures vital to the Reich's war effort. While other accounts have focused on operational details, this is the first book to reveal the crucial role of air intelligence in these dramatic campaigns. Robert Ehlers reexamines these bombings through the lens of both air intelligence and operations, a dual approach that shows how the former was so vital to the latter's success. Air intelligence was essential to both targeting and damage assessment, and by demonstrating its contributions to the Combined Bomber Offensive of 1943-1945, Ehlers provides a wealth of new insight into the war. Ehlers describes the close ties that developed between the Royal Air Force's "precision intelligence" arm and the U.S. Army Air Force's "precision bombardment" forces, telling how the RAF's photographic reconnaissance and signals intelligence steered both British and American bombers to the right targets at the right intervals with the right munitions. He shows that the greatest strength of this partnership was its ability to orchestrate all aspects of damage assessment within an effective organizational structure, so that by 1944 senior air commanders-like the RAF's Arthur "Bomber" Harris and the AAF's Carl "Tooey" Spaatz-could gauge the accuracy of bombing with a high degree of precision, analyze its effects on the German war effort, and determine its effectiveness in helping the Allies achieve strategic objectives. Ehlers focuses on three key offensives in 1944-against French and Belgian rail supply lines delivering German troops and supplies to Normandy, against German oil refineries, and against railroads and waterways inside the Reich-that had a disastrous effect on the Nazi war effort. In the process, he underscores the degree to which bombers constituted part of a highly effective combined-arms force, giving Allied armies crucial advantages on the battlefield. Drawing on a huge collection of bomb-damage assessment photographs and a wealth of other archival sources, he shows that the success of these and other efforts can be traced directly to the success of air intelligence. Providing a deeper and more accurate understanding of the bomber campaigns' role in the Allied victory, Ehlers's study testifies to the strategic importance of these efforts in that war and provides a tool for understanding the importance of intelligence operations in future conflicts.

Can air bombardment break the morale of an enemy and force it to capitulate or does it strengthen the enemy's determination to resist? In the first major book since the Vietnam War on the theory and practice of airpower and its political effects, Robert A. Pape helps policy makers judge the purpose of various air strategies, and helps general readers understand the policy debates. Pape examines the air raids on Germany, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq as well as those of Israel versus Egypt, providing details of bombing operations and governmental decision making. His detailed narratives of the strategic effectiveness of bombing range from the classical cases of World War II to an extraordinary reconstruction of airpower use in the Gulf War, based on recently declassified documents. Pape argues convincingly that airpower is no "magic bullet" nor a way to win inexpensively. His conclusions will provoke debate from the highest military circles to the armchair generals in academia and Congress and have ramifications for questions from defense budget cuts to international policy in Bosnia. The wealth of systematically collected evidence should be a source of scholarly debates for years to come.

Examines the U.S.Air Force strategic bombing campaign of Iraq & Iraqi armed forces occupying Kuwait from January 17th through February 28th, 1991 . Describes the aircraft & weapons, changes in technology & the reexamination & reapplication of traditional strategic bombing theory by USAF planning officers. Provides a chronological review of the campaign with an analysis of the results. Photos, maps, graphs & tables. Includes suggested readings.