Carpet Bombing in WWII

[Rodion Romanovich]

I'm still confused though, who was the first to impliment the tactic, was it the Luftwaffe???

Was it nessecary for the outcome of a Allied Victory???

Was it a tactic used by the Allies out of spite and vengence???

First city bombing is often said to be a RAF response raid to a German bomber accidentally dropping bombs over London when the bombers returned from a military mission against an airfield or something like that, some problem with the bomb hatch or similar. The first massively employed city carpet bombing strategy was the Blitz by Luftwaffe. Goring thought bombing London would bring out the last hidden RAF reserves, which turned out to be a fallacy. He also thought it would demoralize the British, but that too turned out to be a fallacy. The British probably thought the late war carpet bombing of German cities would demoralize the Germans and make them surrender earlier, but that too turned out to be a fallacy. It's probable that there was rage on both sides affecting the decisions to carpet bomb, because both sides must have seen how little effect it had on themselves when the other side did it. Spite and vengeance existed on both sides who carpet bombed as far as I can see.

To be exact, Luftwaffe actually bombed Warsaw in 1939, so the Blitz wasn't really the first occurences of city bombing. However the raids didn't become large bomb carpet raids until during the Blitz. The early bombings of the war used something like less than 100 planes or so, while the real carpet bombings used up to 1000 planes

The earliest RAF city bomb raids, and the Soviet carpet bombing of Berlin in 1941 seem to be the only instances of carpet bombing that were really useful at damaging morale, because the RAF raid showed that Germany wasn't invulnerable, and the Soviety raid happened so early during Operation Barbarossa that it similarly broke the rumour of German heartlands being invulnerable. But more important were probably the Soviet bombings of the Ploesti oil fields at almost the same time as the Berlin raid.

The first nuclear bomb (over Hiroshima) seems to have been successful in giving the Japanese an excuse to stop fighting even though their honor code would normally forbid them to. It was difficult to argue that it was honorable to fight to the death against such a weapon that was impossible for the Japanese to counter.

I don't think carpet bombing was crucial to the victory of any side. Perhaps the carpet bombing affected how all countries after the war got a strong desire to work for peace and make sure it wouldn't happen again, but that probably applies to both sides equally. As for the Japanese theater, it wasn't crucial for victory, but it saved a lot of allied lives, probably also Japanese lives as odd as it might seem, by making it possible for the Japanese leadership to surrender and prevent massive starvation of millions of Japanese civilians, which was imminent at the time (on the other hand historians don't seem to agree on whether the Japanese would have surrendered or not at that time even if the nuke hadn't been dropped). The second nuke is more controversial though.

What can be said is that unfortunately both sides overestimated the effectiveness of the carpet bombing strategy, with the horrible consequences that both sides ended up using massive carpet bombing.