Japan fell both as a result of the proposed two land invasions that never came as planned in Operations Coronet and Olympic, but instead via the dropping of the first two atomic bombs.
There, several enemy garrisons were simply bypassed, left on their island fortresses as the Allies leapfrogged over them to only those spots necessary as air bases from which to launch new and more costly offensives against the more important Japanese Home Islands. Revisionists can speculate on “what might have been” (as I do here, granted) until the end of time, but in this case-and, indeed, in the same war-there is a concrete example to which one can point: the American war against Imperial Japan in the vast Pacific Ocean. One source gives the following figures for Germany’s destruction: Hamburg, 75 percent Bremerhaven, 79 percent Frankfurt, 52 percent Dresden, 59 percent Kassel, 69 percent Dortmund, 54 percent, and so on.” “When the European war ended, Germany lay in ruins-a ruination obvious to the eye. The losses from the retreats in Russia-or from the surrender at Stalingrad-were considerably less.”Īdded author Karl Roebling in his 1985 work, Great Myths of World War II, “Germany needed new models but couldn’t produce them due to the bombings periodic follow-up raids after Schweinfurt would have put Germany out of business…. “As far as I can judge, no one has yet seen that this was the greatest lost battle on the German side.
“Defense against air attacks required the production of thousands of anti-aircraft guns, the stockpiling of tremendous quantities of ammunition all over the country, and holding in readiness thousands of soldiers, who in addition had to stay in position by their guns-totally inactive-for months at a time. Was it necessary to invade the European continent to defeat Nazi Germany, or could the continual aerial bombing of towns and factories alone have done the job? Or was the invasion really mounted to forestall a Soviet victory and communist takeover of Europe? Some historians still debate the question. The fleets of bombers might appear at any time over any large German city or important factory…. Albert Speer, who wrote in his 1976 memoir, Spandau: The Secret Diaries, “The real importance of the air war consisted in the fact that it opened a second front long before the invasion of Europe. The man responsible for Germany’s war production from early 1942 until the end of it was Dr. Is it possible that the Combined Chiefs of Staff feared that a sudden collapse of Germany-brought about by bombing-would have resulted in the Russians sweeping across Germany with no opposition, and even occupying parts of France, Belgium, and Holland, before the British and American occupying forces could gain any worthwhile foothold on the Continent of Europe? The indications are that Germany would have collapsed under bombing alone, which was what Harris always believed to be a certainty….” Dudley Saward in Bomber Harris wrote, “The German Air Force was almost non-existent as a weapon of defense or offense from April 1944 until the end of the war…. Was this a gross oversimplification of Allied air might? Let’s take a closer look. He concluded, “Germany could be so devastated and dispirited by bombing,” making an invasion “a mopping-up operation,” and proposed the total destruction of “30 or 40” major German cities and industrial sites. “Both the future possibilities and the past results point to the inevitable conclusion that no matter what other operations are engaged upon, the final decision-if it is to be in our favor-must come through a direct air war between the United Nations and Germany.”
On September 3, 1942, Harris sent a top-secret memo to Winston Churchill: “Prime Minister: It is urgently necessary that a decision should be arrived at as to the future main strategy of the war… One who thought so at the time was Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris, chief of the British Royal Air Force’s Bomber Command. One query that was raised on the Allied side in 1942-two years before Operation Overlord-was if the cross-English Channel invasion of Northwest Europe via France was necessary at all in order to defeat the Third Reich.Ĭould Nazi Germany have been beaten by Allied air power alone, without the shedding of blood in costly ground-combat battle? Today-almost eight decades later-that cogent question persists.
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