[.ca] Bomber War (ISBN 1585671622)

From Amazon.com:
"We must make war as we must, not as we would like," observed the great British general Lord Kitchener after witnessing the carnage of World War I. Former Royal Marines commando Robin Neillands concurs in this often grim account of a bombing campaign that devastated much of continental Europe in the cause of destroying Nazism. In this history of the Allied air war over Europe, Neillands maintains that the use of bombers as strategic weapons aimed at the enemy's ability to wage war--as opposed to purely tactical weapons aimed at enemy troops--necessarily involved the loss of civilian life and the destruction of nonmilitary targets, however unintentional. One such target was Dresden, a once-beautiful city that, some historians have protested, had no strategic importance and merely served as an example of what would happen to the rest of Germany should the fighting continue. Those historians are off the mark, Neillands counters: Dresden produced essential war materiel, such as military aircraft engines, shell fuses, and cigarettes ("a vital product for maintaining wartime morale"), and thus it was a legitimate target. So, he continues, were cities such as Berlin, Ludwigshafen, and Hamburg, the last the site of a firestorm that killed some 46,000 civilians. Their deaths were unfortunate, Neillands suggests, but necessary in ending Hitler's regime and in inaugurating an era in which total war is unthinkable. Neillands rightly observes that most histories of the Allied air war in Europe present either the English or the American side, and he does a good job of weaving both accounts, drawing on official histories and the memories of veterans (including some German fliers) alike. More detailed and technically inclined than recent work by Stephen Ambrose and other popular writers on World War II, his book makes a useful addition to the historical literature. --Gregory McNamee

insteresting information but lamentable book structure:
Being a pilot myself and interested by WWII, I naturally bought this book. The author surely made an extensive research on the subject but I found the book pretty labourious to read. He constantly repeats himself, he often mentions that he will talk about a subject later in the book, and, worse, the chronology is not always respected: sometimes we go backwards two years, so it is hard to understand the evolution of the bomber war. The description of the various electronic aids (Gee, H2S, Freya...) shows that the author hardly understands what he is talking about, although the aids were key to the precision of the bombings. In terms of organisation, a chart showing the structure of the bomber command with the various groups and squadrons would have saved pages of blabla. A map of Europe, UK with airfields (I doubt that readers can figure out where a countryside airfield in UK can be located), and Germany with the main cities would have helped, as well as a concise list of the missions, given the fact that the author doesn't follow a chronological order. All in all, I found very deceptive that a good base of information is so badly organized, as if the book were not finished. The author could have done a much better job with at least 100 pages less. Simply put, the author didn't put himself in the reader's shoes. On the positive side, personnal stories give a more lively account rather than dry statictics. The fact that the author could get testimony of so many people directly involved in the war more than 50 years after its end is remarkable: this will be hardly feasible in 10 years. Also remarkable is the fact that the author crosschecked information between allied and German sources, and we are amazed by the descrepancies about the real damages (target destroyed and planes shot down). I won't enter the polemic of who (RAF or USAAF) did the best job or had a leading role, I think the book is pretty well balanced in that respect. There will always be people on one side or the other but all in all the book presents the contribution of everyone (US, UK, Canadians, Australians...), and behind nationalities there were just humans fighting for liberty. The book also deals pretty well with the fact that the more the war advances the more you don't feel bad about using terror weapons. It is an infernal spiral where human beings die in horrible conditions and cultural heritage is devastated and gone for ever. Bombing is not a computer game where you are happy with a good score, bombing generates wounds and death of innocents, and behind each human killed there are family members and friends grieving. Let's not forget it

Very good...but a deceiving title:
I won't explain what this book is about. Others have done that much better than I could. I bought this book because I love reading about the WWII avaition campaign involving B-24s and B-17s. In saying that, I was disappointed in this book. Neillands discusses the strategic and tactical use of bombers during the war and their effectiveness in bombing targets. This book doesn't offer much of a perspective from the American point of view. The USAAF comes across as "second stringers" in this book. Neillands gives the impression that the British Bomber Command were the ones running the air war. Most of the text is devoted to missions flown by the RAF with supplemental references to the USAAF. In that respect, the book was more about Bomber Command than it was the "Allied Air Offensive". Neillands criticizes the air effort as, perhaps, unnecessary since the bombing was not very accurate. He gives the impression that the RAF and the USAAF succeeded in spite of themselves! The book is worth reading one time but I would not read it again. Secondly, I don't think the issue of morality deserves a discussion in this book. The RAF and the USAAF did what was right at the time and we should not discuss history with today's moral views. If you are interested in reading anecdotes about the air crews, stick to Roger Freeman's books or Stephen Ambrose.

Failed Mission:
A lot of errors here, ranging from the minor--a claim that the Me-262 was not used as a night fighter (it was) and that the Ar-234 never saw combat (it did), to the major--no mention whatsoever of the 8th Air Force's Operation Argument (February-May 1944), possibly (I nearly wrote "aguably") the turning point of the entire Allied air campaign, to the imbecilic--August 6, 1945 is somehow transformed to "mid-August" (P. 380). And I could go on. The book badly needed both careful editing and close reading by experts well-versed in the subject. The fact that it received neither renders it useless in its stated aim, as an argument calling for a reappraisal of RAF Bomber Command chief Arthur Harris. Such an argument could be made, but not with the level of error here. A detailed discussion of the morality of area bombing (one reaching the exact opposite of Neilland's conclusion) can be found in Michael Walzer's "Just and Unjust Wars". For a good history of the RAF bombing campaign I would suggest Max Hasting's "Bomber Command", both available nowhere else but on Amazon.

Dares to question the "official" history:
Hello, Excellent book, Niellands put you really back into the mindset of times we never hope to encounter it again. Furthermore it offers an excellent analysis of the "we were victims" version of WW2 which is gaining popularity in Germany. Niellands also doesn't spare Bomber Command and the USAAF regarding tactics and results. Niellands ask the obvious questions, "historians" out on anti Harris mission fail to ask. A must read for someone who seriously wants to learn about WW2 events, or someone who just wants to read an original analysis of these horrible times.

Countering the modern liberal condemnation of the bombing:
As head of RAF Bomber Command, Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris became one of the most controversial figures of World War II. While most of the men he commanded respected him, his advocacy of saturation bombing and the infamous fire raids on Dresden and other German civilian targets caused much controversy postwar, if only muted concerns were expressed during the war itself. Yet for author Robin Neillands it seems quite preposterous that critics of RAF Bomber Command and Sir Arthur Harris can pose the question, " Does a state of war really justify the killing of defenseless civilians?"......well, yes , in the case of Nazi Germany, yes it does ..it frankly beggars belief that people can think there possibly be any other response even if admittedly there was an element of retribution in the punishment meted out to the German civilian population... Harris took a demoralized and dispirited RAF Bomber Command in 1942 and built it up into a most formidable force that played a vital role in the defeat of Nazi Germany. The author points out that the policy of night-time area bombing designed to destroy the cities that served as the locations of the German war industries was decided upon before Harris became Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command. Within a few weeks, he put together the extremely risky Operation Millenium, the thousand-bomber raid on Cologne, whose success proved to sceptics the power and effectiveness that Bomber Command was capable of wielding. Although it really took another two years to make the bombing campaign really effective, it has been proven beyond a doubt that German war production was severely damaged by the bombing campaign; the comments of Albert Speer, Hitler's Armaments & Production Minister emphasize this point. RAF Bomber Command were the much vaunted Second Front; even as early as 1941 over 500,000 Germans were manning anti-aircraft guns in the cities.....a considerable number of these could perhaps have been fighting soldiers at the front...against the British in North Africa or against Stalin's Russia in front of Moscow... The book is a riposte to those that would heap opprobrium on the entire theory of strategic bombing in WWII and the wholesale slaughter of civilians specifically.....this is a moral viewpoint, the luxury of which was denied the British in 1940.......of course bombing erodes humanity but we were fighting a regime that was slaughtering millions of civilians in death factories..... Our American reviewers conveniently forget that the British were on their own against the might of Nazi Germany for nearly two years between the fall of France and Pearl Harbor....sitting back on the defensive, ie not bombing civilians was NOT an option... Neillands reserves his sharpest barbs are for those politicians (Churchill included) and senior military planners that made policy and knew full well that wide-area terror bombing was the only avenue available to Bomber Command. Neillands also correlates Bomber Command's policy and operations with that of the USAAF, who, he writes, also hid behind a pretense that collateral casualties were a regrettable but unavoidable tragedy of war. The British also tried surgical strikes with their cadre of highly capable precision bombing units, such as 617 Squadron's Dambusters.. ironically in view of the arguments for precision strikes, destroying the dams was ultimately an object in laying waste to an entire region. Quite simply the technology to do anything else was not available.. Of course the Yanks were just as eager to bomb the big German cities and especially Berlin as the Brits had been and the USAAF tried any number of times from March 1944 when they felt sufficiently strong enough to do it. The hypocrisy of THEIR position was laid bare following the continued slaughter of unprotected German cities in 1945 long after everyone knew that the bombing would make no difference to the outcome or even pace of the war. It became bombing just for bombing's sake, or in the case of Dresden, showing the Soviets what Anglo-American air power could do; slaughtering refugees fleeing from the advancing Soviet horde. Neillands argues that the moral repugnance that is increasingly attached, almost wholly, to RAF Bomber Command serves unfairly to exonerate the Americans who continue to protest that theirs was a precision campaign; the truth is that the USAAF were still carrying out large scale raids as late as April 1945 until they finally called a halt when there were no worthwhile targets left to hit....and of course in the Japanese theatre the Americans went on to unleash the "area-bomb" par excellence in the form of the nuclear weapons that devastated two cities and which significantly for the critics of area bombing brought about the Japanese capitulation....even the Germans recognised that a few more attacks like those which razed Hamburg in July 1943 killing tens of thousands in huge firestorms could have potentially ended the war there and then....