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carpet bombing or napalming of japan::The phrase probably is intended to invoke the image of bombs completely covering an area, in the same way that a covers a floor.
Initially, carpet bombing was effected by multiple aircraft, often returning to the target in waves.
A few days of such destruction would, he opined, cause one side to rapidly sue for peace.
With no means of prior detection, a bomber pilot was both deadly and safe.
During the 1920s and 1930s, the bomber arm of an air force was the most attractive and heroic to join, rather as the fighter arm is today.
Although this is now presented as an inhumane act, it is worth noting that it precisely matched the military tenets of the day.
The strategy was developed during , by the head of , air vice marshal and copied by the to try to weaken german morale and destroy cities which contained war industries.
When went to war with in 1939, the civilian population expected to receive this form of attack within days.
Plans were made for the expected large casualty rate in , and many children were evacuated to the comparative safety of the countryside.
Though it did not occur immediately, the finally did try to subdue in the latter stages of the.
It is normally considered that the precision target bombing of airfields which formed the first part of the could have won the battle for the germans, and changing tactics to carpet bombing effectively lost them the battle.
They did not have enough heavy bombers to effectively eradicate , and their aircraft suffered heavy attrition due to the effective raf fighters, guided to their targets by the new british invention of radar controlled airspace.
This lesson was not, however, learned by the british, who soon developed heavy, longrange bombers like the lancaster to pay the germans back.
In spite of heavy initial casualties the british built up a which was capable of delivering many thousands of tons of bombs onto a single target.
This was then wielded by in an effort to break german morale and obtain the surrender which douhet had predicted 15 years earlier.
When america joined the war the was joined to the british force, and continuous day and night bombing of germany became possible.
Probably the most spectacular example of this was the by combined forces of the and usaaf.
Carpet bombing was also used extensively against japanese civilian population centers, such as.
Considerable discussion about the relative merits of carpet vs.
Precision bombing has resulted among military historians ever since.
It must be remembered that, until precision guidance systems became available during the 1980s, targeted individual bombs dropped from height might fall tens of miles from their target.
Low level attacks were more likely to be accurate, but the attacker was less likely to survive.
Consequently, carpet bombing was a strategy forced by circumstance.
The raf had also found that heavy industrial machinery could often survive high levels of blast, and needed to be directly struck by a weapon to be disabled.
This suggested a bomber should drop many smaller weapons, one of which might have a lucky hit.
It was this kind of thinking which lead the raf to ignore the great british engineer who advocated large precision weapons dropped at supersonic speeds to penetrate the ground below a target.
These s and s were only developed by the british towards the end of the war, but were responsible for some of the more spectacular bombing feats in that conflict.
Carpet bombing also applies to a modern nuclear weapons doctrine that prefers targeting an area with several loweryield , usually launched s, rather than using an individual multimegaton to achieve the desired mass destruction more efficiently.
However, carpet bombing has largely fallen away to in recent years.