How Effective is Strategic Bombing?: Lessons Learned From World War II to Kosovo

by Gian Gentile

In the wake of World War II, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson and President Harry S. Truman established the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, to determine exactly how effectively strategic air power had been applied in the European theater and in the Pacific. The final study, consisting of over 330 separate reports and annexes, was staggering in its size and emphatic in its conclusions. As such it has for decades been used as an objective primary source and a guiding text, a veritable Bible for historians of air power.
In this aggressively revisionist volume, Gian Gentile examines afresh this influential document to reveal how it reflected to its very foundation the American conceptual approach to strategic bombing. In the process, he exposes the survey as largely tautological and thereby throwing into question many of the central tenets of American air power philosophy and strategy.
With a detailed chapter on the Gulf War and the resulting Gulf War Air Power Survey, and a concluding chapter on the lessons of the Kosovo air war, How Effective is Strategic Bombing? is the most comprehensive and important book on air power strategy in decades.

286 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 2000

About the author

Gian P. Gentile (October 9, 1957) is a retired US Army colonel, who served for many years as a history professor at the United States Military Academy at West Point. Gentile has also been a visiting fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a senior historian at the RAND Corporation.

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

One review said the book was entirely negative. Another said that the book did not answer the question of the title.

Both statements are true. Nevertheless, the point of the book is mainly the way that such studies are written, with vast interests competing behind the scenes.

The USSBS was always suspicious because it was so obviously aimed at helping to prepare for an independent Air arm. What Prof. Gentile does is specify how that happened.

The conclusion of the USSBS that WWII would have ended before DEcember and probably in Novemember was, as Prof. Gentile, put it, "counter-factual." The facts in the study itself did indicate preparations by the Japanese to continue the war. There was no real basis for the conclusion of a fast surrender without using the atom bomb.

What does show clearly is that area bombing of itself was not decisive. There was also an interesting distinction drawn by Gentile between area bombing of industrial areas and indiscriminate area bombing, against people or morale only.

The book is an excellent overview of the problems of rational formation of policy where self-interest of competing groups is involved.

[Ed · Rating 2 out of 5]

A bit too ranty for my taste. His point is that the US Strategic Bombing Survey of World War II was only superficially objective because the the questions they asked and the organization set up by the USAAF predisposed the study's authors to predetermined conclusions. In addition, I dislike books that are entirely negative. The author only tears down the USSBS and MacIsaac's book written about it 1976, but doesn't really seem to say anything positive or constructive. It's almost entirely criticism.