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Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

The B-17 was a big marketing and propaganda coup.

It was pretty much obsolete at the beginning of the war. The “Flying Fortress” moniker, the (mostly bullshit) notion that the bomber would always get through and defend itself, the powerful imagery of battered bombers coming home, and the terrible sacrifices made by the crews made it a legendary symbol.

The B-24 wasn’t a pretty plane. The B-29 came too late in the war, and was only deployed in the Pacific.

Personally, I find the glorification of the daylight bombing campaigns increasingly gross as I get older. Those men paid a very high price and I wonder if that sacrifice was truly justified.

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Lots of people wonder if it was justified. Since then many historians have examined this and concluded that many of those bombing increased enemy support for the war and so were counter productive. Bombing of munitions factories and other military installations is still useful, but bombing cities like was often done in WWII is not considered a good idea.

Tell this to Russians.

Well, Hitler could have told them that, certainly. Doesn't matter whether you're talking about the UK or Ukraine... bombing civilians pisses them off and redoubles their commitment to the fight. It's a waste of munitions, because you'll never kill enough civilians to matter.

>you'll never kill enough civilians to matter.

-- unless you use nukes.

Even then I question if you can do so. You can level your enemy perhaps, but if the enemy is the US or Russia they have provisions to end the whole world after you level all their cities and so you don't win. If it is anyone else they might not end the world themselves, but there are good odds many countries that otherwise hate each other will join together to destroy you because they don't going nuclear to be an option for the next country. (basic physics and engineering can build a nuclear bomb - it isn't easy, but several countries have proven it can be done and most suspect more would if it was cost effective - but since you can't use them in war it isn't cost effective so they don't)

No one can "end the whole world" or bring about human extinction using nukes even if that were their explicit goal.

Industrial civilization can be ended using nukes. Too many interconnected supply chains would fail, including those needed to produce fertilizer for modern agriculture.

Possibly most human and land animal life could be ended if enough ground burst bombs were used to maximize fallout.

Destroying all life is extremely unlikely, e.g. deep-sea hydrothermal vent ecosystems, cave-dwelling life, bacteria, and more will survive even deliberate coordinated attempts by all nations to nuke as much as possible with ground detonations to maximize fallout.

Destroying the Earth (a 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-tonne ball of mostly iron) is not happening with nukes.

When most people say "end the world" they mean "end modern civilization", not "make the planet Earth cease to be a body in hydrostatic equilibrium in orbit of Sol".

Nukes cannot be used to end industrial civilization, either.

Nuclear planners have always planned to use many ground bursts: on hardened targets like command bunkers, but also to destroy communications networks. Specifically, a "landing station" where transoceanic cables make landfall or wherever there used to be a 5ESS switch (the locations of which are publicly known) is a great place to hit with a ground burst to destroy much of the nation's non-wireless communications infrastructure. Estimates during the end of the Cold War are that about half of CONUS's area would be covered with lethal levels of fallout from these expected ground bursts. I guess if the Russians and Chinese were deliberately trying to cover as much area as possible with lethal levels of fallout (which they wouldn't because it is not an effective plan) they could cover 70 or 80% -- if they had as many nukes and means to "deliver" them intercontinentally as the Soviets did, which the Russians don't unless they've been hiding them from US inspectors, but I consider it very unlikely that they could've managed that.

And bomb fallout is very different from radioactive contamination from accidents at nuclear power plants: basically no area continues to have lethal levels of bomb fallout 4 weeks after the last bomb explodes. The method for decontaminating your house is to get up on a ladder and wash down your roof with a garden hose, then wash down all driveways and sidewalks.

So, again, nukes cannot be used to end industrial civilization. Note that this means that if the US ever nukes Russia with everything it has, Russia would bounce back and would again be a military threat (whether that takes 3 years or 15 years I don't know) so it makes little sense to nuke Russia unless the US is going to follow up with a long-term occupation of Russia's ports and maybe some key transportation hubs.

The USSR knew it had no chance to occupy US ports or occupy a substantial portion of US territory: their plan for followup was to grab the rest of the European plain, which includes most of Germany and all of northern France to the border with Spain.

And bomb fallout is very different from the radioactive contamination from accidents at nuclear power plants: basically no area continues to have lethal levels of bomb fallout 4 weeks after the last bomb explodes. The method for decontaminating your house is to get up on a ladder and wash down your roof with a garden hose, then wash down all driveways and sidewalks.

Assuming they all have enough supplies to shelter in place for 4 weeks. Sure, they do. Oh, and where does all that runoff go?

Most of the runoff probably ends up far enough away from your house that it doesn't harm you. Again: its very different from power-plant contamination: its radioactivity is diminishing very quickly.

If you were lucky enough that your home was not covered in lethal levels of fallout, then it is likely that all the land within miles of your home is similarly safe, so you can range around looking for water, and most people can survive without eating (or eating only what food they happened to have around at the time of the attack) for a few weeks. It wouldn't be pleasant, of course (and I sure would prefer to be in a fallout shelter pre-stocked with food and water when the attack happens) but the point is that many people would survive even in the countries that were attacked.

There's probably enough food in the US right now (mostly intended to be fed to farm animals, mostly stored on farms) to feed half of the US population. 2 weeks after the attack, it starts to makes sense for altruistically-inclined people (particularly if they have a Geiger counter) to load such food (along with a mill with which to turn it into flour -- also a common item stored on farms) on a truck and take it to where hungry people are. Old people are a good fit for this task: if you are 60 years old, then the prospect of developing cancer in 20 or 30 years is not exactly pleasant, but not particularly scary either.

So you can range around looking for water

Which most folks know how to do, of course. And we can be sure that when they encounter other groups of people at their favorite puddle, everyone will get along just fine.

Most people can survive without eating (or eating only what food they happened to have around at the time of the attack) for a few weeks.

And wouldn't be in the least motivated to leave their shelters. Howabout you try it first, and report back to us?

Look, I'm not trying to be cute here. And we agree that it won't end global industry capacity (and even the countries directly affected would eventually spring back, as after WW2). I've also done my time in physics classes, and know about all that neat physics stuff.

But your arguments sound very hand-wavy, and something tells me you're glossing over lots and lots of additional factors, and are basically trying to spin the situation as being far less of a calamity than it actually would be.

Let's take a step back and recall what I'm arguing against: I never argued or meant to imply that there wouldn't be tremendous suffering and death. I'm only arguing that nuclear war is extremely unlikely to end industrial civilization (though it can sure suppress industrial capacity for a few years and possibly if we get very unlucky for a few decades) and is extremely unlikely cause human extinction.

How bad it is very much depends on how long it takes to restore meaningful amounts of the power grid. If it’s north of 60 days, forget it, you’re losing 90+% of your population.

basically no area continues to have lethal levels of bomb fallout 4 weeks after the last bomb explodes

While this may be true enough for 'conventional' nukes, there have been proposals to intentionally salt bombs with elements such as cobalt that can render large areas of territory unfit for habitation for many years.

This isn't fiction or speculation, it's basically what MacArthur wanted to do in Korea.

I think enough people will die that we cannot sustain civialization. It takes a lot of people to get oil from a well to the pump and too many of them will be dead. You can keep things going in degraded form but eventually you can't make replacement parts for the refinery to a level of quality that allows for current output and so you lose trucks and tractors. Steel refineries need some weird subblies that you won't be able to source well enough.

There are many different things that we need that nobody thinks of and all those are disrupted with loss of important people at once.

Currently, it's Russia leveling their own Russian cities with guided bombs.

I think the area bombing falls into the category of stuff which on an individual action level was a horrendous waste of life on both sides, but on a strategic level was essential to the Allied victory, because British bombing raids on German cities provoked Hitler into focusing German efforts on bombing British cities, which was considerably less useful to the Germans than the military targets they were hitting before, in the context of Britain desperately trying to avoid the Germans establishing the degree of air superiority that would allow an invasion of the British Isles.

A corollary of this is that the sacrifices made on bombing raids later in the war, including by US forces, were a lot less relevant. US bombing strategy was typically more targeted towards military assets than UK bombing though

(There is of course also the massive can of worms of how necessary the atomic bombs were: obviously unlike other bombings they actually did bring about immediate capitulation, but in the context that parts of Japanese High Command were opening tentative discussions in the full awareness that they were losing the war, and possibility the US might have been able to offer its surprisingly reasonable ultimate terms instead of unconditional surrender)

>obviously [the atomic bombs] actually did bring about immediate capitulation

Not at all obvious:

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-stone-kuznick-hi...

(this op-ed is the first thing that popped up on a quick google but it has been covered much more thoroughly elsewhere - the short of it is that having a city bombed to oblivion wasn't actually a terribly novel thing for Japan at this stage of the war, whereas the Soviet invasion of Manchuria was a Big Deal)

Like the concept of strategic bombing at all (which is pretty… questionable… in terms of effectiveness), or the idea of doing it in daylight specifically?

I thought the one redeeming feature of daylight runs was that they could at least hit some targets, rather than just… hitting cities and towns in general.

Especially in the early war, when navigation and targeting tech was worse, yeah, accuracy was a major concern.

I think the benefits of night fighting were also more mixed than one might think, due to the increase of air accidents—the accident rate in the war was so high that it was responsible for the overwhelming majority of lost airframes, not enemy fire. If you need more missions to achieve the same effect on a target (because accuracy is worse) and your crash rate goes up because flying at night (enemy activities aside) is riskier than during the day, I could see that making it less of an absolute win even before considering increased collateral damage (which, at least at times, they do seem to have genuinely preferred to minimize)

> Personally, I find the glorification of the daylight bombing campaigns increasingly gross as I get older. Those men paid a very high price and I wonder if that sacrifice was truly justified.

German here. Given what they fought against, yes it was. Visit any of the too many concentration camp sites across Europe... it's definitely worth the time.

> Given what they fought against

Mass murder of civilians isn't morally acceptable no matter what the "other side" is doing.

Firebombing a kindergarten in the Rheinland doesn't do anything to help someone in an extermination camp in occupied Poland.

Post war analysis of allied strategic bombing indicates that it did not have a large impact on the war effort and probably wasn't worth the high rate of loss of the expensive airframes and crews.

MAD is accepted strategy of USA and other nuclear countries.

>Post war analysis of allied strategic bombing indicates that it did not have a large impact on the war effort

The bombing didn't cause the German people to overthrow their government like Allied leaders hoped it would, but it did significantly impact the war IMHO by decreasing German production of essential materials like refined oil products, particularly lubricants, ball bearings, airframes and probably other materials.

Even if no factories had been hit, just the fact that the Germans underwent the expense and inefficiencies of distributing manufacturing among many small factories, some underground and some in caves (which the Germans did in fact do) would still have significantly decreased German production.

One of those cold-calculus-of-war things is that if you’re out-producing the enemy by (say) 5x, you can suffer 4:1 costs on an operation and still be “winning” in terms of causing more harm to their war effort than to yours. That is, you can spend four abstract units of war-fighting-capability to destroy one unit of theirs, and that’s still a net-loss for them. If you don’t have more effective ways to spend that (abstract) productivity, it may still be in your best interest to use it that way.

It can make evaluating things like this tricky. So a raid that lost dozens of bombers and cost weeks in training time only put some part of their industry out of action for a couple weeks and diverted a week or so of other factory productivity for the rebuild and retooling effort—that looks bad, but could still actually be a deal you should take every time under certain circumstances.

I think the reference may have been to the efficacy of the effort at ending the war sooner, which is a topic of some debate I believe. You watch something like 12 O’Clock High and wonder whether this “maximum effort” they were seeking to find (beyond which even the most dedicated and capable crewmen break down) was… worth it.

The deliberate terror bombings that constituted some part of the effort, especially in the mid and late years, were also and separately awful, though the ethics somewhat muddied by the targeting of civilians having undergone a tit-for-tat ratcheting up early in the war, and yeah, the whole death camps thing. But there too the question of whether those deaths served any useful purpose, as far as ending the war sooner or reducing its scope, makes the whole thing even sadder.

> But there too the question of whether those deaths served any useful purpose, as far as ending the war sooner or reducing its scope, makes the whole thing even sadder.

Well, given that an utter majority were supportive of the Nazi regime up until and even after the war ended... I'd say it was necessary, if only to set an example for any future offender just how brutal the crackdown will be.

Unfortunately, the world failed to keep the reminder up on "genocide = bad and WILL lead to a brutal response" - the response towards Serbia in the 90s, Russia after 2014 or Syria was way too lackluster IMHO.

I can accept that total warfare where the population was the target as a “thing” in that type of conflict. A dirty business, but reality.

The daylight raid aspect, however, seems to me to be more grounded in ego and dogma than military utility. I don’t think avoidance of civilian casualties was a deciding factor. Those airmen were sent into a meat-grinder.

> The daylight raid aspect, however, seems to me to be more grounded in ego and dogma than military utility. I don’t think avoidance of civilian casualties was a deciding factor. Those airmen were sent into a meat-grinder.

They were, but also remember that back in 1945 there was no such thing as GPS or any kind of more precise navigation than a compass, a sextant and star charts. It was very easy to get lost at night or to hit some mountain, particularly as Germans were pretty strict in enforcing Verdunkelung [1].

Flying during daytime was obviously more risky because AA defense can see you, but it was also less risky because navigation was easier - and more precise, because you could actually see where you were.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verdunkelung_(Luftschutz)

> It was pretty much obsolete at the beginning of the war.

In what way was it obsolete? Can you go into more detail?

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