Couldn't have put it better myself. GG is hated, just as Stokes was hated in WW2, but who was right in the end?
The problem is that Stokes was wrong!!! The cities were attacked because that was where the war industries were and a city was the smallest target that either bomber force could hit (USAAF had to bomb by radar half the time, plus their method of formation defence resulted in any attack destroying more that just the small area of the aiming point). The whole point of the bombing campaign against German was to keep them on the back foot and stop them from throwing everything at the Russians or at our forces. That's why half of the German Fighter Force was stuck in Germany by 1944, plus half of all of the 88mm Flak guns ever made. They could have made the Allied efforts on the ground all over the place a lot harder than it finally was and resulted in even more ground losses than were suffered in the Air by Bomber Command and 8th Air Force. Also attacking a city as a whole unit did more than just damage the factories. It also disrupted all of the services required for the Factories to operate, Power, Water, Gas, Transport, etc and this could damage production of war equipment just as much as bombing of the factories. Also the City attacks had an effect on the small workshops that were the sub contractors that produced the small specialist components for military equipment. The Battle of the Ruhr in 1943 resulted in the Germans having 1/3 of the steel they required for arms production that year. They also suffered a shortage of spares thanks to what they called the 'Sub components' Crises because of the city bombing. The thing is in Britain, the majority of the industry was in Cities. lots of small components were made in back street workshops, sometimes by Children after school using hand presses and foot drills (My late father spend most of his evenings in WWII helping his old man in that making aircraft engine parts in a shed at the back of the garden) and of course a lot of the military production in the UK, USA and the Soviet Union was done by women. When the Bombing of Germany started, it would have been suspected that the Germans were doing the same so killing women and children was killing the workforce. Of course due to Nazi doctrine, they used slave labour instead and didn't evacuate the childern as the UK did. Also If area bombing wasn't effective, why did Curtis Le May use it against the Japs? The simple reason was because it WORKS!!!!!
LJ
Galloway does actually talk a lot of sense and in a perfect world most of his ideas would be the ideal solution, the problem is however, it isn't a perfect world. The guy did help save the union
, so the term traitor is a little bit harsh.