Carpet bombing
Carpet bombing of cities, towns, villages, or other areas containing a concentration of protected civilians has been considered a war crime since 1977,[5] through Article 51 of Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions.
[citation needed] In the inter-war years, a growing expectation developed that, on the outbreak of war, cities would be rapidly destroyed by bombing raids.
This originated, in part, from the views of military experts such as Douhet, and was taken up by politicians and journalists, with, for example, Stanley Baldwin coining the phrase "The bomber will always get through".
The targeting of the civilian population would, some theories suggested, cause a breakdown in morale that would lead to civil unrest that would compel a government to surrender.
At the time that Douhet and others were publishing their ideas, no air force had planned their capabilities with the intent of making a "knockout blow" against civilian targets.
[14] At the start of World War II, the Royal Air Force had an initial instruction to abide by the Hague Rules for as long as the enemy did.
[15] This restraint was followed by both Britain and Germany until 11 May 1940, when, with Winston Churchill now in the role of Prime Minister and the war in France going badly, the RAF attacked industrial and transport infrastructure targets in Mönchengladbach.
[16] In the European theatre, the first city to suffer heavily from aerial bombardment was Warsaw, on 25 September 1939 following the start of the German invasion of Poland.
Despite a ceasefire, the bombing destroyed almost the entire historic city centre, killing nearly nine hundred civilians and leaving 30,000 people homeless.
[18] As the war progressed, the Battle of Britain developed from a fight for air supremacy into the strategic and aerial bombing of London, Liverpool, Coventry and other British cities.
[20] The area bombing directive was issued to RAF Bomber Command in 1942 The Eighth Air Force of the USAAF arrived in Britain over the summer of 1942.
Therefore a bombing campaign - the Combined Bomber Offensive - following the Casablanca directive to the Allied air forces was all they could offer to support the Soviet Union.
Operation Gomorrah, carried out by Bomber Command against Hamburg, targeted a city with both high susceptibility to fire and a large number of factories making products for the German war effort.
The massive bombing was concentrated in a narrow and shallow area of the front (a few kilometers by a few hundred meters deep), closely coordinated with the advance of friendly troops.
[26] In just one night, over 100,000 people burned to death from a heavy bombardment of incendiary bombs,[26] comparable to the wartime number of U.S. casualties in the entire Pacific theater.
[27] These attacks were followed by similar ones against Kobe, Osaka, and Nagoya, as well as other sectors of Tokyo, where over 9,373 tons[26] of incendiary bombs were dropped on civilian and military targets.
[28] During the final months of the war in the Philippines, the United States military used carpet bombing against the Japanese forces in Manila and Baguio, reducing much of the cities to rubble.
The first combat mission, Operation Arc Light, was flown by B-52Fs on 18 June 1965, when 30 bombers of the 9th and 441st Bombardment Squadrons struck a communist stronghold near the Bến Cát District in South Vietnam.
