Tamay Besiroglu

Tons of people will die.

So basically, we can't have a war, because if there's a war, then it will be a disaster, because we will have this aerial bombardment.

But later it turned out that that was totally wrong.

In fact, in all of Britain, there were fewer casualties from air bombing in the entire sort of six years of the Second World War than the British government expected in the first few weeks of the war.

Like they had less casualties in six years than they expected in like a few weeks.

So why did they get it wrong?

Well, I mean, there are lots of boring practical reasons.

Like, for example, it turned out to be really infeasible to bomb, especially early on, to bomb cities in daytime because your aircraft would just get shot down.

But then if you tried to bomb at nighttime, then your bombing was really imprecise and only a very small fraction of it actually hit.

And then people also underestimated the extent to which

People on the ground could, like firefighters and so on, could just sort of go around the city and put out fires from bombs that were falling on structures.

They overestimated the amount of economic damage that it would do.

They underestimated how economically costly it would be.

Like basically you're sending these aircraft and then they're getting shot down.

Well, an aircraft is very expensive.

So in the end, what turned out is when the Allies started bombing Germany, they were like for each dollar of capital they were destroying in Germany, they were spending like $4 to $5 on the aircraft and fuel and training of the pilots and so on that they were sending in missions.

And the casualty rate was very high, which later got covered up by the government because they didn't want people to worry about, you know,

Yeah.

So that is a kind of situation where all the planning that you would have done in advance predicated on this assumption of like air bombing is going to be this like nuclear weapons light, basically.

Like it's extremely destructive.