Amerika Bombers I: Black Gay Hitler

The Me 264.

 'Black Gay Hitler' is a term used on the somethingawful.com forums; it means any history counterfactual so far removed from the actual history as to cease to be a meaningful what-if. For instance, given how World War 2 went down, the Nazis winning the battle of the Atlantic (IE imposing an effective blockade against Britain) is something that could have happened, given not very many changes on the Allied and Axis sides. It is not Black Gay Hitler. The Germans never declaring war on the Soviet Union on the first place, and, say, using at least some of those resources to secure Mideast oil instead is very black gay Hitler, since you are changing not only history, but in a large part the reasons and mentality of the Nazis in the first place

The German transocean aircraft projects, collectively lumped under the label "Amerika bombers" is definitely Black Gay Hitler. While a few prototype Amerika bombers did actually exist, none of them could have accomplished a trans-continental air raid. Furthermore, even if a viable design existed, the Nazis utterly lacked the resources, fuel, and industrial capacity to build a fleet, or even a bombing wing of such aircraft. If you've read some of the Luftwaffe posts on this blog, you can guess the reasons why. Even if you can't do that, you can look at the only design that ever entered service that was "transocean" as the Nazis envisioned: the B-36. That airplane took the USA until the end of the Second World War to engineer. This long build time was despite that the USA had 1) vastly greater experience in strategic bombers, 2) aero engines that could actually power a sky-leviathan, and 3) overwhelming material and industrial might compared to - well - anyone. A quick perusal through the B-36's development will give you a handy list of things the German aircraft industry just couldn't do.

I recently read a book on the Third Reich's Amerika bomber projects, The Luftwaffe Over America, by Manfred Griel. Griel in his introduction too marks the whole thing as Black Gay Hitler (he may have used a different term) by setting the base condition for Amerika bombers being: control of the caucuses oil fields by Germany and the Soviet Union knocked out of the war. This is a little series of posts sharing what I've learned.

I remember Roger Ebert writing about the movie Metropolis, and noting that Metropolis' villains are easily recognizable to modern audiences: they cackle as they pull levers to enforce their will. Villains in James Bond and Batman are very similar, as they often use the artifice of technology for sinister ends. The Nazis were the real world organizational analog of these fictional tropes, and were open in their love of any sort of conceivable technological lever to accomplish their twisted goals.  The Nazis - Hitler especially - also had a love for the huge, the grandiose, and the out-sized that created a fascinating parade of projects that only ever existed on paper. The tank with the pocket battleship turrets never existed, but it is well known enough that you can buy models of it today. The Nazis' menagerie of wunder-waffen is usually great comedy, and occasionally historically important, either predating ideas that would be used later, or trailblazing technology important today, both inside and outside the military. This weird tension of the plausible and the lunatic, often existing side by side, still has a pull on people.

The Nazis had other things going on with technology, too: as on a material basis their war became hopeless, they fervently believed technology could be the great equalizer; allowing them to come back and win the Second World War. So in may ways, the hope of victory was hung, not subtly, on new weapon developments. This was a human impulse, not just a Nazi one: if your choice is thinking all is lost or working on a flying wing transoceanic jet bomber, well, *most* people would get to work on the bomber. Hope after all is fundamentally irrational; if you had reason to think you could win, why would you need hope?

At the same time, the Amerika bomber projects became a excellent example of how hope (or delusion, depending on your point of view) can have seriously toxic effect on an organization. Reading Griel's book, even I, an obsessive nerd on these sorta things, find it shocking how deep the disconnect from reality was among senior Reich Luft Ministurum (RLM) heads. At some point in 1943, the RLM's production projections themselves take wing, even as hypothetical Amerika bombers remain grounded. Projected runs of models sometimes are on a per month basis greater than their entire historical run, with no real plans as to how to achieve those numbers. The Amerika bomber project - particularly the existing prototypes - also were allowed to suck up oxygen that could have went toward  more useful projects. There was a great reluctance to give up on demonstratively inadequate ideas, simply because they worried there was no time to develop proper alternatives. This was combined with an aversion of doing a bespoke version of an Amerika bomber (positively the only way for 1940s technology to do it) because Nazi resources were stretched too thin to justify it; therefore, such a aircraft had to bomb America, and do any number of other things.  Despite this, the Nazis and the RLM persisted, even in 1944 when the roof was caving in. In the end, the Nazis retreated into an obsession of historical hypotheticals: what if we had a bomber that could cross the ocean, and a fleet of these burned America's eastern seaboard with atomic fire? Would that be enough to knock America out of the war?

So the Amerika bomber projects are kind of a Nazi industrial id: reflecting unfulfilled desires, and also surrealistically tangled with other desires involving big airplanes. It also (and this is very Nazi) demonstrated how very badly the Nazis could mismanage things thanks to delusion, a lack of focus, and an inability to face facts.

Derp Background

Our journey starts, regrettably, with a stop off at the spooky, anti-Semitic batcave that was Adolf Hitler's mind. Hitler's thinking obviously had a large impact on World War 2; what I perhaps didn't fully realize until now what a significant influence it had on the economic structure of the Third Reich. Far from being a secondary concern for Hitler, Germany's relative economic weakness was the central concern when Hitler thought internationally.

This is going to be a very weird management seminar.

When he first assumed power, Hitler already had drawn up a to-do list for the Thousand Year Reich. The first was security of the German people against the sinister hand of world Jewry, which Germany would achieve by making Germany great again; a power of the first rank. This meant massively expanding Germany's economy, not only so Germany could afford a massive military budget, but also to raise the standard of living among racially-pure Germans. Why Hitler and the Nazis settled on lebenstraum in the east, IE colonizing Eastern Europe and the Ukraine is very deep in the batshit: a gordian knot of Nazism and Germany's backward agriculture and the deaths of millions of utermenchen, but suffice it to say the creation of a Greater German Reich was what the Nazis settled on. (#1) While aforementioned untermenchen were no threat militarily, France, Britain and the United States obviously were. Hitler hoped that the British Empire had no more desire to be eclipsed by America than Germany did, and would support (or at the very least, not interfere) with the establishment of this new empire. France would have to be defeated militarily. While Britain and France were obviously a problem, the thing Hitler really feared was the involvement of the United States. He was acutely conscious of the enormous material boost France and Britain had received throughout the First World War by buying from America, and the American military's critical contribution to Germany's defeat.

The American Colossus could not be fought hand to hand until Germany had gained enormously in size and strength. In fact, Hitler's definition of security and being a World Power seems be being able to do exactly that. So, Germany had to seize the initiative and act quickly. Furthermore, she had to rearm as quickly as possible; in the long run any gains in military strength could be outmatched by France, Britain, and the USA, especially if they worked as allies.

So, German rearmament had to happen at a breakneck pace, with production ultimately taking a higher priority than expanding Germany's industrial capacity. (#2) This was true even in aircraft production, where the Nazis accomplished something close to a miracle in expanding the industrial base. In 1932, the German Aviation industry employed 3500 workers; by 1939, some 250,000 were employed in aircraft manufacturing, with similarly large numbers of workers trained in aircraft maintenance. (#3) Junkers, the largest aviation firm at the start of this expansion was now one of the 20 largest corporations in Germany. While this was a titanic achievement in state-funded industry, the results were still was not enough for the insatiable Nazi war machine. The bottleneck was aircraft engines: all modern designs were earmarked for production aircraft. Even getting engines released for military RnD projects was surprisingly difficult. Despite the enormous expansion in the manufacturing base, aircraft production was still running into the material limits of the German economy.

Dead Horse Beating Time

Case in point: strategic bombers. Nazi analysis had come to the conclusion that Germany simply couldn't afford a strategic bomber fleet. The manufacturing capacity was needed elsewhere, and more acutely, Germany didn't have the fuel capacity for a large fleet of bombers. This was a point of contention inside the RLM, with a pro-strategic bomber camp and anti-strategic bomber camp forming. The Pro faction was lead by General Walter Wever, whose death in a plane crash in 1936 was the end of this factionalism; the anti faction believed (not without reason) that strategic bombers were something that the Reich could ultimately do without. The Luftwaffe was instead being built into an air-superiority and close support force for the German army. It was also anticipated (not just by the Nazis) that wars would be short and sharp, not long and grinding, raising the question of how necessary interfering with enemy industry would be. While these assumptions were wrong, they were at least logical; but in the midst of this a large mistake was made: it was decided to forego even the development of a strategic bomber. [I've talked about this before in relation to the Ju 290.]

On the very day General Wever died, the RLM proposed a new strategic bomber more amicable to Germany's material constraints. This new bomber's specification was incredibly ambitious: in a way, what the RLM was thinking about was a medium bomber, with a medium bomber's crew, with the speed of daytime fighters of the day, but with a heavy bomber's capabilities, range, and defenses. Add on top of all these extra rich procurement demands was the ability to dive bomb targets for greater accuracy. Somewhat worse is that these demands were not all specified right away. Some of these demands, such as a greater range, were a result of changes in the political situation. The Munich crisis of 1938 made Hitler and friends aware that Britain was not, in fact, on board with Germany carving an empire out of the backs of Eastern Europeans. This meant that in the yet-hypothetical war with Britain, strategic bombers were back on the table as a need. While this new "Bomber A" project would be able to have the pick of current aircraft engines, it soon became clear that the bomber would be limited to a maximum of two propellers, to limit drag and increase stability while diving, and this was yet another problem. There was no aircraft engine either being made, or soon to be operational, with the required power for the new aircraft. The solution was to create a "power-pack" out of two engines, running out of a common gearbox. Oh, and good short field performance, a light weight, and remote-control turrets so we can limit the crew to three?

The simple lines of the initial prototype gave no hint of the madness to come.

  In abstract, all this made sense. Strategic bombing in the 1930s and '40s was very much a numbers game; your ability to damage or destroy a particular target was partially a function of how many aircraft you could throw at the problem. This is why the Nazis gave up on conventional strategic bombers: they figured simply getting the numbers for effective attacks was beyond their capacity to build and fuel them. Dive bombing, however, was an entirely different beast. By diving at the target, a airplane could release its bombs with much greater accuracy, which is why bombers attacking ships and tanks were frequently dive bombers. It was hoped that Germany could deploy these more accurate heavy bombers, and get the same results with far fewer air-frames. The remote turrets and the linked engines were dictated by the dive bombing requirement. Remote turrets required (in theory anyway,) far fewer crew than manned positions, and didn't require armor either: all this was to save weight in an aircraft that needed to be light if it was going to be effective. The linked engines were simply the only way for the German aero engine industry to power the beast in a reasonable time-frame.

 Heinkel won the contract, and set about designing what would be known as the He 177 'Grief' (Griffon in English, though the phonetic German would prove eerily appropriate.) Considering all the new and unproven technologies the imagined He 177 relied on, the whole venture was extremely high risk; Heinkel had gotten the contract by promising to fill the RLM's extraordinarily tall order. I've talked about the essential conservative nature of the RLM in this post on the He 219; here is the opposite trend. This seems to have happened quite a bit in the Luftwaffe: aircraft makers could win contracts by promising technological go-arounds to Germany's material constrains. This big risk strategy paid off sometimes, as well. The Junkers 88 medium bomber, after a rocky model rollout, became an outstanding all-rounder aircraft, exactly what Nazi Germany needed. The Me 262, the first jet fighter, can also be seen as a win for the big risk strategy. Then you have the He 177: in some ways the most valuable German aircraft in the Allied arsenal. Heinkel was no fool; having won the contract by promising the moon, he now wanted to hedge some of the He 177's technological risks. In particular, he wanted to start design work on a conventional four engine bomber version. This proposal was refused by the RLM, who didn't want the Big Bomber's dive bombing ability compromised.

Two cutaways of the He 177's interior. The front has a good view but is also very, very small; just the sort of space you want to cram yourself into with three other people when the engines have a tendency to spontaneously catch fire.  

  
The tail gunner was pretty much stuck in the position you see him in now; at least a ball turret gunner could get out of the ball turret.

 And so, when basically all of the RLM's big bets came back as losses, the program became a disaster.  The remote turrets were a wash, as Germany's manufacturer's couldn't make a reliable model; this lead to the introduction of manned turrets, which increased weight, especially after it was decided the gunners should have their own armor protection. Dive bombing proved dangerous, with the now very heavy bomber sometimes cracking its own wing spars in dives. Strengthening the wings to withstand diving increased their weight, sapping range. The power packs proved horribly unreliable, given to breaking down and often catching fire.The engine fires had a few causes, one of which was inadequate ventilation from the engine cowl. The engine cowl had to be kept remarkably tight to reduce drag and keep the He 177 stable while in a dive; allowing the engine cowl to draw more air reduced the engine fires but spoiled the bomber's stability, and thus its ability to bomb accurately, which was the reason for all this malarkey in the first place. Weight, meanwhile, had increased to the point that the He 177 was a heavy bomber rather than a long range one: while it had the capacity to strike anywhere in the UK, it's lack of range spoiled it for bombing missions against the Urals and reconnaissance/attack far out into the Atlantic. And so on. In Luftwaffe service, it was used mostly by maritime bomber units in the west, with most He 177s serving as day and night bombers on the eastern front. Sources vary as to how reliable the He 177 eventually became, but its reliability more or less forbade the extremely long distance operations the Luftwaffe wanted to use them for.

They did get some cool camo patterns, though. This captured He 177 has blue painted sides with white oversprays to make it sorta look like clouds.

 After the Second World War,  the He 177 became a popular target of blame for the failure of the  Luftwaffe by its former commanders, and you can understand why. 1000 or so were produced, and the Germans figured every He 177 equaled, in resources at least, five single engine fighters. 5000 Fighters, (especially remembering the grand total of Luftwaffe air-frame strength peaked at around 5000 machines) is obviously nothing to sneeze at. What's perhaps more damning about this number is that only half of the He 177s produced were ever used operationally, so about 2500 of those hypothetical fighters were completely wasted.

The point here is simple: when it came to strategic bombers, Germany didn't so much screw up as light itself on fire. They managed to get the worst of both worlds: they used lots of resources on an airplane that often couldn't do the strategic bomber role. This puts Germany behind other Axis nations when it came to strategic bombers, not just other nations; both Italy and Japan produced four engine strategic bombers, admittedly in modest numbers. Any discussion of German Amerika bombers should be prefaced by this fact.

It's worth mentioning as well that while Germany struggled with the He 177, the airplanes that would eventually do so much to destroy the Third Reich were really not all that sophisticated. There's three aircraft I'd like to highlight: the B-24 Liberator, the Short Stirling, and the Avro Manchester.

All three started development later than the He 177, in 1938. The Stirling and the Manchester were British built, and it is notable that Britain was in many ways economically similar to Germany, and had followed a surprisingly similar line of thinking in bombers, at least in the 1930s. The RAF had initially disdained four engine bombers as uneconomical, and thought the future was twin engine bombers using next-generation aircraft engines. The Manchester, in fact, was a continuation of that theory - it was to use twin Rolls-Royce Vulture engines, which were two V12 mashed into a X-24 combination.

The Short Stirling: sorta obscure...

...but not small.

 Britain started mulling a different direction thanks to the success of the American B-17. The British were impressed with the Flying Fortress, as it was a capable machine that used older, lower output engines: Wright Cyclone radials making 1200 hp. The RAF issued new design competitions in 1938 for four engine heavy bombers; aircraft that would compose its later war strategic bomber fleet. The Short Stirling was the first four engine model to appear, as Short took a rather brilliant production shortcut: it simply took the already existing wing of the Short Sunderland and built a new fuselage around it. The Stirling was the first "heavy" to see service in the RAF in 1941, and while it saw lots of action, it was withdrawn by 1943, seeing a production number by war's end of over 2000. What's perhaps more pertinent when talking about the He 177 is that the Stirling was developed, deployed operationally, then retired and replaced by two improved models all in the time the He 177 was greifing its hapless aircrews flight testing it. The Stirling also proved adaptable, having a long second-line career as a glider tug and transport.

The Avro Manchester is even closer to the He 177. Like the Greif, its aforementioned linked engines proved to be dogs. Under powered and with terrible reliability, the Manchester saw a modest production of 200.  Still, what happened next was perhaps a key difference between the British and German aircraft industries. Even as the Manchester was being developed, a four engine version was being studied. The much smaller Merlin V12 had a similar output to the overly-complex Vulture, and when the Vulture proved to be a pig, the Manchester was recast with four engines, boosting power and reliability. The four engine Manchester was soon renamed to Lancaster, and would become the cornerstone of RAF bomber command, with variants having a long post war service.

The B-24 also deserves a mention. In America's 1938 bomber revision, it was decided that America (and Britain and other Allies) were going to need heavy bombers in great numbers. They would need an air frame that was adaptable, too, capable of ocean patrol and transport duties if need be. The aircraft in question would also have to be eminently mass produce-able. To save time, like the Stirling, some of the design was cribbed from a flying boat, in this case the Consolidated Corregidor prototype. The result was the B-24 Liberator, whose only real technical innovation in was the use of a high mounted wing using the recently developed "Davis" airfoil. None the less, the B-24 was a aircraft critical to Allied victory. In its ocean patrol form, it closed the mid-atlantic air gap, a essential step in defeating the U-boats. As a bomber, it saw service in every theater of war, and was built in such numbers it remains the most produced four engine aircraft in history.

Also, while we are talking about B-24s, some of the paint jobs were pretty good, too.

None of these aircraft were perfect. The Stirling became obsolete rather quickly in the bomber role as it couldn't fly high enough, and the Lancaster and the B-24 were deathtraps when crashing; evidently economy in production had ruled over "getting out of the aircraft easily." The B-24 was also a handful to fly. While obviously, these bombers were all produced in numbers that the Third Reich could only fantasize about, Germany was eminently capable of producing the same sort of aircraft, if only in limited numbers. That it didn't was due to the Nazis making dumb decisions early on, and then not admitting said dumb decisions thanks to the sunken costs fallacy.

As for the He 177, Heinkel, despite not getting official permission from the RLM, started work on four engine variants. The He 177B was a conventional four engine version of the 177, and the He 274 was a further evolution of the design. Freed from malfunctioning engines and the dive bombing requirement, the He 274 had its fuselage redesigned for high altitude operations. The results were quite impressive - the He 274 retained its high speed and could now fly in higher altitudes with ease - at least that's what the Allies discovered in their flight testing, after they captured the He 274 at the end of the war. Both designs came too late to be used, and too late to be even flight tested properly by the Germans.

And here we get to the Amerika bomber program. The Germans had failed, totally tripped and fell on their faces in their attempts to make a strategic bomber. Despite this pratfall in the background, this didn't stop the Nazis from dreaming of even more marvelous and improbable aircraft with which to fight America.

Part of the Amerika Bomber series. 

Part 2: Vague Plans and Flying Boats

 Part 3: Walkin' on Sunshine

Part 4: Stuffing arrogant mouths

Part 5: Eris is Goddess

Part 6: Ragnarocky Road 
 
Part 7: Look Busy and Hope Americans Capture You

Part 8: Rocket-Powered Daydream Death Notes

Appendix: A4 Guidance 

Notes

#1) Another factor in this decision was Hitler seems to have thought prosperity was a zero-sum game: in order for Germany to win, others had to lose. Therefore, if Germany's standard of living was to rise, other people's standards must fall. You can see how this sort of thinking rapidly leads to genocide as a logical end.

#2)  Once Hitler's government came to power, it adopted protectionist trade policies, while at the same time starting the biggest re-armament program up in modern history. Germany was constrained not by spending, but by the balance of trade. The balance of trade, along with certain economic inputs like steel and coal, were the intractable hard limits on the expansion of the Nazi war machine. The Third Reich, [once again] was in many ways like Britain: it was reliant on trade for basic economic inputs. In addition to more mundane things like high protein animal feed, it also needed things like copper and rubber for re-armament efforts, without which, Germany's rearmament effort and its economy in general would shudder to a halt. Trading steel gave Germany the foreign currency it needed to purchase foreign goods. This trade balance was so critical that steel was actually marked for foreign trade over military uses.

Despite the overwhelming push for expanded capacity and more arms and armaments, the push for military expansion often was deemed more critical, to the point that it weakened Germany's economic base. This was ultimately deemed necessary, as Nazi Germany's increasingly belligerent stance against other nations was resulting in other nations being more belligerent against the Nazis, and this (in the mind of Hitler, anyway) was more evidence of the sinister Jewish cabal manipulating world events. As an example of this industrial degradation in action, German rail was given almost none of the precious steel allocation pre war, and thus had most of its rolling stock degrade. That this was a problem in a land where most industrial inputs had to go by rail is obvious; but it is even worse when you consider that the Third Reich ran on coal, which obviously requires lots of coal cars. When the Second World War eventually started, there was a 1)  crushing demand for coal, and 2) mountains of coal growing at pit-heads, simply because the rail deliveries of coal were so far behind thanks to diminished capacity on the part of German railways. Coal is also a critical input in steel making, creating a nasty feedback loop where the Nazis least wanted it.

Anyway, my point here is that German re-armament was shaped very specifically by Hitler's assumptions about the Lurking Jewish menace, and by the absolute material constraints of Nazi Germany's economy.

#3) These and other economic facts come from The Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze, which I believe is now the standard book on the economy of the Third Reich. If you ever wanted to see a few myths shattered about the economics of the Third Reich (like how Nazi Germany never mobilized its women) or find the surprising connection between Germany's backwards agriculture and its war economy, this is the book for you. Two vignettes from it:

First, in 1938 the Nazis had completely tapped out Germany's labor market. The Nazi response was to extend government control over the labor market via bureaucracy.  People had to keep official 'job books' and in high demand positions needed government permission to quit. (Nobody tell Canada this, it seems like they'd be into it.) Anyway, Berlin was a particularly hot job market; the sum total of unemployed people was 35,000, of which only 6000 or so were fully fit.

Of these, at least a third were 'artistic professionals', would-be actors and musicians, who as paid up members of the Reich's corporation of artistic workers enjoyed a protected status. Dealing with the bohemian residuum posed a special problem for the officials of the Berlin labor exchanges, who faced 'fits of temper' and 'time consuming complaints' , if a change of profession was 'even suggested.' At a time of national emergency, the Berlin trustee of labor was moved to the philistine observation that it was surely unacceptable that 'such a large number of fully fit Volksgenossen should be exempt from...radical occupational redirection'.

Tooze also has an extremely annoyed Hermann Goering a few days after the Krystalnacht complaining how he was the real victim of the Jewish Pogrom (aside from the Jews I guess:)

"Three days after the pogrom, on 12th November, Goering asserted his authora-taugh with a major conference on the Jewish question. As head of the Four Year Plan [take two on making the German economy produce the 'uuugest, most luxurious military] Goering was indignant at the wanton damage to property over the previous days. 'I have had enough of these demonstrations! They don't harm the Jew, but me, who am in the last authority for coordinating the German economy.' Goering was incensed by the furs and the jewels looted in Berlin and issued special orders for the arrest of the persons responsible. More seriously, Germany's streets were littered with debris of thousands of smashed shop windows. The Jews would pay the bill for cleaning up the mess, but replacing the high quality Belgian plate glass would cost 3 million Reich marks in precious foreign exchange. As Goering put it: 'I wish you had killed 200 Jews, and not destroyed such values.'"

So, for the doubters: Hemann Goring? Bad person.

A little slow, because life happens and I am garbage

A kind reader tipped me off that there was something screwed up with link navigation in the R100/R101 posts. I'm not sure what exactly the problem was (blogspot upgraded to https while I writing the series, and the resulting technical twitches might've borked the links) but something was up. One of the chapters vanished from the sidebar as well. Anyway, I've gone through and fixed the links at the bottom of the page, and you can now find everything on the sidebar again. The metatags work as well if you are looking for different chapters. If you spot anything else wrong, please don't hesitate to comment/drop me a note.

Oh, and I'm nearly done not one, but two new aeronautical nerd-posts on two different subjects. If you read that and ask "why didn't you finish one so we could read that while you did another", well, see above.

Returning to Form

Random kits I've noticed lately:

Meng has started a kids line which includes this obscure aircraft in kids form. I get kids lines, though I'm interested to know why the He 177 was picked. A kit for your younger sibling when the older one is a flourishing wehraboo?

I'm in the middle of two kits right now, otherwise I might pick up one of these new weird car kits. For a long time, the '50s and the '60s was the staple for north American makers. Now that Round2 has had success redoing kits from the 70s, it seems like everybody is being out these horrible tasteless (IE absolutely wonderful) kits from the 70s and 80s.

Like this ugly son of a bitch. The Volare is forgotten by everyone but serious car nerds. For about 20 years, Dodge made a car called the Dart. It was that was robust, and popular, actually gaining in popularity as the years rolled on. In the late 70s, Dodge replaced it with the Aspen/Volare, who were so misbegotten and terrible, its failure played a significant role in Chrysler's early 80s bankruptcy. Now, RE-LIVE that memory!

Speaking of bad cars in improbable sport kits, how would you like a Ford Pinto Wagon, "pony express" edition? Comes with a "bonus mini-box", which is intriguing onto itself.

If you've ever wanted to build a bitchin' custom van, there's lots of choice. I highlight this kit as I think it comes with a "lounge lizard/shaggin' wagon" option and a *transparent roof.* It gave me a little chill when I realized you could simulate shag carpet with velour, or maybe suede. There's also this "Journey-Mural ready" early-80s Dodge, or this 70s 4wd lifted large-scale van, when you like going offroading with a DnD-themed mural on the side.

More difficult to take the piss out of is this kit of the Vanishing Point R/T Challenger, which is actually awesome. (Well, frankly I think all these kits are legit awesome, but I guess Kowolski's Challenger is one I don't have to explain.)

MPC also has you covered if you want to build the villain's truck from any number of 80s movies.

And finally, Revell just re-released this. It's this early 1980s Dodge Ramcharger. As a Canadian boy who grew up in mostly rural Canada, I have fond memories of these things, as they were popular in their day. Cheap, durable, and good off road, the Ramcharger developed quite a following with people who did shit in the middle of nowhere. Produced unchanged for god knows how long, once production finally ended they were all used up, with the very few remaining now coveted by truck types. It's one of those things I never imagined would ever make it to kit form (much like the AMC Gremlin) so I think it's very cool.

Tiny Tanks: 1/72 Revell Leopard 2

After a pause of many months, I finished a new tiny tank, a modern one this time:

A Leopard 2 A5. This tank is the tank of choice for pretty much any modern nation that doesn't produce its own Main Battle Tank (MBT) nationally.

The kit itself was frustrating in places. The frustration started with me looking at the tracks. The tracks came in four pieces, which you were supposed to bend via hot water into the proper shape. The instructions came with a helpful note: "Bend with the help of hot water, do not use boiling water in any case!" Long story short, the tracks were a nightmare jigsaw of superglue and tepid water when I followed the vague instructions and got nowhere.

After the fact I did work out a procedure for making the tracks work.

A proper assembly would read:

1. Assemble drive sprockets, return wheels, road wheels.

2. Boil a kettle's worth of hot water.

3. Just after boiling, pour 2 cups or so of hot water into a medium bowl, preferably something that doesn't absorb heat. The large amount of water lets it retain the heat a bit better.

4. Throw the track into the water. Wait a minute, then fish the track out with a tool of some sort.

5. Bend the track around the wheel/sprocket. Do not do this with the wheel/sprocket on the chassis, it will break something.

6. Repeat steps 2-5 as necessary, until the track looks right.

7. Glue tracks to sprockets/wheels.

8. Paint.

9. Mount on tank chassis.

Aside from that, the kit was normal, though the side skirt is pretty shoddy - it glues on, but is at a place where you have to keep touching (and thus it keeps breaking.) Mine are mounted with bluetac. 

The camouflage was also shaped with bluetac, and it requires more work than you would believe to do two different colors via this method. For weathering I pulled the old trick of a dilute overspray of Tamiya buff to take the shine off of everything and mute the colors, and then use ground pastels in a light application.

It's made up to look like a German Army Panzer; which was really the only option in the kit. (You can make it up as a 'NL'  [IE a Netherlands version], which changes the grenade launchers and the mounted machine gun, but the paint is the same.

Steel tow cables seem carelessly stowed.

The turret on an Leo 2 A5 is gigantic; the upgraded version has fore and aft additions to give the tank a little more survivability against anti-tank shaped charges.

Though the end result is that the turret is a big angular wedge, like a robot's head. The flaps along the side actually open, like the crest of some frilled lizard, to further protect the sides of the turret from RPGs. 

Pioneer tools were done by hand.

The angle can things along the turret sides are smoke grenade launchers. Like Batman, the Leo 2 has smoke grenades, utility cables, and is bulletproof. Unlike Batman, the Leo 2 weighs 62 tons and would most definitely get stuck in Gotham city traffic.

Ikea-style stowage was added onto the back. Actually useful as when on the move, tankers have to haul all their gear with them like any other soldier.

Business end of the tank is the same 120mm L/55 smoothbore gun used by the American M1A1 Abrams. Fires many types of ammunition, is hydraulically dampened, and is gyroscopically stabilized so the tank can fire accurately while doing all sorts of goofy stuff.

Sunlight shows off the tricolors a bit better.

Compared to the T-72, the Leopard 2 is higher, bigger and heavier. But it does have air conditioning and a modern sensor suite, can survive being hit with modern anti-tank munitions, a hit on the ammo magazine doesn't kill the crew, etc.

Quarter for scale.

The Challenger 2 is just as tall, but a bit wider. If this were some episode of old Top Gear, Jeremy Clarkson would talk about the British tank having the longer gun endlessly.

James May: "You've both done it wrong! The T-72 has everything you really need in a tank. You aim the gun yourself. You can get your arm ripped off if you put it in the wrong place, how manly is that?"

Jeremy Clarkson: "Rubbish."

Richard Hammond: "I agree! Old fashioned ideas about tanks are nonsense! That's why you want the Leo 2. It has a loader, it doesn't rip your arm off..."

Clarkson: "You would - if you couldn't get six point six meters of rifled British magnificence."

Hammond: "How much is that in feet?"

Clarkson: "A lot."

Nope, moving on...

This little German armored car is about as close as I have to a normal sized vehicle to compare the Leopard 2 with. Like most modern MBTs, the Leo 2 is enormous: 3 meters tall, 3.75 meters wide, and nearly 10 meters long when the length of the gun barrel is counted. All that weight is driven by a 1500 hp diesel engine-transmission "power pack". The engine is a turbocharged V12 displacing 47.6 liters, the displacement of 28 Honda 1.7L engines. Probably the most amazing thing about this unit is that it can be swapped out for a replacement power pack in half an hour. Post World War 2 German tank designs place a great emphasis on field serviceability.

A lesson the Germans learned the hard way.

When what was West Germany began to rearm itself in the 1950s, it immediately began to think of tanks - both for the obvious military / industrial reasons, and because the tanks the Americans were selling West Germany were already looking a bit old-fashioned compared to projects being forged behind the Iron Curtain. Starting in the mid 1950s, the West Germans developed their own MBT, the Leopard. The Leopard was in one way very surprising:  the first Leopard was a tank that had given up entirely on the idea of armoring itself against enemy tanks. The advances in tank destroying by the late 1950s had made the high-grade steel approach of World War 2 tank armor entirely obsolete. Directional shaped charges in the form of High Explosive Anti Tank [HEAT] rounds, and the soon to be unveiled Kinetic Energy [KE] Penatrator rounds made the high strength steel armor of the World War 2 era about as effective as soggy cardboard. While armored against machine gun bullets and light cannon, the first Leopard focused entirely on mobility and accurate firepower. It first entered service in the mid 1960s.

At some point in the late 1960s, West Germany's allies, the British and the Americans, sat Germany down someplace secure, and showed them Britain's latest innovation. Known later as Dorchester or Chobham armor, it was a new style of composite armor that gave yet undesignated tanks a fighting chance of shrugging off KE penetrators or HEAT rounds. The basic idea to the still highly classified Dorchester armor is that a matrix of steel plates, ceramic tiles, and rubber could twist the otherwise irresistible forces and use their extreme energy against them, deflecting the shot away from the tank's vulnerable interior. While the Germans declined to use Chobram themselves, it clearly gave them a few ideas, (or maybe the Germans just had some material science Dpl. Ings who couldn't wait to play around with the new concept.) At any rate, they developed their own version of Chobram, which didn't protect as well, but was 1) cheaper, and 2) easier to maintain and replace. The Germans were already in the early stages of developing a successor to the Leopard, so the addition of the new composite armor was made a top priority.

A long development process followed. The tank that would become the Leopard 2 is similar to many other Western MBTs. It has composite armor and a smooth-bore gun for firing modern tank rounds, a modern sensor and optics suite, and a emphasis on crew survivability. It has four crew stations - commander, gunner, loader, and driver, and the ammo is sequestered from the crew cabin to prevent a unlucky hit from killing the crew. By the time series production was ready, it was 1980.

The Cold War was by this point reaching new lows, and tank battles in West Germany were more than a theoretical interest to NATO. The previous Leopard had been a large export success, and so naturally many countries were interested in the new MBT. the Netherlands was the first to take an order of 445(!) Leo 2s in the early 1980s. There was no lack of domestic demand, either: the West German Army was at the time enormous compared to what it is today, having 12 divisions, nearly all of them being heavily mechanicalized. So many Leo 2s were produced - over 2000. The reunification of Germany and the subsequent military draw down saw most of these tanks excess to requirements, and thus Leopard became the deal going in modern MBTs. Canada replaced its knackered Leopard 1s during the war in Afghanistan with Leo 2s, one of the few procurement decisions that Canada has made in recent decades that actually went well. The Swedes recently picked the Leopard 2 as their MBT over the French Leclerc, and the Challenger 2.

In fact, that's why I think I dig modern tanks. Military Procurement has always been a bit of a mess, and the situation has gotten a lot worse for western nations since the Cold War's end. Somehow, western MBTs have avoided this rot. Tanks are not invulnerable super-machines (in fact, nearly all operational uses of MBTs stress how important it is that that they be supported by infantry.) Instead, the Main Battle Tank is the modern heavy cavalry. They operate as powerful mobile reserves, and as an armored lance to punch through enemy resistance. This isn't the existential battle for Germany the Leo 2 was originally designed for, but it is good to know that modern tanks are more than up to the task.

Elon Musk never did Philosophy in University

and it shows.

For those who can't be bothered to click, it's a story on Musk getting up in front of an audience some place and doing some philosophy, badly: that we're all living in a video game in the future.

"If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality, even if that rate of advancement drops by a thousand from what it is now. Then you just say, okay, let's imagine it's 10,000 years in the future, which is nothing on the evolutionary scale.

So given that we're clearly on a trajectory to have games that are indistinguishable from reality, and those games could be played on any set-top box or on a PC or whatever, and there would probably be billions of such computers or set-top boxes, it would seem to follow that the odds that we're in base reality is one in billions.

Tell me what's wrong with that argument. Is there a flaw in that argument?"

Thanks, Elon, I'll take it from here. If you've been hanging around the internet for awhile, you've probably seen these sorts of ideas before. And the fatal flaw in all of them is very simple: where's the evidence? Without evidence (and projecting past trends into the future while assuming we're actually living in the future is most certainly not evidence) then the entire argument is null and void. An interesting question on its own we could ask is "what would constitute good evidence for reality itself being falsified?" I suspect that the rabbit bites off its own head at this point, since if you could, in theory, have some evidence of a falsified reality, it seems to me the evidence would undermine itself, since any evidence in this [falsified] reality could, in itself, be falsified.

If you're still not convinced, let me rephrase the argument, but make it explicitly religious: "what if the rapture already happened, and this world we live in now is in fact heaven?" Does it still appeal? I'm guessing it doesn't.

So: Musk's argument (and all similar ideas) are stuff that, in short, you don't need to worry about. So why do these ideas kick about? I think it's part of a much larger story, where people act in a religious manner, even as the explicit references to religion are (heh) exorcised. When Friedrich Nietzsche wrote his most famous quip, "God is dead" is actually meant a hell of a lot more (if you pardon the pun) than simply the nonexistence of a supreme being. He meant the death of the whole system of values that God and religion underpinned; a serious event in our civilization that went way beyond mere epistemology. Not only did religion give us our values, it gave us our ability to give meaning to human suffering. This is also why Nietzsche took the Atheists of his time to task: that if religion was a behavior, and not just one or a series of truth statements, you could easily behave in a religious manner without actually having explicit religious ideas. And of course, Nietzsche thought that Atheists did exactly that: condemn the belief, but still keep up the behavior. Given how many academics are atheists but still believe in objective morality today, I'd say it's still a relevant criticism.

TL;DR: You shouldn't be surprised that people with an abiding faith in technology to redeem the world start talking like a Renaissance monk. Nietzsche certainly wouldn't. And it certainly won't be the last time you'll see people take arguments that somebody like Rene Descartes would have familiarity with, add some math or science (numbers, typically) to fortify it, and then act like they've discovered something new.

I watch it so you don't have to: Victory Through Air Power

I assume that most people reading this blog are like me; history nerds and people who like scale model things.  I bring this up because I've always more or less assumed the broad historical context is understood, be it about Zeppelins or B-36s. This blog features a lot of stuff that assumes the background of strategic bombing is understood. Now, if you are someone who does not understand strategic bombing, the Second World War must be filled with inexplicable, horrific events. Not that World War 2 in particular isn't chock full of those anyway, but Nazis murdering people is at least understandable because the Nazis are understood to be nasty, nasty people. Strategic bombing by the Allies, in contrast, must seem just as horrific but without any rhyme or reason behind it.

Take the atomic attacks against Hiroshima and Nagasaki for example. They're the topic of many a university undergrad discussion/shouting match, where they are often treated as unique events. Truth be told, the only thing unique about them was the technology involved; everything else was standard Allied practice. More people died in the firebombings of Tokyo than died in both atomic attacks, for example, but that's usually unknown to the undergrad debater. This chilling montage from the Errol Morris documentary The Fog of War does a great job illustrating the sheer destruction wrought on Japan by USAAF B-29s - and if the montage is your first point of contact with strategic bombing, it must seem like madness.

Well, good news! If you are confused by these events, I found something that can help: a World War 2 propaganda film animated by of Walt Disney, of all people.

Victory Through Air Power is an hour-long film Disney produced out of his own pocket, to explain the role of strategic bombing in World War 2, and to champion the ideas set forth in a book by the same name. Alexander P. de Seversky, the book's author, argued that the best way to win the Second World War was through applied use of air power; in particular, the use of strategic bombers to destroy heavy industry. At this juncture a brief outline of the reasons for strategic bombing may be useful. There are four:

1. Break the will of the people to fight by attacking them in their homes;

2. Destroy the enemy's industry and removing their ability to fight a modern industrialized war;

3. Destroy the enemy's air force (the air-force, even if not directly targeted, has to get in the sky to fight your bombers;)

 4. and making the enemy use resources to defend their airspace.

Even the pokey Zeppelin raiders managed #4, while the Allied bombing campaign against the Nazis managed #2, #3, and #4. At the same time, the Allies also spent a lot of time and effort on #1 - which is something that remains deeply controversial. My take: 2, 3, and 4 proved to be effective tactics at winning the war, while #1 was at best a waste of resources that managed to kill huge numbers of civilians. Victory Through Air Power is going to spend all its time concentrating on selling the audience the #2 formula. As a expository bonus, it also explains supply lines and the basics of logistics to Second World War audiences. People who really know the material may be able to spot flaws in its assumptions, but it is a propaganda film; it's purpose is to get an argument across, not struggle with mere detail. There's one part near the end that is eerie in how accurate de Seversky's words are, and for a film trying to predict the future, it is admerable in how reasonable and generally accurate de Seversky's analysis is. Predicting the future is a long history of people being wrong, so it's always impressive when somebody shows some accuracy that's guided by reason instead of luck.

Also I know how to make .gifs now, so there's that.

0-7:30 minutes: preface, intro, and dedication. Film critic Leonard Maltin introduces the film. Disney also got de Seversky to do live action bits in the film where de Seversky explains his own ideas.

7:30 - 23:15: a brief history of aviation, then 40 years old. This is mostly off to the side of the interesting stuff, so I'll say little, except that the most interesting anecdote it has is the first person to fly across the United States.  A $50,000 prize tempted Calbraith P. Rogers to try his luck -  69 flights and 15 crashes later, he became the first trans-continental flyer (though his airplane had a ship of Theseus problem: only his left-rear strut has started off with Rogers in Long Island.) Also, unfortunately for Rogers, the $50,000 prize came with a 30 day restriction on attempts, which Rogers had missed by 19 days. Certainly, you appreciate how amazing modern air travel is (as per my last post) when you read about the early days of aviation.

I've love to see a short made like this summarizing the development of digital computing.

23:15 - 26:00: The film introduces Alexander P. de Seversky, and gives his bona-fies as an aeronautical smarty-man. Like Igor Siskorsky, de Seversky was was born in the Russian Empire, and after a rather amazing early career in aviation, fled to America to escape the communist revolution. Many aviation firsts were achived by de Seversky after this, despite having lost his leg in combat during World War 1. While the film doesn't mention it, de Seversky started his own aviation firm that would, after a Russian revolution-esque management change, became Republic Aviation, and would go on to produce the P-47 Thunderbolt. (The P-47 was designed by another expat Russian, Alexander Kartveli.) TL;DR dude knows aviation.

26:00 -    The film settles down to brass tacks. First up is air power: it changes shit. Those familiar with history will recognize the points: first, the Nazis bypassed and neutralized the fixed defenses of the French Maginot line, and then used air power to press their attack. Only when German air power had to contend with the RAF over Dunkirk was its power neutralized. Then, air power allowed for the German invasion of Norway, and the rebuff of the British counter-invasion. This lesson about Navies needing air cover was driven home in December 1941, when the Royal Navy Resolute and Prince of Wales were sunk by Japanese land-based bombers. The battle of Crete is also brought out as an example of air power prevailing over land and sea power. These historical examples are also slightly sneaky, as all of them are examples of western allied nations not taking air power seriously, and paying for it.

41:00  The second major point is the importance of supply lines for everybody, and more especially the weakness of the Allied position compared to the Axis. The Axis powers are likened to wheels: their supply lines are short and insular. Meanwhile, the supply lines of the Allies literally span the globe; lend lease supplies to Russia were often landed through the Persian Gulf and sent up through Iran. This weakness means that the Axis have an advantage on defense. (It's interesting, too, to read about weaknesses in the Allied strategic position; if you know World War 2 history, you hear a lot about weaknesses in the Axis strategic position and strengths in the Allied one, but not vice versa.)

As Nazi Germany is already in the range of existing bomber designs, it gets used as the working example. We're given the USA, a beating heart of Industrial power:

Versus the grinding factories of the crooked cross:

The problem is distance of supply. The Third Reich has comparatively short and fast supply lines, while America has long, slow ones.

The literal bottleneck of shipping slows things down further. And of course, those long supply lines are easy to attack. Meanwhile, the supply lines from the industrial heart to the front lines are quick and easy for the Nazis. (An irony here; Victory Through Air Power assumes that submarines are a problem that can only really be dealt with via strikes on shipyards and sub pens; in reality, it was air power over the ocean hunting submarines that was critical in the defeat of the U-boats. Bombing raids against sub pens proved pointless: the Nazis had constructed sub pens in France so strong even the heaviest bombs could not damage them, and manufacturing of U-boats was distributed so that the bits of a U-boat only needed to come together for final assembly.)

This has consequences for anybody attacking the Nazis. The Nazi position (if you couldn't guess already) is likened to a wheel, with the hub being the factories of Nazi Germany, and the spokes of supply strengthening the rim. Attack by land, and it looks like this:

A bunch of forces trying to beat in the wheel, with the lines of supply and the industrial hub untouched. Even if you concentrate a really big force:

The Nazis can shift their forces to resist this greater force easily. Attack with many strong forces, the Nazis can shrink their wheel to create a thicker rim, etc. The message here is that using land forces alone create at best a war of attrition, which is something anybody remembering the First World War surely wants to avoid.

But, with the application of Air Power, you can skip over the battlefield, and strike at assets before they reach the battlefield.

Even better, you can use air power to bypass the spokes and the rim of the wheel entirely, and strike at the resupplying hub:

With the central hub smashed, attacking forces can make real headway against the rim and take out Nazi Germany with "a tremendous saving of human lives." Air power thus becomes not only the most effective tactic, but a (sorta) humanitarian one as well. It's ambiguous if you're saving German lives by doing this, but you are definitely saving the lives of Allied Soldiers, probably the greatest concern of a potential 1943 viewer. At any rate, this is how strategic bombing thesis #2 works: destroy the industrial power of the enemy, then defeat him on the ground.

Now that the film has the theory, it now seeks thornier tactical problems, and maybe to the surprise of modern audiences, turns away from the Nazis and to Japan. Most of the war effort as a stated government policy was directed toward the defeat of Germany, with only about 20% effort going against Japan. Meanwhile, any belief that the Japanese were going to be pushovers died very quickly in Guadalcanal, and when battles to take lone islands producing appalling casualties. Clearly, the Japanese had no fear of a war of attrition. The public was worried that after the defeat of Germany, it still faced years of war against an enemy who seemed fearless and disdainful of all human life, especially his own.

Victory Through Air Power is quick to point out that the strategy outlined above against Germany won't work against Japan - the ranges from viable bases are just too big. Several hypothetical lines of attack are examined and then rejected. The strategy of bombing from China is rejected as you need an absolute mountain of stuff to resupply a strategic bombing campaign, and the only way to get it into China a whole new war in Southeast Asia to take Rangoon, Thailand, Vietnam etc back from the Imperial Japanese Army. (Historically, the USAAF tried doing a airlift over the Himalayas for resupply - it was just too inefficient.) Bombing from Siberia is out for several tactical reasons, though a bigger one would be the Soviet Union and Japan having a Neutrality pact. Attack direct by sea is dismissed as land airplanes are more capable than carrier aircraft. (I guess this is meant to be "why don't we sail a huge carrier fleet to Japan directly" instead of what happened historically.)

Then the topic of a combined arms island-hopping campaign is brought up, and dismissed, on the basis that it would be 'far too costly in lives and material.' Another factor is that while this campaign is going on, those interior supply lines will be inviolate, as all the newly seized war-making materials will be shipped back to Japan's industrial heart, making it stronger. (History reveals this line of reasoning to be questionable at best, since historically Allied forces pursued the island hopping strategy - capturing outlying islands and isolating major strongholds in the South Pacific, all the while fighting its way up New Guinea and disrupting Japan's supply lines - and when the Americans belatedly equipped their submarines with working torpedoes, USN submarines sank half the Japanese Merchant fleet in six months - crippling Japanese industry.  So yeah, ignore this argument.)

This was the worry.

Faced with yet another grinding war of attrition, Victory through Air Power offers up its solution: erm, air power. Long range bombers are the answer, naturally. With the optimistic formula of "twice the range cuts the fighting time in half"  de Seversky proposes the creation of a new extremely long range bomber fleet. The clincher for the sale is that a sufficiently long range bomber could be staged to attack Japan out of Alaska - which would make America's supply lines the interior, fast ones. It's not God from a machine, but it is a aeronautical solution to an otherwise insoluble problem.

The wing and fuselage span in these blueprints are close to what the B-36 would be.

Alaska is halfway to everywhere, and thus a logical place for big airbases.

De Seversky also talks a bit about what these bombers would be like. The craft envisioned by Victory is very close to the B-36, then under development. While de Seversky doesn't go into the technical details, such bombers would be able to neutralize the enemy's air force via defensive guns. (A whole generation of flyers in B-17s and B-24s, fighting trench warfare over Europe's skies, must have laughed harshly at that one.) Still, once again, de Seversky is thinking of a giant airplane with a destroyer's worth of anti-aircraft cannon - another B-36 design feature.

When we say "bristling with cannon" we're serious.

"While single engine fighters must maneuver to get into firing position, the heavy bomber is *always* in firing position."

Not only will these transoceanic bombers destroy the enemy's air force in the sky, they will hit the enemy's air force on the ground too. It's a slightly paradoxical quirk of the argument that fighting on land and sea is viewed as folly, while fighting in the air is 1) more efficient and 2) will definitely go America's way even before enemy industry is affected. "Once complete mastery of the air is achieved, enemy war industries will lie helplessly exposed for systematic destruction" says de Seversky. The strategic bombing campaign over Europe would eventually prove the truth of these words.

As super bombers are developed, so are bombs "forever growing in size and destructive power".We get to see a whole new series of hypothetical bombs, able to destory even the most intransigent of structures.  De Seversky emphasis that this sort of destructive power is in the long run something that everybody will have - but right now is America's alone, as only America has the spare industrial output to start working on such things. Japan must take time to consolidate its gains, and that time is to America's advantage. As de Seversky says: "today the enemy is sprawled on the ground, and while his greedy tentacles are clutching the loot, his body lies unprotected. Why spend our precious time trying to loosen his grip in a struggle that can only lead to the complete devastation of the very lands we are trying to free?"

We're in the home stretch now - it's now time for the "LET'S GET 'EM" moment. I mean, why make a film about Victory through Air Power, if you're not going to show Victory through Air Power? "For with the strategy of air power, they will make the enemy fight on our terms, against the weapons of our choosing, on our time, but on his soil. "

Get the point yet? Well, this is a propaganda film, and THEY ARE COMING AROUND FOR ANOTHER PASS

Yes, this is a Bald eagle kicking the shit out of a sinister oriental octopus, what of it

And thus peace is restored.

So, there you have it: Victory through Air Power. While history doesn't agree with all of its arguments, you can understand why this was a popular vision. Technology creating an American victory without a WW1 style war of attrition couldn't help but be attractive for people who remembered the First World War. With a positive vision of a less costly war, and a sort-of humanitarian justification in saving human lives*, you can understand how strategic bombing in general was so popular with the Americans and British.

There's one more thing I'd like to pull out. de Seversky at one point manages to get downright prophetic:

"this is the coming reality. And we must face the fact that it is a two-way proposition. No nation has a monopoly on this kind of air power. And when it comes, there can be no real defense against such an attack. [...] And the only sure defense is a vigorous offense. It's a question of who destroys who first."

In that, he was absolutely right. The only thing de Seversky didn't see was that two new technologies would emerge that would not only massively increase the firepower of his bomber fleets, it would also render them obsolete...

This blog has a excellent writeup of the magazine article.

A direct link to the article for the interested