How Effective is Strategic Bombing?

Including single-authored titles, primary source collections, and readers, The History of Disability series will address the full range of topics in disability history: policies and laws, political movements and organizations, medical treatment anf views, education, institutions and agencies, philanthropy, labor, eugenics, cultural representations, disability cultures, and more.Books in the series will trace the intersections of disability with gender, race, ethnicity, and class. While some books will focus on particular disability groups, others will attempt to excavate the unspoken, unacknowledged, and often invisible ties that bind people with different disabilities together in a common history. The individual contributions and the series as a whole will bring to light the underlying common themes that bridge the apparent divisions among physical, sensory, and mental disability. Informed by the social constructionist insights and interdisciplinarity of cultural studies but firmly grounded in empirical research, the series will facilitate development of both the theory and methodology of disability history.In the wake of World War II, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson and President Harry S. Truman established the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, to determine exactly how effectively strategic air power had been applied in the European theater and in the Pacific. The final study, consisting of over 330 separate reports and annexes, was staggering in its size and emphatic in its conclusions. As such it has for decades been used as an objective primary source and a guiding text, a veritable Bible for historians of air power.In this aggressively revisionist volume, Gian Gentileexamines afresh this influential document to reveal how it reflected to its very foundation the American conceptual approach to strategic bombing. In the process, he exposes the survey as largely tautological and thereby throwing into question many of the central tenets of Amer