I've seen the term "carpet bombing" bandied about for years. I've never
seen or
heard a definition. Is there one? A generally accepted one?


Personally, I think its a direct translation from the wartime German phrase. I
have the postwar interviews carried out at Schleswig and back in the UK, where
defense industry and military brass were questioned concerning the
effectiveness of Allied bombing. My specific interest is in the Allied
destruction of airfields, so that's what I am referring to here - in those
attacks, the Germans (all the way up to Goering), agreed that (paraphrasing,
but very similar wording in many cases) "unless a bomb carpet was used, damage
to the runways and aprons would not be sufficient to make the airfield unusable
for more than a few hours or a day/two at the most." The Germans had become
masters of the war between "shovel and bomb" and proved quite capable of
standing things back up after a short time. This could be done if the bombs
fell scattered, by aircraft releasing at different moments or different
altitudes, but not if the "bomb carpet" technique was used. Evaluating the
attacks that these Germans were discussing shows that they meant heavy bombers
('viermots') in tight formations, all dropping their bombs in a string, as
opposed to dumping all of them in a tight bundle. At Burg-bei-Magdeburg and
other jet airfields struck on 10 April 45, the bomb craters stitched their way
across the facility, leaving no usable tracks for air operations. It was the
last time the airfield was used during the war.

I think of it as area bombing. The ultimate example would be the March
10, 1945, fire bombing of Tokyo. Though that was incendiary rather
than high explosive, it was planned to cover whole square miles of a
city.

The Germans appear to have never used the term "bomb carpet" in any other cases
than the one I discribed above. "Area bombing" has nothing to do with
precision bombing of a specific industrial target and I don't think the term
should be used or confused with "carpet bombing", which was used against
factories, airfields, marshalling yards, and occasionally troop/supply
concentrations.

Just my opinion of course.

v/r
Gordon
====(A+C====
USN SAR

Donate your memories - write a note on the back and send your old photos to a
reputable museum, don't take them with you when you're gone.