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Le bombardement anglo-américain de 1944 sur la France

6 avril 2013, 04:36

Destroy the cities and the civilians was the purpose...

"... In the past eighteen months, Bomber Command has virtually destroyed forty-five out of the leading sixty German cities. In spite of invasion diversions (i.e. D-Day) we have so far managed to keep up and even to exceed our average of two and a half cities devastated a month. ... There are not many industrial centres of population now left intact. Are we going to abandon this vast task, which the Germans themselves have long admitted to be their worst headache, just as it nears completion ?" — Sir Arthur Harris to Air Staff Chief Sir Charles Portal, November 1, 1944 quoted in Max Hastings, Bomber Command (NY : Dial Press, 1979), p. 331.

"You refer to a plan for the destruction of the sixty leading German cities, and to your efforts to keep up with, and even to exceed, your average of two and a half such cities devastated each month ; I know that you have long felt such a plan to be the most effective way of bringing about the collapse of Germany. Knowing this, I have, I must confess, at times wondered whether the magnetism of the remaining German cities has not in the past tended as much to deflect our bombers from their primary objectives as the tactical and weather difficulties which you described so fully in your letter of 1 November. I would like you to reassure me that this is not so. If I knew you to be as wholehearted in the attack on oil as in the past you have been in the matter of attacking cities, I would have little to worry about." — Air Staff Chief Sir Charles Portal to Sir Arthur Harris, November 12, 1944, quoted in Max Hastings, Bomber Command (NY : Dial Press, 1979), p. 331.

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