Description of the event
The mass use of aviation is the most important difference between World War Two and One, during which it was however used. In the years between the two World Wars there are continuous improvements in civil and military aviation (such as Radar), connected with several increasings in technology applied on war. Such progress allow to deem, already before 1939, that supremacy on sky would be essential to a success in land and sea military operations.
Although still in 1939-1940 it was used to talk about a sort of code of honour which prevented to bomb non-military targets, it has already often come true the opposite, with the bombings on Madrid and Guernica during the Spanish Civil War and the Japanese attacks against Shangai and Nanking in 1937. At the outbreak of Worl War II, bombing is maybe the determinant point in militaty strategies and it will confer to the world conflict the character of a “total war”, in the sense that involves and hit not only sodliers on fronts but also civilians in the cities. Bombings against cities are deemed also as a dreadful psychological instrument, the best to pull down the morale of a nation, as well as to deprive it of the industrial, means and ways of communication apparatus.
Each one of the belligerant countries uses the air force in such ways, against targets either military or not. We can remind, for example, already in September 1939, Nazi bombings on Warsaw. In 1940, when takes place the famous “Battle of England”, we can also remind the hard bombings against the Netherlands, most of all on the city (and port) of Rotterdam. By the beginning of that year, either English or Germans are used to bomb by night too.
In Worl War II the aviation is used in any way: bombing, fighting, reconnaissance and, since the Nazi invasion of Norway (april 1940), troops transportation too. This could also mean the possibility of using paratroops, as would Nazi show since their blitz in the isle of Crete, in May 1941. Since 1942, the English Command starts using this system (especially in North Africa), which is one of the most important innovations in World War II.
In 1943, while even the obsolete USSR aviation is innovating, are getting more frequent the terribile bombings by the Allied aviations on cities, against Germany and countries allied to her (Italy included). In 1943-1944 winter Berlin suffers its first Allied bombings, while the mass use of aviation on all fronts is going on. Not only from this point of view is getting in evidence an Allied supremacy (UK and USA carry out a strategy of continuous bombing, called pointblack, with RAF bombers generally engaged during the night and USAF bombers during the day).
The last year of war begins with the terribile Allied bombing on Dresden, a city of art without any military or industrial targets. In that moment is starting speaking seriously about the morality of bombings against non-military targets. In spite of these debates, bombings will go on until the end of August, when two US bombers drop two atomic bombs against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, putting an end on World War II.