Personal preference for this cause...I'm going to reactivate this thread in reply to this... Remember what Bomber Command Chief Arthur Harris said on taking command in 1942? " The Germans began this war under the childish assumption that they were going to bomb everybody else's cities and no one was going to bomb theirs...." Do we not now realise that Bomber Command provided the " Second Front" two years before ground troops made it ashore? Albert Speer is on record as stating that "six more Hamburg's would have finished the war"...a statement that Harris, had he been aware of it, would have used to try to achieve exactly that. It will always be academic as to whether bombing alone could have achieved a surrender. But according to Speer, it was possible, given the right circumstances. Bombing is NOT "terrorism", despite the aircrew receiving the public label of "terrorflieger". All of those men were in uniform, were not paramilitary, and were a significant part of a war effort that was becoming more and more effective all the time. Six more Hamburg's would have saved millions of lives. Think of all the gassed people in death camps that would have survived alone. All the Hungarian Jews who were put to death in mid 1944 still alive. The many German soldiers killed or wounded between August 1943 and May 1945. The Nazi government have it all to answer for. Stopping the war was entirely dependent on their desire to cease to continue. But they waited for "vengeance", waited for a "super bomb" that didn't happen, and by Hamburg the " Final Solution" was well underway. It makes me think the National Socialist party were simply prolonging the conflict to finish The Final Solution. Maybe if Harris had have had two thousand more aircraft operational in mid 1943, the war might have come to a screeching halt. But it didn't, and nobody listened to Harris. That's my take on it all. And I will defend Bomber Command operations until I die of old age or misadventure. Bolshevik