Determining the Effects of the Allied Air Offensive

2020 ◽  
pp. 186-207
Author(s):  
Phillip S. Meilinger

This essay deals with the massive report chartered by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1944 to measure the effects of strategic bombing on Germany and Japan—the US Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS). Ascertaining the effects of air strikes was critical, and airmen took steps to ensure that data would be amassed and analyzed to determine if the strategic bombing campaign was successful and worth the effort. USSBS was a massive effort employing over 1,500 personnel that conducted a detailed examination of the evidence both in Europe and the Pacific. Its unimpeachable findings and answers were fairly clear-cut, as detailed in the statistical findings published in over 300 reports. This essay closely examines the bulk of the surveys and reveals what they actually said.

2010 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 1345-1359 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. G. Pfister ◽  
L. K. Emmons ◽  
D. P. Edwards ◽  
A. Arellano ◽  
T. Campos ◽  
...  

Abstract. We analyze the transport of pollution across the Pacific during the NASA INTEX-B (Intercontinental Chemical Transport Experiment Part B) campaign in spring 2006 and examine how this year compares to the time period for 2000 through 2006. In addition to aircraft measurements of carbon monoxide (CO) collected during INTEX-B, we include in this study multi-year satellite retrievals of CO from the Measurements of Pollution in the Troposphere (MOPITT) instrument and simulations from the chemistry transport model MOZART-4. Model tracers are used to examine the contributions of different source regions and source types to pollution levels over the Pacific. Additional modeling studies are performed to separate the impacts of inter-annual variability in meteorology and dynamics from changes in source strength. Interannual variability in the tropospheric CO burden over the Pacific and the US as estimated from the MOPITT data range up to 7% and a somewhat smaller estimate (5%) is derived from the model. When keeping the emissions in the model constant between years, the year-to-year changes are reduced (2%), but show that in addition to changes in emissions, variable meteorological conditions also impact transpacific pollution transport. We estimate that about 1/3 of the variability in the tropospheric CO loading over the contiguous US is explained by changes in emissions and about 2/3 by changes in meteorology and transport. Biomass burning sources are found to be a larger driver for inter-annual variability in the CO loading compared to fossil and biofuel sources or photochemical CO production even though their absolute contributions are smaller. Source contribution analysis shows that the aircraft sampling during INTEX-B was fairly representative of the larger scale region, but with a slight bias towards higher influence from Asian contributions.


Radiocarbon ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 61 (6) ◽  
pp. 1775-1784
Author(s):  
Helene Svarva ◽  
Pieter Grootes ◽  
Martin Seiler ◽  
Terje Thun ◽  
Einar Værnes ◽  
...  

ABSTRACTTo resolve an inconsistency around AD 1895 between radiocarbon (14C) measurements on oak from the British Isles and Douglas fir and Sitka spruce from the Pacific Northwest, USA, we measured the 14C content in single-year tree rings from a Scots pine tree (Pinus sylvestris L.), which grew in a remote location in Saltdal, northern Norway. The dataset covers the period AD 1864–1937 and its results are in agreement with measurements from the US Pacific coast around 1895. The most likely explanation for older ages in British oak in this period seems to be 14C depletion associated with the combustion of fossil fuels.


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-55
Author(s):  
Mohamad Zreik

AbstractThe Chinese Ministry of Commerce issued a statement Friday morning, July 6, 2018, confirming the outbreak of a trade war between the United States and China. The statement came after the United States imposed tariffs on many Chinese goods, in violation of international and bilateral agreements, and the destruction of the concept of free trade which the United States calls for following it. It is a war of opposite directions, especially the contradiction between the new Trump policy and the Chinese approach. The proof is what US Defense Secretary James Matisse announced in Singapore in early June 2018 of “the full strategy of the new United States, in the Indian Ocean and the Pacific,” where China was the “sole enemy of the United States” in China’s geostrategic region. Intentions have become publicized, and trade war between the two economic giants is turning into a reality. This paper will give an overview of the US-China scenario of trade war, then a focused analysis on the Trump’s administration economic decision regarding China, and the consequences of this decision.


Author(s):  
Michele K. Troy

This chapter examines how the Allied bombings of Germany affected the lives of people in the Albatross-Tauchnitz fold, particularly Max Christian Wegner and Walter Gey. To celebrate the tenth anniversary of Adolf Hitler's reign, the Nazi elite gathered with thousands of party loyalists on January 30, 1943 for an evening of rousing speeches at the Berlin Sportpalast. The Allies commemorated Hitler's tenth anniversary by sending Royal Air Force Mosquito light bombers on a daylight air raid on the German capital. For Prime Minister Winston Churchill, President Franklin Roosevelt, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, this attack marked the beginning of the “strategic bombing” campaign they had agreed upon at the Casablanca Conference days earlier. This chapter considers Wegner's arrest and imprisonment at the height of World War II as well as Gey's efforts to make the best of the Albatross Press's ever-shrinking terrain.


Author(s):  
Scott Edwards

From 6 June to 20 August, 2020, I undertook a 76-day, ~3800 mile bicycle trip across the United States from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans. In this talk I will share with you some of the amazing people, landscapes and birds I encountered, mostly in rural towns and along blue highways. The gradually changing birdscape, both in sight and sound, underscored the sensitive ecological gradients to which birds respond, as well as the ability of some species to thrive in agricultural monocultures. Rivers large and small regularly benchmarked my progress, as well as the western journey of Lewis & Clark over 200 years ago. The recent incidents in the US involving African Americans as targets of white violence inexorably caused me to festoon my bicycle with #BlackLivesMatter (#BLM) signs and share my experiences on social media. I encountered a variety of reactions, often positive and occasionally sharply negative, in a sea of generosity and extraordinary kindness as I wheeled my way through towns on the brink of collapse, vast private ranches and the occasional city. Rural America exhibits an abundance of loyalty and empathy for local communities, yet it is sometimes hard for Americans – myself included – to empathize with people they have never met in person. Two imperatives I took away, with ramifications for both biodiversity and political stability, were the need to somehow bring divergent communities together and to encourage empathy at the national level, among communities that otherwise experience each other only on TV.


1995 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-72
Author(s):  
Philip Cass
Keyword(s):  
The Us ◽  

Fiji prides itself on being at the crossroads of the Pacific and yet the rest of the great ocean remains almost invisible to the Fijian press, to whom the world consists of floods in India, stock prices in Australia and OJ in the US.  


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanne Wallis ◽  
Anna Powles

Abstract One of President Joseph Biden's foreign policy priorities is to ‘renew’ and ‘strengthen’ the United States' alliances, as they were perceived to have been ‘undermined’ during the Trump administration, which regularly expressed concern that allies were free-riding on the United States' military capability. Yet the broad range of threats states face in the contemporary context suggests that security assistance from allies no longer only—or even primarily—comes in the form of military capability. We consider whether there is a need to rethink understandings of how alliance relationships are managed, particularly how the goals—or strategic burdens—of alliances are understood, how allies contribute to those burdens, and how influence is exercised within alliances. We do this by analysing how the United States–Australia and Australia–New Zealand alliances operate in the Pacific islands. Our focus on the Pacific islands reflects the United States' perception that the region plays a ‘critical’ role in helping to ‘preserve a free and open Indo-Pacific region’. We conclude that these understandings need to be rethought, particularly in the Pacific islands, where meeting non-traditional security challenges such as economic, social and environmental issues, is important to advancing the United States, Australia and New Zealand's shared strategic goal of remaining the region's primary security partners and ensuring that no power hostile to their interests establishes a strategic foothold.


Author(s):  
Paul J. Heer

This book chronicles and assesses the little-known involvement of US diplomat George F. Kennan—renowned as an expert on the Soviet Union—in US policy toward East Asia, primarily in the early Cold War years. Kennan, with vital assistance from his deputy John Paton Davies, played pivotal roles in effecting the US withdrawal from the Chinese civil war and the redirection of American occupation policy in Japan, and in developing the “defensive perimeter” concept in the western Pacific. His influence, however, faded soon thereafter: he was less successful in warning against US security commitments in Korea and Indochina, and the impact of the Korean War ultimately eclipsed his strategic vision for US policy in East Asia. This was due in large part to Kennan’s inability to reconcile his judgment that the mainland of East Asia was strategically expendable to the United States with his belief that US prestige should not be compromised there. The book examines the subsequent evolution of Kennan’s thinking about East Asian issues—including his role as a prominent critic of US involvement in the Vietnam War—and the legacies of his engagement with the region.


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