Wasting our airmen to give the USSR a break is idiocy: they would have better served the war and in the long run, the Soviets by concentrating on direct attacks on German formations and their staging areas, their fixed fortifications - and just killed German combatants without wasting millions of tons of bombs and countless aircraft missing important targets and killing old people, women and children.
The Air Force has always despised the ground troops and any whisper of direct support ("aerial artillery") is dismissed as useless, yet well-directed and coordinated CAS kills the enemy, shortens the war, and save our ground-pounder lives in the process. The Soviets stuck to direct support as their primary offensive air power and they were right to do so.
That lack of concentration on CAS killed a lot our people too - look at what happened when the Air Force "supported" the drive out of the Normandy bocage using high and medium altitude bombers. They missed for a large part and killed hundreds of our troops because of inherent inaccuracy, no air to ground communication, and no common doctrine.
I served for over 23 years and I had a close look at the way our different service do things - the enormous wastes of men and moral authority of WWII should be learning experiences.
I am a former ground pounder so I get the CAS problem. The issues in WWII were that there was little means of communication between ground forces and CAS. The bureaucracy of the military hampered the effort as different commands were often incapable of rapid communication with one another.
War is a horrible thing where young men are sent to die and suffer for the whims of old men. Just my .02
All things being equal I would rather we had not bombed cities and civilian populations but we did not start the war and they believed the manufacturing base could be destroyed - it wasn’t. They did what they thought was right at the time and many of them lived with the consequences the rest of their lives if they survived.
I lived in Germany as a kid and remember seeing the damage on cathedrals and other buildings from the bombing. Sad. Germany was a beautiful place and how an entire nation could fall under the evil spell of such a madman is troubling.
Our mass bombing campaign was not our shining moment but to me there can be very little comparison between the Allies and the Axis powers in WWII. It is undeniable that it diverted a large amount of resources from the Eastern Front and while our casualties were horrific they are insignificant when compared to the Russian carnage. We would have potentially had similar numbers if we had needed to invade Japan.
Such an evil needed to be fully eradicated and it was and let us pray it never raises its head again.
There are many opinions on the big war. Regardless, thanks for your service and Merry Christmas!