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On May 14, 1940. At 1:22 p.m., German bombers set the whole inner city of Rotterdam ablaze, killing 814 of its inhabitants

97% of Wesel was destroyed before it was finally taken by Allied troops in 1945.

Napalm bombs explode on Viet Cong structures south of Saigon in the Republic of Vietnam, 1965.

The phrase carpet bombing refers to the use of large numbers of unguided gravity bombs, often with a high proportion of incendiary bombs, to attempt the complete destruction of a target region, either to destroy personnel and materiel, or as a means of demoralizing the enemy (see terror bombing). The phrase probably is intended to invoke the image of bombs completely covering an area, in the same way that a carpet covers a floor.

Initially, carpet bombing was effected by multiple aircraft, often returning to the target in waves.

The concept of carpet bombing was strongly influenced by the inter-war theories of the Italian strategist Admiral Giulio Douhet, who suggested that future wars would be fought by armies and navies fighting holding actions, while opposing sets of air forces attacked the enemies civilian centres of population. A few days of such destruction would, he opined, cause one side to rapidly sue for peace.

This theory was supported strongly by the press and entertainment industry – H G Wells's book The Shape of Things to Come contains a terrifying description of the aerial destruction of a city, and it became a staple of military thinking. No defence was thought possible; the British Royal Air Force held it to be self-evident that "the bomber will always get through", and indeed the Hawker Hart bomber of the time was faster than any opposing fighter. With no means of prior detection, a bomber pilot was both deadly and safe. During the 1920s and 1930s, the bomber arm of an air force was the most attractive and heroic to join, rather as the fighter arm is today.

The concept of total annihilation of civilian targets as a method of shortening wars was famously tested during the Spanish Civil War, when the German force (the Legión Cóndor) attacked the Spanish town of Guernica in several waves over much of one day, causing many casualties. Although this is now presented as an inhumane act, it is worth noting that it precisely matched the military tenets of the day. Colonel-General Baron Wolfram von Richthofen (cousin of Manfred von Richthofen (the Red Baron)) may have been the instigator of the bombing in this case.

This was followed by the use of the same techniques on infantry targets during the Battle of El Mazuco a few months later; in this case the targeted troops were dispersed on rocky slopes – the Condor Legion learned that carpet bombing was much less effective in such terrain.

The strategy was developed during World War II, by the British head of Bomber Command, Air Vice Marshal Arthur "Bomber" Harris and copied by the United States to try to weaken German morale and destroy cities which contained war industries.

When Britain went to war with Germany in 1939, the civilian population expected to receive this form of attack within days. Plans were made for the expected large casualty rate in London, and many children were evacuated to the comparative safety of the countryside. Though it did not occur immediately, the Luftwaffe finally did try to subdue London in the latter stages of the Battle of Britain.

It is normally considered that the precision target bombing of airfields which formed the first part of the Battle of Britain could have won the battle for the Germans, and changing tactics to carpet bombing effectively lost them the battle. They did not have enough heavy bombers to effectively eradicate London, and their aircraft suffered heavy attrition due to the effective RAF fighters, guided to their targets by the new British invention of Radar Controlled Airspace. This lesson was not, however, learned by the British, who soon developed heavy, long-range bombers like the Lancaster to pay the Germans back.

In spite of heavy initial casualties the British built up a Bomber Command which was capable of delivering many thousands of tons of bombs onto a single target. This was then wielded by Harris in an effort to break German morale and obtain the surrender which Douhet had predicted 15 years earlier. When America joined the war the USAAF was joined to the British force, and continuous day and night bombing of Germany became possible. Probably the most spectacular example of this was the destruction of Dresden by combined forces of the RAF and USAAF.

Carpet bombing was also used extensively against Japanese civilian population centers, such as Tokyo.

Considerable discussion about the relative merits of carpet vs. precision bombing has resulted among military historians ever since. It must be remembered that, until precision guidance systems became available during the 1980s, targeted individual bombs dropped from height might fall tens of miles from their target. Low level attacks were more likely to be accurate, but the attacker was less likely to survive. Consequently, carpet bombing was a strategy forced by circumstance.

Nowadays, a large bomber or missile can be used to create the same effect on a small area (an airfield, for example) by releasing a relatively large number of smaller bombs. Some artillery systems, such as the US Army's MLRS, can also be used to bomb regions in a similar manner.

The RAF had also found that heavy industrial machinery could often survive high levels of blast, and needed to be directly struck by a weapon to be disabled. This suggested a bomber should drop many smaller weapons, one of which might have a lucky hit. It was this kind of thinking which led the RAF to ignore the great British engineer Sir Barnes Wallis who advocated large precision weapons dropped at supersonic speeds to penetrate the ground below a target. These Tallboys and Grand Slams were only developed by the British towards the end of the war, but were responsible for some of the more spectacular bombing feats in that conflict.

Carpet Bombing also applies to a modern nuclear weapons doctrine that prefers targeting an area with several lower-yield warheads, usually ICBM-launched MIRVs, rather than using an individual multi-megaton nuclear weapon to achieve the desired mass destruction more efficiently. However, carpet bombing has largely fallen away to precision bombing in recent years.

• Area bombardment
• The origins of bombing theory with Giulio Douhet
• First use of carpet bombing on a civilian target: Bombing of Guernica, April 1937
• First use of carpet bombing on a military target: Battle of El Mazuco, Asturias, September 1937
• Strategic bombing
• Carpet bombing in the Vietnam War
• The use of B52s to bomb the Iraqi Republican Guard in the Gulf War (1990–1991)