By Simon Pearson.
The mission conducted by B2-007 Spirit of St Louis was typical of the twenty-five other missions flown by the available B-2s that fateful night. B-2s flying from as far afield as Guam, the Azzores and the UK spearheaded the campaign’s first wave. This also included F-117s flying from Turkey, Italy, Greece, Spain, Cyprus and Bahrain, and cruise-missile-carrying B-52s flying from the US, the UK and Diego Garcia, as well as cruise missile launches from submarines and guided missile cruisers in the Mediterranean and Arabian Seas. The target sets chosen in every country from Morocco to Iran were the power stations, electricity substations ad other elements of the national power grids. The Western air power theorists had been waiting many decades for an opportunity to do just this. There was a school of thought that persisted with the theory that had the US Army Air Farce and RAF’s Bomber Command in World War II targeted German power sources alone, and continuously, this would have had a far greater and more immediate effect on German military and industrial production than was actually achieved by the combination of precision daylight and night fire-storm methods.
