His enthusiasm for bombing and for his own role had allowed him to withstand all the subsequent intelligence of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey (not by chance were two of that survey’s chief members, John Kenneth Galbraith and George Ball, among the leading doves on Vietnam), which proved conclusively that the strategic bombing had not worked; on the contrary, it had intensified the will of the German population to resist (as it would in North Vietnam, binding the population to the Hanoi regime).

