The Hour of Air Power

摘要

On Jan. 15, 1945, Hitler―who had been at the western front, where the Battle of the Bulge had blunted his last-gasp offensive in Belgium―was returning to Berlin by train when an SS colonel with a gift for gallows humor said: "Berlin will be most practical as our headquarters: we'll soon be able to take the streetcar from the eastern to the western front!" Historian Martin Gilbert writes: "Hitler laughed." For Hitler, then 105 days from suicide, Berlin was to be a lethal cul-de-sac, as Baghdad might quickly become for Saddam Hussein. One reason for the probable brevity of Saddam's last war is that air power's hour has at last arrived.