They are also not exceptional as the same rhetoric applies to the application of military aviation generally, and the bombing of civilians specifically. It is also all too familiar to students of the twentieth century history of technology. Quantifying the extent and rapidity of growth in aerial smuggling is difficult. At the end of Prohibition, the Coast Guard Intelligence Division assessed that just in the illicit rum traffic between the Bahamas and the East Coast, between fifty and seventy aircraft were active, mostly land planes. Even that assessment may have been a gross underestimate as, "An observer at West End and Bimini recently counted twenty-one planes at the former place and sixteen at the latter, a total of thirty-seven planes at the two places, all of which were being used for the smuggling of contraband to Florida." Given the number of other Bahamian venues, aircraft en route, the aircraft based in Florida, and aircraft that smuggled further afield from the Bahamas, an estimate of over one hundred airplanes engaging in illicit commerce between Miami and south Florida may be a better assessment. Unfortunately, the Coast Guard lacked any more detailed surveys for other regions, though anecdotal evidence points to prolific activity in south Texas, some in southern California, between Vancouver and Seattle, and of course between Chicago and the Canadian border, which appears to be the near equal of the Miami aerial trade. Outside these hotspots, routine reports of smuggling aircraft occurred across the length of the southern and northern borders. Moonshiners also employed airplanes for internal transport and first person accounts testify to complex domestic networks of aerial transport. Taken as a whole, these reports suggest that even in the early years of Prohibition that upwards of one hundred aircraft were engaged in criminal transport and that by the end, five times that number is not an unreasonable estimate.21 Between June 30, 1932 and June 30, 1933, federal authorities seized thirty-five aircraft for smuggling.