Why destroy Laketown's bridge?

[Nogrod]

Originally Posted by davem

Look, destroying the bridges is a desperate act, but its a better move than not destroying them. It removes the option of a ground attack & puts him in a slightly less advantageous position. Your question is about as logical as asking why if your enemy is about to attack you with tanks & planes you'd bother taking out the tanks if you could? Well, if you did you could stop worrying about him attacking you with tanks & focus your attention on the air assault. What they're doing is limiting his options for an assault & using the lake as a more effective deterent. What you're forgetting, or ignoring, is that they are in desperate staits & anything which gives them the slightest advantage is going to be snatched up with both hands.

Originally Posted by Macalaure

Smaug is pretty devasting from the sky, but clearly not devastating enough to his satisfaction. He sets much of the town on fire and takes down some roofs, but he can't directly kill anybody or destroy houses to the ground. He needs to land for that.

Even if we'd ease a bit and confess that he can indeed kill people from up above it clearly looks to me as that Smaug needed something more to the total victory than just a fiery breath from above. Why else would Tolkien have mentioned it?

Or maybe the people were just thinking Smaug needed that other front to actually destroy the city? They might have been wrong but still acted as they acted according to their belief. I don't see the problem here but it sure seems to arouse strong feelings...