Hi
After reading several books on WWII, I found that there is no consensus on the effects of bombing on the German population and German industry. I would like to know which arguments hold up best. See below. I look forward to your feedback.
Question regarding the WWII Allied bombing of Germany
Arguments supporting the Allied bombing run generally thus:
The bombing operations
killed hundreds of thousands of German civilians,
seriously disrupted German war production
broke German morale at home
and 800, 000 servicemen were diverted to air defense.
Counter-arguments run in this vein:
"1. Despite massive bombings, the Germans produced some 1,500 panzers a month
2. German factories hit directly by bombs weren’t put out of action, at least not for very long… The Germans, it seems, learned they could quickly rescue the machinery in bombed-out factories and simply set up shop nearby.
3. John Kenneth Galbraith “insists the bombing campaign may have even helped the Germans increase production. By bombing German cities, the air force helped destroy the urban service economy; this in turn freed waiters and others to man the country’s labor-short factories, located on the outskirts of cities. . Ironically, the American air force was helping the German generals achieve what they couldn’t on their own:a war-based economy” "(Legends Lies and Cherished Myths"by Richard Shenkman.)
There is also the aspect that the bombing campaign provided a means of taking the fight directly to Germany when there was no other means to do so*, even if it was militarily ineffective it provided the Allies (well at the start the UK) with a morale boost and made the Germans realise they were vulnerable.
*as I’m sure you’re aware the the early bombing campaigns were pretty pathetic, by the time it was all over the Allies strategic bombing capability was an effective and devastating war machine.
Thanks bob++, but which of the works listed gives the most balanced view? I understand that there will probably never be a consensus, but works that concede to claims on either side of the argument would be of interest to me.
One analysis I read said that despite the “common view” - while Britain was on an emergency war footing, and had severe rationing, scrap metal drives, and all the other symptoms of a society totally at war, the Germans coasted along with a fairly regular lifestyle until the air superiority changed and they were the ones being bombed. The comment about diverting waiters etc. to war production is probably not too far off base.
However, it would seem to me that the allies probably killed more people than they diverted in the larger urban areas.
IANAH but I don’t recall reading anything where a battle was won due to shortages of material brought on by bombing the factories back in Germany… the closest thing I remember was the Battle of the Bulge IIRC stopped when the Germans ran out of fuel. More significant perhaps was the shortage of manpower, to the point where they were recruiting schoolboys and old age pensioners for canon fodder and home guard duties. More likely that was thanks to the Russian efforts, not allied bombing.
I think this is a large part of it and why it eventually gained a huge momentum. After Dunkirk everyone knew that there was no way for Britain to invade the continent alone and even after the Americans joined the equipment and training meant it was still years in the making. The bombing campaign was a way of doing something to hit back at the Germans. When the USSR was invaded the calls of “Second Front NOW” grew increasingly louder, Churchill argued that the war in the air was effectively a second front of its own, what with diverting (and eventually destroying) the Luftwaffe and valuable 88mm Flak cannons from the Eastern Front where they were badly needed.
You might want to look at Albert Speer’s book, “Inside the Third Reich.” He mentions the effect of the bombing, and if I’m remembering correctly, expalins that during his debriefing by Allied officers after the war, he told them that the bombing had been effective, up to to a point: that the Allies would switch targets too soon, because they assumed the target had been completely destroyed and move onto another one. He thought they should have kept bombing particular targets longer, to really bomb them into the ground. He also mentions the fact that Germany wasn’t really on a total war footing, unlike the UK.
Speer in a 1971 “Playboy” interview says the bombing was much less effective than it could have been. The Allies didn’t realize it but in August 1943 they began a series of devastating effective raids on German ball bearing factories. Ball bearings were important
components to every major weapon. But to the astonishment and relief of the Germans, the Allies stopped and switched to mass saturation of cities, which killed people but didn’t seriously affect the war economy. The Allies had wrongly assumed a totalitarian country like Nazi Germany was good at dispersing factories and camouflaging them Not so, according to Speer who said it was a Byzantine court with competing divisions, often with not very bright corrupt leaders, with Hitler wanting it that way.
As mentioned, some 70 years later the effectiveness of the Allied bombing is still hotly debated.
While the strategic bombing failed to live up to prewar hype and did not end the war quickly and cheaply as was hoped, it nevertheless provided a vital role.
In addition to tying up more than a million men, both soldiers and civilians, in air defense; the flak cannons and the destruction of the Luftwaffe as pointed out by Mr. Kobayashi; the strategic bombing also severely damaged German oil production and their transportation network.
By the end of the war, Luftwaffe pilots were being sent out into combat with a mere 50 hours of training because of fuel shortages. Bombing at reduced production of airplane fuel by 95%. The destruction of the Luftwaffe, allowing Allied air control, was a major contribution to the success of the Normandy invasion was well as the drives to Germany from the West and the East.
The severe damage to the transportation system also contributed to the success in the early days after D-Day, along with Allied air superiority, by drastically slowing down the response of key German reserves.
By the end of the war, attacks on the transportation networks of rail and canals proved effective in disrupting manufacturing. Aircraft could not be fully assembled because of the loss of transportation.
By the time of the surrender German economy was is complete disarray and on the edge of complete collapse.
There is another point that has not been covered, because we tend to examine it from the receiving end, rather than the effect on the nations doing the delivering.
Heavy bombers were proven to be highly vulnerable again and again, and the losses represented a huge industrial capacity impact.
What else could we have done with that industrial capacity and also those service personnel that were lost?
There is a very good argument that the use of fast medium bombers such as Mosquitos would have resulted in lower losses, with a more accurate delivery of a similar amount of ordnance.
Its also worth noting that during the later stages of the war, single seat fighter bombers could carry as much ordnance as a medium bomber, but were much faster, far more manoeuvrable and capable of multi-roles, these might have caused havoc with the Luftwaffe, in this I’m certainly thinking of Hawker Tempests and similar aircraft.
In addition, those long range machines such as the Lancaster might have been better employed in convoy protection, both as warning lookouts and as a/s attack. How much better would it have been to reduce shipping losses by just 5%?
There are certain notable raids that did have a measurable impact, such as Hamburg and there was value to the continual disruption - especially to transport systems.
It is perhaps all too easy to be wise after the event, but coastal command was always in dispute over the use of heavy bombers - so it can be seen there were plenty of others who took a different view at the time and were not heeded.
I think every thing helped.
It is said that Germany still kept up wartime production in spite of the bombing. What would production have been like without the bombing.
On the ground in Germany ; If you were a Nazi bigwig, I can see them saying," The bombing could have been worse.
where as a poor, run of the mill schmuck on the ground might say," When is this ever going to end."
On the other side; I can see the commanders telling their bosses," Were doing a great job." while the pilots who are saying, " It is not worth it."
I’m in the “helped but not nearly as much as the Allies claimed and not used nearly effective as it should have been” camp.
One thing that frustrates me is the argument that Nazi production went up until late in the war despite the bombing. But it certainly did not go up nearly as much as it would have without the bombing!
This. Every rock you can throw at an enemy has some effect, just as every weak rib shot in a boxing match takes some slight toll. It’s easy to second-guess the overall strategy and tactics, but in the roar of a global battle of survival, every sincere effort to disable, distract or damage the enemy has to be counted towards the total of victory.
Anyone can second-guess anything, especially if they weren’t even born when the battles were being fought and have the advantage of historical knowledge and analysis.
I’ll add that attacks on rail and transportation networks were often bitterly resisted by the various Allied air force chiefs, who usually claimed any targets other than factories and housing were wasted effort.
Long ago I went to a talk by the physicist Freeman Dyson. He worked in operations research for the RAF during the war.
His outfit showed the RAF that they should fly their bombers closer together, as the risk of collision was less than the gains in coherent defense.
In retrospect, though, he was unhappy with what they had done. He argued that what won the war in Europe was winning the Battle of the Atlantic, and producing the landing craft armada that made Overlord possible. The air war over Germany was a drain on the resources devoted to those two essential tasks.
Made sense to me. I did notice that he didn’t mention any moral qualms about bombing civilians, but my father, who served in the European theater in the arillery, never had any qualms about helping to bombard German towns.
The air war against Germany seems especially wasteful when you consider that most of the bomb tonnage was dropped after October 1944, when Germany’s defeat was certain.
British author Michael Burleigh in his marvellous book “The Third Reich A New History”(p. 746/747) summarizes the strategic bombing results nicely and I think evenhandedly.
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“The German war economy was driven underground or dispersed away from the cities. The economy gradually fragmented into regionally discreet unit, which in turn made extended transportation routes highly vulnerable to aerial interdiction. In March 1944, it was estimated that two million people were needed to restore severed transport links, but there were only 180,000 railwaymen and 100,000 prisoners of war available.”
"Those in charge of Germany’s war economy concurred, by highlighting the disruption of freight transport as being most responsible for hampering Germany’s ability to wage war. "
“The effects of direct bombing, although still increasing (in spite of the very heavy raids in the first months of 1944) progressively declined in significance and in its proportional share in causing the decline in production when compared with the extensive effects caused by transport difficulties.”
Significant volumes of enemy equipment and raw materials were diverted from the fighting fronts to home defence. Materials such as aluminium, which might have gone into producing forty-four thousand extra fighter aircraft, went into shell fuses for anti-aircraft guns.
Without bombing, the German army would otherwise have disposed of double the quantity of field artillery that it possessed.
Bombing also had indirect political effects on the enemy. It exposed the Nazi leadership to ridicule once it had failed the minimal test of any government, to protect its subjects from aggression. Malicious comments about Göring began to leach towards Hitler…"
That’s an interesting topic, because it raises the question of how effective was their intelligence. One major problem both in Germany and Japan was not enough information from before the war on industry in those countries.
Both Germany and Japan had seriously overestimated their abilities to avoid wars of attrition and they both expected to win much quicker.
The problem with the Schweinfurt Regensburg mission was the extremely high causality rate of the bombers with 60 out of 376 shot down and as many damaged, some unrepairable. The Allies couldn’t continue attacking that deep into Germany without fighter escorts, something they didn’t have until the long range P-51 Mustang was introduced and they had sufficient quantities in the winter of '43, '44.
The bombing strategy of the Allies were for the British to mass bomb at night and the US to do “precision” bombing during the day. The British had been attacking cities from before the disaster of the ball bearing raid.
The was certainly the case in the initial years of the war. More heavy bombers, with their longer range, should have been devoted to anti submarine warfare. However, the Battle of the Atlantic was pretty much over by May of 1943, when Dönitz called off operations in the North Atlantic.
However, by the summer of 1945, they had learned their lessons and were starting to change targets in Japan, based on their findings in post surrender Germany. The even further devastation is another reason that Japan would have lost the war by the end of the year, with or without the atomic bombs.
What TokyoBayer said; Speer was guilty of some serious Monday morning quarterbacking and did or should have known better in 1971. Ball bearings weren’t the bottleneck panacea target they were and are made out to be:
He might be forgiven for faulting the Allies for not launching repeated attacks in 1943 while still seeing things through the lenses of the fog of war; but the loss rates in the Schweinfurt-Regensburg raid in August and the second raid on Schweinfurt in October (another 60 B-17s lost, this time out of a force of only 291) were unsustainably high. A bomber offensive simply can’t be conducted if the attrition rate is 16-22% per mission.
The bombing of Berlin in August 1940 provoked the Germans into retaliatory attacks against British cities rather than their previous tactic of destroying airfields. This could have helped keep our fighters in the air in the following weeks.
[I know the Germans had bombed London the previous night, but it has been pretty much ascertained that it was a navigational error rather than a deliberate policy.]
Part of the issue was that the Allies tried to identify “choke points” for German industry and destroy those, in hopes that they’d be able to cripple entire segments of industry in a series of fell swoops.
It didn’t quite work out like they’d hoped, in that the Germans learned to distribute production, and that the bombing was rarely effective enough to entirely disable a facility and provide the sorts of critical destruction that they were hoping for.
Occasionally it did work- the campaign against the German oil infrastructure- synthetic and natural, was very effective, and there were other examples- in 1944, a set of raids on the Maybach plant in Friedrichshafen hung up Panther tank production for 5 months. Considering that the Panther was only in production for about 24 months, that’s very significant.