Much of the “resistance” by air chiefs to certain target sets was a reasonable recognition of the limitations of the time.
Even in Viet Nam 40 years later, cutting roads & railroads was very difficult. Hundreds of tons of ordnance spent and significant losses of aircraft to achieve small and easily repaired damage.
Attacking large rail yards was much more plausible and was done. But the size of a “large” yard in 1940s Germany or Japan was still tiny by modern standards.
IMO, the tech for effective strategic bombardment was just coming into its own in mid 1944. Had the ground roll-up of German forces happened more slowly and / or had atomic bombs not been invented such that WWII had lasted into 1946 or 1947 we’d be having a very different conversation about the effectiveness of strategic aerial bombardment, especially against a target country with a crumbling counter-air capability.
IMO an air war under those conditions would start to resemble a slo-mo version of the classic naval gunfire battle: The first side to put effective fire on target quickly degrades the enemy counterfire capacity and a battle that started out pretty even on paper rapidly becomes a total rout with near total fleet sinkage for the losing side.
Were the bombings of Warsaw in 1939 and Rotterdam in 1940 navigational errors on the part of the Germans rather than deliberate policy? In any event, this was during the Battle of Britain which the Germans were not going to win as they couldn’t force the RAF to battle if they chose not to; the Me-109 could barely reach south-east England with fuel reserves to engage in combat. If RAF fighter losses got to be too high, they were going to abandon defending airbases in SE England and withdraw to the North, outside of the range of German fighter cover, to await Sea Lion should the Germans ever be foolish enough to launch it while recovering their strength.
No, I had mind to mention them but didn’t want to muddy the waters of the point I was making. I didn’t mention the Zeppelin raids and the shelling of East coast towns in WWI for the same reason.
Relocating the airbases to the North would have had a significant impact on the response time of Fighter Command when dealing with German raids and also reduced their combat time.
In the case of Japan, the combination of strategic bombing and the blockage produced in even greater effects on the civilian population through the destruction of their housing; severe food shortages which resulted in high absenteeism from illness, fatigue, and the time requirements of obtaining food, either from the black market or theft; and loss of morale and defeatism, an while the later could not be openly acknowledged or shown, it had an overall effect on war efforts.
After Japan surrendered, there was no question by the ordinary citizens that they had been defeated, and one of the reason that the country quickly followed the American requirements after the war.
In Germany, as terrible as it was, the strategic bombing was not as bad as in Japan, and the land battle actually occurred in their home country, there may not have been as much potential to deny that they were truly defeated. However, I wonder if it had a similar effect after the war on the civilian population.
This brings us to a point that hasn’t really been raised: there were really three separate campaigns. The first was the original bombing campaign by the RAF, which lacked fighter escorts over Germany. The second was the “round the clock” campaign by the RAF and USAF, which still lacked fighter screening most of the way. The third was the round-the-clock campaign after the introduction of the P-51D, which made the sorties much more survivable.
Certainly bombing factories had a substantial effect on German war production, but prior to 1944 it also wasted huge amounts of men and materiel that probably outweighed German losses. All the money and steel being used to build Lancasters could have been used to build fighters (which were in drastically short supply through most of the war) and tanks.
Was that true for the US though? I mean, we produced some 88,000 tanks, 37% of which were M4 Shermans, and 200,000 combat aircraft over the course of the war, 50% of which were fighters of some stripe, and only 15% were heavy bombers.
It doesn’t seem like the US was having to make hard choices on what to produce because of the resources devoted to strategic bombing…
As Ravenman succinctly put it in another thread, the cost of combat aircraft scales neatly with weight. So a single heavy bomber represents 5-10 fighters or other small aircraft. Plus, the US involvement in the European theater was pretty limited until 1943 (and the Mustang D became available shortly thereafter). So we’re mostly talking about scarce British resources.
Or a much smaller portion of it could have been used to make drop tanks, so that the fighters would have had enough gas to escort the bombers all the way to Germany and back. That would have greatly reduced the losses in the early bombing campaigns.
Expendable drop tanks were already being used, to enable the newly-built fighters in America to be flown across the Atlantic to deliver to England. But nobody thought to use them for the fighters on bombing escort runs for quite a while. Or, more likely, getting such an idea through the military bureaucracy took a long time.
Why didn’t the British follow up the successful destruction of the German dams? Destroying the power plants and depriving German cities of water was very effective.
This is the definitive book on the subject. The bombings of cities were a science aiming at maximum destruction/death. Ever wonder why the Germans werent charged at Nuremberg for their bombing of cities?
Petroleum fuel was the weakest point in the German economy-so why weren’t the oil refineries, pipelines, etc. attacked relentlessly? German synthetic fuel was also a weak link-why were these plants not destroyed?
The failure of all those ‘scientific’ theories of bombing is that it tried to apply a logic that was not there.
Yes there were calculations about housing density, but destroying houses is not the same as destroying production - homeless people can still work, factories can be disbursed.
They tried to assume that after some period of bombing, the population would just give up and perhaps remove the leaders.
The goal of populations under threat of bombing is not to prevent it, or to find someone to blame, it is simply to survive.
Every time they had survived they had won. Unless bombing were to erase people completely, it was never going to work. We did not have the capacity for that kind of bombing until so late in the war that the Germans had already lost
Thing is, Harris stupid theory had already been well debunked during the London blitz, why the heck did he imagine that the German population would react any differently to Londoners?
How much did German bombing disrupt British production, or the railways, or demoralise the population? In fact production went up, British railways were almost impossible to break, and as for the population, it simply hardened their resolve.
Yes bombing had its effect, especially in reducing the Luftwaffe, but its hard to say that it had the intended effects until so late in the war that it was already won.
They were targeted heavily. One of my uncles was on bombers that flew missions over the Ploesti oil fields in Romania. These were practically suicide missions. The fields were heavily defended.
The key thing to keep in mind about aerial bombing of the day is how ineffectual it was on certain types of targets and how quickly things could be repaired. Most bombs missed quite badly. You could have a thousand bombers drop bombs over the fields and cause only a small amount of damage. Damage that would be fixed in days.
Railroad systems also seem like a prime target. But an attack on a rail yard would cause damage that would be fixed in a day or two. If you lucked out and hit a main rail line square on, taking out a 40 foot section, it would be back in service in a half day.
The bridges across major rivers illustrate this. Look at Remagen. A major railway bridge that the US Army lucked into capturing in March, 1945. If I was in charge, I would have insisted that it and all its brethren be bombed to pieces in June of 1944 to slow resupply to the Western Front. Except: there was no reasonable way of taking out those bridges by air. They tried, of course. But from so high an altitude that it made little difference.
As for the dam busting idea. The Germans were really good at figuring out how to defend specific targets. Once they saw the new way of attacking dams, they no doubt beefed up defenses and attacking that way again (so very low level) was not going to work.
Weapons and weapons platforms are not made a big Business Factory where you can just pour in steel and have the object of your choice roll out the other side; the production of something as complicated as a Lancaster bomber or a Sherman tank requires tooling, supplier networks, part manufacturers, and on and on. Switching in 1943 from producing bombers to tanks would have likely resulted in far fewer bombers but not many more tanks.
It is perhaps illustrative of this point that the Commonwealth continued to build Halifax bombers even after they decided the Lancaster was their preferred bomber, simply because the math showed it was more efficient to keep Halifax plants and sub-plants producing those parts than it was to retool to build Lancasters. And that’s just two different kinds of bomber, that actually looked similar.
I’m also not sure how much Britain neglected fighter production; I admit I’ve never heard that was a problem. During the Battle of Britain the UK was building fighters faster than Germany could shoot them down - at about four times the rate of German production, in fact. Britain was always short of fighters in the sense that there really was no way they could have too many fighters; the Second World War was such that no matter how many fighters they built, more fighters would have been even better. But I do not believe it the case that Britain ever neglected fighter production.
