I know that after WWII, there was much soul searching by senior USAAF and RAF commanders, about the cost vs. the benefits of strategic bombing. I undestand that many of the campaigns attempted (like the AF’s attempt to burn german cities to the ground, and the USAAF’s attempt to cripple german ball-bearing production) were found to have been ineffective. US and British bomber crews suffered very high casualties, and thousands of aircraft were destroyed. My question: did anybody calculate how many dollars it took to detroy a dollar’s woth of german materiel? To my mind, bombing has to be EXTREMELy expensive-you have to build the planes fuel them , train the crews, etc., So was the strategic bombing of Germany cost-effective?
On the basis you mention, it probably would be cost-effective. One bomb hitting a munitions plant would clearly cost the Germans more – in rebuilding expense and lost materiel than the cost of the mission.
To put things in perspective, some American munitions plants were churning out bombers at a rate of one per hour. If we assume that the German plants were of a similar efficiency, then even if it took 500 planes to take out one plant, and that the plant was back up and running a month later, it’d still be costing them more than it cost us. And I suspect that it both took significantly less than 500 bombers, and that the downtime would be longer than a month, plus all the other damage that would have been done by near-misses, German fighter planes shot down intercepting the bombers, etc.
It’s not a dollar cost/ benefit but a life cost/ benefit.
We may lose 50 guys on a mission, but if we destroy industry that would have made weapons that would have killed 500 of our guys, then it’s worth it. That’s the kind of calculation they made. The money is trivial.
Of course, the other side were making the same type of calculation.
Tell that to the Soviet Red Army or the North Vietnamese. 
Nope, not even that. In a war the only thing that matters is WINNING.
Yes and no. The problem is you can’t win if you continually lose more troops than you can afford to.
For example, before long range fighter escort became available, the loss rate for the Eighth AF exceeded our ability to train pilots, bombardiers and navigators to maintain the Eighth when all other AF obligations were taken into account.
The Soviet Union lost heavily in personel and territory but had a much larger population and a lot more territory than Germany and could tolerate the losses.
In the US Civil War, Grant and Lincoln fought a war of attrition because the north had far more resources than the south. Their plan was to continually attack at as many places as they could. Such constant attack was costly in casualties but the north could stand the loss. Northern losses were heavy but could be replaced. The southern losses were too much for them to replace.
German materials production reached its peak near the end of the war, near the peak of the Allied bombing (this increase largely for reasons of Germany going to “total war” footing in '42 and becoming more serious as time went on, and only a side comment on bombing ineffectiveness). Post-war analysis has shown that bombing factories and cities failed to swing the war and to the extent that it was useful, it was not for its effect in destroying resources but rather in diverting resources–fuel, flak guns, fighter aircraft, pilots, and so on.
Oh, on cost-effective: as others have said, cost-effective is not the issue here. The US had practically-limitless resources, Germany extremely finite resources. Look at it as Microsoft versus a startup. Microsoft can pay $100 for every $1 the startup pays and not break a sweat. Cost-effective? No, but with that money you can bet Microsoft will win anything it wants.
Air bombing and the Western Allies’ campaigns in North Africa were the pre-Sicily/Normandy attempts to find a method by which to attrite Germany. No one expected these ground campaigns to decide the war, though air leaders were most optimistic. Significant in this was the desire to be seen by Stalin as contributing materially to the USSR’s life-and-death struggle on the East Front. So cost-effectiveness wasn’t an issue, the issue was harass Germany until, years later, production and training were such that a full-on, decisive ground invasion was practical.
So the whole “if we don’t fight them over there, we’ll have to fight them at home” is actually true?
I don’t think it’s relevant here, though a lot of what was put into defense could otherwise have been put into offense. What was relevant was that Germany’s air defenses were concentrated on protecting the Fatherland and, more importantly, the German civilian population rather than German soldiers in the field. The populace was protected so it did not rebel but the Wehrmacht was in trouble when the Allies had air superiority. It was a devil’s bargain Germany had to make because of its limited resources.
When you are talking cost-effectiveness for this kind of thing, you need to consider opportunity costs. Would the resources spent on strategic bombing be better spent on some other area like tactical bombers/fighters, tanks, etc?
Well, i read that near the end of the war, the germans were able to keep production up-only there was no gasoline/diesel to fuel the tanks and fighter planes being produced. There was also the problem of NO men experienced enough to fly planes, drive tanks, etc.,-so many me (of military age) had been killed in Russia, that all that was left were boys and old men. I think air marshall teddar had been right-burn down the german cities, and deny the civilian population their housing. That strategy 9if enacted in 1942 and kept up) would have ended the war sooner.
The crucial German attrition from the bombing campaigns was of their elite fighter arm. That
was likely the main benefit, esp. from the Overlord invasion to the German surrender-the US
and Britain killed enough planes and pilots (many planes destroyed on strafing runs) that
the invasion of the continent could proceed apace. Without air superiority the Germans had
little chance of thwarting Overlord.
ralph124c I think it was Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris who was convinced that the mass bombing of German cities would bring about a quick victory.
Not Tedder.
Well, with the minor proviso that in 1942 the allied airforces could barely find Germany in the dark, never mind hit any specific targets, and daylight bombing would have resulted in them being massacred.
Bombing cities has generally proven to be a crappy use of resources compared to bombing specific targets. Humans can live in a hole in the ground, dress in rags and stay alive on very little, but they can’t build modern weapons without factories and machine tools, or deploy them without roads, fuel and the like.
The Blitz didn’t knock Britain out of the war any more than Dresden and the like knocked Germany out of the war. I’m not familiar with the effect the firebombing of japanese cities had on military production, but I would suspect it was pretty trivial compared to resource shortages caused by the naval blockade.
When the RAF and USAF were setting out their policies they had very little information about what would work, and afterwards a lot of effort went into justifying what turned out to have been sub-optimal decisions - because saying “you know what, it turns out we were wrong” isn’t good for your career when that many lives were invested.
If you dropped an air force officer from tiday back in 1940 or so, I doubt whether they would advise sticking to that same course of action.
As for the boys and old men routine, that was just the Nazis being dumb. Fortunately they didn’t really seem to cotton on that women could work the factories just as well as men, or indeed could fly planes and shoot guns if necessary. So they wasted lots of manpower on the home front and had to resort to slave labour and so on, while lots of potential riveters were still dealing with kinder und kuchen.
:smack: Except of course operation millennium took place in 1942 and they did indeed find Cologne just fine. I am such a numpty sometimes.
So they did indeed put the strategy into place in 1942 as per ralph124c’s suggestion, but it didn’t achieve what was hoped.
slaphead I don’t think the Nazis hadn’t cottoned on that women could do valuable work. It was more a case of the fact that Hitler had decreed that a womans place was in the home and he never went back on that.
Stupid yes, but then he was
It took a while and perhaps didn’t reach the same level as in other countries, but later in the war women definitely worked in the factories and served in paramilitary roles like air defence.
Didn’t they also have a surprisingly high number of people employed as manservants and the like? There was a certain standard of living they wanted to keep up even during the war.
There was certainly an element of that early on, in that Hitler had started the war and didn’t want people to get too miserable since they would pin it on him.
However I think in general the german war effort was not organised as comprehensively as the Allies. Not only was there a long delay in going to an all-out war footing, there was apparently also a dearth of official production statistics and so on, meaning they had a relatively poor grasp of military versus civilian production and consequently were not maximising military output efficiently. They didn’t get really comprehensive data on industrial output until the allied occupation, and a lot of contracts were awarded on the basis of personal and party loyalty.
The US apparently had a complete blueprint for all-out war production lying on the shelf, partially as a result of some macroeconomic studies done during the late thirties, and the UK didn’t have too many illusions as to how desperate it was all going to be and went all out early on.
Hitler thought it WW2 would never happen, and then when it did happen he thought it would all be won by having square heads, blue eyes, and contempt for difficulties. Fortunately. Imagine what WW2 would have been like if he’d kicked it off and then delegated to people who were efficient and competent. :eek: