I like to think that there could never have be a situation where the war was started by the mad man, but run by the relatively sane 
The mention of “Bomber” Harris above remind me of that clip played over and over on the history channels where he lets us know that he thinks strategic bombing should be given a chance as its never been tried before. Quite a stern and icy face on that man, even in interviews long after the war was over.
Your cite says that the Gee navigation system was in place by the time of the Cologne raid and that system was an excellent navigation method. Finding Cologne with Gee was duck soup easy.
Don’t beat yourself up. It was true that from 1939 to the introduction of Gee in March of 1942, they couldn’t be sure of finding the right city at night.
I wonder if the RAF and USAAF had concentrated on long-range ground-attack fighters instead of heavy bombers; would results have been different? These figters could have hit targets with great precision, and would have been able to cope with defending fighters.
I still think that burning the cities was a viable plan-take the RAF raid in Hamburg-95% of the city was burned to the ground-no matter if the civilian population managed to reach bombshelters-the fact is, not nery much got built in Hamburg after that raid! Just about everuything in the center was in ashes. Why the decision to bomb dresden was made, i don’t know-but burning Shweinfurt to the ground would have made a difference.
By the way; did the USAAF bombing raids on the Rumanian oil refineries at Ploesti make any difference (in Germanie’s ability to carry on the war)?
The Nazi government, and to a slightly lesser extent, the economic structure, seemed to be a collection of what we would now call “special interest” groups, all jockying with each other for a slice of the pie.
It seemed to suit Hitler to ensure that the underlings (whether they be political party toadies, or industrial magnates) in his country be kept competing with each other, instead of possibly unifying into a power block that he couldn’t control.
This contributed to the underutilisation of the German industry for war production purposes. (Not just consumer goods production, but also inefficient supply chains.) I think Speer started to make changes in this regard in '43 or '44, when Germany finally realised, with the advance of the Red hordes, just what total war was (in terms of waging it, and losing it might mean).
Absolutely. As pointed out, the drain caused by the Allied strategic bombing campaign meant that the limited pool of German military manpower could not be used to bomb British cities, sink Allied convoys in the Atlantic, or kill Russians in the Ukraine.
As the Japanese found out, killing an elite pilot is not just the loss of a man and a plane, but also all of the time and resources spent training him (and/or his replacement).
But anyway, trying to calculate a dollar amount on the results of the bombing campaign was more of a post-war “marketing” strategy by the Air Force to justify (to the holders of the tax dollar purse strings) the money spent, and requested, by that service as an efficient means of DoD spending. All the services fought for survival when the politicians wanted to cut the military budget in favor of non-DoD spending.
A good fighter bomber needs to be stable at lower speeds, and fly low to find and attack ground targets. These are attributes that actually work against a pilot in a dogfight situation.
(I am not at home, but I have a couple books at home that analyse the air war in the Pacific… A good dogfighting plane is not a forgiving beast to fly. A stable and forgiving plane doesn’t seem to manuever as radically when needed.)
In a strictly unemotional, insect hive mind sense, attacking the population was a legitmate target. However, if we are to hold the (idealistic ?) beliefs that individual humans have an innate value, that killing (and war) should be used as a last resort, than we should not say that firebombing population centers for the sole purpose of killing civilians on a mass scale was a “just” strategy.
The purpose of bombing the civilain folks was to disrupt the production of war material (through killing or displacing the workers), and to break their morale, and hopefully cause them to pressure their leaders to sue for peace.
The first result works on a temporary basis. It requires repeated applications to ensure “success”. The reason that the German war production remained as high as it did to the end of '44 was that the German industry was disbursed to rural (and in some cases, underground) areas, instead of being conveniantly concetrated in the industrial cities. While scattering the industry makes supply and production distribution issues more of a headache, it did not, in itself, cripple the level of production. What did cripple it, was the disruption of the transportation infrastructure (railroads, bridges, barges).
The second result (the morale issue) failed entirely. I find it odd that “Bomber” Harris thought that he could break the German morale, when the Blitz on London showed that that kind of campaign only solidifies the “will” of the people to fight on. When the civilians themselves witness destruction of their homes, and loss of friends and loved ones, they become more motivated to fight on. Either from a desire for revenge, or through fear that being occupied by such a ruthless force would be worse.
Some, but the results were dissapointing. It seems more efficient to overrun the area than to try to destroy it from air, if possible. This result also shows that air power needs to be reapplied on a repeated basis for the desired effect.
They did-after the war. The Mosquito, which had no defensive guns (the fighter-
bomber and night fighter variants had forward facing guns) and was fast and light,
proved to be the forerunner of many postwar attack designs. The slow lumbering
heavy bomber pretty much ended with the B-52 line in the early 50’s (which
nevetheless is such a versatile platform that it is still in use today). It was simply
not cost-effective to have 10 men up in a heavy bomber when 2 guys in a Mosquito
could prove to be almost equally as destructive.
mlees Harris carried on the bombimg because in his opinion the Germans were not of the same fibre as the British.
To quote “All the towns and cities of Germany are not worth the bones of a single British Grenadier”
I believe that Harris made statements like that (even though the one you quoted doesn’t actually say that).
However, the Germans (through propoganda radio) were saying the same things about the moral fiber of the Brits and Churchill. He should have seen the parallel…
I wonder how much of that “fiber” stuff he actually believed. He may have said that stuff for public consumption, and to save face.
For morale purposes, he makes those statements because in the dark days when Britain stood alone, the public would be clamoring for some offensive action against the enemy.
For face saving reasons, the RAF (if not Harris personally) made a lot of promises about the heavy bomber (and strategic bombing strategy) to get a piece of those scarce defence funds. Can’t really say “Heh! How 'bout that? Looks like we were wrong there… Bloody sorry, old chum.”
Practically every paragraph in this post is well-written and consonant with what I have read in numerous historical analyses. 
The only quibble I would have is that I’ve read that the bombing of the oilfields coupled with the later concentration on synthetic fuel plants did eventually starve the German forces of fuel and contribute to their rapid collapse at the end.
Sailboat
I’ve read fairly often in opinion pieces in papers and book reviews as a rebuttal of any idea that bombing cities on the whole would have brought the war to an end, and that the Allies should have concentrated on the oil and fuel plants from the start.
…if you buy the theory that burning down german cities causes massive worker dislocation=stopping war industries. Consider what was involved: Harris had studied the USAAF attempt at precision bombing, and concluded it could not work. Instead, he had the RAF bomber command convert to night bombing, assisted by radar. If you decided to burn cities, all you had to do was drop a LOT of incindiary bombs-and follow this up with high explosive bombs (to spread the flames and destroy the water mains). No great accuracy was required, just get most of the bombs in the city center. And it worked-hamburg was set ablaze, and a huge firestorm erupted-the drafts caused by the fires sucked everything not nailed down into the center of the fire-bombers at 30,000 feet were buffeted by the updrafts. As i said, Hamburg was burned to the ground, and I doubt the Bloem&Voss Shpyards built any UBoats there , after this. Was this approach moral? I don’t know, but it strikes me that if the Allies had bombers capable of very high altitudes (>40,000 ft.), no german intercepter could have reached them-and firebombing would have been pretty safe (for the bomber crws). the USAAF approach resulted in the loss of thousands of aircrew’s lives, and wasn’t effective (until directed at synthetic fuel plants, refineries, etc.) 
But that’s the thing, they did. From ThyssenKrupps website
As I said, if the workers are still alive and capable of working, and their tools and facilities are intact, then whether they are living in comfort or in a hole in the ground, they can still keep producing. You either have to kill a very significant fraction of the the workers, destroy the infrastructure, or destroy the factory. People can hide in bomb shelters and then scratch a living in the rubble, roads and so on can be patched up with some effort, so bombing cities as a whole doesn’t really accomplish very much in the grand scheme of things. If you want to kill industrial production, you have to hit the industry or things like bridges or tunnels that are hard to replace.
I don’t know much about aeronautical engineering, but I suspect it’s a lot harder to build a bomber that can carry a sensible bomb load to 40,000 feet than it is to get a fighter up there with enough guns to take it out - certainly the USAF were never safe from fighter attacks unless they had escorts along, although they did escape the worst of the flak. How the numbers stack up when comparing four-engined ten-man bombers against twin-engine five-man bombers I don’t know, but I’ve always had a sneaking suspicion that the heavies weren’t as good value as the mediums, never mind exceptions such as the mosquito.
In retrospect swarms of Mosquitos at high altitude might have been more efficient than the four-engined multi-turret bombers, though that might have spurred the Germans to finding a counter to them too.
If more air resources have been allocated to it then the Atlantic Gap might have been closed a good deal earlier than it was.
Wish I could find the book but it was titled something like “Secrets of World War Two” and mentioned a specific study on strategic bombing. The results were that if the Allies had gone after German powerplants, the war would have ended at least a year earlier. The Americans did not go after the system because they believed that the grid set-up would make it too easy for the Germans to repair damage and reroute power, negating any damage. After the war, a study stated that a concentrated attack on the powerplants would have shut down Germany’s war industry. It makes sense considering how much efforts it would take to repair damaged plants and other factors such as difficulty hiding them.
(snip)
My understanding is that the US bombing campaign against Japan initially had less effect than the campaign against Germany, because a large amount of Japanese production was handled in thousands of little family workshops. When they switched to the low-level night firebombing raids, the disruption of Japanese industry was much greater due to the wider effect on both the production and the distribution networks.
Your cites helped a lot…i guess Tedder was wrong. One wonders if the whole strategic bombing campaign had been rethought in mid-1943; probably a lot of lives could have been saved. One last thing: I read once that the Schweinfurt raids (intended to detroy the german ball-bearing industry), was a costly failure. But after the war, the german admitted that had these raids been kept up for another 3 monthas, german tank production would have been severely impacted-got any info on that?
The unescorted deep raids on Schweinfurt were legendary debacles for the USAF, but I don’t know much about the strategic impact on the Nazi side. Wikipedia has some stuff that sounds fairly plausible, much of it regurgitated from here apparently.
If correct, then the USAF could have crippled ball-bearing production by mounting concentrated raids inn August 43 - but it would have been broken in the process. Losses (and damage) on the early raids there were terrible and would probably have been worse during a sustained offensive.
The ‘if only you’d hit the vital target properly the first time, before they realised just how vital it was’ scenario is not uncommon. e.g Spitfire production in the early days was done in just two factories. Two heavy well-targeted raids in the summer of 1940 could have left the RAF trying to fight the Battle of Britain with Hurricanes, US imports and whatever museum pieces they could scrape together.
Stephen Fry (of Fry and Laurie) wrote a novel in which
(Spoilers!!!)
Hitler’s death is prevented by use of a time/space wormhole, but the man who led the Nazis instead of him avoided total war and acheived a brokered peace that left Nazis in charge of large parts of Europe. So it’s one of those “screw with the past at your own peril” takes on time travel.
Another thing the WWII Germans didn’t seem to really understand was the need for really good flying instructors. The overall ace of the war was Erich Hartmann on the eastern front, who could rack 352 kills only because he was out there for so long. AFAIK, the obviously good pilots were not rotated back home to teach recruits their real world lessons.
This goes along a bit with what I’ve heard about the Japanese at the end of the war. One of the reasons for the kamikazes was that they didn’t trust their new pilots to do much more than hit a ship. Almost all their good pilots were dead.
This is something that has always intrigued me. Allied policy was to promote good pilots to desk jobs or rotate them out to flying school. German policy was to keep them flying combat even if they had been promoted to very high rank. Since the 80/20 rule seems to apply to fighter pilots, their policy actually makes very good sense indeed providing you can maintain a decent level of output from the flight schools.
I think the pilot problem the germans had was mainly related to their dismal planning and management in general, and the overmatch between allied and german resources. From here
the problem seems to be more with total flying hours and training rather than with whether fighter aces were doing the training.
At the start of WW2, Luftwaffe tactics and training were superior to that of the allies, but tactics stayed stale and training deteriorated, while that of the Allies rapidly went the other way.