It would have been difficult. The strategic bombing campaign was not a trivial effort. The United States and the British Empire devoted a huge amount of manpower and resources to it. But ultimately, they could afford to do so. It’s doubtful however that Germany, which was already stretched by its ground wars, could have afforded to divert anything significant into what would essentially have been a third front. Even the limited bombing campaign against England had to be wound down once Germany shifted its focus to invading the Soviet Union.
The US and Britain would have done a lot better if they had switched production of heavy bombers to tanks and trucks and attack bombers. The bombing campaign was a sideshow that accomplished very little. Especially after D-day. Before D-day the bombers were the only way they could hit the Germans, after D-day they were an almost complete waste.
The strategic bombing campaign was not as decisive as its advocates claimed it would be. But it did serve as a form of attritional warfare. The Germans couldn’t simply ignore the fact that the British and the Americans were bombing Germany. So the Germans had to commit resources to air defense. Being as the British and Americans had a lot more resources to spend on bombing Germany than Germany had to spend on defending itself from that bombing, the overall balance favored Britain and America.
This line of thinking became a popular one about twenty years ago but it’s of very doubtful truth. If bombing was so remarkably ineffective, then one must wonder why the Germans put so much effort into stopping it - so much that just the resources diverted to stop it represented a huge blow to German war production, and resulted in the diversion and destruction of almost the entire Luftwaffe.
25% of all German artillery shell production was eventually diverted to trying to shoot down strategic bombers. Almost all their fighters ended up committed to it. If the bombers had not hit a single target you still have to attribute a hell of an impact to them.
The American strategic bombing campaign pretty much revolved around trying to destroy critical-path/bottleneck factories and resources for German production.
So they’d try and bomb say… the ball bearing factories in Schweinfurt under the thinking that some 44% of all German ball-bearing production was done in Schweinfurt, and if they could seriously damage that, they’d basically impact production of all equipment relying on ball bearings.
Of course, this required there to be an actual bottleneck in the production of ball bearing, which in the case of ball bearings wasn’t the case- the Germans had a huge stockpile, as well as sources from outside Germany.
A successful example was the April 27-28th 1944 bombing of the Maybach engine plant in Friedrichshafen. This was the sole engine plant for Panther and Tiger tank engines in Germany, and put the factory out of production for 5 months, seriously slowing production of both finished tanks, and probably more importantly spare parts, which overall for tanks went from 25-30% in 1943 to 8% in the Fall of 1944.
Another successful example was the Oil Campaign, to destroy German sources and stockpiles of petroleum, oil and lubrication products.
Not necessarily. The bombing campaign probably was mostly ineffective in terms of the damage it was causing to the German economy. It was basically dropping bombs at random on Germany (or a country near Germany in some cases) and hoping that some of the bombs hit valuable targets. But even if only one bomb out of a thousand was hitting a military target, a much higher percentage of bombs were hitting something.
And from the German point of view, anything that got hit was bad. It was bad if a bomb blew up an ammunition factory. But it was also bad if a bomb hit an elementary school. Both were potential targets that Germany had to defend even if only one of them was contributing to the war effort.
So Germany had to spend resources defending against bombers even if the bombers were usually missing military targets and not doing any damage to the German war effort.
Yes, but the strategic bombing campaign was also an enormous sink of Allied resources that would have much better been spent on more quickly defeating Nazi U-Boats and building more LSTs for the invasion of Europe. Bombing Germany wasn’t going to win the war (remember that most bombs were dropped after September 1944, after the war was won). The only thing that would win the war was Allied boots in Berlin.