The Bombing of Germany

By that definition there is no longer such a thing as a "civilian", only enemies out of uniform. Basically it's "anything is allowed as long as it hurts the enemy war effort" even if it does so very indirectly.

Now add asymmetrical warfare, which is the logical answer to an unbalaced firepower situation and enjoy the results. Breaking the "civilians are not legittimate targets" rule was a horrible mistake and we are all paying the consequences.

Not the kind of world I like and one Douhet, Harris and their likes contributed a lot to create it.

 

not wanting to defend Douhet,Harris ..(perish the thought ),but
1)civilians have always been legitimate targets
2) in the od days,less civilians were killed,because there were less people to killed and you can kill less people with a sword
3)there was another 'responsible' that contributed a lot to create it :the aircraft:without the aircraft,no bombardments;it is an illusion to think that the invention of the aircraft would not be used for military purposes:if something is invented,mankind will always look if it can be used in a war .

 

Yes and no, there was an effort to limit "legittimate targets" to people carring weapons and/or wearing a uniform, that's what many international treaties were all about. I believe the signatories were well aware that you can't keep civilians entirely out of the fighting, especially if you get what was then called a "franc tireurs" phenomenon, or when assaulting a city but the attempt to limit targets to the military was international law.

There have always been and will always be "collateral damage" but that definition assumes you are aiming at a military target, with a reasonable expectation of hitting it, and accidentally hit someone else.

IMO The aircraft, that made targets out of people who can't shoot back and can't retreat/surrender, and even more WMDs and balistic missiles made those rules something well worth defending even at the cost of higher military losses in the current conflict.

The main purpose of having a military is to protect the civilians, allowing them to deliberatly target civilians is self defeating in the long run, that particular enemy may be unable to retaliate, but asimmetrical warfare has made even that argument doubtful, and sooner or later you will be facing one that can.

Most soldiers will not see "the big picture", their job is reaching the assigned objectives with minimal losses, that sort of decision must be made at the top.

 

Hardly fair to blame Harris. When he became head of Bomber Command the Luftwaffe had already killed over 40,000 civilians in Britain, along with tens of thousands more in Poland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia etc.

The German army had likewise killed hundreds of thousands of civilians and the German government had begun implementing their plan of seizing food from Poland and the USSR, with much of the existing population being expected to starve to death.

It's worth remembering the first experience of strategic bombing Harris ever had was as a fighter pilot defending London from Zeppelin raids in WW1.

 

If the private war from Harris had succed:i.e. if Germany had capitulated in februrary 1944 due to the bombardments on Berlin,would anybody critizise Harris (the greatest soldier in British history)? Noone would dare.Harris would have be made an earl,or a duke(my goodness) and Britain would have ...no army,only an air force(of course,some malevolents would argue that the air force is only flying artillery),and the Douhet theory would be very politically-correct,indeed.
But,..Harris failed. He lost his battles:his promises were only vain bragging .And,one should think:a general who failed,is fired (Wavell,Auchinleck....),the only general who won an air battle(Dowding),was treated ignominiously .But,Harris,was not fired,of course,after the war,he got nothing and the men of BomberCommand were treated ignominiously .But,was it because he failed,or because he killed to many German civilians ?

 

If countries built their war making plants and factories outside of cities on their own where they could be bombed in relative peace, then the argument would stand. But when the war building machine is diversified and spread out through cottage industries, one can only expect "collateral damage" to occur. I pity the children, but to the factory workers they are targets.
Should Germany have had the range to bomb the US, our cities would have been hit without prejudice because many of our factories are with in our cities. We would have had many women killed as they were a large part of the work force.
There were some good examples of accurate bombing, mostly from low to medium altitudes. In Chambery, there was a strike that took out German communication centers and a major railroad yard. Only two errant bombs were reported by the civil authorities, and the military targets were devastated.

 

Harris was not responsible for making policies, Churchill and Chamberlain were, but for executing then.
Within that "limitation" he did practically everything he could have to turn the bombing campaign into an indiscriminate massacre of civilians in the false hope that it would bring about a German collapse, he obviously learned nothing from the moral effects "the blitz" had on his own country.

He must have been aware the bombs were beng dropped all over the place and that unless he increased the levels of training (possibly to the expense of the number of operational squadrons) they would keep falling all over the place but did nothing and resisted any attempt to change tactics and target priority.
His attempts to justify the the rather poor results the campaign was having, by confusing the issue about what was the objective and finally comming up with "anything goes as long as it hurts the enemy war effort a little", created a precedent that will haunt western democracies for years to come.

 

On the contrary, he learned that area bombing cities was more effective than precision bombing of factories.

That's the lesson the British took from Coventry and other attacks. This is from a letter from Herschel Johnson to the US secretary of state:

David Irving, no friend of the British war effort, described area bombing:

On the contrary Harris tried hard to increase accuracy and did change tactics, pioneering things like thousand bomber raids to do as much damage to Germany as possible.

It wasn't about damaging the enemy "a little", it was about doing as much damage as possible. The whole idea behind area bombing was that by hitting the city you would reduce production in the city as a whole, rather than just in an individual factory.

Hamburg is an example of what Bomber Command was trying to achieve. Hamburg had a population of about 1.5 million. About 50,000 people were killed in the raids in the summer of 1943. The population of Hamburg almost halved, with hundreds of thousands of people fleeing the city.

Before the worst raid on Hamburg over 600,000 people worked in the war industries. 2 months after the raid that was down to just over 300,000. 3 months production from the entire city was lost.

Harris certainly didn't create a precedent.

When the war began Britain decided not to attack targets in Germany because of the risk of civilian casualties. The RAF was ordered to only attack German warships at sea or in harbour, ships in port were off limits because of the risk of collateral damage.

Those restrictions remained in place until 10 May, when the Luftwaffe bombed targets in France, Belgium and the Netherlands. The RAF were then allowed to attack road and rail targets west of the Rhine to slow German reinforcements.

That policy held until 15 May, when the British government decided, in light of the Luftwaffe devastating Rotterdam, that military targets could be attacked in the rest of Germany.

The next change in Bitish bombing policy came after the start of the Blitz, when the RAF were allowed, in light of the "indiscriminate" German bombing, to attack targets of opportunity in Germany.

The RAF then carried out their first area bombing raid in mid December, as a reprisal for Coventry.

By the time Harris was appointed head of Bomber Command the gloves were already off, with the Germans having area bombed Britain to the limit of their capacity, killing tens of thousands of civilians.

You don't "create a precedent" by simply adopting the methods your enemy have already used en masse.

 

I cannot give a direct quote or reference, but Albert Speer said that about 2 MILLION german men and women were 100% occupied defending Germany from the bombing attacks.

All those factories producing 88s etc, and the people shooting the stuff into the sky, and the men in the Luftwaffe doing nothing else but trying to shoot down bombers.

Plus of course all those trying to repair the damage.

And finally, the damage and loss of production when they actually DID hit those factories.


John.

 

German war production continued to increase until late 1944 when it started to decline more for lack of raw materials than for anything else. The bombing campaign failed overall to reduce industrial output and Harris failed to perceive his campaign had hit a sort of "law of diminishing returns" and continued with a strategy that was increasingly ineffective.

The accuracy of the British night bombers remained very low throughout the war with few exceptions, so he either was not very good or he didn't try very hard.

But it didn't work, the Germans dispersed the factories and production rose rather then decrease. No doubt Harris believed he was "doing as much damage as possible", but that doesn't make it true and he was uresponsive to any suggestion about a different approcach.

His "precedent" is that in his attempts to morally justify the bombings he removed all distinctions between soldiers and civilians and that's the horrible legacy he left us.

Both sides began the war with a "no city bombing rule", the escalation towards indiscriminate bombing was gradual and both sides contributed. The Germans, being on the offensive, usually crossed the "unwritten lines" first, but the British and French also bombed cities to the best of their (very limited at the time) capability. In fact Germany didn't have an equivalent of Bomber Command as the Luftwaffe was designed around army support not strategic bombing.

 

TOS,


"German war production continued to increase until late 1944 when it started to decline more for lack of raw materials than for anything else. The bombing campaign failed overall to reduce industrial output"


Does this mean that if there were NO bombing campaign, that German production would have been NO higher or lower than what it actually was?

That the bombing campaign had no effect either way on the supply of those raw materials?

That those factories producing 88s and the ammunition for them would NOT have been diverted to zapping T-34s or Shermans?

That the crews manning those guns would not have been drafted into the german army?

That the firemen etc would not have been drafted also?

That the hospitals and staff would not have been treating wounded soldiers instead?

That a large part of the Luftwaffe 'Fighter Command' would not have been sent to the Eastern Front?



John.

 

Look at the huge increase in German airframe production and compare it to aircraft that managed to fly. Clearly something was badly wrong and thus the 'increased production' that looked good in a statistical chart did not mean an increase in combat aircraft numbers.
The same applies to tanks. Whilst huge numbers of hulls were made the guns and engines were not made in enough numbers to allow for wear and tear replacement. Another huge statistical spike in tanks produced but not the full story.

I believe a major problem with the new 'war winning' U-Boats was the mis-match between components made on various dispersed sites.

What they lacked in bomber-killing capacity they more than made up for on the ground in Russia and the East.
Harris has nothing to fear in any competition to see who killed the most babies.

 

German armament production lagged well behind planned production. According to Speer bombing meant a loss of about 30% of production in 1943/1944.

As to "diminishing returns", the opposite is true. Bombing achieved quite a lot in the second half of 1943. The first half of 1944 saw BC diverted to invasion support, in the second half of 1944 bombing devastated the German economy and caused a collapse in military production.

On the contrary, accuracy increased considerably. In the period August - November 1941, 20% of bombs dropped at night fell within 3 miles of the aiming point. By April - July 1943 it was up over 60%, and by late 1944 over 90%.

Richard G Davis, official historian of the USAF, says Bomber Command was more accurate, on the whole, than the 8th AF. The USSBS bears that out with their comparison of attacks on 3 large German oil plants, with the RAF at night putting a higher proportion of their bombs within the plant boundaries than the 8th AF managed.

Well, production rose as it rose everywhere. It didn't rise as much as it should have, it didn't rise to the levels the Germans needed.

As to Harris being "unresponsive", it's worth looking at the history of British bombing. In 1940, after Rotterdam had shown the folly of trying to avoid civilian casualties in Germany in the hope the Germans would show restraint, BC embarked on a campaign against German oil refineries. Calculations showed a few thousand tons of bombs would put an end to the German war effort. When that didn't work BC switched to other precise targets, each of which would win the war.

It's little wonder Harris didn't believe in what he called "panacea" targets.

Again, Harris just did what the Germans had already done. He area bombed German cities 18 months after they had area bombed British cities. There is no difference in methods, only in scale.

Not really, no.

On 1st September 1939 Germany began what was at best indiscriminate bombing of Poland, and at worst deliberate targeting of civilians.

Britain didn't bomb Germany at all.

In early 1940 the Germans bombed Norwegian towns with again a complete disregard for civilians, and possibly deliberate attempts at terror. Britain didn't bomb Germany at all.

On 10 May 1940 the Germans bombed targets in France, the Netherlands and Belgium. Britain responded with attacks in the rear of the German army, strictly limited to operations west of the Rhine.

On 14 May the Germans took the gloves off and devastated Rotterdam, killing 900 civilians. That convinced the British government that no matter how much restraint they showed, the Germans would do whatever suited them. Britain began bombing military targets in Germany.

That remained the position until the RAF began inflicting unsustainable losses on the Luftwaffe during the BoB. The Germans switched more and more to large scale night bombing, inflicting heavy casualties on the British population.

When the Luftwaffe realised they could not win air superiority by bombing airfields, they launched an all out attack on London, killing tens of thousands.

By the time Britain launched its first area attack on a German city, 20,000 British civilians had been killed in German bombing attacks.

To put that in perspective, the RAF killed less than 500 German civilians in the whole of 1940, and by the start of 1943 had still killed less than 10,000. The Luftwaffe had killed 20,000 British civilians by the end of 1940, over 40,000 by the spring of 1941.

They went on to killed tens of thousands more in the Balkans and USSR in 1941, before Harris was made head of BC.

 

But I see nothing honorable in entering into that sort of competition.

The effect of the bombing campaign on production is difficult to quantify, obviously the Germans would have produced more, or more likely, given the the raw materials limitation, about the same but to better quality control, without the bombings but how much is nearly impossible to determine.

The increase in production despite the bombings is more than enough to show that the airpower advocates theories were flawed, airpower was not going to win the war by itself. In the end it was the Soviet occupation of the Rumanian oilfields that crippled the german war machine.

 

It is your 'competition' because you brought it up. Be aware of the situation AT THE TIME rather than applying modern day hindsight.

I see no one saying it would. You seem to be arguing with yourself.

Oil, even if you have it, is no use stuck miles from where it is needed. Any comment on the Bombing of the German transport system?

 

What I think of our bombing in Germany....My neighbor Frank Farr has written books about his days as a navigator that bombed Germany and was shot down, survived to live in a German prison. What amazes me is that if you read the statistics of a bombing groups survival in that air campaign the only thing you can conclude is that our crews new how badly the odds were against them and they still got in their planes to do their job. This to me is bravery at its best and he has described in his books the difficulty of making a bombing pass to keep the norton sights on target never varying in the slightest to dodge the anti-aircraft flak that was always present by Germany's important targets. What determination it must have taken a crew to accomplish a bombing run in these conditions. Many were lost and some were lucky like my neighbor to survive to tell us what it was like. He spent many hungry days before finally getting out of the prisons. Yes we were effective at bombing in Germany but we paid a high price in losses to obtain that. We couldn't have done that without the bravery of our air crews.

 

Wasn't it true that by Jan. 1945, Germany's industrial production in steel and synthetic oil was down to nil, without any allied ground forces in its borders? How does that compare to Germany's industrial capacity in 1939 when it did not controll conquerored territories?

 

Some figures from Georg Feuchter in his book Der Luftkrieg.......

Oil from ploesti was down 80% by the time the Red army over ran it and synthetic fuel in March '44 Produced 181,000 tons, and consumed 156,000 tons, by Dec '44 it produced 26,000 tons, and consumed 44,000 tons.

In May 1944 the German produced 156,000 tons of aviation gasoline and the allied forces dropped 51,000 tons of bombs on German and Romanian oil installations. In August the amount of gasoline produced had dropped to 17,000 tons. By January 1945 aviation gasoline production had fallen to 11,000 tons. By March it ceased altogether. Moreover the production of gasoline for road vehicles had dropped from 134,000 tons in March 1944 to 39,000 tons in March 1945. The production of diesel oil had fallen from 100,000 tons in March 1944 to 39,000 tons in March 1945.

German aircraft, tanks and vehicles were almost running on empty.

The German war industry owed it's survival to a system of extreme decentralization, & the maintenance of it's production depended in the last resort on keeping open the railways, rivers and roads. On the day when the Anglo- Americans shifted the centre of gravity of their operations to the communications within the Reich the overstretched network began rapid disintegration, and once started became irreversible.

Germany possessed one of the most complex and well maintained railway systems in the world. By the end of 1944, marshaling capacity had fallen to forty percent of normal and barely twenty percent by the end of January 1945. This severely hampered the receipt of raw materials and delivery of the finished products.

The water transport system, which was mainly used for the transport of coal and coke, was initially very efficient. In the first few months of 1944, 66 thousand tons of coal and coke were moved by water daily. By October 1944, the daily average had fallen to 23 thousand tons. This crippled the industrial and railway sectors. They were effectively useless without coal to heat their boilers.


So the attacks on oil production, oil refineries and tank farms, plus the destruction of the transportation network led to the general collapse of Germany in 1945, because this occurred sufficiently late in the war in that Germany was due to be defeated, some times the decisive nature of the bombing is over looked.

The Strategic bombing survey says....


''German armies were still in the field. But with the impending collapse of the supporting economy, the indications are convincing that they would have had to cease fighting -- any effective fighting -- within a few months. Germany was mortally wounded.''

 

Actually from what I recall of post war analysis (perhaps in the strategic bombing survey) they concluded that the problem was that it took longer than anticipated. In several cases where they targeted specfic industries they shifted targets just before it started to have a major impact. The final targets of transportation and energy they stuck with and it crippled the German war effort.

 

Perhaps one of the most telling statistics is the graph in the Adam Tooze book ''wages of Destruction-The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy'' showing that German military production in late '42-early '43 'on average, was rising [& expecting to continue to rise] by 5% per month. After the Ruhr/Hamburg raids in March-July '43 by Bomber command, for the next eight months, German average military production increase was zero.

Tooze states that during the Battle of the Ruhr, Bomber Command severely disrupted German production. Steel production fell by 200,000 tons. The armaments industry was facing a steel shortfall of 400,000 tons. After doubling production in 1942, production of steel increased only by 20 percent in 1943. Hitler and Speer were forced to cut planned increases in production. This disruption caused resulted in the zulieferungskrise [sub-components crisis]. The increase of aircraft production for the Luftwaffe also came to an abrupt halt. Monthly production failed to increase between July 1943 and March 1944.

Thousands more fighters would have been produced,[the German air force planed to produce 80,000 a year by '45 but in '44 produced 36,000] without the bombing, plus a big increase in armour, guns etc,etc. Germany would have been much more heavily armed with battle front weapons and the air force would have proved a much more effective opponent.

And the by product of the bombing was a 3rd of all German artillery production, and a 5th of all shells went to aa defence. Half of all electro technology products, and a 3rd of the optical industry. The aluminium used in the aa defence could produce an estimated 10 to 15 thousand more fighters.

The German authorities deployed over a million people in defense against air attacks, committing 10,000 of their 88 mm. artillery pieces and perhaps 70 percent of the Luftwaffe’s to home defense. [which was decimated in trying to defend the homeland] the 88s were the same gun tubes used as antitank weapons; every 88 deployed in Germany meant one less facing Allied soldiers.