Which did more to win the war?

The issue wasn't just that one was greater than the other - but that one couldn't be transported to satisfy the other.

On the issue of how many more than "several" sythnfuel plants there were - by early 1944 there were 25, with 10 in the Ruhr alone...with another four hydrogenation plants built after that. That makes twenty-nine - somewhat more than "several". Seven more were under construction but weren't completed before the end of the war.

 

I wonder if we are using the best available approach here. Indeed I wonder whether there is such a thing as a 'better' or a 'best' or a 'more'. We know that the allied air effort contributed to victory but how useful is it to retrospectively back-fill the events with such terms in mind?

Discussions over oil / petroleum reserves relative to demand and the extent of Luftwaffe nightfighter destruction by one air force over the other are, I think, capable of being argued either way reasonably succesfully with the available figures.

The problem arises when these figures - and how one might employ them to advance a point of view - are considered more closely. It seems likely that the figures are estimates. They are not necessarily actuarially correct. Nor might fighter claims on the ground or in the air safely taken to be forensically accurate.

What if one were to step aside from the themes that have developed? You know, area versus precision, night versus day, P-51s versus self-defending formations, oil versus de-housing versus transport ...

Far from there being a series of great architects of victory in a neat, sequential order, the air war over Europe might be seen as also being characterised by a number of quite discontinuous developments that reflected opportunistic use of a new or previously under-utilised advantages: paper drop tanks, finger four fighter formations, a massive injection of men and materiel from a previously nominally isolationist ally, German war leaders coping with the ill-considered actions of their Italian contemporaries, German war leaders permitting a two front land war ...

I like to think a lot of planning worked and went a long way to victory. I even want to believe in data as incorrupt evidence; tonnages of this, bags of that. But I am afraid that I cannot see it that way. Some of the greatest plans seem to have been formulated after 1945 in memoirs and histories. Casablanca and its directives springs to mind as a good example.

Michael

 

For example...

To what degree is the USAAF's "success rate " against NIGHTfighters inflated by the several weeks that Me110s were re-deployed against the 8th Air Force in daylight ....and after a short time they were suprised by the first long-range P47 escorts, to the LW's very considerable cost IIRC??

 

Hi phylo roadking,

I tend to run when I see bold, italic, bold-italic and upper case framed as a rhetoric rather than a question.

I certainly respect your right however, to see a causal linkage between the demise of Luftwaffe night fighters and the presence of the USAAF, if that is what you are getting at.

Regards,

Michael

 

Yes, but knocking them down on a one-to-one basis as the RAF had to do is far more meritorious than the gift handed to the USAAF of knocking staffeln of them down when the Germans were stupid enough to start using nightfighters in daylight, only to be caught out by monoplane fighters

What would those figures for comparison look like without that event?

 

A kill is a kill however it may come, or as a Marine once said 'If you are in a fair fight you are doing something wrong'.