Largest Strategic Mistake(s) Made By The Allies

Black Cat - cheers for the reply, will answer it later, bit busy at the moment.

 

I have read figures in that range before, but they strike me as being a little high. Prof Richard Overy puts the figure at 7% of Britain’s resources.

Considering the ultimate strategic benefits of the bombing by both the USAAF and the RAF (the forced redirection and destruction of German industry, diversion of manpower and equipment, the defeat of the Luftwaffe, the increasing paralysis of German transportation/armour etc etc etc) the psychological and political benefits, I would say the bombing offensive justified its material and human cost.

Given that I don’t feel the strategic bomber offensive was over-resourced, I would say 'Yes'.

 

Added to what Greenjacket has said, did the bomber offensive not take up something like 2 million Germans in air defense of one sort or another when they could be better employed elsewhere.

 

I wonder if someone has postwar figures on what kind of impact the bomber offensive had on British economy.I mean this as purely economical aspect, as during the war you have to do what you gotta do.

I did read some authors claim that post war damage might have been extensive and as a matter of fact the British economy struggled to survive because of the resources put in the bomber production?

 

That is not true. Great Britain used a bit more than 40% of all her war effort on the RAF. Remember that the British Army (from 1942 on) was mostly equipped with American material and certainly those 15.000 Lancasters and 20.000 Spitfires produced are a very clear sign that Great Britain - with the 'limited' industrial capacity she had - directed a lot of her efforts to the air arm.

The economic cost of the Air offensive might be justified, but the human cost definately no. 60.000 aviators lost is very, very high. I don't think all those men's deaths were that worth it...

 

Source? (And if you have it to hand, what was the derivation of that statistic?)

I think you have your statistics a little confused - 20,000 Spitfires is about right but there were only ever 7377 Lancasters built, and 430 of these were constructed in Canada.

I think you may be thinking of Mustangs, of which there were 15,000+ produced, but these were built in the Unites States, and thus not a strain on British industry.

In all the Allied bomber offensive killed 140,000 American, British and Commonwealth aviators. Considering the massive accelerating effect that they had on the end of the war, and that Allied war dead in Europe are counted in the millions, I disagree.

[ 19. November 2003, 03:14 PM: Message edited by: Greenjacket ]

 

supplement :

US 8th Air Foce lost a total of :

4,754 B-17's
2,112 B-24's

this is from all causes and not just combat ops

~E

 

A few general thoughts about bomber production - Britain already had fairly extensive design and production facilities for aircraft which could not have been easily turned to armoured vehicle production. The problem of 'taking the fight to the enemy' rises again - something which could not happen effectively between 1940-1943/4 if reliance had been placed totally on the Army. For this reason, jet fighters would have been of limited use due to insufficient range. And as for the Battle of the Atlantic, the Navy was probably far more effective than Coastal Command could have been due to the huge area involved....

 

I don't have the exact source right now, but I'm sure it was from one of the statistics Kai posted somewhere. Well, I didn't know the exact number of Lancasters, but they were quite a lot for a 'limited' war industry.

And I was referring only to the British air casualties.

This figure is too high. Martin posted somewhere the total ammount of British casualties there and were not as big as I thought and the American figures were not bigger than 30.000. And it IS a VERY large number of people killed. And it is not wise to compare the aviators killed to the civilians they killed. And if you take into account the ammount of ground and air troops, the percentage is much higher in the air arm.

 

When considering heavy bomber production, bear in mind the Halifaxes which I believe outnumbered Lancasters, and the Stirlings too. Liberators were also employed by the RAF though they were manufactured in the US. I'm not sure though if they were used for strategic bombing.

 

The Bomber War has been described ( if I remember correctly, by Martin Middlebrook, one of the very best writers on this area ) as the 'trench warfare of WW2'.

The men who died in the bombers were highly intelligent and highly trained - the best of their generation in the same way that the infantry subalterns were in WW1.

The price that these men paid was, in retrospect, too high. When the bombing strategy was embarked upon, I don't believe that the RAF or USAAF had any idea that such high losses would result.

 

sorry Fried .......

just as an example

1 in 6 Americans killed in the ETO were from the 8th AF as a pilot or crewmember.

26,000 killed and 21,000 POW for the 8th AF alone.

 

That proves my point, the human cost was TOO highwere not more than 30.000 American aviators killed in Europe.

Martin, can you post the British figures too, please?

 

I think the British losses were around 50,000..I think.

 

These are the aircrew operational losses of RAF Bomber Command from 9/39 to 5/45 and include RAF,WAAF, Dominion and other Allied serving with RAF : -

Killed and presumed dead : 47,120
Died as POW : 138
Missing later found safe : 2,868
POW later released : 9,784
Wounded : 4,200

The source for these figues is the Official History, ' The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany '

( Personal note : The disparity between killed and wounded figures... )

 

Thank you very much, Martin.

So, the figure of 140.000 Allied air men killed is completely false, the real number is only half of it.

And about your personal note, Martin. That shows how high the price was.

 

Martin, I think the personal note means that in air war you either came back ok or died? Showing how that part of warfare was quite horrible...



In comparison I got figures on one book of about 200,000 Russian tank men dead in WW2 ( 2 out of approx 5 tank men ) and the book says that tanks saved men...!!!

[ 25. November 2003, 08:51 AM: Message edited by: Kai-Petri ]

 

If that is the case, then it only furthers my belief that the bombing campaign justified its human cost.

 

70.000 (more tha the whole Viet Nam war) is STILL a HUGE cost.

 

For Germany´s production numbers for tanks,arms and planes etc the bombing campaign to me did not work. The production figures kept going up even late 1944, maybe even early 1945.

The bombing campaign did destroy cities and killed people but it seems it did not destroy them morally as was supposed, and in the end the Germans fought harder back because they understood that they were going to be destroyed to the last.

One of the things that did work was the bombing of the oil factories and Germans could not get their tanks or planes moving.