WW2

Yoyoma, Google is a good place to research your topic, but there is no substitute for reading; however, if you have procrastinated, that's too bad. Good luck!

Welcome to A2K

Well Google isn't totally useless. It led you here and probably because of this Discussion on the Allied Bombing of Germany.

Way to go, Google!

A few random thoughts here.

German war production peaked in the second half of 1944 - of course production would have been higher than it was if there had been no bombing.

The naval blockade, which greatly reduced imports of raw materials, should not be ignored. This is one of the main reasons the Germans were unable to take greater advantage of jet engines in aircraft - since they were unable to procure the proper metals to alloy turbine blades in sufficient amounts, the engines they did manufacture were limited to around ten hours of running time (the turbine drivers we currently have at work run 25,000 hours between overhauls).

There's an interesting book about German-Japanese trade of critical war materials by submarine and surface blockade runners: "Reluctant Allies, German-Japanese Naval Relations in World War II" by Krug, Hirama, Sander-Nagashima and Niestle, that you might find interesting.

Hope this helps.

A few good ideas for you . . . one is Decision Over Schweinfurt, which is a policy study of the United States Army Air Force in England in the development of it's bombing strategy. Don't have a more complete citation for you, but you should be able to google it. CdK has pointed you to a long discussion we've had here of this topic. Basically, Churchill and "Bomber" Harris (Arthur Harris and Sons, House Removers) decided that area bombing at night would be effective on the principle that factory workers who don't sleep don't work efficiently. My personal take is that this was a very transparent fig leaf to cover their desire for revenge, to "get" the Hun for bombing London and Sheffield. In that regard, Churchill's The Second World War can give you some insight into what ol' Winnie claimed was their policy and how it was arrived at.

More significant would be to google Albert Speer. The American doctrine was, basically, daylight precision bombing. After their first raid on Schweinfurt (the ball- and roller-bearing center in Germany), the USAAF decided it had been a failure. Their standard was 10% of bombs within 1000 yards of ground zero. In fact, they did a lot better than that, but their damage assessment tools at that time were very unreliable. But Albert Speer, and architect who had become Hitler's manager of war production, estimated that that single raid had knocked out 65% of Germany's ball- and roller-bearing production for three months. This was critical. German fighter aircraft, tanks, submarines, etc., were all "over-built," in that they relied upon a high degree of technical sophistication and exacting machine tool products to produce superior weapons systems. This made German war production very vulnerable. The Germans produced fewer than 3,000 Tiger tanks. The Germans in Normandy had a saying: "A Tiger can take out 10 Sherman tanks--the Amis (Americans) always have at least 11." We produced on the order of 50,000 Sherman tanks during that war. When Goering was being interrogated after the war, and was asked when he knew the war was lost, he is reputed to have said: "When i saw the first Mustang over Berlin." The famous American test pilot, Chuck Yaeger was a fighter pilot over Germany. I heard him in an interview once, saying that: "What the Spitfire could do for 40 minutes, the Mustang could do for eight hours." Escorted daylight bombing missions over Germany and Austria spelled disaster for German industry. For a view from the other side, find The First and the Last, which is the war time autobiography of Adolf Galland, who was the head of the Luftwaffe's fighter arm.

Lots of good resources out there, Boss, which you should be able to find through any good library.

Well, the Portal on this site (look under "History") might give some links as well.

H-net German: World War II bombing: rethinking German experiences is another possibilty.

Even you don't understand German, there are a lot of interesting pics at The Battle of the Ruhr

http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=7708&highlight=mohne+dam =" 'Dam Busters' - 60 years ago, the Möhne Dam was bombed" shows a lot of more private rubbish talk, but has some probably interesting news as well :wink:

Thanks
Okay - thanks for the info. I'm just wondering which orginizations/people/events I should be focusing on - my research question relates to "Morality." - very specifically. Oh - and don'y worry the essay is due a long ways off, few months away, I just want to do a lot of research .

I really appreciate any starting information on what arguments I should be making and things I should be researching.

Thanks for your time

As mentioned above, you may find it useful to review remarks in the various relevant threads here at A2k.

Setanta's remarks should be carefully noted because he is one of our very best historians.

This is an extended quote from A Guide to the study and Use of Military History, an annotated publication of the Center of Military History of the US Army, and one of the best guides I know of in this field.

You are referred to ... " The volumes in the official Air Force history, Wesley Frank Craven and James Lea Cate's[eds] The Army Air Forces in World War II, that deal with the war against Germany are in Vol 1; Plans and Early Operations (January 1939 to August 1942) (1948), Vol. II; Europe: Torch to Pointblank (August 1942 to December 1943) (149) Vol. III; Europe: Arguement to V-E Day (January 1944 to May 1945) (1951). Also of particular interest is the multivolume series prepared by the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey that examined the effectiveness of air operations in Europe and Asia, published (1945-1947) by the Government Printing Office. A feel for what it was like to participate in the air war in Europe may be gleaned from an account by a former B-17 pilot; Bert Stiles's serenade to the Big Bird (1952)."

The theoretical foundations of strategic bombing are found in the work of the Italian proponent of airpower, Giulio Douhet. Douhet's most influential work was probably The Command of the Air (1921). This book was published in English by Coward-McCann, 1942. This is one of the essential books in the study of military theory and history, though to today's reader it seems almost naive in light of the carnage inflicted in wars fought since its publication.

That should get you started. When you get your paper completed, please post it for us to read. I'm interested to see what you've learned.

The bombing campaign was at least nominally a joint responsibility of the U.S. and British air staffs. Bomber Harris will probably be an important British commander for you to research.

The British favored carpet bombing at night, and the Americans focused on precision daylight bombing. The difference of opinion was never resolved during the war, though some of the materials mentioned above did publish conclusions after the war.

I have had some thoughts on this topic which might be of use to you. I will present them as the tactical considerations, and the strategic considerations. What motivates me is the comment here that the Germans reached their highest production levels in 1944. The gentleman who posted this points out that such levels of production might have been much higher?-a cogent point. But there is far more underlying this issue. Therefore, I will begin with the strategic considerations.

During the Vietnam War, there was a great opposition to the bombing of North Vietnam, especially on college campuses. Academic historians at that time enlisted their considerable prestige to support a contention that the bombing of Germany in the Second World War had proven ineffective, and that they therefore considered that the bombing of Vietnam would prove ineffective as well. In fact, I agreed then, and do now, with such a contention, but they did a great disservice to history in the manner in which their arguments were presented. Bombing North Vietnam was ineffective in significantly hindering their prosecution of the war because the means of production which supported their efforts were in the Soviet Union, China, and other nations of the Communist bloc, and not in North Vietnam. However, academic historians of that era tried (needlessly, in my opinion) to bolster their argument by contending that the bombing of Germany had not impaired the ability of the Germans to wage war. I cannot say if those promoting that contention were sincere or not, but the thesis seriously distorts historical truth. The contention was based upon a statement that Allied bombing campaigns against Germany reached their peak in late 1943, but German production reached its peak in 1944. This is either a naïve statement, or a disingenuous one. Late in 1943, the United States Army Eighth and Ninth Air Forces, through the agency of their operational staffs, were very gloomily reviewing the success of their bombing campaigns. I have already mentioned that the Americans were convinced, due to faulty damage evaluations, that they were not meeting their own minimum standards, or just barely meeting them. Additionally, of course, the weather as winter drew on mitigated against bombing raids. At this time, Eisenhower pushed what his staff had named "The Transportation Plan." This was a plan to divert bombing resources from attacks on German industry to attacks on the transportation network, and especially that in France. The 8th and 9th USAAF's were happy to agree to such a plan, as they were then uncertain that their campaign was effective against German industry. Feldmarschal Erwin Rommel looked at the pattern of bombing missions, and pronounced that Normandy would be the likely target of an Allied invasion (see The Rommel Papers, edited by B. H. Liddell Hart and Rommel's widow and son?-more about that later). As with so many of his cogent observations at this period, he was ignored by OKW (Hitler's General Staff) and Jodl (the Chief of Staff). The plan was, however devastatingly effective. As an example, the 6th Fallschirmjaeger Brigade (paratroopers) was in Brittany, 60 kilometers from the Cotentin peninsula in Normandy at the time of the invasion. It took them a week to reach the front line?-their transportation was shot to hell on the first day, and they were obliged to hoof it to the battlefield, and only during the brief hours of darkness in that northern European summer. The German soldiers in Normandy had another saying: "If you see a white plane, it's the Tommies (British); if you see a black plane, it's the Amis (Americans); if you don't see any planes?-it's the Luftwaffe."

After the successful breakout in a horrid combined operation of the First Army and the 8th and 9th USAAF's known as Cobra (the carpet bombing of a sector of the German lines, which very nearly obliterated the panzer division in that sector?-the area was so torn up, American troops fell behind by two days in trying to move across the area)?-Eisnehower no longer had a need for these resources, so they just bombed the bejesus out of anything that moved and every cross roads they could see. No one will ever know how many Normans were killed by the indiscriminate bombing of the road network in Normandy. Eventually, the USAAF returned to bombing targets in Germany and Austria. By late 1944, the Mustang, fitted with the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine, was available to escort bombers all the way to the target, and all the way back. The procedure became to assemble the "bomber stream" over England, where P-47 Thunderbolt fighter aircraft would join them and escort them to Aachen on the German border. The P-47 was, in the terms of the day, a nearly indestructible aircraft. I have read of one such fighter which returned to its base in England with more than 300 separate flak and cannon holes in the fuselage. The pilot landed it, emerged unharmed, and went to his debriefing. But it was short ranged, and had to turn back at Aachen. However, by then, flights of P-51 Mustangs would have assembled, and would take up escort duties with the bomber stream to the target. They would then escort the bombers back to Aachen, where newly refueled and rearmed P-47's would escort the bombers back to their bases in England. The Mustangs would then peel off, with hours of fuel left, and shoot up every road, every railroad, every rail marshalling yard, every air field they could find. In his book, Galland tells us that many German fighter pilots returned to their bases, nearly out of fuel, with Mustangs on their tail. By the end of the war, Galland tells us that there were no useable airfields left in Germany, and that they took off from logging roads in the forests, where they hid their fighters when they were not flying.

What this all has to do with the false bombing peak/production peak argument is this: Describing 1943 as the peak of Allied bombing is based on the number of sorties. A sortie is one plane flying one mission?-something a fighter aircraft could do more than once per day. The 5000 to 6000 aircraft of the 8th and 9th USAAF's and the RAF based in England flew nearly 15000 sorties on D Day alone (I have read in more than one source an exact figure of 14827 sorties?-compared to 160 sorties by the Luftwaffe in all of France on that day). This is either a naïve or a willfully disingenuous way to have calculated the "peak" of Allied bombing. I have earlier mentioned the first raid on Schweinfurt. Without escort, that mission, which flew to Schweinfurt and to the Messerschmidt plant in Regensburg, suffered a loss of more than 40% of aircraft and aircrew members. But from late 1944 on, that figure dropped dramatically as the bombers were escorted by the Mustangs. Additionally, the figure does not take into account the B-24 and B-17 missions now being flown from Italy, also escorted by Mustangs, possible due to the advances of Field Marshall Alexander's United Nations army in that country. With fewer bombers delivering a more effective attack, air crew which has been held past their promised rotation date were now released, they were not needed. Many were transferred to the Pacific. At home, the resources which had been allocated to manufacturing B-17's and B-24's were no longer in such great demand, and were diverted to the production of the B-29's which were being assembled to pulverize the Japanese.

There is also the contention about the peak of German production. This is also a disingenuous or naïve characterization. It doesn't do a lot of good to produce lots of ball- and roller-bearings in the now dispersed plants, if you cannot get them to the factories or field repair stations which need them. The roads in Germany were shot to hell on a daily basis. The Germans were no longer manufacturing railway rolling stock. Agricultural machines and tools were no longer being produced. The Messerschmidt 262 jet fighter aircraft was manufactured in large numbers?-and the fuselages sat rotting, with no engines or guns, because those could not be delivered for assembly. A new sort of "Transporation Plan" went into effect, de facto, as roving Mustangs, freed from their escort duties, prowled the German skies looking for "targets of opportunity."

As for the tactical consideration, Rommel in his papers reports that when he confronted Montgomery at El Alamein, the British kept 24 bombers in the air over his lines around the clock. This seems rather paltry compared to the nearly 15000 sorties of D Day, but it was more than sufficient for Rommel to state that his defeated army had to retreat on foot. In his papers, he writes that the armored forces which would defend against an Allied invasion must be placed immediately behind the potential invasion beaches, because they would never be able to make the approach march (the march which gets you to the battlefield). OKW and Jodl (and even the otherwise acute Von Rhunstedt [sp?]) thought otherwise, and dreamed of a great decisive battle in the central plains of France (conveniently ideal for such a battle of armored forces), and therefore concentrated their armored forces within 30 kilometers of Paris. This sort of wishful thinking all too sadly seems to characterize military planners. The Japanese always dreamed of "the Great All-out Battle" in the west central Pacific, with the American Pacific fleet obligingly steaming west, being preyed upon by Japanese submarines, to meet their doom from the excellent Japanese battleships. Unfortunately for Nagano and the Imperial Naval planners, the Americans were not so obliging. The Allies in France were equally disobliging, and used their air power to cripple the German defense. The First SS Panzer division required four or five days to travel about 50 kilometers to the invasion beaches. The 12th SS Panzergrenadier Division, the teenagers of the Hitler Jungen Division, who wreaked such slaughter on the Canadians, basically abandoned their armored personnel carriers and lugged their equipment to the battlefield on foot. The near total domination of the skies over France meant that the German army, already heavily dependent on horses, could not rely at all on their motorized forces. Rommel's old division, originally the 5th Light Infantry, which had become the 21st Panzer Division, was strung out in four positions on the road which lead southeast from Caen on D Day. It took three days to assemble the division. Although they were able to deny Caen to the British, they were unable to make it to that city themselves as a coherent unit. By day, anything that moved beyond the Allied lines was fair game for thousands of Allied aircraft, all looking for something, anything to shoot up. This is an aspect of air power which many of those 1970's historians ignored in formulating their specious contention about the effectiveness of the air forces in that war.

I don't suggest that you take my word for all of this. I do suggest that you also defer automatically accepting what is now the standard take of too many historians to the effect that Germany reached its peak of production after the Allies reached the peak of their bombing campaigns. Do your reading, and decide for yourself.

Probably the most concise treatment of WWII airial warfare is the unfortunately currently out-of-print

Airwar[/b]: Jablonski, J, Doubleday 1971, ISBN: 038514279X

Any major library should have it or be able to locate it within their system of affilliates. I'm sure used copies can be found on the web. About 700 pages in two volumes, it is a US-oriented survey, but authoritative and well written. The extensive bibliography provides a considerable pool of relevant sources for further research. Over the past 30 years or so, just about every scholarly book on the subject has cited or referred to Airwar

Even though out of print, that should be available at any good university library.

Another search for you: "Ploesti in World War II" --google that, it should be helpful in constructing your thesis about the effect of the airwar on Germany. Ploesti, in Romania, was a petroleum refinery center. A huge air raid was mounted from North Africa to destroy the refineries at Ploesti. The aircraft were, if my memory serves, primarily B-24's--good range and a large bomb load, but very little armor compared to the B-17. American casualties were horrible. German casualties were high. And, a great many Romanians who had bought into the specious racist hatred of the Germans, believed that America was owned by the Jews, and that they would never allow anything to happen to "their property." Many Romanians headed for the Standard Oil refineries, convinced the Americans would not bomb them. What a terrible price to pay for naively believing someone else's hateful propaganda.

In a related note, you might research the development of synthetic fuels and lubricants in a petroleum-starved Germany.

Another valuable reference, probably only available through a major library, is

Strategic Bombing in World War II: A Study of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey: MacIsaac, D, Garland Publishing Co., 1976

I'd recommend the United States Strategic Bombing Survey: US Government Prining Office, 1946-1949

itself, but its hundreds of volumes. Probably available digitally or on microfiche through major university libraries, the edition held by The Library of Congress occupies approximately 1000 cubic feet of shelfspace, or about the volume of a modest house.

WW2
WW2

You should have no trouble writing 5000 words on even one of those ideas. The amount of information available is so large that you probably couldn't even read a portion of it working fulltime for the next five years.

Setanta alluded to an important point above that is often overlooked. People tend to think of "strategic" bombing as being directed only at cities and war production facilities. The effectiveness of attacks on those strategic targets during WWII varied widely. Distance, defense, tonnage and accuracy were all factors in the equation. The American dependance on precision bombing at that time was probably not justified, especially when the targets were at extreme range and were heavily defended. As German defenses crumbled and the Mustang came to dominate the air, effectiveness did increase. Carpet bombing at night was terribly destructive and must have had some effect on distrupting the German economy. The German populace was just as determined to resist as the British were during the Blitz. Speer relocated many of his strategic factories into underground to better protect them.

The Allies shifted their use of airpower to a different and much more fragile strategic targeting scheme, the Transportation system. Disruption of the transportation system was probably more effective than the targeting of ball-bearing factories, and petroleum refineries. Roads, railroads, canals and shipping are much more vulnerable. They are difficult to defend, especially if you lose air superiority. Targeting the transportation system didn't require the mass raids used previously against fixed targets, but could be torn up by fighter aircraft. strafing, and low-level light bomb loads could stop the shipment of essential supplies in any of a hundred different places.

Have of my family was killed by bombs, when the British missed a (small) shipping channel and the related mine works by miles: only the town was destroyed.

375 refugees [in a red-cross marked train] and inhabitants died in my native town, when the station was bombed - instead of the 25 miles away railway junction (thus, however, the medieval town of Soest didn't get totally damaged).

The conception of a "total war" i.e. both by the attrition of the civilian population and by the destruction of military and economic structures, led in 1943 to the execution of a combined British-American air offensive. The aim was the unconditional surrender of Germany, by the complete destruction of German cities in the hail of bombs prepared by the autumn 1944 up to the spring 1945.

Modell of the inner city of Münster, administrative center of Westphalia, spring 1945



(This model was created after British and American photos and is to be seen in the town museum Münster [online: http://www.muenster.de/stadt/museum/modelle/stadtmodelle/1945/1945_0.html ] The exhibitions there offers as well [copied] documents, which prove that monasteries, churches, hospitals and other civilian objects were choosen as targets.)

One more point
Do you think I could argue that allied strategic bombing was effective as it helped 'soften' up Germany for specific ground invasions? I guess I could mention important ones.

Yoyoma, that angle might be appropriate in the case of the Normandy invasion, but, there was little strategic help the air forces could render once the armies were in France, and racing for the border. By the time Courtney Hodges's First Army crossed the Rhine at Remagen, and Montgomery launched his disasterous "Market Garden" operation, the weather had predictably deteriorated to the point that most targets were "socked-in" and unavailable. The greatest effect, as Asherman points out, was the destruction of the transport system.

Pay attention to Walter's comments and links, as your theme will be the effect on Germany, he can give you the most help on the German perspective.

By the by, i forgot to mention, i am very impressed with your virtuosity on the cello . . .