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http://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/bitstream/2123/664/2/adt-NU20050104.11440202whole.pdf
A great read. Provides serious economic analysis of what the strategic bombing effort cost Britain. If you don't want to read the entire report just read the conclusion which is only a few pages in length.
Bottom Line.
WWII Britain spent 12.19% of the military budget on strategic bombing.
Bomber Command Casualties.
57,143 dead.
9,162 wounded.
12,867 POW or missing.
kind of hope this thread is shut down before it gets out of hand.
Whose estimate? The U.S. Government reached a completely different conclusion.A conservative guesstimate on German countermeasures expenditure countering the bomber offensive is that about 50-60% of its military spending was spent trying to counter it.
Whose estimate? The U.S. Government reached a completely different conclusion.
Proportions of the principal branches of the total value of armament production.
U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey: Tank Industry Report
It seems to me that the Area Bombardment/De-housing which is about flattening cities and killing civilians to a significant degree was in part motivated by the inaccuracy of night bombing and the inability of Bomber command aircraft to survive in enemy airspace: the Lancaster/Halifax/Sterling were all ill-conceived designs that ignored the importance of speed in minimizing vulnerability to FLAK and fighter interception and the development of radar.
However I suspect carpet bombing was in part a desirable tactic on its own.
At numerous industrial plants, in this part of England, where
hundreds of workmen are employed, only a neglible percent of
uch workpeople is not in one way or another adversely affected
in consequence of air raids. Loss of sleep is a factor even in
cases where the workmen remain at home and do not repair to shelters.
But, generally speaking, a more potent factor is worry induced
by the disintegration of family life. It requires little imagination
to comprehend what must be the state of mind of a workman who
begins his task in the morning knowing that his wife and children
are standing at some windswept bus stop both hungry and cold,
or what must be the state of mind of a workman who knows that
his wife and family must remain in a house which has been rendered
unfit for human habitation and which it is beyond his means to
repair.
The bombing of working-class residential districts in this
area has come to be accepted as an ingenious and effective move
on the part of Germany. Moreover, such bombing has come to be
viewed as even a greater menace than the damage actually done
to industrial plant. What happened at Coventry well illustrates
the devilish effectiveness of the bombing of districts inhabited
by working-class people. It seems to be pretty well established
that as many as 70,000 houses in the comparatively small city
of Coventry were affected by bombing and that of these 30,000
were made unfit for human habitation, and 7,000 demolished entirely.
The big raid on Coventry took place during the night of November
14-15, 1940. Since that time some weeks have elapsed and great
strides have been made in the direction of make-shift repairs
to damaged working-class residences. But there is not a sizeable
industrial enterprise in the whole of Coventry whose production
is not still being adversely affected by raiding has wrought
in the lives of Coventry working people. There hovers over that
city an apprehensiveness which has lingered since the raid took
place. This apprehensiveness is born of a realization that the
Germans can at will again do to Coventry what they did to it
during that one horrible night in November.
Intricate, costly, and heavy machine tools can be extricated
from the cellars of demolished manufacturing plants. Many of
them can be repaired and installed in new plant. But the workers
who man these machines, so long as they live as they do today,
can never attain the efficiency which, before the events in question
took place, they maintained as a mere matter of course.
We are also having difficulties about machine tools. These do not spring
from the actual damage done to the tools. On the contrary, it has been found
that the machine tool stands up to the blast of the bomb remarkably well.
In the attack on Coventry, where 50,000 machine tools were concentrated,
only 700 were destroyed. In Birmingham, where as many as 70,000 were
assembled, 700 were destroyed.
But while the machine tools in our possession might give very good results
when the men worked them by night as well as by day, it is now very hard to
persuade staffs in some centres to do night duty.
The general effect has been to cut down the proportion of men employed on
night work. In many directions night shifts have been abandoned.
For instance:
1 There were no fast heavy bombers developed or even conceived of. The desire to carry city flattening loads took precedence.