Dambusters raid did help to win the war

Peter Gunn said:

Somewhere I have an old collection I bought in the '80's that was a bound set of the USAAF 'Impact' magazine from WWII. In each of the six volumes they had an interview from a notable figure from the war. One volume had an interview with Albert Speer, I'll have to dig it up because in it he was talking about the fear he had that the allies would realize how fragile the power grid for the Reich was and that aerial attack could have really put Germany on the skids pronto. I won't quote from memory but will look up the interview tonight, it was either an eye opener or he was just saying something the interviewer wanted to hear.

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Hitting a vulnerable point on a power grid requires accuracy way beyond the Allies till quite late in the war. Knocking over a Pylon is incredibly difficult you have to hit it with a good sized bomb a near miss doesnt do much unless its a very big Earthquake bomb like a Tallboy. Transformer equipment weighs hundreds of tons and again a near miss by anything less than an Earthquake bomb wont do much damage that isnt relatively easy to fix. There is a National Grid sub station near where I work it drops the power from 250KV down to 11KV iirc, it is on a plot of land about 40 yards by 100 yards. By the end of 44 the Allies where just about hitting small to medium sized towns accurately never mind something the size of a small Railway station.

I couldn't agree more, that's why I'm not sure if he was serious or just blowing smoke. Like stona said, he was as slippery as a bag of weasels.

They had a go at transformers in France with 'Hurribombers' early in the war, which didn't work! Area bombing obviously disrupted power supplies and other utilities substantially. Going after the electrical infra structure exclusively was certainly beyond the ability of either strategic air force in 1944/45 and it would hardly have been considered a priority target for the tactical air forces, even if they could hit it. A power station might have been possible, the distribution infra structure is just too small and dispersed. A network is resilient and local damage to the smaller infra structure easily repaired.
I don't think it was ever identified as one of the choke points in the German economy, except in the context of a special operation like the dams raid. No air force was going to mount a special operations campaign with that level of losses.

The strategic air forces operating in the lead up to Overlord were a bit more accurate than hitting medium sized towns. Marshaling yards and other transport infrastructure were accurately targeted, along with the oil plants and (often forgotten) the aircraft industry which had to be widely dispersed.

Cheers

Steve

stona said:

Marshaling yards and other transport infrastructure were accurately targeted,
Cheers

Steve

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A Marshalling Yard is massively larger than a Power Grid substation. Marshalling yards are often a mile or more long.

Hitting components of a power grid, such as transmission lines/towers or switching transformers is not going to produce any results and would have about the same effect as taking out rail lines, which offered only a temporary disruption and was quickly repaired.

Striking the power generating stations would have been the key, whether it was the hydro-electric or coal-fired plants.

As far as Speer's comments were concerned, he mentioned during the Nuremberg trials that the Allies prolonged the war by not launching a coordinated attack on the German power grid.

A 1945 study by the U.S. (bombing survey) concluded that electricity was essential to modern industry and stated that the German power grid was in a "precarious state". It went on to say that "any loss of production would have directly affected essential war production, and the destruction of any substantial amount would have had serious results".

The study also shows that Allied bombing that involved the power grid was minimal at best:
Out of total U.S. tonnage dropped, only 0.05 percent targeted German Electric utilities.
Out of total RAF tonnage dropped, only 0.04 percent targeted German Electric utilities.

In France, however, the picture was much different and to add to what Steve mentioned, there was the Resistance uprising in 1943 that did considerable damage and then by 1944, with continued attacks both by Allied bombing and resistance saw the French power grid nearly non-existant.

Edgehill Gridiron Marshalling yards Liverpool. The photo shows about 2/3rds of the yard its about 1 1/2 miles long and 1/3 of a mile wide.

The first problem is that the most often used and quoted measurement for the efficacy of WW2 bombing is the total index for armaments production as a percentage of potential production. This ignores other production and simply combines the various armament categories into one figure. This doesn't even begin to fall until the third quarter of 1943. It continues a more or less steady decline until in the first quarter of 1945 it stands at only 45%

Just to build on that. German production to British Production (only )in Calendar years 41, 42, 43 and 44 were:

German
11700, 23200, 46100, and 70700

....well short of a rising star world economic giant that in the area of traditional munitions production was outproducing every other nation pre-war by a comfortable margin (Russian figures are uncertain).

British production for the same periods were:
Britain:
16700, 43000, 48000, 16000

....about what might be expected from a failing and contracting economy of a former world leader

The Germans started the war with 1.6 times the productive index of Britain. Germany had her fair share of extraneous economic handbrakes applicable, but so too did Britain, but far moreso. British efforts virtually halted in 1944, but by that stage nearly all German production of its tube artillery was going into air defence, with a smattering of ATG

Against the Russians, over whom in the prewar period the Germans held a productive advantage of 2.3 to 1
the Russians moreover lost more than 37% of their productive capacity during the war, most of it as early as Dec 1941. The Soviets were ruthless in applying wartime economies and rationing, and about the equivalent of 14% worth of effort was injected into the Soviet economic system by the allies (those figures are mine, open to disagreement I guess). It makes a direct extrapolation with prewar capacities impossible, even meaningless, but common sense and a sense of history suggests that with all that effort by the germans to destroy them, with a high level of success to go with that the Russian efforts would have been eclipsed, not so

Russian production figures in that same category easily outshine those of the Germans:
Russian
42300, 127000, 130000, 122000

....defying their prewar position with respect to economic output, but in particular for pre-war artillery production

People are again going to point out german difficulties, which is fair enough, and then try to minimise or ignore the difficulties of their opponents. NOBODY HAD MORE WORKING AGAINST THEM FOR OUTPUTS MORE THAN THE RUSSIANS, IF THE EFFECTS OF BOMBING (and the blockade) ARE NOT CONSIDERED IMPORTANT.

One of the main differences between the Russians and the Germans was that the Germans were being bombed and the Russians were not. Of course there were other issues, but I believe the effect of bombing is consistently under-estimated.

Im only using artillery production because I have the numbers, know them well, studied the reasons for them being what they are as open minded as i can muster. This was never intended to be a selecting cherry picking exercise



.

'Social' effects of allied bombing of Germany, so often overlooked after the war. Just a few examples.

9 million German people were compelled to leave homes in the cities and move to the countryside. How do you quantify the effect of that ? At the very least it means that millions of people hitherto not directly affected by the bombing now were.

In March 1944 the town of Durdestadt with 4,000 inhabitants had to take in 3,000 evacuees from Hanover. This is not an extraordinary example. How do you quantify the effects of this, the strain on local services etc.?

After the 'Gomorrah' attack on Hamburg the city of Munich reported a large scale exodus from the city every evening, placing a strain on local rail and other transport services and depleting the city of men and women capable of carrying out civil protection services, fire watches etc.

Every time an air raid alarm went off people went to their designated shelters. It is impossible to quantify the effect that the loss of sleep, resulting absenteeism and interrupted shifts had on the German economy. The town of Lippe was never bombed, but by the end of 1944 had suffered 731 air raid alarms, 233 in 1944 alone.
In 1940, long before British air raids had any physical effect, the city of Munster reported a 10% reduction in production and blamed the workers' lack of sleep, caused by air raid alarms.

A 1952 survey conducted in Germany showed that 41% of Germans had experienced heavy bombing and 21% had been bombed out with their families.

It was the party that had to deal with these victims. The NSDAP 'ortsgruppe' for Bremer - Wasserturm reported in January 1945:

"A bomb victim has to organise formalities with the local office etc., but is not in a position to manage all that in a day as the individual offices in most cases are open from 08.30 or 09.00 until 12.00 or 13.00. As a result the person affected, 90 per cent of whom work in armaments, is compelled to leave several days free before midday in order to sort out the matter."

Given that more than 1 in 5 Germans reported that they and their families were bombed out, that is a lot of lost man days.

Berlin was looking after 400,000 homeless people in October 1943, by March 1944 this figure was 1.5 million.

These indirect effects of the raids have largely been ignored by historians on all sides. Even German historians like Groehler tend to focus on the direct effects of the bombing. Others like Peter Heinl do take a broader view. The difficulty for him and others is that any analysis of these wider physical and psychological effects are inevitably much vaguer than the hard figures of something like the USSBS.

Cheers

Steve

Wiki says this
The greatest impact on the Ruhr armaments production was the loss of hydroelectric power. Two power stations (producing 5,100 kilowatts) associated with the dam were destroyed and seven others were damaged. This resulted in a loss of electrical power in the factories and many households in the region for two weeks. In May 1943 coal production dropped by 400,000 tons which German sources attribute to the effects of the raid.[24]
According to an article by German historian Ralf Blank,[25] at least 1,650 people were killed: around 70 of these were in the Eder Valley, and at least 1,579 bodies were found along the Möhne and Ruhr rivers, with hundreds missing. 1,026 of the bodies found downriver of the Möhne Dam were foreign prisoners of war and forced labourers in different camps, mainly from the Soviet Union. Worst hit was the city of Neheim (now part of Neheim-Hüsten) at the confluence of the Möhne and Ruhr rivers, where over 800 people perished, among them at least 493 female forced labourers from the Soviet Union. (Some non-German sources erroneously cite an earlier total of 749 for all foreigners in all camps in the Möhne and Ruhr valleys as the casualty count at a camp just below the Eder Dam.[21])
After the operation Barnes Wallis wrote, "I feel a blow has been struck at Germany from which she cannot recover for several years", but on closer inspection, Operation Chastise did not have the military effect that was at the time believed. By 27 June, full water output was restored, thanks to an emergency pumping scheme inaugurated the previous year, and the electricity grid was again producing power at full capacity.[citation needed] The raid proved to be costly in lives (more than half the lives lost belonging to Allied POWs and forced-labourers), but was no more than a minor inconvenience to the Ruhr's industrial output.[26] The value of the bombing can perhaps best be seen as a very real boost to British morale.[citation needed][dubious – discuss]
In his book Inside the Third Reich, Albert Speer acknowledged the attempt: "That night, employing just a few bombers, the British came close to a success which would have been greater than anything they had achieved hitherto with a commitment of thousands of bombers."[27] He also expressed puzzlement at the raids: the disruption of temporarily having to shift 7,000 construction workers to the Möhne and Eder repairs was offset by the failure of the Allies to follow up with additional (conventional) raids during the dams' reconstruction, and that represented a major lost opportunity.[28] Barnes Wallis was also of this view; he revealed his deep frustration that Bomber Command never sent a high-level bombing force to hit the Mohne dam while repairs were being carried out. He argued that extreme precision would have been unnecessary and that even a few hits by conventional HE bombs would have prevented the rapid repair of the dam which was undertaken by the Germans.[29]
The effect on food production was more significant, with many square kilometres of arable land being washed away and effectively unusable until the 1950s. There was also a great loss of farm animals bred for food.


The breaching of the Sorpe dam was always unlikely, however if that had gone the raid would have been a great success.

Concerns for the safety of allied PoWs in German hands never influenced military decisions. In fact the British Service Chiefs were explicitly directed NOT to take such considerations into account when planning military operations. Anxieties were expressed about the mounting death toll of American and British PoWs as a result of allied bombing, but no concern for other nationalities was ever expressed.

As early as 1943 the Luftwaffe suggested building camps for PoWs in built up areas to afford what it called 'certain securities' against further raids. The existence of the camps would be made known to London through PoW death notices. This was a reflection of a hardening of German attitudes to PoWs, particularly airmen, as what the Germans considered an illegal bombing offensive gathered pace. The camps for what we would now call human shields were never built.

In December 1944 the issue raised its head again when Hitler suggested keeping 5,000 allied PoWs in Berlin for the same reason. Again it was never acted upon.

Two months later Goebbels demanded the execution of several thousand allied PoWs in retaliation for the RAF and USAAF raids on Dresden. This was propaganda bluster, but news soon reached London where nobody believed a change in bombing policy would alter the regime's views. It was generally agreed that concerns over PoW safety be kept secret, lest they encourage Nazi extremists to turn against defenceless prisoners.

There was never a policy of placing PoWs near strategic targets to discourage attacks, though at a local level such instances did occur.
For example on one occasion British PoWs were held at gunpoint in central Braunschweig during a raid.

By mid-1944 the British considered 26 camps, most holding British PoWs, to be dangerously close to strategic targets, but there was no thought that they had been intentionally placed in such positions. Numerous hospitals were also mentioned in the same category.

Most PoW casualties did not occur in the camps but on work details, whose whereabouts were unknown to Swiss diplomats and Red Cross delegates. There are many instances in the memoir literature in which prisoners were endangered by being denied entry to air raid shelters, being confined to barracks during raids and being prevented from constructing suitable trenches or shelters in the camps. London did consider lodging a protest in late 1944, but in the end this never happened either.

Cheers

Steve

A discussion on the raid.