Readie
Chief Master Sergeant
Er, yes.... sow the seeds Mr Hitler and you will reap the whirlwind....
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Hitler had exactly the same reasoning on 4 September 1940 in the Sportpalast, stona, as you do.
Ich habe drei Monate lang das nicht beantworten lassen, in der Meinung, sie würden diesen Unfug einstellen. Herr Churchill sah darin ein Zeichen unserer Schwäche. Sie werden e3 verstehen, daß wir jegt nun Nacht für Nacht die Antwort geben, und zwar steigend Nacht für Nacht. Und wenn die britische Luftwaffe 2000 oder 3000 oder 4000 Kilogramm Bomben wirft, dann werfen wir jetzt in einer Nacht 150 000, 180 000, 230 000, 300 000 und 400 000. Und wenn sie erklären, sie werden bei uns Städte in großem Ausmaß angreifen - wir werden ihre Städte ausradieren!
Firstly because nations have agreed to the principle in several international treaties that the people who make the weapons that kill your people (aka civillians) should be immune from attack. There are several moral and practical considerations to that, but it largely works because when you start to do that, the other side will start to do that to you as well.
Secondly because it just not works, its not a viable military strategy, and never was since the stone age. From the cold and calculating POV randomly killing people, the workers includes is a lot harder to do than destroying the industry itself. The Allies have killed about half a million German civilians, more than half of them women and children who did not contribute much, if anything to the war. How many German workers were killed - 10.000, 50.000, maybe even 100.000 at worst?
Randomly killing a couple of Krupp workers in every raid on Essen for years seem to be very very ineffective compared to just ground the Krupp factory itself.
But the R.A.F. bombing was meant to achieve indirect rather than direct results. There were other ways of preventing the building of U-boats, for example, than of bombing the slipway on which a U-boat was being built. Preceding chapters have illustrated the general breakdown of life in Hamburg — the destruction of services and communications, the destruction of workers' housing and the killing or putting to flight of the workers themselves. This was the industrial side of the R.A.F.'s offensive. The exact extent of such indirect loss was the subject of much investigation immediately after the war. The United States Strategic Bombing Survey and the smaller British Bombing Survey Unit both did much research in Hamburg. The general conclusion was that the Battle of Hamburg caused a loss of war production equivalent to the normal output of the entire city for 1.8 months of full production. Output returned to 80 per cent of normal within five months but full recovery was never achieved. Taking the production of U-boats, again, as a specific case, it was estimated that between twenty (the American estimate) and twenty-six or twenty-seven U-boats (the British estimate) were never produced because of the July and August 1943 bombing.
The important part about the production losses, whether of U-boats or whatever other type of war material or even of the everyday type of commercial production that a nation needs to sustain itself, was that the Hamburg losses were mainly caused by the indirect methods of the great R.A.F. raids. There are interesting figures available for the number of units of electricity consumed in the city's war industries and for the number of workers reporting at their factories. Electrical consumption in Hamburg's war industry fell by 56.9 per cent in August 1943 ! The following tables show the numbers of people reporting for work before and after the battle, both in the entire armaments industry of the city and in the Blohm Voss shipyard.
The raid on Kassel provided a classic illustration of the theories
underlying the area offensive. There was a chain-reaction of dislocation, which first paralysed the city's public utilities then stopped
even the undamaged factories: The city relied for electricity on the city
power station and on the Losse power station; the former was
wrecked, the latter halted by destruction of its coal-conveyer; the
city's low-tension grid was also destroyed. With the loss of only
three gas-holders the undamaged gas works was not in itself unser-viceable and the gas mains were not beyond repair. But without
electricity to drive the gas-works machinery, the whole Kassel
industrial area was deprived of both gas and power supplies.
Although the five water pumping stations were undamaged,
without electricity they too were paralysed. Without gas, water, or
power supplies Kassel's industry was crippled.
The physical damage to the factories was considerable: nine prin-cipal factories, including the Fieseler aircraft plant now manufac-turing the Fi. flying bomb in Kassel-Waldau, were seriously
damaged; the dilapidations to the three Henschel locomotive and
tank plants amounted to forty-two million Reichsmarks.
Speer, the
German armaments minister stated at his July interrogation
that although the tank assembly plants had already been slowed
down by shortages in components caused by bombing raids on
other cities, the October reduced production of the formi-dable new Tiger tanks from 100-150 monthly to only fifty or sixty.
That is because a marshaling yard is an easily identifiable target, and does not equal to what Bomber Command referred to as 'area (=terror) bombing' of city centres. Marshalling yards are not in the most densely populated city centers to start with, but further out, well before the large 'head' RR stations typical of the era. They are also perfectly valid targets (and in fact the most vulnerable part of any RR system).
It's something that many seem to forget. If there had been treaties banning bombing of enemy towns, would they still have been in effect by the time BC launched its first area attack in December 1940? After the Blitz had already killed more than 20,000 in Britain, wouldn't Britain have been able to argue convincingly that the Germans had already abrogated the treaty?
But civilian deaths was never the aim. Destruction of cities was. If you look at Hamburg, whilst around 50,000 were killed, hundreds of thousands of industrial workers fled the city, driven not just by fear but by the destruction of houses, water supplies, shops, trains, electricity supplies etc.
But on the other hand, cutting the power to not just Krupp but every factory in the area, and blocking the roads, destroying bridges, cutting off the gas supply, destroying the telephone exchanges, destroying the worker's house so that he doesn't turn up to work, cutting the water supply, destroying the back street garage that made small brackets, destroying the bank that held the funds to pay for parts and workers wages, and all the other disruptions that an area attack brought, was very effective.
Area bombing wasn't about killing people, it was about taking an area of a city and doing as much damage to it as possible.
Marshalling yards are typically in cities, but the point is the 8th AF disguised most of their area bombing with the euphemism "marshaling yards".
Incendiaries aren't much use against marshaling yards. You need to blow up the tracks and crater the ground, and incendiaries don't do that. As a result the RAF only used about 2% incendiaries when they attacked marshaling yards. The 15th AF used a similar percentage. Even the 8th AF used about 2% incendiaries when they attacked French marshaling yards, and on special operations where they were ordered to attack enemy transport.
But the 8th disguised their area attacks by claiming they were attacking marshaling yards. They loaded up an average 20% incendiaries and used radar bombing to hit German towns, and claimed they were after the marshaling yards.
I agree. I don't think I ever found out how effective bomber defenses were in numbers. What is a reasonable number, of course estimated, of LW fighters downed by bomber defensive guns? How many bombers were shot down per loss of a an attacking fighter? Numbers impossible to know but maybe not to estimate.
I'm looking, tough go. Could be a lifetime project just for numbers. USAAC mission record to see where the fighters attacked from, ie, 12 o'clock high. Maybe comments on the formation. Then the German records for losses, if you can get a clear read on which units were engaged
As I said. I don't buy into the 'marshalling yard is really a city' theory. The only place I saw that theory was a con-theo book from serial con-theo author.
Incendinaries can be pretty effective against wooden railroad waggon and rolling stocks, actually.
Actually rails are a very difficult target, most trains can cross as much as 1 meter of a gap in the rail w/o much problem.. and it's a relatively easy fix.
As to the original question, I would think you could describe the effectiveness of heavy bomber defensive fire as being sufficient to require the LW to alter its tactics, but not sufficient to prevent horrendous losses.