The moral questions raised by the bombing of Germany are all too relevant once again in this new year. How to fight back against a murderous terror regime which shows no respect for innocent life, while safeguarding the lives of the civilians who live under said regime? Despite the best efforts of those who regard innocent life as sanctified, and who have tried to build international protections, humanity seems set to grapple with this conundrum time and time again.
I'd say it was a case of damned if you do and damned if you don't. Yes the damage caused to war industry might slow things down but on the morale side of things, it's counterproductive in that it only makes the will to fight stronger when soldiers' families and homes are being attacked from the air.
Good episode Sparty but as I think you remember I strongly disagree with you on the point of the Allied bombing campaign not being effective and I think I've found the best argument to that yet (with addition to everything else I have argued in the past). Speer's "stats" of the German military production are insanely heavily cooked. The stats that Speer provided to Hitler and used after the war to tout his successes count all equipment coming out of the factories. Which includes all damaged products. So let's use aircraft as the example since that is the most researched topic and is even mentioned within your video. If a German pilot was out on a mission and he was hit by a single round that plane needs to be sent to go get repaired. What Speer did was he counted everything coming out of his factories even if it was just a minor repair happening to something already created and he did not count the product coming into the factories to be repaired or used as spare parts. This is a more recent field of WW2 only recently being looked into (the last 1-3 years maybe) so many older sources won't take this into account. But by the modern estimates we have the German production for just aircraft as inflated by 50-80% (INSANE). This really finally does equate to how he was on paper able to say he was boosting German production numbers when no new factories were coming online, the workers were working the same amount of hours they did to the year prior and he was losing his best staff for unexperienced German workers or unexperienced slave labor that had no reason to work hard. It's all fakery.
Why use B29s for the Tumbnail? THEY NEVER ENGAGED IN EUROPE :) Pls change this, its triggering and I know that you want to make good content, not just something. I expect more for my money with this :)
Perhaps the definition of Total War escapes you. I have some problems with a few of your "War Against Humanity" topics. This is one of them. edit: Your comments towards the end have caused me to think I'll never watch your series again. I'll stick with Indy.
You can question the morality of the Allied bombing campaign and especially in spring '45 you would have a point, but to say the bombing campaign was ineffective is nonsense. Yes German production may have kept increased - party due them not being on a 'total' war footing until late on, but how much more of an increase would have taken place if there was no allied bombing. As someone said, it may even had been Indy, "history does not happen in vacuum". If no allied bomber offensive, the Luftwaffe would have had thousands more aircraft available on other fronts. The same goes for AA guns and ammo. How much more would war production have increased. Could the Germans wunderwaffen programs been more advanced. How much longer could and probably, would the war have gone on. How many more Jews and others would have been killed. Certainly too much allied effort went into bombing in the late war and the wrong targets chosen and this was debated at the time and for reasons unknown Harris and Le May etc got their way.
But seriously, can we all just take a moment and truly appreciate how much we greatly enjoy listening to Sparty expertly and beautifully pronounce the German names and titles?
Thanks, Spartacus. My aunt survived the Darmstadt RAF raid. Though she was quite young, she recalled the bombs approaching, some very loud, with one exploded nearby in a deafening blast. Amidst the shattering noise and chaos, her youngest sister was killed. Meanwhile, in Britain, my mum had just lost her oldest brother, a British soldier, in Normandy during the First Battle of the Odon. Afterwards, she became so depressed, she refused to eat and was in hospital for months. Years after the war, they became close, sisters in a way, both having endured that special misery of war. It's often quite easy to forget the immense scale of suffering amongst civilians during the Second World War. It was a horrific tragedy for all involved.
So right. My mother was a child in Birmingham England and spent much of 1940 in a cellar waiting for the bomb to hit. She lost friends and family but fortunately for me survived. I find it difficult, even against a hideous state that the Nazi Party created, to justify the slaughter of civilians.
The same day that the RAF made its useless attack on Darmstadt (there is a chapter in Hastings' "Bomber Command" about it) the 8th Air Force braved "Merseberg of the thousand guns" to hit the giant Leuna oil refinery. "As early as June 8, two days after D-day, Spaatz had taken advantage of Eisenhower's generously loose rein upon the strategic bombers to order both the Eighth and the Fifteenth air forces that the denial of oil to the enemy's armed forces should be their primary airm. German aircraft and armaments production were specified as secondary targets, with ball bearings to receive particular attention. Even with Ike's generosity, diverse calls upon the heavy bombers, including Crossbow raids as well as support of the ground forces restricted oil targets to 11.6 percent of the American strategic bombers' efforts in June, 17 percent in July, and 16.4 per cent in August. Yet this restricted effort cut the amount of aviation fuel produced for the Luftwaffe from 156,000 tons in May to 54,000 tons in June, 34,700 in July, 17,000 tons in August, and 10,000 tons in September--while the Luftwaffe had consumed 165,000 tomns in April alone. Production of other petroleum products dropped in similar disastrous proportions...But Portal could not prevail on Harris to bring the great weight of Bomber Command to Spaatz's aid; and after a massive late summer climax of the Oil Plan--USSTAF attacks sending 1136, 888, and 718 aircraft against synthetic oil plants on September 11, 12, and 13 respectively--a rainy autumn closed in and the oil campaign fell off. Not knowing how much Spaatz was accomplishing, other Allied commanders, ground and air, still failed like Harris to offer their full support, diversions still carred the Fortresses and Liberators elsewhere, and when diversions combined with autumn weather, the Reich oil supply received the respite it needed...The Allied had held victory through air power in their grasp, but had not persevered for the kill." --Eisenhower's Lieutenants, Russell Weigley, p. 379-80 -------------------------------------------- Spartacus did a good a job presenting the lack of Oil on the German economy. Plenty of tanks and planes but not enough gasoline even for training and that applied to the tank formations too. Imagine the poor Germans in the Ardennes Offensive. "Wait, we have to capture fuel made in Texas to reach Antwerp?"
Was it? was your aunt in the resistance against the nazis? was she protecting jewish people? or was she tacitly complying with the regime and thus supporting it in its endeavours? remember the holocaust wasn't some secret the german people actively engaged in it.
@@JD1010101110 Yeah look at you. So brave and ready to jump into action against terrible regimes! We all know you'd immediately start to organise guerilla warfare against your government if you were in the same situation. I am so glad we have people like you! 🤡🤡
If have seen many contemporary documentaries that state that both man should have been tried as warcriminals. Speer talked himself out of a deathsentence at the Neurenburg trials.
@@Sacto1654 recent re-evaluation of Speers is actually quite new. He enjoyed a reputation as "the Nazi who said sorry" for decades after the war. As mentioned, many considered him as apolitical and so focused on developing infrastructure and technology that he never knew about or supported the racial genocides his government was perpetrating.
@@ClanWiEMy read of his first book was that he knew as little as he could get away with and admits to that. He actively sought to know less, but could have and should have known more. He rationalized slave labor as - well as slaves they are fed better and aren’t exterminated. He sounded like a lot of people who enjoyed their positions and privileges while pretending not to know the sordid details. It’s like knowing about Auschwitz but skipping past the details. There were Polish and Jewish slaves as well as those sent directly to the “showers”. So it was rationalized as a brutal work camp, but not as an instrument of genocide.
I think both of them have gotten any more severe look in modern history than they did in the fifties and sixties. Time has given us more records and more proof of both of their crimes and both of their culpability. Speer got a pass because he said sorry but he's probably the largest slave owner of all times.Von Braun launched his entire career off the backs of slave workers. He certainly knew that everything was being built by slaves because he visited the site 10 times.
I grew up in the Ruhr area, my grandmother lived there during the bombing days. She said, she was bombed out four times. She lost all her belongings four times. But she never talked about this with bitterness, she was just happy that she and my grandfather survived.
Great coverage of the oil campaign and some of its effects. As Luftwaffe Field Marshal Erhard Milch said: "The British left us with deep and bleeding wounds, but the Americans stabbed us in the heart." And while the effects of lack of oil and skilled pilots were most important in breaking the Luftwaffe, those miraculous production numbers in 1944 also deserve some scrutiny. Many "new" aircraft were simply refurbished older or damaged aircraft. Many airframes were completed by raiding spare part stores, actually making the situation worse in the field, as getting a finished aircraft to the frontline was a lot harder than sending parts. With most workers not exactly being motivated, sabotage was equally very common with delivered aircraft being unusable from the start. Finally, part quality also took a nosedive as Germany no longer had access to many strategic materials. As the saying goes there are lies, damn lies, statistics and German war production numbers. Finally, Speer deserves the scorn he gets now, he was simply smart enough to read the room at Nurnberg and try something other than blame it all on Hitler. And despite his many later achievements, Von Braun had a lot of blood on his hands, making him one of the hardest people to render a solid verdict on.
IIRC, Speer took credit for many of the reforms brought in by his predecessor. Incidentally, in one of the slave produced ME 163s which ran on incredibly dangerous fuel that could explode with the slightest touch, they found a jagged piece of metal which in the event of a rough landing would have pierced the fuel tank and ignited the lot - with a note that said "I am not happy in my work."
A good supplemental read of the war against civilians is "Sherman's Ghost" by Matthew Carr which examines the doctrine of overwhelming force and "Total War". If you agree with the book or not, it brings up some very good discussion points of the doctrine of overwhelming force and civilian morale. (Remember the March to the Sea and subsequent campaigns were meant to demonstrate to the planter-ruling class that the war was lost.)
In fact, the German Industrial production was going up because they FINALLY went into FULL war production mode. The strategic bombing really did effect the German's war effort greatly. One other thing, imagine all those Luftwaffe fighters being sent Eastward because they werent needed for air defense. Alot of production was switched from ground weapons to fighter planes.
Unlike ground-based armies, aircraft couldn't always fly 24/7 in WW2. Especially true in the East in their appalling weather conditions; the Luftwaffe found it very difficult to do maintenance on their planes in winter. I once met a former Royal Australian Air Force mechanic who spent 1942 in Murmansk, and didn't have the same problem because the RAF/RAAF and the Russians could work under cover there; the Germans could not.
It’s interesting that the strategic bombing in Germany affected the enemy’s war effort, but in Laos and North Vietnam in the Vietnam war, there is no analysis it seems
@@Kabutoes The problem with analyzing strategic bombing and the effect it had on the opposing war effort is that the war itself was not one of conquest or victory, but one of containment. The policy makers for much of the Vietnam war were so afraid of Soviet or Chinese direct intervention like what had happened in Korea they chose a passive action plan centered on reacting to North Vietnamese incursions and conducting patrol sweeps rather than pushing North or directly attacking North Vietnam's ability to make war. That meant for much of the war the USAF was strictly limited on where, when, and how they could bomb making much of the North's factories, supply depots, transportation infrastructure, and oil reserves were off limits. It wasn't until the last three or four years of the war that true strategic bombing was undertaken, and with the exception of Operation Linebacker I & II most of that was wasted on leveling Laotian cities and civilian centers in an effort to cut Viet-Cong supply lines through the country, back a Pro US coup against the leader who was all but allied with North Vietnam, and prevent the Khemr Rouge from taking over which happened anyways. Operation Linebacker I & II from late 1972 though were arguably very effective in dealing extensive damage to North Vietnam in the short time they were implemented, but they were only used as a negotiation tactic to end the war and allow a withdrawal than any real effort to actually win it.
Harris would greatly have preferred to focus on strategically relevant targets. But he knew that his bombers, flying 4 miles up at night, could at best hope to hit something within a few miles of the target. By aiming at the centre of a large city, some bombs were likely to fall within the city or suburbs and perhaps do some meaningful damage. Harris rationalized that his goal was to “de-house” Germany's industrial workforce, thereby reducing its morale and productivity. However, his real strategy was to strike the enemy with the only - wildly inaccurate - weapon he had, with massive force, and hope that something important broke. Some significant damage was indeed done - for example, at the Alkett tank factory, 6 miles from the (targeted) centre of Berlin. But the biggest military achievement was to divert Germany's war effort partly towards home defence.
@@Maus5000 For example, from Wikipedia's page on Alkett: “Alkett had produced 255 StuG IIIs in October 1943, but in December [after the RAF raids in November] the number fell to just 24 vehicles”.
Harris was a realist, and knew that heavy bombers couldn't hit precision targets at all. Even the Americans in daylight with their miracle bombsight couldn't hit anything, except by accident.@@chonpincher
@@chonpincher That's all complete nonsense. [early in 1944] "Already opposition to Harris' strategy had been growing, and the Air Staff were coming to recognize that the policy of selective bombing, that is to say attack upon selected industries such as oil, aircraft, and the like, was better suited to the Casablanca concept that a land invasion of northern Europe was necessary and could not be launched until command of the air was definitely gained. As the German air defense grew, the more questioned Harris's views became...By the beginning of 1944, the Air Staff rejected his notion that he could bring Germany to its knees with Lancasters alone by April and insisted on on selective targets against German industry, such as the Schweinfurt ball-bearing plants." --"History of the Second World War", B. H. Liddell Hart
When I was studying at the Unis in Stuttgart and Tuebingen in the 80s, it was very common for restaurants and pubs to hang "before and after" photos of their locations. Late-war photos of completely bombed out streets juxtaposed with their completely rebuilt postwar images. I don't know if this is still a commonplace anymore, but I do recall talking with some specialist craftsmen who were extensively repairing 4 and 5 hundred year-old buildings in the Rathaus square in Tuebingen--work that involved replacing huge main beams in the traditional manner with very little steel or modern structural technology--and I very often heard them say that these restorations would have been impossible if these ancient wooden buildings had suffered direct hits by Allied bombing. I can only contrast this with the rebuilding of a synagogue in nearby Reutlingen...that had been razed to the ground by the Germans themselves. Literally no brick sat atop another when this painstaking reconstruction began, more than 4 decades after its destruction. Most disheartening was the desecration of a uniquely undisturbed and very old Jewish cemetery by neo-Nazi hooligans at the same time in Hechingen, another nearby town where one of my very good friends was born and raised. He was with me when I visited the reconstruction of the Reutlinger synagogue, where he was extremely happy...and was just devastated and very deeply angry at the desecration of the little cemetery in his home town that he had known his whole life. Despite still being very optimistic 40 years ago that the scourge of Nazism and intolerance could never again become resurgent, as an American I have since then many times wondered whether our species might not just be too stupid and savage to survive...
Great episode Spartacus . As to your last comments at the end re. The German People, I think Ian Kershaw said it best in his two volume Hitler biography Hubris / Nemesis. The German People ..... Shared in his Hubris and as result had to face the cost of his Nemesis.
The Ruhr production was unable to ship the finished goods out of the plants. This suffocated the plants. Krupp NEVER stopped. my reference " The Arms of Krupp by William Manchester.
The growth in industrial production was not just down to slave labourers, but also due to re-allocation of people. If someone worked in a restaurant, they continued to work there despite demands for production workers. Once the allies had bombed the restaurant, the workers were given jobs in production, hence the increase in production.
@@grahamogle6332 this had very marginal effect. As I have shown in previous episodes, the main trick Speer used with non-slave labor was to move the workers into work camps that were not in the cities, and did not have living quarters right next to the factories. There was no net growth of labor through displacement due to bombing, and the Nazis efforts to forcefully get people out of non-essential war work to the war industry were only moderately successful. It really was slave labor that kept the machinery ticking.
The Germans did have a war ready economy. The pre war Nazi Germany economy is mobilized already, to keep prices (officially) low and expand the military industry
The reason German war production continued to increase despite the bombing was because they finally switched their economy on a total war footing. Until 1942 Germany was still producing normal consumer goods as would any nation in peacetime. When the economy was geared towards total war there was enough slack for an increase in production of war materials. What Allied Strategic Bombing did achieve was prevent the German war economy from reaching its full potential. The bombing sort of acted as a cap that weighed down on German industry which although was increasing it never reached maximum levels. The strategic bombing campaign also placed huge logistical issues on the German war machine. The increased air attacks forced the Luftwaffe to reallocate most of its fighters and the majority of its anti-aircraft weapons back to Germany in a defensive role. The bombing of marshalling yards and railroad lines also caused significant setbacks in Germany's already flimsy logistics. Perhaps the third and most important achievement of the strategic bombing campaign was the destruction of the Luftwaffe. When the Pointblank Directive was issued and when General Doolittle took command of the 8th Air Force the entire focus of the 8th became air supremacy. American fighter pilots who before were ordered to never leave the bombers were turned loose against the German fighter pilots. In what became a battle of attrition most of the experienced German pilots were killed resulting in a catastrophic brain drain from which the Luftwaffe never recovered. To keep up with the losses training was reduced and the result were inexperienced, half-baked pilots going up to fight against experienced and veteran American pilots.
@@monza1002000 The amount of time between BoB and a final gelding of Luftwaffe was more than enough to train effective pilots - American air force was a sufficient evidence one did not need 10 years or so. Also, Eastern front provided Germans what Americans did not have: a lot of live target exercises against victims of even less efficient system. And yet the quality of "German veterancy" - ie. of those who survived BoB and/or gained it over USSR - was quickly re-evaluated when the same aces began dropping like flies after being transferred to the West.
'By March 1944, it became clear that the area offensive had fallen short of its goals and that Bomber Command was facing destruction by night fighters just as earlier it had faced destruction by day fighters.' - Noble Frankland, historian and Bomber Command veteran "Losses were running at the unsustainable rate of 6-7 per cent per raid, with no prospect of a German surrender. With Germany reasserting command of the air and the Normandy landings in prospect, Arthur Harris's dream of defeating Germany through bombing was slipping away." BBC Berlin Air Offensive
Darmstadt is the Town I was born and raised in. The Bombing has been a Story told over and over at every opportunity of my youth and adolescence. Almost to the point of oversaturating me and my classmates in school so we only groaned when we were told it would be the next subject in class, first in histor, then in Local Geography and Social studies, Religion and then again in Music of all subjects. Well, my hometown was never a Metropolis or even large. But having this subject trumpeted in our ears all the time has filled me with a kind of disgust when someone brings it up and how we were just innocent victims or what great things were destroyed then. "Bomber Harris" is almost a Curseword in the elderly Folk and even my father, now in his 70s dabbles in revisionistic Nonesense. That is why we need constant reminders, so that we, the Grandchildren of the WWII-survivors will not become entranced by the new Promises that sound so old and familiar to the Knowing. Never forget.
Morals aside, Speers Fighter production was useless without trained pilots to use them. The Germans couldn't train pilots near fast enough to replace their losses in men let alone aircraft. The old Aces flew till they died ours went home and trained thousands orf new pilots. All the technology in the world is useless without trained people to use it.
'The idea of area bombing was to attack an aiming point which lay at the centre of a large area whose destruction would be useful. It was, in other words, a way of making bombs which missed the aiming point contribute to the destruction of the German war machine. Since nearly all the bombs were missing the aiming point, there was a certain logic about the idea.' - Noble Frankland, historian and Bomber Command veteran BBC Thousand-bomber Raids page
So the German economy didn't went to total war mobilisation until 1944? Damn, imagine if they went all out starting from early 1940 that sounds terrific... I will really want to see an episode on how did Speer managed to increase the production so much despite the losing of territory and the continuous increase in Allies bombing.
Toujours d'excellentes questions philosophiques sur les actions de guerre du côté des alliés, Sparty. Merci pour votre réflexion si juste sur les bombardements à objectifs civils-ce qui n'a pas empêché le criminel Speer de maximiser la machine de guerre avec une forte main d'œuvre d'esclaves. Bomber Harris reste néanmoins une honte pour l'humanité en tuant des centaines de milliers de civils sans aucune efficacité sur le cours de la guerre. Never forget, a lot of thanks to you!
When the Allies switched a portion of their bombing offensive from bombing cities to striking Germany's energy infrastructure in May 1944, it started to have a major effect on oil production. Due to these attacks German domestic oil production dropped from two hundred and fifty thousand tons a month in April 1944 to less than fifty thousand tons in November of that year. Combined with attacks on the German transportation system, by the end of the war the Germans had a difficult time keeping their forces operational. As far as Bomber Command's area bombing offensive was concerned, it's effects were not that effective. Although the R.A.F. was able to kill large numbers of people and create giant piles of wreckage, it failed in its objective to destroy civilian morale. The wanton destruction cities from a strategic and operational point of view therefore makes little sense. It only serves to stiffen the enemy's obduracy. Harris's pigheaded determination to continue with a policy that had obviously failed, represents a prime example of doing the same thing over and over again while hoping for a different outcome, which is the definition of insanity.
The factual part of this video, before the moral pondering at the end, is accurate and pertinent. In summary, the strategic bombing of Germany in 1944 effectively diverted the increase in German war production, along with approximately 900,000 Luftwaffe personnel, into defence against the bombers - continuing a trend that had been in place since 1942. Moreover, about half the available 8.8-cm artillery (arguably the Wehrmacht's most effective and versatile weapon) was held back for home-front flak units. Further, some 1.5 million workers were employed just to repair bomb-damaged factories and infrastructure. The consequent weakness of the Wehrmacht on the eastern and western fronts hastened its overall collapse. Whether this shortened the war by months or by years is debatable.
Just to hone in on one interesting point, there's a funny question of how much 8,8cm artillery was even wanted at the front, by this point. Following the loss of 70 Pak 43 on the Eastern Front, abandoned without firing a shot because tow capacity did not exist to retreat with them, a meeting was held in April 44 including representatives from Krupp and the Waffenamt. It was relayed that Hitler specifically ordered towed 8,8cm Pak production to be replaced entirely with fully motorized Waffenträger. Production of towed pieces, of course, was not stopped, and the Waffenträger program went through numerous dead end prototypes they werent satisfied with, but I think it's a fascinating little episode in bizarre German production priorities, and Hitlers reactionist behavior I realize you mean to speak more about the dual purpose flak gun, though I think the employment of that weapon in a direct fire role was increasingly undesirable because of its tall silhouette and firing height. The much lighter Pak 40 was also pointed out as too heavy to man handle, and with towing vehicles in such short supply, I would have little hope for the Flak 8,8's prospects
Keep in mind that the large number of German civilian casualties lengthened the war by strengthening the German will to fight. Had they not occurred, Hitler's regime would probably have already been overthrown, with its successor suing for peace. We're long past the point where the ordinary German citizen could have had any expectation of winning the war - those still supporting the regime were doing so to extract vengeance for the terror bombing of German cities.
The question shouldn't be merely how much effect the bombing had, or how much effort/material the Germans were forced to allocate. We should really ask whether the effort/material of the Allied bombing could have been better used elsewhere?
@@Duncomrade What if the answer is "no idea"? Would that qualify as "tentatively no" or is burden of proof supposed to switch? Aside from that, there was no reason to push for more resource for Allied navy and Allied armies were primarily bottlenecked by lacking port infrastructure and general logistics, ie. two areas Allies already poured massive amount of resources and care into and with further advancement being also blocked by time requirements and other limitations. For example, you can only reallocate so much effort and material into "building a bigger port" before hitting into diminishing returns territory and issues like lack of specialized labor. Ultimately, Allied handling of infrastructure was already something to behold. So, with German naval effort already reduced to irrelevancy and Allied land units having, _on average_ , more issues with own logistics than with defeating Germans, it only leaves air as a method of projecting more power and hastening overall collapse.
@@Saeronor The problem is that the answer right now is probably "no idea". I've never seen anyone even bring up the question, let alone discuss it in detail. Meanwhile, there's loads of discussion and stats about the bombing's effect and German allocation of resources. You made some interesting points, would be great if someone could make a vid looking at it in detail. I would say maybe more resources could have been put into engineers at least, to alleviate those bottlenecks.
It did not mater how much Germany made the Allied concentration on fuel production and on transportation made the difference. Also adopting the policy of letting escorting fighters go hunting ground targets once the escort job was done also had an overall effect.
Sparty hits a home run again with this episode. It's such sick irony that I see so many parallels to today in this episode, let alone the whole series. This channel ought to be watched by every blasted fool who serves in elected office today. Because they have clearly forgotten. Never forget.
Speer was a devious, and weasly bastard no doubt. He talked himself out of the Nuremberg trials with absolute bullshit and skirted the sentence of using slave labor. But how the hell do you keep that kind of production levels afloat with basically nothing. Speer was awful but damn some credit has to be given to his effectiveness, even though again terrible person.
I think but I could be wrong but the attacks on transportation had far negative affects on the Germanys war effort you can build all you want but if combatants can't 'get the parts' or is destroyed before it gets there then.....
Transport disruption yes, but aerial bombardment was not the most efficient part of that. Sabotage, and cutting off rail lines by advancing on the ground had greater effect than the terribly imprecise bombing efforts.
@@spartacus-olsson I have read a little about the 9th AF. Being the tactical force of the US Air Force in Europe they attacked railway logistics allot. Reading about the 365th FG they hit trains and marshalling yards almost daily. So did the other 20 or so groups do. This must have had huge effect.
@@emilrydstrm3944 it didn’t though. It caused ac lot of delays, but didn’t cut off the supplies. The rail network is huuuge in Europe. Now, scale is really hard to understand, but if you look on a map, and try to imagine a few hundred, even thousands of planes over the continent, you might realize that there is no way in hell they can bomb everywhere all the time. And there’s the problem - rail lines are relatively easy to fix and pretty hard to hit. Within days of being bombed they can be up and running again, and the planes can’t return for several weeks, since they have other places to bomb as well.
@@spartacus-olsson Fair point. But the tactical air forces of the allied did not fly that far and worked over a area closer to the front. I think logistics here got hit allot more frequent than rest of nazi occupied Europe.
my oldr eyes didn't notice that - but- I appreciate the stellar vocal clarity- too many other sources are more off-putting by the compromise of clarity for what has to be economy.
Thanks again for your final words, Spartacus. So true and important, in 1945 as well as in 2023 and for all the years to come. Civilians must be protected in armed conflicts. Full stop.
Well yes… the Western Allies and the US were wise before the events though, when in 1939 and 1940 they condemned these kinds of operations as illegal, immoral, and strategically useless… but then everyone got really, really angry. That’s unfortunately most often the case in war, and why we need to remind ourselves to try to keep our moral compass true, even when we get angry.
The US Air Force requires all officer cadets to study the history of air power, thus my comments are based on my learning and experience. The claim that intensifying the Allied bomber offensive only increased German productivity is an exercise in flawed logic because it infers there was a causal relationship when in fact it was a casual relationship. The question never asked or answered is what would German productivity have been like if we had not carried out a strategic air campaign against them? Logic dictates it would have been much higher. If one wishes to argue the soundness of the targets chosen, then a decent case can be made that Bomber Harris was Germany's best air strategist. Ignorance of the truth is no excuse for poor target planning. A panel of civilian industrial and logistics experts had been assembled earlier in the war to recommend ideal targets. Their suggestions were largely ignored until late in the war and some targets were never hit. Postwar analysis showed they had been right all along. Men like Harris had been wrong.
@Saeronor No, the Luffwaffe was made up of very experienced pilots who learnt their trade in the Spanish Civil war plus they sharpen those skills in the first year of the WW2. Those pilots were across the board but from on they were replaced by "pilots" as against fighter pilots. This becomes very clear if you look at the shear losses of pilots from 1942 on.
Germany had whole continental Europe with it's producing industrial capacity in it's hands. Yet never suprassed at least Soviet production. To say, that allied bombing didn't affect German production is simply not true. It did and stopped them to even start real war production in large scale.
This comment ignores both reality and logic in a fantastic, even rather impressive way. They didn’t have anywhere close to the same access to resources as the Allies. It was for sure Hitler’s plan… but it failed. They never conquered the Caucasus oil fields. The failed to reach the Middle Eastern oil fields. Extracting resources from occupied territory was more costly and difficult than you think and the Nazis thought. Forcing an occupied people to produce for you does not yield an optimal output. The Soviet Union did not supply the majority of resources and industrial power that won the war… the US, with its territory untouched by the war did, even Soviet industrial output itself depended on US supplies. Think and read before you make up your mind that you’ve “gotten it”.
@@spartacus-olsson They had whole European industrial capacity in their hands. They had Romanian oil fields in their hands. They had whole European coal capacity in their hands. The problem is, they never truly started a real war-time ecconomy. And the moment they tried, allied bombing destroyed it. "Think and read before you make up your mind" applies to you. German tank production: 49,700 Soviet tank production: 107,347 US tank production: 88 000 British tank production: 27 500
@@tomfu9909 we’re not disagreeing on that Germany weren’t able to outproduce the Allies… it’s the fantasy that bombing stopped them from doing that we disagree on. Look, it’s really simple, it’s about timelines. German production increases constantly from the time Speer takes over. In 40 and 41 the Allie’s don’t bomb Germany in any significant way. In 42 the RAF start the de-housing campaign, it focuses solely on bombing cities and has no effect on industry - measurably, provably and on purpose (look up Arthur Harris quote about the combined bomber offensive if you don’t believe me). In early 43 the Combined Bomber Offensive begins. Harris refuses to end the de-housing campaign, and the USAAF try some sorties against aerial industry, they largely fail. That’s the year… In early 44, Eisenhower forces Harris and Spaatz to suspend both the de-Housing Campaign, and the campaign against Aerial industry and focus on the Transportation Plan to interdict support to Normandy for Operation Overlord. Harris and Spatz protest that it won’t work, they’re mostly right as it turns out. However, resistance sabotage, the deception operations, and Hitler’s boneheaded refusal to allow reserves sent in have the same effect. In August 1944 the combined Bomber Offensive resumes, but slowly at first. Spaatz now focuses on the Oil Campaign, Harris again refuses, but is forced to lend some support. Only in November 1944 does both the deHousing Campaign and the oil campaign take off in any significant way. So… there you have it. It’s only when in the East, the Red Army, outnumbering the Germans 5:1, and in the West the Allied Expeditionary Force, outnumbering the Germans 4:1 are both standing at the German borders that bombing _begins_ to have any effect on supplies. At that point German supply production is still running at full speed, and they have already lost so many men and allies that they have more stuff than they can use. Explain to me with that in mind how your ‘calculations’ should work?
Yes, though far less of it than the British & American air forces. Chonpincher's post is mostly correct but there were some limited raids on German & other Axis or occupied cities by Soviet bombers even as early as 1941. The number of sorties & tonnage of bombs dropped however was dwarfed by that of the Western Allies, as the Soviet Air Force was more structured to support the front.
That they were able to get so much under way economically and materially this late in the war leaves the impression that for most of the war they were sitting on their laurels assuming their “master race” was more than adequate.
At 5:40 Could you possibly elaborate on POW from other belligerent nations? Mainly France, but what about smaller countries that have surrendered early in the war, like Norway, Yugoslavia, Greece, or even those from momentarily successful campaigns, like Anzac men from the Africa campaigns of '40-'43?
The Nazis had only suspended the Geneva Conventions against Eastern POWs and soldiers of color. Yugsolvaia surrendered, partisans weren't taken to concentration camps.
The French government signed away the freedom of French POWs during the surrender in 1940. They agreed for them to remain captive until the end of the war because they expected Britain to be defeated immediately after the fall of France. That didn't happen.
Well, Germany did a real surprised Pikachu with that. And some people are still bitter up to this day. As if they were done some unfair treatment without any wrongdoing.
Since my father flew in a 15th AF B-17 late in the war, I was raised to believe that German--and other nations'--civilian bombing casualties were morally justified because, well, they'd started it, or they did the same thing when they could, or our cause was right and theirs was wrong, etc. In retrospect I've come to question those rationalizations, especially as I've seen them played out in dozens of conflict zones from Sarajevo to Kyiv to Gaza.
As a pedantic nit-picker, I have to speak up. The thumbnail for this video about bombing Germany is an image of B-29s, which were not used in the European theater. EDIT: Oh, my God, they actually changed it. Sorry to be a pest, and thank you, you have made my OCD very happy. _...senpai noticed me..._
My gf grandmother saw how her mother was bombed to death in front of her. It has left her traumatized and she passed her trauma on. Believe me that even i do suffer three generations later because of this crime against humanity.
I rarely comment. I will say that I love your channel and look forward to the releases of your entire staff. Having been brought up in NYC and my father served in WWII, I was taught to treat history as a lesson for the future. I have been actually waiting to see if you would ever even hint at the 10/7 massacres in Israel. No, I did not expect a political statement to come out of a TH-cam channel, but still, it interested me if you would touch the subject. I am an american who lives in Israel for many many years. All my children and grandchildren were born and live here. I, myself, served as a reserve battlefield medic for 28 years and I know the horror of war. Yet, I must, in all good conscience point out 4 things, some of which you make reference to in your various videos. 1. It is hubris for us to judge the actions of the allies when destroying Germany and Japan. One cannot apply our knowledge of events from 2023 to how the allies should have done things. At that period of time, yes there was a call for vengeance. I also do not buy the "innocent german civilian" argument. That is a misnomer that has painted our modern view of things. They wanted the Jews and Gypsys and all non-aryans dead. Until the day they gave up. Sorry, I love Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and his writing, (even knew him from my neighborhood), but Dresden had to be bombed. And yes, to save the lives of allied soldiers there were drastic decisions that had to be made. That is war. 2. Studying history and putting it on an TH-cam channel, no matter how excellent your channel is, and it deserves awards fro what you guys do, is not going thorough the war, and watching the horrors of it unfold. Those are two different universes - which have no meeting point. You have not seen it, but I promise you if you watched that 43 minute made by the Hamas GoPro cameras wou would be singing a much different tune in regard to "going after civilian populations" 3. There are rules to war, especially applied to "collateral damage." I have written scholarly articles on it for renowned journals and conferences. They are available for anyone to read and study. Israel has gone beyond such laws in the millions of percentage points, at the loss of our soldiers - our children. No country on earth in history has ever done so much to protect the citizens of an enemy who has vowed to kill everyone of us. 4, After all your and Indy's study of war, do not tell me you have not seen the face of evil. On 10/7 it reared its ugly face again. The only difference is, this time we are not going to the slaughter. This time we will not be silent. This time we will fight back, with a vengeance the world has thought Jews incapabable of. This time there will be no pictures of Jews in concentration camps or being pushed to the sea. I can guarantee that. I run and write a very popular Newletter on Substack, which does say something, called "The View From Israel." It is free and so are all the podcasts. The reason I am taking the time to write this is twofold: 1. I congratulate on the courage it took for an TH-cam channel to say what you said in this 124 at the end. 2. I beseech you not to judge my fathers generation through our modern eyes. I know, he believed along with all his friends, that the more Germans dead the better. Simply put, I grew up with Hungarian refugees from the concentration camps. From the time I was 4 I knew exactly what those blue tattooed numbers meant. Never Forget. Never Forgive. And for Israel, Never Again. Sometime evil is evil - no matter how many morality tinged glasses you wish to wear. And when you face evil, you have but one option. Eradicate it before it eradicates you and your way of life. End of speech. I do this every day in The View From Israel Newsletter & Podcast. But I had to comment, as I truly respect your team.
I say this with all due respect, for your viewpoint, but feel that I must point out the reason that the indiscriminate bombing of German cities is roundly condemned today, and was criticised at the time. This is because it was known at the time that simply flattening German cities was having little effect on Germany's production of weaponary, and it was also known that it was highly unlikely to break the spirit of the civilian population.. This is why focussed attacks on fuel production, ball-bearing factories an transportation in general were argued for. Yrs, bombing accuracy was unavoidably poor, and there would have been many civilian casualties even without deliberate area-bombing of German cities. But those like Harris, who argued for simply flattening German cities wanted to kill German civilians simply becayse they were German, and irrespective of the known fact that such bombing was having very liyyle impact on the Wehrmacht's ability to fight. That is what made it abhorent.even to some at the time. I had the good futune to meet and chat with the father of my best friend a few times. He had served in the RAF, flying in Halifax bombers. He was a haubted man. He told me that quite a number of crewmen, like him, didn't like to be sent on raids that were not against military targets, as it meant that the sole purpose of such raids was to kill civilians. Yes, the scale of atrocities committed by the Third Reich were far larger than those committed by the Allies, and we weren't as cold-bloodedly murderous towards those we didn't like amidst our societies, in the west . But that does not excuse the deliberate attempt to simply flatten German cities and to kill German civilians simply becuse we could, when we could, and should have used our airforces specifically to try to defeat the Wehrmact as raoidly as possible. But we did not do that, and it is shameful that the Allies commited such a war crime.. The way tat the Soviets conducted themselves was even more shameful, as I am sure you well know, and let us not forget that Jews weren't exactly seen in a good light in most European countries prior to WW2; pogroms against Jews, sadly, happened many times in many countries over the centuries. Sure, the Third Reich was by far the worst in their actions against Jews, but does that mean that the rest of Europe is in the clear because we weren't as thorough in our pogroms as Nazi Germany was? No! My point is that the intent of what is done in war does matter, and a war crime is still a war crime even if against an individual citizen of an apalling regime. In conclusion, I would like to add that whilst, given the sctrewed-up mess us British caused in the Middle East due to our offhand treatment of the native peoples there (and elsewhee too, of course), that Israel, once established and recognised as an independent nation, it most certainly had a right to defens itself against those who threatened its very existence. Indeed, I cheered Israel on, from afar, in most of those conflicts. But I have become increasingly disturbed over the years at the attitude of the leadership of Israel with regard to the Palestinians.. Yes, Hamas are absolutely barbarian terrorists who clearly don't have much regatd for the lives of other Palestinians, let alone Israelis, and I fully agree that the civilised world needs to act to destroy such terrorist groups as rapidly as possible. But does Hamas' actions agaibst Israel really justify treating all Palestinians so poorly? My best friend, a Jew, does not, and neither do I, and we noth find Netenyahus attitude and actions regarding Palestinians abhorent. He is as culpable for the situation he caused by his policies, as are Hamas. He treated Palestinians concerns and desire for their own homeland as political playthings, and, sadly, Israeli civilians paid the price. May God smile upon us all, and bring a swift and just -not vengeful- resolution to all of the conflicts in the world. God knows, we have better things to be doing, like undoing the harm we have caused to the ecosytem that keeps us all alive, rather than having insane wars driven by no more than individuals pride or contempt for others, or to simply weild power over others, or to continue centuries old vendettas.
@@esmenhamaire6398 Maybe so. Maybe that is true. I am not sure, though I will accept your POV for the sake of this. AND? Will you deny that the "majority" of people living in those cities supported the Nazis? Will you also tell me they knew nothing of the atrocities taking place under their noses? Literal noses by the way, as the smell of burning flesh and prisoners and slave labor were everywhere. Goebells certainly did not hide it. So let us assume it was the "flattening of German cities" because the allies were confronted with the worst crimes, to that date, that were possible. Beyond imagination. And let us assume they were mad as hell, or some of them. And let us assume they did it our of pure vengeance. Do not forget thousands of allied soldiers were being killed every day. If that is the case, and it was, then "breaking the spirit of the Nazis" (and they were all Nazis), was not a goal. It was to erradicate as much of them as possible. It was for revenge. If you feel revenge is never correct, not in any situation, then one must agree with you. I cannot fault you there. It is your POV and your own moral judgement and you have every right to it. The next problem lies, of course, with the Atom Bomb. Any sane human being today would say that was horrific. And we know from documents that many were against it at the time. Yet, there was a cogent argument, that because the Japanese absolutely refused to surrender, it would cost 1,000,000 allied lives or more to subdue Japan. I am sorry. You do not sacrifice 1,000,000+ lives even under such horrific circumstance. And do not for a moment think that Japan today was the Japan of 1940-1945. That too is something we look at with rose-colored glasses. It is wonderful to sit in our ivory towers and be able to judge. To be honest, until 6:29 AM on October 7th, I thought pretty much like you. After that moment, I realized I had been completely wrong. Never Forget - comes with consequences. It comes with the need to act and react. It is not a call to conscience, it is a call to make sure that it cannot happen again. It is not just a statement you make from behind a desk in a staged set with air-conditioning blowing on you and food in the refrigerator. It is a call from pure despair and from the depths of a broken heart. The moment we start judging what reasons, motivations, and plans were hidden in the Allies minds, including as you imply "revenge" and ignore the "why" is the moment we become complicit in the next tragedy. So, yes, even if it was done out of pure revenge, even if the German cities were bombed - just because they were Nazis, even if it was not going to break the spirit of the Nazis, I still say it was 100% justified. If it had not been done, and Japan had been taken with "boots on the ground" many of us would not be here today. And the world would have looked much different, and not in a good sense. That is MHO.
Most of them were single engine fighters which were verging on Obsolete (Me-109's and alike). Engines were not run in for 30 hours before fitting to the aircraft due to lack of fuel. Trainee pilots crashed loads of them due to engine failures.
@@richardvernon317 the final version of 109 wasn't exactly obsolete. It was still competitive with the ally fighters. The 190 was as good as if not better than most ally fighters, on par with the Mustang.
On Christmas Eve 1944, my village (which is now a suburb of Trier) Pfalzel was bombed, ostensibly due to the railway bridge across the Mosel river, which was part of the strategic railway towards Metz. The bridge was quickly destroyed in the first wave, so the second wave attacked the rest of the village (quite far from the railway), including buildings which had stood for more than 1500 years; killing 116 people. Miraculously, my family's house, which included a large "bomb-proof" basement, survived. Other neighbors were not so lucky: Many took refuge in the large wine cellar of a tavern down the street, which was directly hit. The basement collapsed and was flooded by wine leaking out of broken barrels, so that many victims were unrecognizable when they were dug out a few days later. For decades afterwards, my great-grandmother would occasionally be approached by forgotten former neighbors, recounting that they spend this day in our basement. And still, each Christmas Eve at 14:30, the church bells ring in remembrance (instead of in celebration of christmas)
Production numbers and quality are two separate ideas when your factories are being bombed. Late war German armor was often lacking crucial hardening of steel and there were many other problems as well. Materials were diverted to production, leaving equipment that was forward deployed without crucial spare parts. Losing half of your combat strength to "non combat" reasons is the telling number that indicates the equipment being produced is more dangerous to the Germans than to the enemy. Germany had to divert resources from the Eastern Front to combat the bomber campaign, opening the way for the Soviets.
Not to mention production numbers are often used to misrepresent this "great jump in productivity" by tricks like "number of armored vehicles". Dig a bit deeper and SURPRISE! You found... Hetzers.
@@billd2635 And massive air defense network, with, aside from specialized equipment, absurd number of guns, many of which -were- would be pretty useful on Eastern front.
Is tha map in the background updating? I swear its a little different every week. Amazing touch if so. Me going a little insane and just seeing things if not
Well I'm either your subconscious telling you that it doesn't change, or yes, it does change every week. Only certain episodes are produced before they air, so they show an outdated map.
The map is the same week by week, we only update it every so often with a completely new design. Probably just your mind playing tricks on you through lighting and set dressing! Thanks for watching.
One other item to add to the list of why someone might try to justify bombing civilians: so that they understood that they have in fact lost the war. In WWI, Germany ended the war still on French territory, Germany controlled vast new territories in the east, and German newspapers had still been painting a rosy picture of imminent victory just weeks before the end. This contributed greatly to the "stabbed in the back" myth. From the perspective of the German civilian population in 1918, after four difficult years of war, they had gone from the brink of total victory to swift and ignominious defeat within weeks. In WWII, with the bombing campaigns systematically levelling German cities, it was much harder to pretend that all was well and to convince people that Germany was winning the war.
Complete nonsense, especially considering that the allied victory was obvious to anyone except the most fanatical Nazis. The Allies were pushing through France, Netherlands and into Germany from both sides. Refugees were walking through towns and villages, families were relocating to flee from the front. Not to mention, unlike WW1 Germany ended up being occuppied rather than left to its own devices. Drawing such a comparison or justification is complete nonsense and takes away from the already scarce justifications that exist for the civilian bombing campaigns.
Why are you using B-29 as header. B-29 was never deployed over Germany in WW2, only deployed against Japan (because of range issue). Eight Air Force employed B-17/B-24. If you want serious analysis of German economic management under bombing see Adam Tooze: The Wages of Destruction, Richard Overy: The Bombing War, Williamson Murray: Luftwaffe-A Strategy for Defeat. Concentration camp inmates were also compelled to work for airframe manufacturing.
It could be argued that early in the war, Great Britain and her commonwealth and later the USA, could do little to attack or even to be much of a nuisance to Nazi Germany except for an aerial campaign. If the Allies had sat around doing absolutely nothing her citizens would have been quite dissatisfied. Even while the Allies were launching thousands of bombers against the Reich, it seemed to Stalin that they were doing very little while the Soviets were carrying the burden. I don't see how the bombing campaign against Germany could have been avoided given the circumstances.
These were indeed the real reasons for bombing Germany. Stalin didn’t buy it as an answer to his demands and continued demanding a real front… and is it right to do something wrong because it’s popular? Moreover, you can choose your targets differently. Bombing inner cities wasn’t the only way to bomb Germany.
The victory in Europe was a combined arms effort. Oil turned out to be the irreplaceable resource, even more important than troops and pilots. Interesting that Germany sits atop huge gas reserves not understood then as far as technology or application.
Technically the Geneva convention that covers the treatment of prisoners of war (1929) and the earlier Hague convention weren't signed by the Soviets, they refused to sign it. As the conventions are only between signatories, the Germans were free to do whatever the hell they wanted to the Soviet prisoners.
I used to kind of buy the arguments in favour of "strategic" bombing. Not that I thought it was ethical or anything like that, but at least that it served a purpose. These days, I absolutely don't. Yes, I think it's inarguable that it did negatively effect Germany, both in the way it pushed the nazis to focus even harder on strategically worthless expenses such as the V-program and in the disruption of war production. Yes, I know Germany managed to increase production significantly despite the bombing, but I just can't see any way they couldn't have ramped up even more if left alone. But the thing is: that's just not good enough. Not for the resources spent, the lives lost or the violated principles. Just looking at how many resources were spent building, maintaining and operating the strategic bomber forces, those resources could have had a much greater effect on the war if deployed directly on the battlefield. Say for example that all those resources had been spent on developing, building and operating long-range fighters. They would have been enough to essentially flood the european theater and turning it into a no-fly-zone. And when you can get better results for less casualties, and you dont have to commit atrocities, strategic bombing becomes indefensible.
I went through the same change. The literal targeting of civilians gets glossed over or mixed in as unavoidable tragedy and I think it's important to own up to what happened. The British did not weaken in resolve after terror bombing, it was irrational to assume the Germans would be any different. -TimeGhost Ambassador
I watched a video from Ukraine and in Soledar after it fell, PRYGOSIAN(sp?) led a tour through its nearby miles of tunnels. In addition to the Ukrainian Army weapons repair facilty, there were tens of thousands of boxes of small arms weapons and ammo piled up. While many were rotted, some were in great shape and not surprising there were hundreds of US lend-lease M1 Garands and Thompsons, in cosmoline never opened. Crates and crates full of new in box WWII small arms.
Some Thompsons were shipped to the USSR as part of Lend-Lease, especially in 1942. Given the huge Soviet output of submachine-guns, it was like sending coals to Newcastle. Larger numbers of Thompsons were sent to Chiang Kai Shek's forces. They often fell into Communist hands in the Civil War, and some of the Chinese sent into Korea in 1950 and 1951 carried them. They occasionally appear in propaganda photos, for example Chinese troops in posed photos in which they hold US POWs at gunpoint are shown carrying them.
I'm torn between the morally deplorable idea of bombing civilians to destroy morale, and the idea that bombing civilian populations will prevent future wars. By the end of 1918, German civilians had not been attacked... they then gleefully followed their Fuhrer into insanity. In 1945, the whole country had been leveled. Yet, to this day, war is still a painful memory. It also helps that they were helped in reconstruction by the very same Americans who savagely bombed them. I know this is a twisted logic, but do bloodbaths (and help afterwards) create good long-lasting conditions for peace? I'm torn.
Isn't it funny that you attribute all the bombings on the US? England bombed them just as much or more, but nobody remembers that eh? Blame everything in the world, past and present on the USA.
@@booboo8577 The point I was making is the USA did bomb civilian populations (as shown in the video with Bomber Harris), but then helped reconstruct the countries they destroyed. Yes, Britain did bomb German civilians, but they did not help much in the reconstruction of Germany. That US strategy might have resulted in longer lasting peace than the British one. The same thing happened in Japan. Sorry, your Snowflakiness.
@@marcguindon8499 Yes, the UK didn't do as much as the USA in helping Germany recover. I wonder why? Maybe they had their own rubble filled cities to concentrate on? Also, I imagine that any effort to do so would have been political suicide with an electorate who had gone through 1940-41 blitz, and the subsequent attacks of the indiscriminate V weapons. Having said that, I think you'll find that the RAF did more than its fair share during the Berlin Airlift, helping German citizens.
Hi, i have a question. How exactly does the Montreux Convention work with regards to Turkiye and its role in guarding the Bosphorus Strait and the Dardanelles? What role did the Montreux Convention play in the governance of the Straits during Second World War, particularly on the Eastern Front? And how is the Convention relevant to current conflicts, particularly the war between Russia and Ukraine? Thanks!!
Aside from the fact that Speer lied about his accomplishments to keep Hitler satisfied he did increase production by convincing companies to simplify production, but he could not replicate American mass production which was more efficient to begin with plus American cities were never bombed, and the war against the U-boats was being won so what was produced was reaching where it was needed most. The carpet bombing of cities was never morally accepted by Harris's critics for good reason, but because of the inaccuracy of America's "precision bombing" it was grudgingly accepted as the only way to disrupt German war production. So take the figures of German production with a grain of salt, the fact remains the lack of oil doomed the Germans.
"Within Essen there was still Krupps, virtually intact after nearly three years of attack." page 158 Hyperwar Royal Air Force 1939-1945 Vol II 'By March 1944, it became clear that the area offensive had fallen short of its goals and that Bomber Command was facing destruction by night fighters just as earlier it had faced destruction by day fighters.' - Noble Frankland, historian and Bomber Command veteran BBC Berlin Air Offensive page SPAATZ: Which had the more effect in the defeat of Germany, the area bombing or the precision bombing ~ GOERING: The precision bombing, because it was decisive. Destroyed cities could be evacuated but destroyed industry was difficult to replace. SPAATZ: Did the Germans realize that the American Air Forces by intention did only precision bombing ? -5 GOERING ~ Yes. I planned to do only precision bombing myself at the beginning. pdf COPY INTERROGATION OF REICH MARSHAL HERMANN GOERING
Harris at Bomber Command did everything he could to bomb civilians and not military targets. ..."Harris's behavior towards the Air Staff in this last phase almost certainly influenced the fact that he received no peerage and was offered no further employment in the coming of peace, much more than any notion of making him the scapegoat for Dresden. If he had shown the flexibility in the autumn of 1944 to acknowledge that the usefulness of area bombing was ended, that his force was now capable of of better and more important things, history might have judged him more kindly. But he did not. With the single-mindedness that even one of his principal advocates at the Air Ministry had termed obsession, he continued remorselessly with his personal programme for the leveling of Germany's cities until the very end." --"Bomber Command", pp.391-92 by Max Hastings BC could possibly have had a decisive effect, but Harris wouldn't have it.
@@jamesdrummond7684i think I’ve told you this before… we do not stand with one subset of humanity, or against one subset of humanity. I should also point out that your repeated insinuation that we depend on cozying up to Israel to maintain our finances is a terrible antisemitic dog whistle. Shameful.
Without the area bombing campaign the allies wouldn’t have gained air superiority , also a great deal of men and armaments had to be diverted ( from the Russian Front initially ) to fight off the bombers . It’s also hard to say what German war production would have been like without the area bombing . Despite the bombing it did rise but without it we ho knows what they could have achieved. For many years the only way Stalin could be placated in calling for a second front was by the activity of bomber command . I personally knew 2 old timers who had fought in bomber command and to me these men were heros . It’s easy to look back now and condemn those men but back then very difficult decisions had to be taken and this country came very close to getting rubbed out .
1. the combined bomber offensive was not the only way to defeat the Luftwaffe. 2. no weapons and no men were diverted from the Eastern Front or any front to defend against bombing. Defense was mounted by deconscripted men, and teenagers with arms and ammunition never intended for the front in the first place. If you’re thinking of the Luftwaffe, see point 1, 3. you’re right, we don’t know the effect not bombing would have had, but we know the effect it had: very little. 4. I agree that your friends who flew for bomber command are heroes. Their boss Arthur Harris not so much. In fact your friends and the 55,573 of their comrades who were killed in this campaign were victims of a wasteful strategy with little regard for their lives, despite Harris’ peers’ protests that it wasn’t working. They’re heroes for getting into their flying machines over and over again to fight Naziism at the peril of losing their lives. They’re victims because Harris robbed them of that chance to fight the Nazis, and still put them in harm’s way.
I'm sure anyone would be hard-pressed to find an example in history where directly targeting civilians ever broke a people's will to fight, but rather made them dig in their heels to fight for their lives.
![[Full] 4 ต่อ 4 Celebrity EP.922 | 10 พ.ย. 67 | one31](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/zmV5HRIxIBI/mqdefault.jpg)
The moral questions raised by the bombing of Germany are all too relevant once again in this new year. How to fight back against a murderous terror regime which shows no respect for innocent life, while safeguarding the lives of the civilians who live under said regime? Despite the best efforts of those who regard innocent life as sanctified, and who have tried to build international protections, humanity seems set to grapple with this conundrum time and time again.
I'd say it was a case of damned if you do and damned if you don't.
Yes the damage caused to war industry might slow things down but on the morale side of things, it's counterproductive in that it only makes the will to fight stronger when soldiers' families and homes are being attacked from the air.
Good episode Sparty but as I think you remember I strongly disagree with you on the point of the Allied bombing campaign not being effective and I think I've found the best argument to that yet (with addition to everything else I have argued in the past).
Speer's "stats" of the German military production are insanely heavily cooked. The stats that Speer provided to Hitler and used after the war to tout his successes count all equipment coming out of the factories. Which includes all damaged products. So let's use aircraft as the example since that is the most researched topic and is even mentioned within your video. If a German pilot was out on a mission and he was hit by a single round that plane needs to be sent to go get repaired. What Speer did was he counted everything coming out of his factories even if it was just a minor repair happening to something already created and he did not count the product coming into the factories to be repaired or used as spare parts.
This is a more recent field of WW2 only recently being looked into (the last 1-3 years maybe) so many older sources won't take this into account. But by the modern estimates we have the German production for just aircraft as inflated by 50-80% (INSANE). This really finally does equate to how he was on paper able to say he was boosting German production numbers when no new factories were coming online, the workers were working the same amount of hours they did to the year prior and he was losing his best staff for unexperienced German workers or unexperienced slave labor that had no reason to work hard. It's all fakery.
Why use B29s for the Tumbnail? THEY NEVER ENGAGED IN EUROPE :) Pls change this, its triggering and I know that you want to make good content, not just something. I expect more for my money with this :)
Perhaps the definition of Total War escapes you. I have some problems with a few of your "War Against Humanity" topics. This is one of them. edit: Your comments towards the end have caused me to think I'll never watch your series again. I'll stick with Indy.
You can question the morality of the Allied bombing campaign and especially in spring '45 you would have a point, but to say the bombing campaign was ineffective is nonsense. Yes German production may have kept increased - party due them not being on a 'total' war footing until late on, but how much more of an increase would have taken place if there was no allied bombing. As someone said, it may even had been Indy, "history does not happen in vacuum". If no allied bomber offensive, the Luftwaffe would have had thousands more aircraft available on other fronts. The same goes for AA guns and ammo. How much more would war production have increased. Could the Germans wunderwaffen programs been more advanced. How much longer could and probably, would the war have gone on. How many more Jews and others would have been killed. Certainly too much allied effort went into bombing in the late war and the wrong targets chosen and this was debated at the time and for reasons unknown Harris and Le May etc got their way.
But seriously, can we all just take a moment and truly appreciate how much we greatly enjoy listening to Sparty expertly and beautifully pronounce the German names and titles?
Thank you for noticing!
- TimeGhost Ambassador
Ya. It's almost like he lives there or something.lol
and Ploesti!
@@richardtalbott6215
Isn't he half German or something like that?
Thanks, Spartacus. My aunt survived the Darmstadt RAF raid. Though she was quite young, she recalled the bombs approaching, some very loud, with one exploded nearby in a deafening blast. Amidst the shattering noise and chaos, her youngest sister was killed. Meanwhile, in Britain, my mum had just lost her oldest brother, a British soldier, in Normandy during the First Battle of the Odon. Afterwards, she became so depressed, she refused to eat and was in hospital for months. Years after the war, they became close, sisters in a way, both having endured that special misery of war. It's often quite easy to forget the immense scale of suffering amongst civilians during the Second World War. It was a horrific tragedy for all involved.
So right. My mother was a child in Birmingham England and spent much of 1940 in a cellar waiting for the bomb to hit. She lost friends and family but fortunately for me survived. I find it difficult, even against a hideous state that the Nazi Party created, to justify the slaughter of civilians.
The same day that the RAF made its useless attack on Darmstadt (there is a chapter in Hastings' "Bomber Command" about it) the 8th Air Force braved "Merseberg of the thousand guns" to hit the giant Leuna oil refinery.
"As early as June 8, two days after D-day, Spaatz had taken advantage of
Eisenhower's generously loose rein upon the strategic bombers to order both the
Eighth and the Fifteenth air forces that the denial of oil to the enemy's armed
forces should be their primary airm. German aircraft and armaments production
were specified as secondary targets, with ball bearings to receive particular
attention. Even with Ike's generosity, diverse calls upon the heavy bombers,
including Crossbow raids as well as support of the ground forces restricted oil
targets to 11.6 percent of the American strategic bombers' efforts in June, 17
percent in July, and 16.4 per cent in August. Yet this restricted effort cut
the amount of aviation fuel produced for the Luftwaffe from 156,000 tons in May
to 54,000 tons in June, 34,700 in July, 17,000 tons in August, and 10,000 tons
in September--while the Luftwaffe had consumed 165,000 tomns in April alone.
Production of other petroleum products dropped in similar disastrous
proportions...But Portal could not prevail on Harris to bring the great weight
of Bomber Command to Spaatz's aid; and after a massive late summer climax of
the Oil Plan--USSTAF attacks sending 1136, 888, and 718 aircraft against
synthetic oil plants on September 11, 12, and 13 respectively--a rainy autumn
closed in and the oil campaign fell off. Not knowing how much Spaatz was
accomplishing, other Allied commanders, ground and air, still failed like
Harris to offer their full support, diversions still carred the Fortresses and
Liberators elsewhere, and when diversions combined with autumn weather, the
Reich oil supply received the respite it needed...The Allied had held victory
through air power in their grasp, but had not persevered for the kill."
--Eisenhower's Lieutenants, Russell Weigley, p. 379-80
--------------------------------------------
Spartacus did a good a job presenting the lack of Oil on the German economy. Plenty of tanks and planes but not enough gasoline even for training and that applied to the tank formations too.
Imagine the poor Germans in the Ardennes Offensive. "Wait, we have to capture fuel made in Texas to reach Antwerp?"
Was it? was your aunt in the resistance against the nazis? was she protecting jewish people? or was she tacitly complying with the regime and thus supporting it in its endeavours? remember the holocaust wasn't some secret the german people actively engaged in it.
@@capoislamort100
th-cam.com/video/IMy1ZLyaSqk/w-d-xo.htmlsi=RMSmkwv2DWCyYCjJ
@@JD1010101110 Yeah look at you. So brave and ready to jump into action against terrible regimes! We all know you'd immediately start to organise guerilla warfare against your government if you were in the same situation. I am so glad we have people like you! 🤡🤡
We need a complete series on Albert Speer as well as Wernher von Braun. Both seem to "get a pass" in modern history.
If have seen many contemporary documentaries that state that both man should have been tried as warcriminals. Speer talked himself out of a deathsentence at the Neurenburg trials.
von Braun gets more of a pass because of his massive contributions to the NASA. Speer, not so much.
@@Sacto1654 recent re-evaluation of Speers is actually quite new. He enjoyed a reputation as "the Nazi who said sorry" for decades after the war. As mentioned, many considered him as apolitical and so focused on developing infrastructure and technology that he never knew about or supported the racial genocides his government was perpetrating.
@@ClanWiEMy read of his first book was that he knew as little as he could get away with and admits to that. He actively sought to know less, but could have and should have known more. He rationalized slave labor as - well as slaves they are fed better and aren’t exterminated. He sounded like a lot of people who enjoyed their positions and privileges while pretending not to know the sordid details. It’s like knowing about Auschwitz but skipping past the details. There were Polish and Jewish slaves as well as those sent directly to the “showers”. So it was rationalized as a brutal work camp, but not as an instrument of genocide.
I think both of them have gotten any more severe look in modern history than they did in the fifties and sixties. Time has given us more records and more proof of both of their crimes and both of their culpability. Speer got a pass because he said sorry but he's probably the largest slave owner of all times.Von Braun launched his entire career off the backs of slave workers. He certainly knew that everything was being built by slaves because he visited the site 10 times.
I grew up in the Ruhr area, my grandmother lived there during the bombing days. She said, she was bombed out four times. She lost all her belongings four times. But she never talked about this with bitterness, she was just happy that she and my grandfather survived.
Great coverage of the oil campaign and some of its effects. As Luftwaffe Field Marshal Erhard Milch said: "The British left us with deep and bleeding wounds, but the Americans stabbed us in the heart." And while the effects of lack of oil and skilled pilots were most important in breaking the Luftwaffe, those miraculous production numbers in 1944 also deserve some scrutiny.
Many "new" aircraft were simply refurbished older or damaged aircraft. Many airframes were completed by raiding spare part stores, actually making the situation worse in the field, as getting a finished aircraft to the frontline was a lot harder than sending parts. With most workers not exactly being motivated, sabotage was equally very common with delivered aircraft being unusable from the start. Finally, part quality also took a nosedive as Germany no longer had access to many strategic materials. As the saying goes there are lies, damn lies, statistics and German war production numbers.
Finally, Speer deserves the scorn he gets now, he was simply smart enough to read the room at Nurnberg and try something other than blame it all on Hitler. And despite his many later achievements, Von Braun had a lot of blood on his hands, making him one of the hardest people to render a solid verdict on.
IIRC, Speer took credit for many of the reforms brought in by his predecessor. Incidentally, in one of the slave produced ME 163s which ran on incredibly dangerous fuel that could explode with the slightest touch, they found a jagged piece of metal which in the event of a rough landing would have pierced the fuel tank and ignited the lot - with a note that said "I am not happy in my work."
makes no difference how many planes you have if you do not have pilots and fuel. Without Pilots and Fuel, they are just very large paperweights.
A good supplemental read of the war against civilians is "Sherman's Ghost" by Matthew Carr which examines the doctrine of overwhelming force and "Total War". If you agree with the book or not, it brings up some very good discussion points of the doctrine of overwhelming force and civilian morale. (Remember the March to the Sea and subsequent campaigns were meant to demonstrate to the planter-ruling class that the war was lost.)
In fact, the German Industrial production was going up because they FINALLY went into FULL war production mode. The strategic bombing really did effect the German's war effort greatly. One other thing, imagine all those Luftwaffe fighters being sent Eastward because they werent needed for air defense. Alot of production was switched from ground weapons to fighter planes.
All those fighters were on the Eastern Front in 1942, it didn't made a difference.
@@samuelgordino They were not, same as all the guns. And it DID made a difference in 1942. It was a year of great German offensives.
Unlike ground-based armies, aircraft couldn't always fly 24/7 in WW2. Especially true in the East in their appalling weather conditions; the Luftwaffe found it very difficult to do maintenance on their planes in winter. I once met a former Royal Australian Air Force mechanic who spent 1942 in Murmansk, and didn't have the same problem because the RAF/RAAF and the Russians could work under cover there; the Germans could not.
It’s interesting that the strategic bombing in Germany affected the enemy’s war effort, but in Laos and North Vietnam in the Vietnam war, there is no analysis it seems
@@Kabutoes The problem with analyzing strategic bombing and the effect it had on the opposing war effort is that the war itself was not one of conquest or victory, but one of containment.
The policy makers for much of the Vietnam war were so afraid of Soviet or Chinese direct intervention like what had happened in Korea they chose a passive action plan centered on reacting to North Vietnamese incursions and conducting patrol sweeps rather than pushing North or directly attacking North Vietnam's ability to make war.
That meant for much of the war the USAF was strictly limited on where, when, and how they could bomb making much of the North's factories, supply depots, transportation infrastructure, and oil reserves were off limits.
It wasn't until the last three or four years of the war that true strategic bombing was undertaken, and with the exception of Operation Linebacker I & II most of that was wasted on leveling Laotian cities and civilian centers in an effort to cut Viet-Cong supply lines through the country, back a Pro US coup against the leader who was all but allied with North Vietnam, and prevent the Khemr Rouge from taking over which happened anyways.
Operation Linebacker I & II from late 1972 though were arguably very effective in dealing extensive damage to North Vietnam in the short time they were implemented, but they were only used as a negotiation tactic to end the war and allow a withdrawal than any real effort to actually win it.
It's why it's so vital to learn these items of history so that we do not repeat the same mistakes over and over, yet here we are.
that angry feeling when you're Arthur Harris and they force you to attack strategically relevent targets instead of civilians
Harris would greatly have preferred to focus on strategically relevant targets. But he knew that his bombers, flying 4 miles up at night, could at best hope to hit something within a few miles of the target. By aiming at the centre of a large city, some bombs were likely to fall within the city or suburbs and perhaps do some meaningful damage. Harris rationalized that his goal was to “de-house” Germany's industrial workforce, thereby reducing its morale and productivity. However, his real strategy was to strike the enemy with the only - wildly inaccurate - weapon he had, with massive force, and hope that something important broke. Some significant damage was indeed done - for example, at the Alkett tank factory, 6 miles from the (targeted) centre of Berlin. But the biggest military achievement was to divert Germany's war effort partly towards home defence.
@@chonpincher Can you elaborate more on the damage done to Alkett and it's output?
@@Maus5000 For example, from Wikipedia's page on Alkett: “Alkett had produced 255 StuG IIIs in October 1943, but in December [after the RAF raids in November] the number fell to just 24 vehicles”.
Harris was a realist, and knew that heavy bombers couldn't hit precision targets at all. Even the Americans in daylight with their miracle bombsight couldn't hit anything, except by accident.@@chonpincher
@@chonpincher That's all complete nonsense.
[early in 1944] "Already opposition to Harris' strategy had been growing, and
the Air Staff were coming to recognize that the policy of selective bombing,
that is to say attack upon selected industries such as oil, aircraft, and the
like, was better suited to the Casablanca concept that a land invasion of
northern Europe was necessary and could not be launched until command of the
air was definitely gained.
As the German air defense grew, the more questioned Harris's views
became...By the beginning of 1944, the Air Staff rejected his notion that he
could bring Germany to its knees with Lancasters alone by April and insisted on
on selective targets against German industry, such as the Schweinfurt
ball-bearing plants."
--"History of the Second World War", B. H. Liddell Hart
Geez, 20% Luftwaffe losses per month. Less than every half year your entire force has turnover. Thats nuts
When I was studying at the Unis in Stuttgart and Tuebingen in the 80s, it was very common for restaurants and pubs to hang "before and after" photos of their locations. Late-war photos of completely bombed out streets juxtaposed with their completely rebuilt postwar images. I don't know if this is still a commonplace anymore, but I do recall talking with some specialist craftsmen who were extensively repairing 4 and 5 hundred year-old buildings in the Rathaus square in Tuebingen--work that involved replacing huge main beams in the traditional manner with very little steel or modern structural technology--and I very often heard them say that these restorations would have been impossible if these ancient wooden buildings had suffered direct hits by Allied bombing.
I can only contrast this with the rebuilding of a synagogue in nearby Reutlingen...that had been razed to the ground by the Germans themselves. Literally no brick sat atop another when this painstaking reconstruction began, more than 4 decades after its destruction. Most disheartening was the desecration of a uniquely undisturbed and very old Jewish cemetery by neo-Nazi hooligans at the same time in Hechingen, another nearby town where one of my very good friends was born and raised. He was with me when I visited the reconstruction of the Reutlinger synagogue, where he was extremely happy...and was just devastated and very deeply angry at the desecration of the little cemetery in his home town that he had known his whole life. Despite still being very optimistic 40 years ago that the scourge of Nazism and intolerance could never again become resurgent, as an American I have since then many times wondered whether our species might not just be too stupid and savage to survive...
I have after WW2 and now photos of Berlin and Koln
Would you consider a full biography episode on Speer?
I love these episodes but I always need time to brace myself for the emotions I end up feeling.
Great episode Spartacus . As to your last comments at the end re. The German People, I think Ian Kershaw said it best in his two volume Hitler biography Hubris / Nemesis. The German People ..... Shared in his Hubris and as result had to face the cost of his Nemesis.
The Ruhr production was unable to ship the finished goods out of the plants. This suffocated the plants. Krupp NEVER stopped. my reference " The Arms of Krupp by William Manchester.
Germany's war economy reached its peak in 1944 which I find astonishing. They started the war without a war ready economy.
so they forgot to spend 150 pp to jump from partial war economy to war economy. noob kilter
Free market Ideology while the Allies did planned and command economy
The growth in industrial production was not just down to slave labourers, but also due to re-allocation of people. If someone worked in a restaurant, they continued to work there despite demands for production workers. Once the allies had bombed the restaurant, the workers were given jobs in production, hence the increase in production.
@@grahamogle6332 this had very marginal effect. As I have shown in previous episodes, the main trick Speer used with non-slave labor was to move the workers into work camps that were not in the cities, and did not have living quarters right next to the factories. There was no net growth of labor through displacement due to bombing, and the Nazis efforts to forcefully get people out of non-essential war work to the war industry were only moderately successful. It really was slave labor that kept the machinery ticking.
The Germans did have a war ready economy. The pre war Nazi Germany economy is mobilized already, to keep prices (officially) low and expand the military industry
The reason German war production continued to increase despite the bombing was because they finally switched their economy on a total war footing. Until 1942 Germany was still producing normal consumer goods as would any nation in peacetime. When the economy was geared towards total war there was enough slack for an increase in production of war materials.
What Allied Strategic Bombing did achieve was prevent the German war economy from reaching its full potential. The bombing sort of acted as a cap that weighed down on German industry which although was increasing it never reached maximum levels.
The strategic bombing campaign also placed huge logistical issues on the German war machine. The increased air attacks forced the Luftwaffe to reallocate most of its fighters and the majority of its anti-aircraft weapons back to Germany in a defensive role. The bombing of marshalling yards and railroad lines also caused significant setbacks in Germany's already flimsy logistics.
Perhaps the third and most important achievement of the strategic bombing campaign was the destruction of the Luftwaffe. When the Pointblank Directive was issued and when General Doolittle took command of the 8th Air Force the entire focus of the 8th became air supremacy. American fighter pilots who before were ordered to never leave the bombers were turned loose against the German fighter pilots. In what became a battle of attrition most of the experienced German pilots were killed resulting in a catastrophic brain drain from which the Luftwaffe never recovered. To keep up with the losses training was reduced and the result were inexperienced, half-baked pilots going up to fight against experienced and veteran American pilots.
The Luffwaffe lost 50% of its experienced fighter pilots in the BoB
@@monza1002000
The amount of time between BoB and a final gelding of Luftwaffe was more than enough to train effective pilots - American air force was a sufficient evidence one did not need 10 years or so. Also, Eastern front provided Germans what Americans did not have: a lot of live target exercises against victims of even less efficient system.
And yet the quality of "German veterancy" - ie. of those who survived BoB and/or gained it over USSR - was quickly re-evaluated when the same aces began dropping like flies after being transferred to the West.
'By March 1944, it became clear that the area offensive had fallen short of its goals and that Bomber Command was facing destruction by night fighters just as earlier it had faced destruction by day fighters.' - Noble Frankland, historian and Bomber Command veteran
"Losses were running at the unsustainable rate of 6-7 per cent per raid, with no prospect of a German surrender. With Germany reasserting command of the air and the Normandy landings in prospect, Arthur Harris's dream of defeating Germany through bombing was slipping away."
BBC Berlin Air Offensive
Darmstadt is the Town I was born and raised in. The Bombing has been a Story told over and over at every opportunity of my youth and adolescence. Almost to the point of oversaturating me and my classmates in school so we only groaned when we were told it would be the next subject in class, first in histor, then in Local Geography and Social studies, Religion and then again in Music of all subjects. Well, my hometown was never a Metropolis or even large. But having this subject trumpeted in our ears all the time has filled me with a kind of disgust when someone brings it up and how we were just innocent victims or what great things were destroyed then. "Bomber Harris" is almost a Curseword in the elderly Folk and even my father, now in his 70s dabbles in revisionistic Nonesense. That is why we need constant reminders, so that we, the Grandchildren of the WWII-survivors will not become entranced by the new Promises that sound so old and familiar to the Knowing. Never forget.
Classy and professional, as always Spartacus! Well done TGA!!
Thank you for watching.
Morals aside, Speers Fighter production was useless without trained pilots to use them. The Germans couldn't train pilots near fast enough to replace their losses in men let alone aircraft. The old Aces flew till they died ours went home and trained thousands orf new pilots. All the technology in the world is useless without trained people to use it.
'The idea of area bombing was to attack an aiming point which lay at the centre of a large area whose destruction would be useful. It was, in other words, a way of making bombs which missed the aiming point contribute to the destruction of the German war machine. Since nearly all the bombs were missing the aiming point, there was a certain logic about the idea.' - Noble Frankland, historian and Bomber Command veteran
BBC Thousand-bomber Raids page
So the German economy didn't went to total war mobilisation until 1944? Damn, imagine if they went all out starting from early 1940 that sounds terrific... I will really want to see an episode on how did Speer managed to increase the production so much despite the losing of territory and the continuous increase in Allies bombing.
Toujours d'excellentes questions philosophiques sur les actions de guerre du côté des alliés, Sparty. Merci pour votre réflexion si juste sur les bombardements à objectifs civils-ce qui n'a pas empêché le criminel Speer de maximiser la machine de guerre avec une forte main d'œuvre d'esclaves. Bomber Harris reste néanmoins une honte pour l'humanité en tuant des centaines de milliers de civils sans aucune efficacité sur le cours de la guerre. Never forget, a lot of thanks to you!
your last ines were so awfully true Sparty, as always on point.. never forget.
Well said, Spartacus. Thank you.
Thanks to you for watching! Never Forget. -TimeGhost Ambassador
Always a great video in this series
When the Allies switched a portion of their bombing offensive from bombing cities to striking Germany's energy infrastructure in May 1944, it started to have a major effect on oil production. Due to these attacks German domestic oil production dropped from two hundred and fifty thousand tons a month in April 1944 to less than fifty thousand tons in November of that year. Combined with attacks on the German transportation system, by the end of the war the Germans had a difficult time keeping their forces operational. As far as Bomber Command's area bombing offensive was concerned, it's effects were not that effective. Although the R.A.F. was able to kill large numbers of people and create giant piles of wreckage, it failed in its objective to destroy civilian morale. The wanton destruction cities from a strategic and operational point of view therefore makes little sense. It only serves to stiffen the enemy's obduracy. Harris's pigheaded determination to continue with a policy that had obviously failed, represents a prime example of doing the same thing over and over again while hoping for a different outcome, which is the definition of insanity.
Your best episode to date. It makes me sad too.
Thanks for your kind words. Every WAH episode has this effect on me.
-TimeGhsot Ambassador
The factual part of this video, before the moral pondering at the end, is accurate and pertinent. In summary, the strategic bombing of Germany in 1944 effectively diverted the increase in German war production, along with approximately 900,000 Luftwaffe personnel, into defence against the bombers - continuing a trend that had been in place since 1942. Moreover, about half the available 8.8-cm artillery (arguably the Wehrmacht's most effective and versatile weapon) was held back for home-front flak units. Further, some 1.5 million workers were employed just to repair bomb-damaged factories and infrastructure. The consequent weakness of the Wehrmacht on the eastern and western fronts hastened its overall collapse. Whether this shortened the war by months or by years is debatable.
Just to hone in on one interesting point, there's a funny question of how much 8,8cm artillery was even wanted at the front, by this point. Following the loss of 70 Pak 43 on the Eastern Front, abandoned without firing a shot because tow capacity did not exist to retreat with them, a meeting was held in April 44 including representatives from Krupp and the Waffenamt. It was relayed that Hitler specifically ordered towed 8,8cm Pak production to be replaced entirely with fully motorized Waffenträger. Production of towed pieces, of course, was not stopped, and the Waffenträger program went through numerous dead end prototypes they werent satisfied with, but I think it's a fascinating little episode in bizarre German production priorities, and Hitlers reactionist behavior
I realize you mean to speak more about the dual purpose flak gun, though I think the employment of that weapon in a direct fire role was increasingly undesirable because of its tall silhouette and firing height. The much lighter Pak 40 was also pointed out as too heavy to man handle, and with towing vehicles in such short supply, I would have little hope for the Flak 8,8's prospects
Keep in mind that the large number of German civilian casualties lengthened the war by strengthening the German will to fight. Had they not occurred, Hitler's regime would probably have already been overthrown, with its successor suing for peace. We're long past the point where the ordinary German citizen could have had any expectation of winning the war - those still supporting the regime were doing so to extract vengeance for the terror bombing of German cities.
The question shouldn't be merely how much effect the bombing had, or how much effort/material the Germans were forced to allocate. We should really ask whether the effort/material of the Allied bombing could have been better used elsewhere?
@@Duncomrade
What if the answer is "no idea"? Would that qualify as "tentatively no" or is burden of proof supposed to switch?
Aside from that, there was no reason to push for more resource for Allied navy and Allied armies were primarily bottlenecked by lacking port infrastructure and general logistics, ie. two areas Allies already poured massive amount of resources and care into and with further advancement being also blocked by time requirements and other limitations. For example, you can only reallocate so much effort and material into "building a bigger port" before hitting into diminishing returns territory and issues like lack of specialized labor. Ultimately, Allied handling of infrastructure was already something to behold.
So, with German naval effort already reduced to irrelevancy and Allied land units having, _on average_ , more issues with own logistics than with defeating Germans, it only leaves air as a method of projecting more power and hastening overall collapse.
@@Saeronor The problem is that the answer right now is probably "no idea". I've never seen anyone even bring up the question, let alone discuss it in detail. Meanwhile, there's loads of discussion and stats about the bombing's effect and German allocation of resources. You made some interesting points, would be great if someone could make a vid looking at it in detail. I would say maybe more resources could have been put into engineers at least, to alleviate those bottlenecks.
I'm a veteran of the war in Croatia and I live 6 years already in a small city near Heilbronn. I didn't know about the death toll on 04.12.1944.
It did not mater how much Germany made the Allied concentration on fuel production and on transportation made the difference. Also adopting the policy of letting escorting fighters go hunting ground targets once the escort job was done also had an overall effect.
Sparty hits a home run again with this episode. It's such sick irony that I see so many parallels to today in this episode, let alone the whole series. This channel ought to be watched by every blasted fool who serves in elected office today. Because they have clearly forgotten. Never forget.
Speer was a devious, and weasly bastard no doubt. He talked himself out of the Nuremberg trials with absolute bullshit and skirted the sentence of using slave labor. But how the hell do you keep that kind of production levels afloat with basically nothing. Speer was awful but damn some credit has to be given to his effectiveness, even though again terrible person.
Love your channel, you sound a lot like Peter K. Rosenthal with your inflections in this one.
Imagine if the sound of these awesome videos was made to sound like radiola radios and the videos were sepia toned
I think but I could be wrong but the attacks on transportation had far negative affects on the Germanys war effort you can build all you want but if combatants can't 'get the parts' or is destroyed before it gets there then.....
Transport disruption yes, but aerial bombardment was not the most efficient part of that. Sabotage, and cutting off rail lines by advancing on the ground had greater effect than the terribly imprecise bombing efforts.
@@spartacus-olsson I have read a little about the 9th AF. Being the tactical force of the US Air Force in Europe they attacked railway logistics allot. Reading about the 365th FG they hit trains and marshalling yards almost daily. So did the other 20 or so groups do. This must have had huge effect.
Agreed@@spartacus-olsson
@@emilrydstrm3944 it didn’t though. It caused ac lot of delays, but didn’t cut off the supplies. The rail network is huuuge in Europe. Now, scale is really hard to understand, but if you look on a map, and try to imagine a few hundred, even thousands of planes over the continent, you might realize that there is no way in hell they can bomb everywhere all the time. And there’s the problem - rail lines are relatively easy to fix and pretty hard to hit. Within days of being bombed they can be up and running again, and the planes can’t return for several weeks, since they have other places to bomb as well.
@@spartacus-olsson Fair point. But the tactical air forces of the allied did not fly that far and worked over a area closer to the front. I think logistics here got hit allot more frequent than rest of nazi occupied Europe.
Hoping that your lighting issues can be fixed. Love the content related to WW2.
my oldr eyes didn't notice that - but- I appreciate the stellar vocal clarity- too many other sources are more off-putting by the compromise of clarity for what has to be economy.
Thanks again for your final words, Spartacus. So true and important, in 1945 as well as in 2023 and for all the years to come. Civilians must be protected in armed conflicts. Full stop.
My,but we’re all so wise after the event.
Well yes… the Western Allies and the US were wise before the events though, when in 1939 and 1940 they condemned these kinds of operations as illegal, immoral, and strategically useless… but then everyone got really, really angry. That’s unfortunately most often the case in war, and why we need to remind ourselves to try to keep our moral compass true, even when we get angry.
Enjoy the series, but I know I will be one of a thousand viewers to say B-29s we're only used in the Pacific theater.
What an amazing variety of genius techniques
There always has to be that one guy who never learns, regardless of experience. Arthur Harris seems to be that guy in this war.
The US Air Force requires all officer cadets to study the history of air power, thus my comments are based on my learning and experience. The claim that intensifying the Allied bomber offensive only increased German productivity is an exercise in flawed logic because it infers there was a causal relationship when in fact it was a casual relationship. The question never asked or answered is what would German productivity have been like if we had not carried out a strategic air campaign against them? Logic dictates it would have been much higher. If one wishes to argue the soundness of the targets chosen, then a decent case can be made that Bomber Harris was Germany's best air strategist. Ignorance of the truth is no excuse for poor target planning. A panel of civilian industrial and logistics experts had been assembled earlier in the war to recommend ideal targets. Their suggestions were largely ignored until late in the war and some targets were never hit. Postwar analysis showed they had been right all along. Men like Harris had been wrong.
Totally agree! Very brave final statement.
Thank you.
@Saeronor No, the Luffwaffe was made up of very experienced pilots who learnt their trade in the Spanish Civil war plus they sharpen those skills in the first year of the WW2. Those pilots were across the board but from on they were replaced by "pilots" as against fighter pilots. This becomes very clear if you look at the shear losses of pilots from 1942 on.
Germany had whole continental Europe with it's producing industrial capacity in it's hands. Yet never suprassed at least Soviet production. To say, that allied bombing didn't affect German production is simply not true. It did and stopped them to even start real war production in large scale.
This comment ignores both reality and logic in a fantastic, even rather impressive way. They didn’t have anywhere close to the same access to resources as the Allies. It was for sure Hitler’s plan… but it failed. They never conquered the Caucasus oil fields. The failed to reach the Middle Eastern oil fields. Extracting resources from occupied territory was more costly and difficult than you think and the Nazis thought. Forcing an occupied people to produce for you does not yield an optimal output. The Soviet Union did not supply the majority of resources and industrial power that won the war… the US, with its territory untouched by the war did, even Soviet industrial output itself depended on US supplies.
Think and read before you make up your mind that you’ve “gotten it”.
@@spartacus-olsson They had whole European industrial capacity in their hands. They had Romanian oil fields in their hands. They had whole European coal capacity in their hands. The problem is, they never truly started a real war-time ecconomy. And the moment they tried, allied bombing destroyed it. "Think and read before you make up your mind" applies to you.
German tank production: 49,700
Soviet tank production: 107,347
US tank production: 88 000
British tank production: 27 500
@@tomfu9909 we’re not disagreeing on that Germany weren’t able to outproduce the Allies… it’s the fantasy that bombing stopped them from doing that we disagree on. Look, it’s really simple, it’s about timelines. German production increases constantly from the time Speer takes over.
In 40 and 41 the Allie’s don’t bomb Germany in any significant way.
In 42 the RAF start the de-housing campaign, it focuses solely on bombing cities and has no effect on industry - measurably, provably and on purpose (look up Arthur Harris quote about the combined bomber offensive if you don’t believe me).
In early 43 the Combined Bomber Offensive begins. Harris refuses to end the de-housing campaign, and the USAAF try some sorties against aerial industry, they largely fail. That’s the year…
In early 44, Eisenhower forces Harris and Spaatz to suspend both the de-Housing Campaign, and the campaign against Aerial industry and focus on the Transportation Plan to interdict support to Normandy for Operation Overlord. Harris and Spatz protest that it won’t work, they’re mostly right as it turns out. However, resistance sabotage, the deception operations, and Hitler’s boneheaded refusal to allow reserves sent in have the same effect.
In August 1944 the combined Bomber Offensive resumes, but slowly at first. Spaatz now focuses on the Oil Campaign, Harris again refuses, but is forced to lend some support.
Only in November 1944 does both the deHousing Campaign and the oil campaign take off in any significant way.
So… there you have it. It’s only when in the East, the Red Army, outnumbering the Germans 5:1, and in the West the Allied Expeditionary Force, outnumbering the Germans 4:1 are both standing at the German borders that bombing _begins_ to have any effect on supplies. At that point German supply production is still running at full speed, and they have already lost so many men and allies that they have more stuff than they can use.
Explain to me with that in mind how your ‘calculations’ should work?
Inalienable rights to life can’t be forfeited…hence the doubling down of clarity between RIGHT and INALIENABLE
You're right I wouldnt believe it, but because its you saying it Sparty, I do believe it.
Did you say television interviews??
What about the Soviet Airforce? Did they do any strategic bombing?
In short, no. The Soviet air force was designed to support the army, and eventually it did so quite effectively.
Yes, though far less of it than the British & American air forces. Chonpincher's post is mostly correct but there were some limited raids on German & other Axis or occupied cities by Soviet bombers even as early as 1941. The number of sorties & tonnage of bombs dropped however was dwarfed by that of the Western Allies, as the Soviet Air Force was more structured to support the front.
That they were able to get so much under way economically and materially this late in the war leaves the impression that for most of the war they were sitting on their laurels assuming their “master race” was more than adequate.
At 5:40
Could you possibly elaborate on POW from other belligerent nations? Mainly France, but what about smaller countries that have surrendered early in the war, like Norway, Yugoslavia, Greece, or even those from momentarily successful campaigns, like Anzac men from the Africa campaigns of '40-'43?
The Nazis had only suspended the Geneva Conventions against Eastern POWs and soldiers of color. Yugsolvaia surrendered, partisans weren't taken to concentration camps.
The French government signed away the freedom of French POWs during the surrender in 1940. They agreed for them to remain captive until the end of the war because they expected Britain to be defeated immediately after the fall of France. That didn't happen.
The Germans and Japanese both suffered the same problem with their air forces near the end of the war, lack of fuel for training new pilots.
Thanks to the British naval blockade.
Another thought provoking episode. How much are civilians culpable for their government?
Thank you for watching.
Well, Germany did a real surprised Pikachu with that. And some people are still bitter up to this day. As if they were done some unfair treatment without any wrongdoing.
Most Germans don’t feel that way, I find
Question, wouldn't the resources germany used to trying to figth and have revenge for the bomings count as resources germany wasted due to bombgins.
Saddens me, too.
What do you mean the last winter of the war
We will have to wait and see...
Thanks for watching! Never Forget! -TimeGhost Ambassador
Since my father flew in a 15th AF B-17 late in the war, I was raised to believe that German--and other nations'--civilian bombing casualties were morally justified because, well, they'd started it, or they did the same thing when they could, or our cause was right and theirs was wrong, etc. In retrospect I've come to question those rationalizations, especially as I've seen them played out in dozens of conflict zones from Sarajevo to Kyiv to Gaza.
As a pedantic nit-picker, I have to speak up. The thumbnail for this video about bombing Germany is an image of B-29s, which were not used in the European theater.
EDIT: Oh, my God, they actually changed it. Sorry to be a pest, and thank you, you have made my OCD very happy.
_...senpai noticed me..._
My gf grandmother saw how her mother was bombed to death in front of her.
It has left her traumatized and she passed her trauma on.
Believe me that even i do suffer three generations later because of this crime against humanity.
Thanks!
Thank you very much and thanks for watching!
And, never forget of what President Eisenhower warned.
I rarely comment. I will say that I love your channel and look forward to the releases of your entire staff.
Having been brought up in NYC and my father served in WWII, I was taught to treat history as a lesson for the future. I have been actually waiting to see if you would ever even hint at the 10/7 massacres in Israel. No, I did not expect a political statement to come out of a TH-cam channel, but still, it interested me if you would touch the subject.
I am an american who lives in Israel for many many years. All my children and grandchildren were born and live here. I, myself, served as a reserve battlefield medic for 28 years and I know the horror of war.
Yet, I must, in all good conscience point out 4 things, some of which you make reference to in your various videos.
1. It is hubris for us to judge the actions of the allies when destroying Germany and Japan. One cannot apply our knowledge of events from 2023 to how the allies should have done things. At that period of time, yes there was a call for vengeance. I also do not buy the "innocent german civilian" argument. That is a misnomer that has painted our modern view of things. They wanted the Jews and Gypsys and all non-aryans dead. Until the day they gave up. Sorry, I love Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and his writing, (even knew him from my neighborhood), but Dresden had to be bombed. And yes, to save the lives of allied soldiers there were drastic decisions that had to be made. That is war.
2. Studying history and putting it on an TH-cam channel, no matter how excellent your channel is, and it deserves awards fro what you guys do, is not going thorough the war, and watching the horrors of it unfold. Those are two different universes - which have no meeting point. You have not seen it, but I promise you if you watched that 43 minute made by the Hamas GoPro cameras wou would be singing a much different tune in regard to "going after civilian populations"
3. There are rules to war, especially applied to "collateral damage." I have written scholarly articles on it for renowned journals and conferences. They are available for anyone to read and study. Israel has gone beyond such laws in the millions of percentage points, at the loss of our soldiers - our children. No country on earth in history has ever done so much to protect the citizens of an enemy who has vowed to kill everyone of us.
4, After all your and Indy's study of war, do not tell me you have not seen the face of evil. On 10/7 it reared its ugly face again. The only difference is, this time we are not going to the slaughter. This time we will not be silent. This time we will fight back, with a vengeance the world has thought Jews incapabable of. This time there will be no pictures of Jews in concentration camps or being pushed to the sea. I can guarantee that.
I run and write a very popular Newletter on Substack, which does say something, called "The View From Israel." It is free and so are all the podcasts. The reason I am taking the time to write this is twofold:
1. I congratulate on the courage it took for an TH-cam channel to say what you said in this 124 at the end.
2. I beseech you not to judge my fathers generation through our modern eyes. I know, he believed along with all his friends, that the more Germans dead the better.
Simply put, I grew up with Hungarian refugees from the concentration camps. From the time I was 4 I knew exactly what those blue tattooed numbers meant.
Never Forget. Never Forgive. And for Israel, Never Again.
Sometime evil is evil - no matter how many morality tinged glasses you wish to wear. And when you face evil, you have but one option. Eradicate it before it eradicates you and your way of life.
End of speech. I do this every day in The View From Israel Newsletter & Podcast. But I had to comment, as I truly respect your team.
I say this with all due respect, for your viewpoint, but feel that I must point out the reason that the indiscriminate bombing of German cities is roundly condemned today, and was criticised at the time. This is because it was known at the time that simply flattening German cities was having little effect on Germany's production of weaponary, and it was also known that it was highly unlikely to break the spirit of the civilian population..
This is why focussed attacks on fuel production, ball-bearing factories an transportation in general were argued for. Yrs, bombing accuracy was unavoidably poor, and there would have been many civilian casualties even without deliberate area-bombing of German cities. But those like Harris, who argued for simply flattening German cities wanted to kill German civilians simply becayse they were German, and irrespective of the known fact that such bombing was having very liyyle impact on the Wehrmacht's ability to fight. That is what made it abhorent.even to some at the time.
I had the good futune to meet and chat with the father of my best friend a few times. He had served in the RAF, flying in Halifax bombers. He was a haubted man. He told me that quite a number of crewmen, like him, didn't like to be sent on raids that were not against military targets, as it meant that the sole purpose of such raids was to kill civilians.
Yes, the scale of atrocities committed by the Third Reich were far larger than those committed by the Allies, and we weren't as cold-bloodedly murderous towards those we didn't like amidst our societies, in the west . But that does not excuse the deliberate attempt to simply flatten German cities and to kill German civilians simply becuse we could, when we could, and should have used our airforces specifically to try to defeat the Wehrmact as raoidly as possible. But we did not do that, and it is shameful that the Allies commited such a war crime.. The way tat the Soviets conducted themselves was even more shameful, as I am sure you well know, and let us not forget that Jews weren't exactly seen in a good light in most European countries prior to WW2; pogroms against Jews, sadly, happened many times in many countries over the centuries. Sure, the Third Reich was by far the worst in their actions against Jews, but does that mean that the rest of Europe is in the clear because we weren't as thorough in our pogroms as Nazi Germany was? No! My point is that the intent of what is done in war does matter, and a war crime is still a war crime even if against an individual citizen of an apalling regime.
In conclusion, I would like to add that whilst, given the sctrewed-up mess us British caused in the Middle East due to our offhand treatment of the native peoples there (and elsewhee too, of course), that Israel, once established and recognised as an independent nation, it most certainly had a right to defens itself against those who threatened its very existence. Indeed, I cheered Israel on, from afar, in most of those conflicts. But I have become increasingly disturbed over the years at the attitude of the leadership of Israel with regard to the Palestinians.. Yes, Hamas are absolutely barbarian terrorists who clearly don't have much regatd for the lives of other Palestinians, let alone Israelis, and I fully agree that the civilised world needs to act to destroy such terrorist groups as rapidly as possible. But does Hamas' actions agaibst Israel really justify treating all Palestinians so poorly? My best friend, a Jew, does not, and neither do I, and we noth find Netenyahus attitude and actions regarding Palestinians abhorent. He is as culpable for the situation he caused by his policies, as are Hamas. He treated Palestinians concerns and desire for their own homeland as political playthings, and, sadly, Israeli civilians paid the price.
May God smile upon us all, and bring a swift and just -not vengeful- resolution to all of the conflicts in the world. God knows, we have better things to be doing, like undoing the harm we have caused to the ecosytem that keeps us all alive, rather than having insane wars driven by no more than individuals pride or contempt for others, or to simply weild power over others, or to continue centuries old vendettas.
Well said.
@@esmenhamaire6398 Maybe so. Maybe that is true. I am not sure, though I will accept your POV for the sake of this. AND? Will you deny that the "majority" of people living in those cities supported the Nazis? Will you also tell me they knew nothing of the atrocities taking place under their noses? Literal noses by the way, as the smell of burning flesh and prisoners and slave labor were everywhere. Goebells certainly did not hide it. So let us assume it was the "flattening of German cities" because the allies were confronted with the worst crimes, to that date, that were possible. Beyond imagination. And let us assume they were mad as hell, or some of them. And let us assume they did it our of pure vengeance. Do not forget thousands of allied soldiers were being killed every day. If that is the case, and it was, then "breaking the spirit of the Nazis" (and they were all Nazis), was not a goal. It was to erradicate as much of them as possible. It was for revenge.
If you feel revenge is never correct, not in any situation, then one must agree with you. I cannot fault you there. It is your POV and your own moral judgement and you have every right to it.
The next problem lies, of course, with the Atom Bomb. Any sane human being today would say that was horrific. And we know from documents that many were against it at the time. Yet, there was a cogent argument, that because the Japanese absolutely refused to surrender, it would cost 1,000,000 allied lives or more to subdue Japan.
I am sorry. You do not sacrifice 1,000,000+ lives even under such horrific circumstance.
And do not for a moment think that Japan today was the Japan of 1940-1945. That too is something we look at with rose-colored glasses.
It is wonderful to sit in our ivory towers and be able to judge. To be honest, until 6:29 AM on October 7th, I thought pretty much like you. After that moment, I realized I had been completely wrong.
Never Forget - comes with consequences. It comes with the need to act and react. It is not a call to conscience, it is a call to make sure that it cannot happen again. It is not just a statement you make from behind a desk in a staged set with air-conditioning blowing on you and food in the refrigerator.
It is a call from pure despair and from the depths of a broken heart.
The moment we start judging what reasons, motivations, and plans were hidden in the Allies minds, including as you imply "revenge" and ignore the "why" is the moment we become complicit in the next tragedy.
So, yes, even if it was done out of pure revenge, even if the German cities were bombed - just because they were Nazis, even if it was not going to break the spirit of the Nazis, I still say it was 100% justified. If it had not been done, and Japan had been taken with "boots on the ground" many of us would not be here today. And the world would have looked much different, and not in a good sense.
That is MHO.
40,000 aircraft in 1944 is very impressive! It's scary to think what may have occurred if Germany had been producing at this rate years earlier.
Most of them were single engine fighters which were verging on Obsolete (Me-109's and alike). Engines were not run in for 30 hours before fitting to the aircraft due to lack of fuel. Trainee pilots crashed loads of them due to engine failures.
@@richardvernon317 the final version of 109 wasn't exactly obsolete. It was still competitive with the ally fighters. The 190 was as good as if not better than most ally fighters, on par with the Mustang.
On Christmas Eve 1944, my village (which is now a suburb of Trier) Pfalzel was bombed, ostensibly due to the railway bridge across the Mosel river, which was part of the strategic railway towards Metz.
The bridge was quickly destroyed in the first wave, so the second wave attacked the rest of the village (quite far from the railway), including buildings which had stood for more than 1500 years; killing 116 people.
Miraculously, my family's house, which included a large "bomb-proof" basement, survived. Other neighbors were not so lucky: Many took refuge in the large wine cellar of a tavern down the street, which was directly hit. The basement collapsed and was flooded by wine leaking out of broken barrels, so that many victims were unrecognizable when they were dug out a few days later.
For decades afterwards, my great-grandmother would occasionally be approached by forgotten former neighbors, recounting that they spend this day in our basement.
And still, each Christmas Eve at 14:30, the church bells ring in remembrance (instead of in celebration of christmas)
That must have been a harrowing experience. Thank you for sharing.
-TimeGhost Ambassador
Production numbers and quality are two separate ideas when your factories are being bombed. Late war German armor was often lacking crucial hardening of steel and there were many other problems as well. Materials were diverted to production, leaving equipment that was forward deployed without crucial spare parts. Losing half of your combat strength to "non combat" reasons is the telling number that indicates the equipment being produced is more dangerous to the Germans than to the enemy.
Germany had to divert resources from the Eastern Front to combat the bomber campaign, opening the way for the Soviets.
That the Germans allocated so many resources to fighter production meant less tanks were going to be fielded. You're welcome Ivan.
Not to mention production numbers are often used to misrepresent this "great jump in productivity" by tricks like "number of armored vehicles". Dig a bit deeper and SURPRISE! You found... Hetzers.
@@billd2635
And massive air defense network, with, aside from specialized equipment, absurd number of guns, many of which -were- would be pretty useful on Eastern front.
Is tha map in the background updating? I swear its a little different every week. Amazing touch if so. Me going a little insane and just seeing things if not
Well I'm either your subconscious telling you that it doesn't change, or yes, it does change every week. Only certain episodes are produced before they air, so they show an outdated map.
The map is the same week by week, we only update it every so often with a completely new design. Probably just your mind playing tricks on you through lighting and set dressing!
Thanks for watching.
One other item to add to the list of why someone might try to justify bombing civilians: so that they understood that they have in fact lost the war. In WWI, Germany ended the war still on French territory, Germany controlled vast new territories in the east, and German newspapers had still been painting a rosy picture of imminent victory just weeks before the end. This contributed greatly to the "stabbed in the back" myth. From the perspective of the German civilian population in 1918, after four difficult years of war, they had gone from the brink of total victory to swift and ignominious defeat within weeks. In WWII, with the bombing campaigns systematically levelling German cities, it was much harder to pretend that all was well and to convince people that Germany was winning the war.
Very good point.
Agreed, good point.
Complete nonsense, especially considering that the allied victory was obvious to anyone except the most fanatical Nazis. The Allies were pushing through France, Netherlands and into Germany from both sides. Refugees were walking through towns and villages, families were relocating to flee from the front. Not to mention, unlike WW1 Germany ended up being occuppied rather than left to its own devices.
Drawing such a comparison or justification is complete nonsense and takes away from the already scarce justifications that exist for the civilian bombing campaigns.
Why are you using B-29 as header. B-29 was never deployed over Germany in WW2, only deployed against Japan (because of range issue). Eight Air Force employed B-17/B-24. If you want serious analysis of German economic management under bombing see Adam Tooze: The Wages of Destruction, Richard Overy: The Bombing War, Williamson Murray: Luftwaffe-A Strategy for Defeat.
Concentration camp inmates were also compelled to work for airframe manufacturing.
It could be argued that early in the war, Great Britain and her commonwealth and later the USA, could do little to attack or even to be much of a nuisance to Nazi Germany except for an aerial campaign. If the Allies had sat around doing absolutely nothing her citizens would have been quite dissatisfied. Even while the Allies were launching thousands of bombers against the Reich, it seemed to Stalin that they were doing very little while the Soviets were carrying the burden. I don't see how the bombing campaign against Germany could have been avoided given the circumstances.
These were indeed the real reasons for bombing Germany. Stalin didn’t buy it as an answer to his demands and continued demanding a real front… and is it right to do something wrong because it’s popular? Moreover, you can choose your targets differently. Bombing inner cities wasn’t the only way to bomb Germany.
GREAT video.❤
Thanks for your comment. Never Forget. -TimeGhost ambassador
The victory in Europe was a combined arms effort. Oil turned out to be the irreplaceable resource, even more important than troops and pilots. Interesting that Germany sits atop huge gas reserves not understood then as far as technology or application.
Outstanding👍👍👍
Thank you very much, never forget.
Technically the Geneva convention that covers the treatment of prisoners of war (1929) and the earlier Hague convention weren't signed by the Soviets, they refused to sign it. As the conventions are only between signatories, the Germans were free to do whatever the hell they wanted to the Soviet prisoners.
Total War does not have rules.
Antiquity it does… like tons of them, and it has since 1899.
@@spartacus-olsson that did not stop the allies from firebombing axis cities.
@@ryanlynn yes… it’s funny that, how laws by themselves don’t stop crime.
A comment to show my support, and feed the algorithm
Thank you and thanks for watching.
I used to kind of buy the arguments in favour of "strategic" bombing. Not that I thought it was ethical or anything like that, but at least that it served a purpose.
These days, I absolutely don't.
Yes, I think it's inarguable that it did negatively effect Germany, both in the way it pushed the nazis to focus even harder on strategically worthless expenses such as the V-program and in the disruption of war production.
Yes, I know Germany managed to increase production significantly despite the bombing, but I just can't see any way they couldn't have ramped up even more if left alone.
But the thing is: that's just not good enough. Not for the resources spent, the lives lost or the violated principles.
Just looking at how many resources were spent building, maintaining and operating the strategic bomber forces, those resources could have had a much greater effect on the war if deployed directly on the battlefield.
Say for example that all those resources had been spent on developing, building and operating long-range fighters. They would have been enough to essentially flood the european theater and turning it into a no-fly-zone.
And when you can get better results for less casualties, and you dont have to commit atrocities, strategic bombing becomes indefensible.
I went through the same change. The literal targeting of civilians gets glossed over or mixed in as unavoidable tragedy and I think it's important to own up to what happened. The British did not weaken in resolve after terror bombing, it was irrational to assume the Germans would be any different.
-TimeGhost Ambassador
Never forget.
I was watching the battle of Kurtz, and I may be mistaken, but I thought for sure I saw a Russian soldier carrying a Thompson machine gun!
I watched a video from Ukraine and in Soledar after it fell, PRYGOSIAN(sp?) led a tour through its nearby miles of tunnels. In addition to the Ukrainian Army weapons repair facilty, there were tens of thousands of boxes of small arms weapons and ammo piled up. While many were rotted, some were in great shape and not surprising there were hundreds of US lend-lease M1 Garands and Thompsons, in cosmoline never opened. Crates and crates full of new in box WWII small arms.
Some Thompsons were shipped to the USSR as part of Lend-Lease, especially in 1942. Given the huge Soviet output of submachine-guns, it was like sending coals to Newcastle.
Larger numbers of Thompsons were sent to Chiang Kai Shek's forces. They often fell into Communist hands in the Civil War, and some of the Chinese sent into Korea in 1950 and 1951 carried them. They occasionally appear in propaganda photos, for example Chinese troops in posed photos in which they hold US POWs at gunpoint are shown carrying them.
That last line is a real gut punch. Makes me sad too 😢
@@jamesdrummond7684 This is a series about World War 2. How is Israel relevant?
@@keithscott1957 did you not understand the last comment on the video?
I'm torn between the morally deplorable idea of bombing civilians to destroy morale, and the idea that bombing civilian populations will prevent future wars.
By the end of 1918, German civilians had not been attacked... they then gleefully followed their Fuhrer into insanity.
In 1945, the whole country had been leveled. Yet, to this day, war is still a painful memory. It also helps that they were helped in reconstruction by the very same Americans who savagely bombed them.
I know this is a twisted logic, but do bloodbaths (and help afterwards) create good long-lasting conditions for peace?
I'm torn.
Isn't it funny that you attribute all the bombings on the US? England bombed them just as much or more, but nobody remembers that eh? Blame everything in the world, past and present on the USA.
@@booboo8577
The point I was making is the USA did bomb civilian populations (as shown in the video with Bomber Harris), but then helped reconstruct the countries they destroyed.
Yes, Britain did bomb German civilians, but they did not help much in the reconstruction of Germany.
That US strategy might have resulted in longer lasting peace than the British one. The same thing happened in Japan.
Sorry, your Snowflakiness.
@@marcguindon8499
Yes, the UK didn't do as much as the USA in helping Germany recover. I wonder why? Maybe they had their own rubble filled cities to concentrate on?
Also, I imagine that any effort to do so would have been political suicide with an electorate who had gone through 1940-41 blitz, and the subsequent attacks of the indiscriminate V weapons.
Having said that, I think you'll find that the RAF did more than its fair share during the Berlin Airlift, helping German citizens.
What is the production index measuring?
Hi, i have a question. How exactly does the Montreux Convention work with regards to Turkiye and its role in guarding the Bosphorus Strait and the Dardanelles? What role did the Montreux Convention play in the governance of the Straits during Second World War, particularly on the Eastern Front? And how is the Convention relevant to current conflicts, particularly the war between Russia and Ukraine? Thanks!!
Aside from the fact that Speer lied about his accomplishments to keep Hitler satisfied he did increase production by convincing companies to simplify production, but he could not replicate American mass production which was more efficient to begin with plus American cities were never bombed, and the war against the U-boats was being won so what was produced was reaching where it was needed most. The carpet bombing of cities was never morally accepted by Harris's critics for good reason, but because of the inaccuracy of America's "precision bombing" it was grudgingly accepted as the only way to disrupt German war production. So take the figures of German production with a grain of salt, the fact remains the lack of oil doomed the Germans.
"Within Essen there was still Krupps, virtually intact after nearly three years of attack."
page 158 Hyperwar Royal Air Force 1939-1945 Vol II
'By March 1944, it became clear that the area offensive had fallen short of its goals and that Bomber Command was facing destruction by night fighters just as earlier it had faced destruction by day fighters.' - Noble Frankland, historian and Bomber Command veteran
BBC Berlin Air Offensive page
SPAATZ: Which had the more effect in the defeat of Germany, the area bombing or the precision bombing ~
GOERING: The precision bombing, because it was decisive. Destroyed cities could be evacuated but destroyed industry was difficult to replace.
SPAATZ: Did the Germans realize that the American Air Forces by intention did only precision bombing ?
-5
GOERING ~ Yes. I planned to do only precision bombing myself at the beginning.
pdf COPY INTERROGATION OF REICH MARSHAL HERMANN GOERING
Thank you again, pretty much a spot on factual summary - facts from a non-biased intent.
Harris at Bomber Command did everything he could to bomb civilians and not military targets. ..."Harris's behavior towards the Air Staff
in this last phase almost certainly influenced the fact that he received no
peerage and was offered no further employment in the coming of peace, much more
than any notion of making him the scapegoat for Dresden. If he had shown the
flexibility in the autumn of 1944 to acknowledge that the usefulness of area
bombing was ended, that his force was now capable of of better and more
important things, history might have judged him more kindly. But he did not.
With the single-mindedness that even one of his principal advocates at the Air
Ministry had termed obsession, he continued remorselessly with his personal
programme for the leveling of Germany's cities until the very end."
--"Bomber Command", pp.391-92 by Max Hastings
BC could possibly have had a decisive effect, but Harris wouldn't have it.
My dad was 9th AAC.
great vid guys. love youre stuff
Thanks for watching! -TimeGhost Ambassador
This video has one of your most poignant final thoughts. It is deeply saddening on multiple levels.
Never forget
@@jamesdrummond7684i think I’ve told you this before… we do not stand with one subset of humanity, or against one subset of humanity.
I should also point out that your repeated insinuation that we depend on cozying up to Israel to maintain our finances is a terrible antisemitic dog whistle. Shameful.
@@jamesdrummond7684 If that is how you feel, why are you here? Take your clicks and go to your favorite ant-semitic website/channel instead.
No easy answers from Sparty.
Without the area bombing campaign the allies wouldn’t have gained air superiority , also a great deal of men and armaments had to be diverted ( from the Russian Front initially ) to fight off the bombers . It’s also hard to say what German war production would have been like without the area bombing . Despite the bombing it did rise but without it we ho knows what they could have achieved.
For many years the only way Stalin could be placated in calling for a second front was by the activity of bomber command .
I personally knew 2 old timers who had fought in bomber command and to me these men were heros . It’s easy to look back now and condemn those men but back then very difficult decisions had to be taken and this country came very close to getting rubbed out .
1. the combined bomber offensive was not the only way to defeat the Luftwaffe.
2. no weapons and no men were diverted from the Eastern Front or any front to defend against bombing. Defense was mounted by deconscripted men, and teenagers with arms and ammunition never intended for the front in the first place. If you’re thinking of the Luftwaffe, see point 1,
3. you’re right, we don’t know the effect not bombing would have had, but we know the effect it had: very little.
4. I agree that your friends who flew for bomber command are heroes. Their boss Arthur Harris not so much. In fact your friends and the 55,573 of their comrades who were killed in this campaign were victims of a wasteful strategy with little regard for their lives, despite Harris’ peers’ protests that it wasn’t working. They’re heroes for getting into their flying machines over and over again to fight Naziism at the peril of losing their lives. They’re victims because Harris robbed them of that chance to fight the Nazis, and still put them in harm’s way.
I'm sure anyone would be hard-pressed to find an example in history where directly targeting civilians ever broke a people's will to fight, but rather made them dig in their heels to fight for their lives.
iN hIsToRy
History repeats... or shall we stop it? - Stop it!
Your last comments are so true, it makes me sad too!