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Talk:Strategic bombing

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Tannin (talk | contribs) at 19:12, 15 January 2003. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

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For instance, the Stratgic bombing survey? conducted by the United States after World War II determined that German industrial production had risen every year of the war despite strategic bombing. Although designed to "break the enemy's will", the opposite often happens.

I'd really like to see some backup of this claim. -- ansible

I wrote this short piece while working on Dr. Strangelove. Of course, it is considerably more complicated than that. It appears that German production went up every year of the war until late 1944-45 despite strategic bombing. In part, this was because the Germans did not seriously ramp up production until 1942, or so. That is, they were well under capacity until after the invasion of Russia. Still, production in most sectors continued to rise. There was a great deal of difference from industry to industry. The collapse in 1945 was so total that it is difficult to know what portion to attribute to the bombing and what to other factors. I will edit the piece a little to reflect this further research, and also link the survey itself.
The stuff about morale holds up pretty well.
Even when I beef up the article a little, this will still be only a stub, which is all I intended to provide. Others are welcome to continue. Ortolan88 19:22 Aug 6, 2002 (PDT)
Of course, I've got to wonder what would have happened to German production figures if there had been no strategic bombing at all during WWII. Would it have gone up even higher? The Allies won the war by vastly out-producing the Axis countries. Consider tank warfare in the European theater.
The German Tiger was quite superior to the American Sherman and the USSR T-34 tanks. I've seen 5 to 1 kill ratios vs. the Sherman quoted a couple times. The thing was that the the Allies were producing 10x as many tanks by 1944. If the Germans had something close to parity in numbers, they would have pushed the Allies back out of continental Europe.
These are not exact figures, BTW, don't quote me on it.
At any rate, this article is going to need to address such points, namely that there isn't as much scientific evidence as we'd like.
I happen to agree with you on the morale bit, however.
Just wanted to give y'all something to chew on. - 2002/9/11, Ansible

The low rate of German production up to 1942 is probably more meaningful than any growth after 1942. How weird is it that they really didn't seem to take the war seriously, even after their dopey invasion of the Soviet Union?

Adding these links here for convenience of me and Ansible and anyone else interested:

Obviously plenty remains to be done. Ortolan88 16:11 Sep 12, 2002 (UTC)

The following period is grammatically difficult: "Because of the controversial nature of deliberating [deliberately?] bombing civilian targets, the United States military has in more recent wars attempted to minimize the negative publicity associate [associated?] with such bombing campaigns."
S.

The edit I just did is a little sloppy: I must try to get back to it and replace broad assertions with the exact figures (e.g., the actual proportion of British bombs that fell outside the five mile "on target" limit), and also tighten it up a little, probably cutting the length of the section I added a little. But not tonight.

On the Gulf War, I removed "although in fact civilian casualties were high during the bombing campaign of that war". Before this statement goes back in it needs to say "high" by what standard of comparison. Tannin

Excuse me while I bend the rule about "no debate" a little to respond to some comments in this talk page. Ansible doubts that German industrial production rose despite strategic bombing. This is an abundantly well-established fact: sources are leigon. Second, the suggestion that "the Allies won the war by vastly out-producing the Axis". Well, if you ignore the Soviet Union, perhaps so. It would be equally true (and equally misleading) to say that "The Soviet Union won the war by replacing casualties faster than the Axis", or "The Alies won the war by developing better technology than the Axis" (Radar, the Mustang, the Lancaster, the proximity fuse, and so on) or "Hitler lost the war by failing to organise his scientific and industrial effort effectively". And so on. Single explanations are rarely very useful. And on tanks, the German tanks were indeed superior to the Sherman and the Churchill, but were by no means superior to the rugged, effective, powerful T-34 and the IS1/IS2.

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