Quote:
Originally Posted by FalkeEins
But I can relate to 'mediocre' too.....mediocre bomber arm, industrial production, naval air power etc etc..you have a small country like the UK (yes I know about the Commonwealth, the Canadians etc etc) producing literally thousands of four-engine bombers and dispatching them on huge raids, whereas by late 1943 the Luftwaffe can barely scrape together two hundred medium twins to raid small provincial towns in England ...
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Are you sure that this is the proper comparison? In my humble opinion, calling the Luftwaffe's bomber arm as 'medicore' only because they were not able to retaliate in 1943/44 with the same strength as the British did is entirely wrong, since these were pointless raids and just waste of resources and crews+aircraft. There was a huge pressure on them and on their leaders to retaliate but their main efforts and successes were against the Soviet Union while supporting the ground forces. They gained many important successes during the war against tactical targets. Have you ever researched deeply for example the successes of the Eisenbahn Staffeln in the Soviet Union? Or the scattered Soviet military deployments(sometimes even offensives) by air raids? Anything about the annihilated units by them? And these are not only the German claims, many times captured Soviet documents, or genuine Soviet sources confirmed them as well. Just one example: a Soviet Corps confimed, that during an offensive, 90% of their losses were caused by air raids (and only 10% by ground fight). 40% of their entire losses were suffered during only two days by heavy air raids. Is it a medicore performance?
Or if we are talking about Bomber Command (I assume, you suggest, that if German bomber arm was 'medicore', they fared much better?) In the first half of the war their night accuracy was especially bad and after they noticed their continuous fails, they had turned against larger area targets.
What did Bomber Command achieve with ruining the German cities? Did they destroy the German industry? No, they didn't. Did they cut back the German industrial performance considerably? No, they didn't. Did they broke the morale of the German citizens? No, they didn't. What they had destroyed were mostly not industrial or military targets, but residential areas with their owners (i.e. mass killing civilians) Was it a great military success? I wouldn't say that... And they paid a very high price for it (very high personnel and aircraft losses and the British economy partly crippled because of this very expensive 'experiment')
Was it a far superior performance over the Luftwaffe's bomber arm?