The momentous cost of Bomber Command.

[RodM]

After having a read of the thesis, my own opinion is that it is an important addition to the debate of the strategic air offensive.

Having said that, I feel that the author has missed the point in several areas and not delved into several complex issues.

I actually find it offensive that the author should emphasize a calculation of the cost for each German civilian killed, as if this is the marker upon which the success of the SBC should be judged. In fact, the calculation is completely irrelevant. Of more importance would be comparing the cost to Germany of defending against and repairing the damage caused by the SBC, not to mention the simple expedient that Bomber Command was an offensive weapon that, along with the USAAF, diverted a fair portion of German output to defence - output that otherwise been used for offensive over the British Isles. I would maintain that Germany's failure to mount a proper and sustained strategic campaign against the UK as a base of war operations was a grave mistake. Whether Germany could have mounted such a sustained campaign, considering that it had ultimately 'bitten off more than it could chew' once America had joined the European war, is another matter.

In terms of the construction and maintenance of airfields and infrastructure, I don't believe that one can separate the needs of Bomber Command from that of the USAAF. To that end, if the investment had not been made in Bomber Command, how would the USAAF strategic bomber force have fared in establishing itself in the UK? The USAAF in the UK relied heavily on RAF support in a number of areas, including the infrastructure set up to aid Bomber Command. To suggest that the investment in Bomber Command infrastructure was a cost that Britain could not afford, would automatically call into question the parallel USAAF SBC. I don't believe these two issues can be separated.

Nor do I see detailed analysis of the offsetting of costs against reverse lend-lease. A question I would be asking is did Britain get full economic value from technological advances and research shared with America? While the military value of this sharing undoubtedly bore fruit in American manufacturing of and improvements to British technology in the fields of both the aeronautics and electronics, to what extent did America economically profit to the detriment of Britain in the post-war years because of technology provided to the Americans for no real direct economic recompense?

The author also places emphasis on the wastage due to the dissolution of a substantial portion of Bomber Command in the immediate post-war years, without exploring the late-war requirements of fighting Japan, and the planned deployment of 'Tiger Force'; plans only made redundant by the Japanese surrender after the Atomic bombings. That Britain could reduce this war material to scrap only came about because the Allies defeated the Axis powers and the Soviet Union did not 'liberate' western Europe.

Tony, most of your theories are based on the notion/belief that Bomber Command operations had no political or material effect against Germany and its ability to wage war, and were thus a complete waste of effort. Many people flatly disagree with this notion, including Webster/Frankland in the Official History (which, in my view, is one of the most forthright and courageous Official Histories ever published by any country. If you haven't done so, I suggest that you read all four volumes from end-to-end, and not selectively take what suits your own hypothesises).

What most people now agree on is that with hindsight the British SBC could and should have been more effective than what it was. This is obviously different from suggesting that Britain should not have embarked upon a SBC at all. Should Britain not have done so then I would suggest that the economic cost to Britain could have been much more dire because the war might have been lost.

Cheers

Rod

[Jan Gazda]

Nick,

I do not want to add any more heat to the thread. This has always been a very friendly board and discussion on a topic like this can easily get out of hand which is unnecessary. We are talking history here and it will be always open to different interpretations. Russians will always feel that the Western Allies could have done more and the Western Allies will always argue that they did what they could. I think that this is one of the matters on which there will always be split opinions. One of the reasons is that people in the West never came to fully understand the extent of the carnage on the Eastern front. The Russians really fought a completely different war out there.

Jan

[Nick Beale]

Originally Posted by Jan Gazda

I do not want to add any more heat to the thread. This has always been a very friendly board and discussion on a topic like this can easily get out of hand which is unnecessary.

Jan, I admire your wish to keep the mood of this board amicable. I am less impressed by your throwing out an intemperate accusation which you then completely fail to justify, preferring instead to withdraw from further discussion. I can only hope that this is because you now regret what you wrote although it is difficult to see how "We are talking history here and it will be always open to different interpretations" could suffice either as an explanation or an apology.

[tcolvin]

I have been thinking about an approach that might move us all closer to a consensus, and I would be interested in your responses.

We can all agree that the Air Staff, Air Ministry, RAF and Churchill failed to deliver on their original promise that the RAF could win the war for Britain by destroying German morale and will to continue without the cost of committing ground forces in battle. It was claimed to be the economic option.
But although their programme was revealed by events as bogus wishful thinking, BC has never lacked for defenders, including many on this board, whose mouthpiece surely is Richard Overy in this opinion piece; (Source: http://warbirdsforum.com/showthread.php?t=1334).
"Bombing: The Balance Sheet. The effects of the bombing campaign went far beyond the mere physical destruction of factories and dwelling-houses .... The bombing produced serious social dislocation and a high cost in terms of man-hours ..... Evacuation, rehabilitation and welfare provision were carried out on the largest scale in an economy struggling with serious manpower losses and cuts in civilian production. Bombing also encouraged a strategic response from Hitler which placed a further strain on the war economy by diverting vast resources to projects of little advantage to the German war effort.
The net effect of the many ways in which bombing directly or indirectly impeded economic mobilisation cannot be calculated precisely (my emphasis). But in the absence of physical destruction and dislocation, without expensive programmes for secret weapons and underground production and without the diversion of four-fifths of the fighter force, one-third of all guns and one-fifth of all ammunition to the anti-bombing war the German armed forces could have been supplied with at least 50% more equipment in the last two years of war, perhaps much more. In an environment entirely free of bomb attack the German authorities and German industrial managers would have had the opportunity to exploit Germany’s resource-rich empire in Europe to the full. In 1942 the air force had begun to plan the production of 7000 aircraft a month, yet at the peak in 1944 a little over 3000 were produced, of which one-quarter were destroyed before even reaching the front-line.
Bombing took the strategic initiative away from German forces, and compelled Germany to divert an ever-increasing share of its manpower and resources away from production for the battlefield. ........."

Overy's opinion is not supported by the British Bombing Survey; “In terms of overall production decrease resulting from the RAF area attacks, the US survey, based upon limited research, found that in 1943 it amounted to 9% and in 1944 to 17%. Relying on US gathered statistics the British survey found that actual arms production decreases were a mere 3% for 1943, and 1% for 1944. However they did find decreases of 46.5% and 39% in the second half of 1943 and 1944 respectively in the metal processing industries. These losses resulted from the devastating series of raids the Command launched on the Ruhr Valley at these times.” (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAF_Bomber_Command)

The evidence that strategic bombing had only marginal effect on arms production was predicted in Zuckerman's report on the bombing of Birmingham and Hull dated 8.4.1942 (source: 'From Apes to Warlords' page 405). His conclusions were misrepresented to Churchill by Lindemann. But Zuckerman's results were repeated in Germany, and negated the strategic bombing campaign.
His Summary of Conclusions;
1. Social Effects and Morale
a) The factor most affecting the population is the destruction of houses.
b) 35 people are bombed out for everyone killed.
c) Dwelling houses are destroyed by HE and not by fire.
d) Large towns have a high capacity for absorbing their bombed out population.
e) Other raid effects such as stoppage of water or gas have little effect on the population.
f) Steady employment and a high rate of wages are the major stabilising factors for the population.
(h) There is no evidence of breakdown of morale for the intensities of the raids experienced by Hull or Birmingham.
II. Production
a) Machine tools are rarely damage by HE but very extensively by fire.
b) Loss of production is caused almost entirely by direct damage to factories.
c) Factories are more seriously damaged by fire than HE. In Birmingham 30% of factories were damaged – 10% seriously (8% by fire and 2% by HE)
d) Most fires could have been prevented at the scale of fire attack encountered.
e) Indirect effects of raids on labour, turnover, health and efficiency are insignificant.
(f) The direct loss of production in Birmingham due to the raids was about 5% and the loss of productive potential was very small.
g) Transport activity is only partially interfered with and recovery is rapid in the absence of continuous raiding.
h) Docking was not interfered with and docking potential was diminished by about 10% in the raids on Hull.

It is surely up to Overy and those of his view to prove Zuckerman wrong and to quantify their Balance Sheet rather than just expressing an opinion.
I have quantified the balance sheet with respect to Wilhelmshaven. It is consistent with Zuckerman's report and shows a significant negative imbalance to Britain between the costs and benefits of strategic bombing. Those who want more on Wilhelmshaven can read my article published in Issue 148 of After The Battle Magazine.

Wilhelmshaven was throughout the war a priority target, being BC's first target (on 4/9/1939), and the first target in Germany attacked by 8USAAF (on 27/01/1943). The disaster of the Battle of Heligoland Bight in December 1939 drove BC to abandon day-bombing for night-flying. Fahey's analysis showed the total cost of bombing Germany was £2,911 per ton of bombs dropped. The 19,048 tons of bombs dropped on Wilhelmshaven, therefore cost £55.5 million. I show below that the cost of military damage in Wilhelmshaven was only £8.3 million. Extrapolating the Wilhelmshaven experience to the whole of Germany shows that while BC cost Britain £2.78 - £3.5 billion, it caused a maximum of £0.5 billion to the German military economy. This was not a viable method of waging war. Several cheaper and more effective methods can be listed.

Wilhelmshaven was the closest major German military target to the airfields of BC and 8USAAF. The target presented a clear image on H2S. Built of non-inflammable Victorian brick, it had an efficient fire-fighting service with plenty of water - there were no uncontrolled fires. Wilhelmshaven contained valuable military targets concentrated in the small area of the Bauhafen shipyard, including Tirpitz (cost £15.2 million) that was fitting out until 9/3/1941 and attacked unsuccessfully by BC in 17 raids with 281 sorties. Wilhelmshaven was the home port of Scharnhorst (cost £12 million) and a destroyer flotilla until 1941. 29 U-boats worth £370,000 each were launched from 16/11/1940 to 17/6/1944, of which only 2 were destroyed by 8USAAF and none by BC. Some 90 units of Section 2 of the eight sections that were assembled in Bremen and Hamburg into Type XXI Electric Boats, (each complete boat costing £483,000) were built in Wilhelmshaven without loss. Production in Wilhelmshaven was never interrupted except for periods of an hour or two when a raid was in progress. Loss of production in the shipyard was much less than the 5% in Birmingham reported by Zuckerman, with negligible destruction of productive potential. The shipyard functioned fully after the war until it was dismantled and shipped to Russia as reparations.

The area of Wilhelmshaven and the Jade was the second most defended locality in Germany after the Ruhrgebiet. The cost of LW Fliegerhorsts at Jever and Nordholz are excluded from the balance sheet. Outside Wilhelmshaven, Kriegsmarine Nord HQ in Sengwarden and the Aurich arsenal were never bombed.

In attacking Wilhelmshaven, BC and 8USAAF:
- despatched 5,668 sorties (BC 3,580 and 8USAAF 2088)
- lost 146 bombers (BC 97 and 8USAAF 49)
- lost 856 aircrew killed (BC 406 and 8USAAF 450)
- dropped 19,048 tons of bombs (BC 13,676 and 8USAAF 5,372)
- killed 452 Germans on the ground (358 civilians and 94 military)
- wounded 1,125 Germans on the ground.
NB: nearly twice as many aircrew died in the air as Germans on the ground.

Bombing Wilhelmshaven cost £8.3 million, comprising;

• • Loss of production of 2% of a total production due to disruption from air raids and the threat of air raids. The value of war production in Wilhelmshaven was £41.1 million, comprising Tirpitz (£15 million), Type VII submarines (£10.7 million), Section 2 of Type XXI submarines (£5.4 million) and sundry shipbuilding and repair (£10 million). The 2% loss of production was £0.8 million. Note that Birmingham's loss of production was 5%, but Wilhelmshaven had bomb-proof bunker air-raid shelters for every inhabitant close to home or place of work, which minimised disruption, and fires were quickly extinguished n the shipyard.
  • Damage estimated at £0.01 million (£10,000) was caused to the cruiser Emden on 4/9/1939 with 11 sailors killed and 30 wounded when Blenheim N6189 flown by Lightoller of 107 Squadron was shot down and crashed into it.
  • U-769 and U-780 (Type VII), costing RM4.4 million each, were damaged on the stocks beyond repair by 8USAAF on 27/1/1943. The maximum total cost, assuming they were completely ready for launch, was RM 8.8 million = £0.7 million.
  • Mariensiel arsenal was destroyed by luck on 11/02/1943 in probably the biggest explosion ever caused by BC. The arsenal was over 3kms downwind of the aiming point in the shipyard and it was blowing a NE gale. The explosion had no impact on military operations because the destroyed ordnance comprised surplus shells for the much diminished surface fleet and sea mines. Flak munition and current naval munitions were dispersed in a dispersed arsenal at Aurich that was never identified or bombed.
  • On 11/06/1943 two out of nine oil storage tanks were destroyed by 8USAAF. No record exists of how much oil they contained or its value, which is guessed at £0.2 million.
  • The Flakship Medusa was badly damaged in Jade Bay on 19/4/1945 by 15 RP Typhoon fighter bombers of 2TAF, killing 22 and wounding 41. These casualties are not included in the statistics as they were not caused by BC. The wreck was towed into Wilhelmshaven and decommissioned. The ship had been built in the early 1900s as a Gazelle Class cruiser costing £0.4 million but had no military value when it was destroyed because Allied air raids had ceased.
  • The cruiser Köln, which cost £3 million in 1930, was sunk in the Bauhafen by 8USAAF in their last raid on 30/03/1945. But the cruisers' guns were fired later against the Polish Armoured Division in April 1945 so its insignificant military value was not affected by its sinking.
  • Also sunk on 30/03/1945 was the Fleet auxiliary Drachenfels which cost perhaps £0.4 million in the late 1930s but had no military value when it was sunk. A training submarine and sundry lighters and tugs were also sunk, but had negligible military value.
  • Likewise the destruction of the liners Tanganjika and Monte Pascoal in air raids had minimal military value, although they were used as naval accommodation ships. The liner Nyassa was damaged, but functioned as Naval HQ after the destruction of the HQ buildings. 36,000 buildings were destroyed in the air raids, but few had military value.
  • Wilhelmshaven, the Jade Bay and Schillig Roads were defended by 2 Marineflakbrigade of 5,000 -7,000 troops (male and female) equipped with 60 searchlights, 6 early warning Freya radars, 92 units of 105-mm Flak, and 20 units of 128mm Flak in 24 batteries and two Flak ships all with Würzburg gun-laying radars. The price of an 88mm Flak 18 was £2,822. Assuming the 105-mm cost twice the 88-mm, the 128-mm cost three times as much as an 88-mm, the searchlight cost one quarter of an 88-mm, and the Freyas and Würzburgs cost the same as an 88-mm, then the total equipment cost of 2 Marineflakbrigade was about £1.0 million. The cost of the equipment's concrete emplacement, of ship conversion and of communications is guessed at £0.5 million. Ammunition expended is guessed at costing another £0.5 million. An unknown proportion of 2 Marineflakbrigade comprised women and Kriegshilfseinsatz der Jugend bei der Kriegsmarine, popularly known as Flakhilfer such as Pope Ratzinger, who were recruited from those born between 1926 – 1929. These men and women were not diverted from war work. The total Flak cost is estimated at £2.0 million.

1. Smokescreen generators were installed around the town in 1942. Actual cost is unknown, with a guess of £0.1 million.
2. A balloon barrage was installed in 1940 with perhaps 30 balloons. Actual cost is unknown , but guessed at £0.1 million
3. A decoy site was built on reclaimed marshes to the North of Wilhelmshaven at unknown cost. Also large numbers of reflectors were built and installed to try and disguise the port's H2S signature. The total cost is guessed at £0.2 million
4. Air raid shelters were built for the entire population of 120,000 at a cost of RM34 - 50 million = £4.2 million. The population actually declined to 80,000 by war's end so there was plenty of spare bunker room.

Tony

[Nick Beale]

"Extrapolating the Wilhelmshaven experience to the whole of Germany …"

And for me, that's where your methodology breaks down.

[CJE]

Fascinating discussion.

But how can we discard the waste of ressources and young men of Fighter Command sent in useless missions such as Rhubarb, Rodeo or Circus over the continent for over three years? No more than mosquito stings on an elefant's back.
Moreover with such an unsuitable aircraft as the Spitfire with its limited range and ordnance load.

When you have at hand thousands of aircrews and aircraft available, you just cannot let them idle about when the enemy is knocking at your back door.

The Air Ministry, the RAF and WC built up BC.
What else could they have done with BC?
They all were trapped inside their own strategy.
It's easy to blame WC or Harris, but the fault rests on Trenchard's shoulders.

[David Ransome]

I would concur with Nick, I feel that this sort of extrapolation would definitely have an extreme bias one way or another, certainly no balance.

Again , hindsight is a wonderful thing. At a Military college seminar several years ago many of the things that Tony mentions were discussed and consideration as to what would have happened if all that was known now was known back in WWII. The consensus was that individual items might have been useful but that a fuller knowledge could have lost the war for the Allies. Sounds perverse but there are occasions when too much knowledge dilutes the overall will to fight, especially where there appears to be no major need to put in 100% effort. Guess what can happen then?

David

[tcolvin]

An extrapolation from facts is surely infinitely more valuable than the expression of an opinion based on no facts and contrary to some known facts.
Is that what you are denying?

I would let Zuckerman have the last word about trying to break enemy morale through area bombing;
"All the participants in the debate (about area bombing in WW2) were wrong. As we now know, bombing at about a hundred times the intensity of anything ever suffered by European cities during WW2 at no moment broke the spirit of the people of Vietnam against whom the American forces were fighting between 1964 and 1973. In those nine years, seven million tons of bombs dropped on South Vietnam (which received about half the total), North Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia - three times the total tonnage of British, American and German bombs dropped on European soil in WW2. And the seven million tons brought no victory - only death and destruction".

Tony

[RodM]

Hi Tony,

as had been pointed out by others, taking extreme and specific examples doesn't provide balance. In the case of Wilhelmshaven, one could equally pick a target such as the oil refinery at Politz and prove via extrapolation that the overall BC SBC was considerably more effective than it really was.

As a New Zealander, I could take a similar (and unfounded) stance as yourself with regard to the British army, since The United Kingdom had a habit of committing the soldiers of my country to ineffective and costly land campaigns (Gallipoli, Passchendaele, Greece, Crete, Singapore). If I looked at these periods in isolation, I'm sure I could produce a theory that the British army and its command should have been disbanded because all it did was provide raw materials and labour to the enemy. I could look at the overall cost of the British army, especially between 1939-45 and find that most of the money was wasted because only a small proportion of the army actually met the enemy in battle during the war, and only a small proportion of those actually defeated the enemy in battle.

As to the breaking of morale, this was policy decision made above the auspices of Bomber Command, and few would disagree that in itself, it was a rather pointless and misguided exercise (based, IMHO, on some rather elitist and frankly quite racist assumptions about 'the Hun'). The fact is that from 1944 onwards, BC was able to significantly move away from solely targeting the enemy's 'morale'. Zuckermann's pronouncement in comparing Vietnam and Germany, while valid to a degree, is actually very misguided because the two cannot be compared. The United States never sought to systematically destroy the cities of North Vietnam in the same manner as had occurred in Germany and Japan.

I don't believe that the true effect of the British SBC can ever be precisely quantified other than to say that the campaign was considerably less effective in the years 1939-43 than in the years 1944-45. In addition, parts of the campaign (such as the area bombing of cities, and by this I mean when the aiming point was clearly the civil heart of a city, not industrial or military areas within a city) cannot be used in isolation to pronounce on the overall effectiveness of the whole campaign, especially in the 1944-45 period, when the SBC of both the British and Americans actually began to have a significant effect.

As Webster/Frankland point out, the USSBS didn't set out to really explore the city area bombing campaign in great detail, and the differences of opinion between both the USSBS and the BBSU highlight some of the assumptions that had to be made in attempting to quantify such a complex issue (by the way, I believe it is no co-incidence that Prof. Zuckermann sought control of the BBSU and then that body just happened to reach a conclusion that vindicated Zuckermann's theories. Thus when individuals or bodies that had a vested interest in the direction of the SBC pronounce on it, one should always ask in terms of what they had to say, "who benefits?").

I doubt that too many people would disagree that had BC been better directed from mid-1944 onwards, the collapse of Germany could have been brought about slightly quicker. This in itself clearly pronounces on the debate as to whether BC should have existed or not in the first place.

Cheers

Rod

[Nick Beale]

Originally Posted by tcolvin

An extrapolation from facts is surely infinitely more valuable than the expression of an opinion based on no facts and contrary to some known facts. Is that what you are denying?
Tony

I'm not "denying" anything, I am disputing an assumption. Specifically that extrapolation from the case of a particular city yields a valid result for the entire campaign any more that extrapolating from the Great War reliably predicted casualties in the Blitz.

You would have to show that the case of Wilhelmshaven was in some sense average or typical and that could be difficult. One might as well extrapolate from Pforzheim or Darmstadt to demonstrate that the campaign was utterly devastating and firestorms a regular occurrence but I suspect that an altogether more sophisticated approach is needed. For all I know, attacks on coastal targets could have been half as effective as those on inland targets (if X% of bombs fall within a notional circle, for a coastal target half that circle will be water). Did the local soil (Berlin is built on sand for instance) influence the number of UXBs or the propagation of shock waves from explosions? The potential number of variables in immense, I suspect.