Effect of mass bombing on civilian morale in Germany

[Mkk]

As not to derail this thread: The White Rose

In my country [the U.K], the mass bombing policy is often defended in the mainstream media by references to "bringing the war to the enemy", reducing German civillian morale and damaging German war production capacity.

I am interested in opinions and evidence in regards to whether the mass bombing reduced German civillian morale and war production, or not?

[Hannover]

The official Allied Strategic Bombing Survey states unequivocally that German morale remained unbroken by the Allied terror bombings.

Also, Fire and Fury: The Allied Bombing of Germany, 1942-1945, by Randall Hansen goes into the fact that the terror bombing prolonged the war as German military & civilian resistance actually increased.
I have no doubt there are other sources.

Notice how the starting date is always given as 1942, when we know that Allied terror bombing of purely civilian targets began in 1940, ca. 6 mos. before the Luftwaffe's restrained retaliation ... after Germany pleaded with the Britain to cease such terrorist activities.
And, the demand of 'unconditional surrender' by the Allies against all Axis powers also increased resistance and prolonged the war on all fronts. I believe Eisenhower and MacArthur stated as much.

Albert Speer (the brilliant German minister of armaments production, construction, etc.) in his Inside The Third Reich shows that 1944, the last full year of the war was the biggest year of German armaments production.

- Hannover

[Mkk]

This BBC documentary from 1989 features an interview with an air raid survivor from Dusseldorf: he states " We ask ourselves: Why are they doing this to our people?". Because of the Allies hatred of Germany's plan for a new European order. ".

"Churchill and Rosevelt thought they could demoralise the German people, make them surrender: but he reached the opposite of it"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n63ET9STGis

[hermod]

[...]

Der Brand (The Fire: Germany Under Bombardment 1940-45) by the historian Jorg Friedrich, which claims to be the most authoritative account of the bombing campaign so far.

[...]

Friedrich argues that the Allied policy of seeking to break German morale through bombing proved mistaken, the attacks merely serving to weld together the German population.

The debate is certain to anger those in Britain who see the strategic air campaign as a necessary evil.


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... minal.html

[Moderator]

MKK:
Enlarging your rather microscopic document resulted in a non-stop flooding / barrage of this thread*. I deleted the errant post. I suggest that it is most probably a technical 'glitch'. Please feel free to repost.

* Contact me via PM if you desire a more scholarly description.

M1

[Mkk]

Moderator,

That's strange, the document opened and displayed fine for me, at a readable size. In any case, I uploaded it to Imageshack: http://img405.imageshack.us/img405/3450/pi5.gif

The original text can be found on page 257 here http://www.fpp.co.uk/books/Dresden/Apocalypse_2007.pdf

[Mkk]

Max Hastings is a British historian who has written a number of books about the Second World war [he recently came out with one on the First World war entitled Catastrophe: Europe goes to war 1914]. His one-volume work on WWII, All Hell let loose , was very much praised by establishment historians. What I'm saying is, he is barely a revisionist historian.

Despite this, he was highly critical of the bombing policy in his book Bomber Command , writing that ""The morale of the German people remained unbroken to the end"

A.V. Hill, one of the founding fathers of British radar and a Member of Parliament, informed his colleagues that great resources were being squandered on Bomber Command and "the idea of bombing a well-defended enemy into submission or seriously affecting his morale -- of even doing substantial damage to him -- is an illusion. We know that most of the bombs we drop hit nothing of importance."

The authors of the official British history, Sir Charles Webster and Dr. Noble Frankland, have argued that by late 1941 there were only two choices left to Churchill, area bombing or no bombing at all.
Hastings rejects that specious assertion and points out alternatives, a third choice being "to persist in the face of whatever difficulties, in attempting to hit precision targets" and a "fourth and more realistic alternative: faced by the fact that Britain's bombers were incapable of a precision campaign, there was no compulsion upon the Government to authorize the huge bomber programme that was now to be undertaken. Aircraft could have been transferred to the Battle of the Atlantic and the Middle and Far East where they were so urgently needed, and many British strategists would have wholeheartedly defended the decision to move them... There were alternatives to the area campaign, albeit at great cost to the amour propre of the RAF."

Hastings goes on to discuss the opposition by Britain's leading military theorists, J.F.C. Fuller and B.H. Liddell Hart, but emphasizes that these distinguished critics had no impact upon policy.

"The morale of the German people remained unbroken to the end," Hastings points out, even though Bomber Command "destroyed centuries of construction and culture."

Bomber Command launched a massive series of assaults against the Ruhr, Hamburg, and Berlin during 1943 and early 1944. Thousands of acres were burned and hundreds of thousands of Germans were killed. The RAF lost over 4,100 bombers. Yet German arms production increased.

Bomber Command stepped up its devastation of German cities. Hastings devotes a revealing chapter to describe the destruction of Darmstadt on the night of 11/12 September, which was typical of the sort of targets remaining to the British by that date. Darmstadt was another classic representative of German culture which produced less than two-tenths of one percent of Germany's total production and an infinitesimal amount of its war production. A minimum of ten per cent of Darmstadt's population died as a result of the firestorm that was created and a Russian POW camp was totally destroyed. Over-all, industries located in the area lost about two weeks production.

But, he concludes, "the cost of the bomber offensive in life, treasure and moral superiority over the enemy tragically outstripped the results that it achieved."

http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v01/v01p247_Lutton.html

[Mkk]

Time-Life has a series called WW2

It is very imbued with a 60's style pro Jewish set of writers.

One book is called The Homefront Germany

It says that a study conducted on people subjected to bombing raids was COMPLETELY counter productive

In fact what it did was to create a solidarity of the people with their leadership and soldiers because they now felt hat they were all "in it together"

The same happened in Japan and the UK

The civilian bombing strengthened the resolve of the homefront.

So Butcher Harris failed completely.

http://www.amazon.com/World-War-II-39-Set/dp/B000MC7H4I

[Mkk]

David Irving's "Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe" p.277:

"Paradoxically, Göring’s popularity with the public was still undeniable. In the last week of October [1943] he toured the fighter organization in the west, and wherever his Mercedes halted in the Ruhr and Rhineland cities he was mobbed and cheered by the populace. For the generals who accompanied him it was mystifying. In a private speech to them at fighter defence headquarters in Holland, Göring emotionally exclaimed:

‘I am human too, and I would have understood if these people who stand among ruins nothing but rubble to left and right! and who have put up with over a hundred air raids, had taken the chance of a passing visit by one of the dignitaries who is actually responsible for this mess and had . . . well, not exactly chucked rotten eggs at me, but at least put on a sour face or hollered “You fat slob!” at me.’ He smiled wanly: ‘Nor would I have intervened if they had!’²⁸

This public acclaim strengthened Göring in his contempt for his officers. By the morning of October, as hundreds of fighter pilots gathered in one of the hangars at Arnhem to hear him speak, huge fires were sweeping Kassel, devastated by eighteen hundred tons of RAF bombs during the night. Nearly six thousand civilians had died between dusk and dawn. Göring put it to the pilots that they were ‘pussy-foots, and some of you somewhat more’. He angrily reminded them how, when he had withdrawn fighter squadrons to the defence of the Reich, they had assured him, ‘Just let those four-engined rattletraps try coming! What a party that will be what a thrashing! Well, the party’s over and still they keep coming. Look at it this way: the German public has suffered indescribably from the enemy bombing terror, by day and night. At night-time the public can just about understand the problems of making contact with the bombers; but what it will never understand is what problem there is by day, particularly in clear weather. I am not going to single out one squadron, or one flight, as particularly bad. But of one thing you must rest assured: I will not have cowards in my force. I intend to winkle every one of them out!’²⁹"

http://www.fpp.co.uk/books/Milch/Milch.pdf

[Mkk]

James L. Stokesbury was a professor of history at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, Canada. He wrote in his book A short history of World war II:

Harris also predicted that the raid [Cologne 1942], and ones like it, would soon destroy German civilian morale. This attitude, basically a holdover from the prewar period, never proved true. Civilians showed themselves able to endure an amazing amount of punishment, and in fact rather than having their morale broken by the ruin of their homes and the deaths of their families, they became more supportive of their nation’s war effort. One of the remarkable aspects of wartime planning was that governments seldom seemed to apply their own experience to their enemies’ situations. The British knew they had not broken under the German bombing but they assumed the Germans would break under their bombing.

In fact, German production capacity never did fall off as a result of the bombing offensive. After Albert Speer took over as Minister of Production, German factories increased their output substantially. In spite of Allied bombing and the necessity to decentralize, production figures in key industries kept going up right to the very last stages of the war.

Final judgment on the bomber offensive remains elusive. Its cost, in allocation of resources, in aircraft, and in aircrew, was heavy. The bombers never achieved what their original champions claimed they would do; German morale never cracked, and only at the very end of the war did the German ground forces suffer any real shortages of supplies that could be traced to the bombing.

Chapter 22, "The Stategic bombing campaign"

[Mkk]

James L. Stokesbury was a professor of history at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, Canada. He wrote in his book A short history of World war II:

Harris also predicted that the raid [Cologne 1942], and ones like it, would soon destroy German civilian morale. This attitude, basically a holdover from the prewar period, never proved true. Civilians showed themselves able to endure an amazing amount of punishment, and in fact rather than having their morale broken by the ruin of their homes and the deaths of their families, they became more supportive of their nation’s war effort. One of the remarkable aspects of wartime planning was that governments seldom seemed to apply their own experience to their enemies’ situations. The British knew they had not broken under the German bombing but they assumed the Germans would break under their bombing.

In fact, German production capacity never did fall off as a result of the bombing offensive. After Albert Speer took over as Minister of Production, German factories increased their output substantially. In spite of Allied bombing and the necessity to decentralize, production figures in key industries kept going up right to the very last stages of the war.

Final judgment on the bomber offensive remains elusive. Its cost, in allocation of resources, in aircraft, and in aircrew, was heavy. The bombers never achieved what their original champions claimed they would do; German morale never cracked, and only at the very end of the war did the German ground forces suffer any real shortages of supplies that could be traced to the bombing.

Chapter 22, "The Stategic bombing campaign"

[Mkk]

James L. Stokesbury was a professor of history at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, Canada. He wrote in his book A short history of World war II:

Harris also predicted that the raid [Cologne 1942], and ones like it, would soon destroy German civilian morale. This attitude, basically a holdover from the prewar period, never proved true. Civilians showed themselves able to endure an amazing amount of punishment, and in fact rather than having their morale broken by the ruin of their homes and the deaths of their families, they became more supportive of their nation’s war effort. One of the remarkable aspects of wartime planning was that governments seldom seemed to apply their own experience to their enemies’ situations. The British knew they had not broken under the German bombing but they assumed the Germans would break under their bombing.

In fact, German production capacity never did fall off as a result of the bombing offensive. After Albert Speer took over as Minister of Production, German factories increased their output substantially. In spite of Allied bombing and the necessity to decentralize, production figures in key industries kept going up right to the very last stages of the war.

Final judgment on the bomber offensive remains elusive. Its cost, in allocation of resources, in aircraft, and in aircrew, was heavy. The bombers never achieved what their original champions claimed they would do; German morale never cracked, and only at the very end of the war did the German ground forces suffer any real shortages of supplies that could be traced to the bombing.

Chapter 22, "The Stategic bombing campaign"