> Up until June 1944, every Nazi artillery piece inside the Reich
> pointing skyward to try to defend German cities against Allied
> terror-bombing was one artillery piece fewer on the Russian front.
> The abandonment of strategic bombing in 1942-1944 would have meant a
> lot more German civilians alive, a lot more Russian soldiers dead,
> and--possibly--a different outcome to the struggle on the Eastern
> Front: it was a very near-run thing. It's not clear to me that
> Galbraith was wrong in condemning the strategic bombing campaign as a
> waste that killed German civilians by the hundreds of thousands
> without harming Nazi war production. But it's not clear to me that
> Galbraith was right either: half of Nazi artillery pieces in the
> Reich pointing skyward does count for something.
>
>
> Brad DeLong
This is bizarre. Of course if there were NO air campaign against the Third Reich by the US & UK then military resources (Luftwaffe even more than air defense) would have been available with perhaps significant results on the Eastern Front, just as in the absence of a Second Front in 1943 other resources were in fact available for the Eastern Front with significant results. What is at issue is the choice of targets, not whether the US/UK air corps should or should not have been used against the Axis. If the same US & UK resources had been directed against military-industrial-administative targets there could have been no significant transfer of AA guns to the eastern front (even AA defense of the population centers could not have been abandoned, the industrial targets, railyards, government offices etc were most often within those areas and the fact that strictly residential districts had not yet been bombed would not have eliminated the need to attempt to protect them; remember Goering's 'call me Meier' boast). Perhaps the US and UK air corps might even had put the rail system to, or gas chambers at, Aushwitz out of action. But instead they chose the mass murder of non-combatants by the incendiary terror-bombing of densely built up residential districts (and Dresden was more or less undefended by AA guns!).
john mage