----- Original Message ----- From: "John Mage" <jmage at panix.com>
> Brad DeLong wrote:
>
>
> > 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
>
>
=========================
Well they may not have bombed industrial targets because they wanted to, um, expropriate lots of that technology for reverse engineering etc. John Gimbel's Science, Technology, and Reparations:Exploitation and Plunder in Postwar Germany goes into some of the details. Michael Perelman might be coaxed into telling us more....
Ian