Some figures from Georg Feuchter in his book Der Luftkrieg…
The German war industry owed it’s survival to a system of extreme decentralization.
The maintenance of it’s production depended in the last resort on keeping open the railways, rivers and roads. On the day when the Anglo- Americans shifted the centre of gravity of their operations to the communications within the Reich the overstretched network began rapid disintegration, and once started became irreversible.
Germany possessed one of the most complex and well maintained railway systems in the world. By the end of 1944, marshaling capacity had fallen to forty percent of normal and barely twenty percent by the end of January 1945. This severely hampered the receipt of raw materials and delivery of the finished products.
The water transport system, which was mainly used for the transport of coal and coke, was initially very efficient. In the first few months of 1944, 66 thousand tons of coal and coke were moved by water daily. By October 1944, the daily average had fallen to 23 thousand tons. This crippled the industrial and railway sectors. They were effectively useless without coal to heat their boilers.
Oil from ploesti was down 80% by the time the Red army over ran it and synthetic fuel in March '44 Produced 181,000 tons, and consumed 156,000 tons, by Dec '44 it produced 26,000 tons, and consumed 44,000 tons.
In May 1944 the German produced 156,000 tons of aviation gasoline and the allied forces dropped 51,000 tons of bombs on German and Romanian oil installations. In August the amount of gasoline produced had dropped to 17,000 tons. By January 1945 aviation gasoline production had fallen to 11,000 tons. By March it ceased altogether. Moreover the production of gasoline for road vehicles had dropped from 134,000 tons in March 1944 to 39,000 tons in March 1945. The production of diesel oil had fallen from 100,000 tons in March 1944 to 39,000 tons in March 1945.
German aircraft, tanks and vehicles were almost running on empty.
The attacks on oil production, oil refineries and tank farms, plus the destruction of the transportation network led to the general collapse of Germany in 1945, because this occurred sufficiently late in the war in that Germany was due to be defeated, some times the decisive nature of the bombing is over looked.
The Strategic bombing survey says…
‘‘German armies were still in the field. But with the impending collapse of the supporting economy, the indications are convincing that they would have had to cease fighting – any effective fighting – within a few months. Germany was mortally wounded.’’
So is it fair to say that the destruction of Germany’s oil production and transportation network would have brought Germany to it’s knees, even if the ground forces weren’t over running the Reich.
What’s often ignored in simplistic analyses of the not always great destruction wrought by bombing railway centres is that fairly minor damage often had steadily multiplying adverse effects up the line.
This is easily illustrated by how a modern urban passenger network gets thrown out by relatively minor events, such as one train being out of service. Put even a tenth of a railyard out of service for a day or two on a busy line and it stuffs up a vast range of troop and goods movements up to hundreds of miles away, and throws everything out of whack for even weeks.
One other thing that’s often overlooked about Germany’s military transportation was that, unlike the Western Allies (not sure about the Soviets), it was still heavily reliant on horse drawn transport. While horses don’t need oil and can forage in fields, in large numbers they need very large quantities of bulky food transported to feed them if they’re to work at peak levels, so that displaces other goods of higher value. Not unlike the Papuan porters on Kokoda who carried much more in their own supplies at times than the troops’ supplies they were carrying forward. The law of diminishing returns applies the further horses and porters have to go. Damaging rail and other transport carrying horse feed had a serious impact on horse transport.
A separate aspect of reliance on horses is that in large numbers horses produce vast quantities of manure which creates breeding grounds for flies and disease, which creates field hygeine problems that internal combustion engines don’t, thus putting another burden on Germans that the Allies didn’t have.
I partially agree with your post but also think that taking the “Strategic Bombing Survey” as gospel is a bit off. I agree that attacking fuel and transportation was critical to the Allied war effort, but then, what was RAF Bomber Command doing wiping out and burning large numbers of civilian “workers” in area bombing, and what on earth was the Eighth Air Force doing attempting to go after ball-bearing plants when the Germans could simply procure more from Switzerland or Sweden? The presumptive statements were made by air generals in the West, influenced by Italian general, and air war theorist, Giulio Douhet’s beliefs that were reflected, if not adopted, throughout the air arms of Europe and America. That the “bomber would always get through.” But I think they would have had a greater impact if Allied strategic bombing had been used in direct support of armies, to cripple the transportation infrastructure, and against the supply depots rather than against whole cities. This would have lessoned the stain of civilian casualties and perhaps, if not have brought the ground war to a quicker close, would have lessoned the number of Allied casualties…
They were essentially correct, but the bomber would only get through effectively with sufficient protection from fighters, or with the partial cover that night offered. The belief that a raid, a singular one, could influence, if not alter, the outcome of the campaign still prevailed early, even in late 1942 and 1943. The given example, the Ploesti oil refinery had been attacked, and attacked frequently. It was thought by United States Army Air Forces commanders that a decisive raid on the refinery, which was providing over one-third of the German war machines petroleum products, would seriously damage, if not almost cripple the ability for the Wehrmacht to fuel its panzers and the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine to fuel their aircraft and ships, respectively.
The Ploesti raid (a detailed account, which I have used as reference can be found here) was launched in August of 1943, after a year of planning and training. And the mission, rather harrowing and dramatic as the flyers found themselves engaged with shooting up a Flak train after their navigation leader’s plane was force out of the mission, and had to dead reckon using the train tracks to find the exact location of the oil field. The remaining flyers, forced to fly around Turkish air space which lengthened their mission and forced out a number of the B-24 Liberators, were able to hit their target after flying through a gauntlet of Me109s and German flak fire. But the damage, thought to be overwhelming, was limited. Production was effected, but the fires were contained and the damage circumvented, then repaired.
The raid was a precious learning experience for the crews and the USAAF, but was a clear disappointment, and showed that air power would only be effective decisively if used in a battle of attrition, mirroring the blood letting in all other forms of warfare. The British found this out as well, that bombers without sufficient concentration over the targets could not cause any great effect at night, which is why they had to resort to area bombing and the unfortunate killing of civilians, while the USAAF continued to believe that a handful of precise operations conducted against the very vulnerable niche sectors of German industry (ball-bearings plants) could have an effect that far outweigh the resources allocated. That a thousand pin pricks would bleed the beast to death.
I think they were quite mistaken. That is not to say that strategic bombing was a false premise, just that I think Air Marshall Bomber Harris and General Carl Spaatz (and Generals Le May, Arnold, and Eaker) were misguided in their belief that industry could be crippled by bomber strikes. The strategic air war was successful only terms of a battle of attrition forced the Luftwaffe to allocate resources they otherwise could have sent to the Eastern Front, North Africa, deployed in the Mediterranean logistical air and sea battles waged against Malta, and used to reinforce the Atlantic Wall. The contravening argument is that the Germans could have produced a lot more if they had not had to spread out their industry to divergent rural areas. But still, German industry had only gone over to a full war economy in 1942, and continued to boon in production totals throughout 1944 --even considering the complexity inherent in most German systems.
Harris, Spaatz, and Le May believed in the primacy of the strategic air arm unto its own, and railed against the use of strategic bombers in direct support of armies. It was General Eisenhower and his deputy, the overlooked Air Marshal Tedders, that forced the issue and ordered their air generals to plan for the use of direct targeting to French rail systems, marshaling yards, supply depots, and fuel depots in support of the Operation Overlord/Normandy campaign. Arguably, it was the most successful allocation of air power in the entire war with correlating, directly tangible results of the crippling of the German divisions, that were highly dependent on railroad transport. The focused use of air power in such circumstance not only crippled the German efforts to reinforce Normandy once the extent of crisis was realized thereby saving the lives of Allied ground troops. The campaign also reduced the numbers of civilian collateral casualties, and indeed, the need to make civilians direct targets at all (provided they weren’t locomotive engineers or railway workers :)).
I think most people here are aware of how the “experiment” conducted by the fire-power loving US Army. To batter a Wehrmacht division with successive waves strategic bombers and tactical “Jabolt” fighters basically rendered the division combat ineffective and they were made easy pickings as dazed Wehrmacht soldiers were found wandering around and mostly surrendered…
I might be mistaken, but in some instances, the french railroad workers were warned in advance of incoming raids by the resistance. They often delayed train traffic, so that the tracks were clogged with juicy targets. Many paid dearly with their lives.
In hindsight, the bombing might have been employed differently or better and no doubt some big mistakes were made, [and learnt from] but in the end it seems that it was decisive.
It was the first time that an offensive of this magnitude was tried and the obsession with area bombing by Harris was proven wrong, but at the beginning that was the only way Britain could take the fight to Germany, earlier attempts at trying to hit industrial targets by day resulted in minimal damage done and maximum casualties for bomber command, and when Harris took over he was positive that area bombing by night would eventually do the trick.
And the overconfidence of the Americans that the heavily armed B-17’s flying in tight formation would bulldoze their way to any target with acceptable casualties, were wrong, if it wasn’t for the largely forgotten P-51 Mustang being up engined with the Merlin engine, who knows how it might have gone.
Things were really tough going for the bombers.
But when the Luftwaffe fighter arm was destroyed in four months, Feb-May '44, it was open slather for the bombers.
And when the Anglo- Americans shifted the centre of gravity of their operations to oil and communications within the Reich, Germany was virtually doomed.
Because it really doesnt matter how many aircraft, tanks or any thing else on wheels you produce, if you A… have no fuel for them, and B…you have virtually no way of transportation.
The attacks on oil production, oil refineries and tank farms, plus the destruction of the transportation network tore the heart out of the Reich, a few more months and it probably wouldn’t have been beating at all, it virtually brought the Wehrmacht to a standstill in the West and impacted on their forces in the East.
