ABSTRACT

The efficacy of these two bombing strategies is not easily established. There is no consensus, for instance, on the degree to which the German war effort was retarded. The heavy British raids on German cities from the summer of 1943 onwards have been viewed by some commentators as having served to enhance Germany's war effort by allowing War Minister Speer and others to convince Hitler and leading Nazis that a much fuller mobilisation of the economy for war was urgently needed. However, Allied bombing can be held to account for particular acute shortages in the German war economy. This was notably true of fuel oil. Attacks against synthetic oil plants at one stage brought production to a standstill (September 1944); and over the last six months of the war the German Army and the German Air Force often had more tanks and more aircraft than they had fuel to operate them. The urban-industrial concentrations of the Rhine-Ruhr area sustained some of the heaviest bombing. This reflected the great concentration of German industrial and raw material capacity in the area, but it had another, less immediately apparent significance. Much remaining industrial capacity was in some way dependent on products from the Rhine-Ruhr. The dislocation of the area was thus an indirect path to retarding the broad mass of German industry, a feature which was enhanced as precision bombing of railway lines in and around the Rhine-Ruhr gathered force, so impeding the outward flow of goods, especially coal.