Thread by @TrentTelenko

@CalumDouglas1 @GoodClearTweets @militaryhistori My own views on strategic area bombing were similar to yours but were utterly changed by the following books:

Tooze's work & the following books:

1. Phillips Payson O’Brien’s How the War was Won: Air-Sea Power and Allied Victory in World War II (Cambridge Military Histories)...

@CalumDouglas1 @GoodClearTweets @militaryhistori amazon.com/How-War-was-Wo…

and

2. Alfred C. Mierzejewski "The Collapse of the German War Economy, 1944-1945: Allied Air Power and the German National Railway" (Paperback)

@CalumDouglas1 @GoodClearTweets @militaryhistori amazon.com/dp/0807858501/…

Understanding the full impact of the strategic bombing requires a deep understanding of the major economies involved in WW2. Pretty much everything academic military history thought it knew about WW2's economics, and by extension strategic bombing, was..

@CalumDouglas1 @GoodClearTweets @militaryhistori ...made obsolete by these works.

Starting with Tooze's book "The Wages of Destruction" first, it would more accurately subtitled "How Hitler Controlled the Nazi Mobilization and War Economy Through Steel Allocations." The idea that the Nazi German economy was not mobilized at...

@CalumDouglas1 @GoodClearTweets @militaryhistori ...the beginning of WW2 is an utter myth.

In fact, it was heavily mobilized and Hitler was doing everything he could to win fast enough, big enough, to put together an economy to take on a fully mobilized USA.

@CalumDouglas1 @GoodClearTweets @militaryhistori You can see Tooze's numbers on that in his on-line power point presentation here:

War in Germany (17): The High Point of German Militarism, the death of the Weimar Republic and the Making of the Third Reich
adamtooze.com/2018/08/11/war…

@CalumDouglas1 @GoodClearTweets @militaryhistori Tooze asserts that this overwhelming strategic need to prepare for the USA's mobilized war economy was the main reason the Germans went in to Russia in 1941 – the fact that Hitler had no other option but to do it now or never. Nazi Germany was on a strategic, oil driven,...

@CalumDouglas1 @GoodClearTweets @militaryhistori ...American mobilization economic clock. On p. 666 we have part of a summary by Tooze on the reasons why Hitler widened the war in 1941:

“The astonishing defeat of France in the early summer of 1940 had promised to change everything. But in fact the Wehrmacht’s spectacular...

@CalumDouglas1 @GoodClearTweets @militaryhistori ...victory did not solve Hitler’s fundamental strategic dilemma. The German navy and air force were too weak to force Britain to the negotiating table. The competitive logic of the arms race continued to apply in 1940 and 1941.

Rather than surrender to Hitler’s will, Britain...

@CalumDouglas1 @GoodClearTweets @militaryhistori ... proved willing to go to the point of national bankruptcy before being rescued by lend-lease. And thanks to its comparatively abundant foreign reserves and American assistance it could mobilize a far larger percentage of foreign resources than Germany at this critical point...

@CalumDouglas1 @GoodClearTweets @militaryhistori ... in the war.

In Berlin, by contrast, once the euphoria of victory had worn off, a considerable disillusionment set in over the economic viability of Germany’s new Grossraum. Conquering most of Western Europe added a drastic shortage of oil, nagging difficulties in coal...

@CalumDouglas1 @GoodClearTweets @militaryhistori ...supply and a serious shortage of animal feed to Germany’s already severe deficiencies. The populations of Western Europe were a vital asset, as was their industrial capacity, but, given the constraints imposed by the British blockade, it was far from clear that these resources

@CalumDouglas1 @GoodClearTweets @militaryhistori ... could be effectively mobilized. Unless Germany could secure access to the grain surpluses and oil of the Soviet Union, and organize a sustained increase in coal production, continental Europe was threatened with a prolonged decline in output, productivity and living...

@CalumDouglas1 @GoodClearTweets @militaryhistori ...standards. Added to which, Roosevelt had launched his own spectacular rearmament program within days of Germany’s breakthrough at Sedan.

The strategic pressure on Hitler to preempt decisive American intervention in the war can only really be appreciated if we do full justice

@CalumDouglas1 @GoodClearTweets @militaryhistori ... to the scale of the Anglo-American effort from as early as the summer of 1940. In this respect, the truly vast discrepancy between Anglo-American aircraft procurement and Germany’s relatively insignificant outsourcing to France and the Netherlands is very telling. it was...

@CalumDouglas1 @GoodClearTweets @militaryhistori ... an imbalance that was not lost on Goering and the German Air Ministry.”

@CalumDouglas1 @GoodClearTweets @militaryhistori Tooze made the observation based on the above that RAF Bomber Command's area bombing of the Ruhr was most effective because the Ruhr's "feeder" industries were the bed rock upon which Nazi War Mobilization was built. The 2nd & 3rd order effects of damage to those 'feeder

@CalumDouglas1 @GoodClearTweets @militaryhistori ...industries' by Bomber Command's 1942-1943 strikes on the Ruhr stopped German war production expansion dead. And that "Bomber Harris" decision to strike Berlin in Winter 1943/1944 in lieu of the Ruhr was a strategic mistake that underpinned German war production...

@CalumDouglas1 @GoodClearTweets @militaryhistori ...expansion in 1944.

Listen to Tooze here regards the Ruhr:
bobrowen.com/nymas/podcasts…

@CalumDouglas1 @GoodClearTweets @militaryhistori Next is Mierzejewski's "The Collapse of the German War Economy, 1944-1945..." which would be more accurately subtitled "How Bureaucratic Fights of Ultra Intelligence Delayed Giving the German Economy a Coal Distribution Heart Attack Via Strategic Bombing."

@CalumDouglas1 @GoodClearTweets @militaryhistori Mierzejewski's key insights are that coal was the key precursor material for electric power, transportation and most other German economic activities. That the German railways not only used coal to provide most transportation, but that it was utterly key in distributing coal...

@CalumDouglas1 @GoodClearTweets @militaryhistori ...through out the German economy. And that by hitting every major Reichbahn railway marshaling yard simultaneously. You could cause a German coal distribution "Heart Attack" to such a degree that the Reichbahn could not delver coal to it's own engines.

@CalumDouglas1 @GoodClearTweets @militaryhistori Figuring those facts out took the transportation campaign in France, the strategic bombing strikes on Reichbahn marshaling yards supporting the German Ardennes Offensive, collecting data on both, and the discovery that the Oil bombing advocates in the UK were excluding data...

@CalumDouglas1 @GoodClearTweets @militaryhistori ...on the effectiveness of Combined bombing marshaling yard strikes to SHAEF in Feb 1945 in the intelligence postmortem of the Ardennes Offensive.

An October 1990 RAF historical seminar had this statement by Lord Zuckerman:

@CalumDouglas1 @GoodClearTweets @militaryhistori “We now know that the destruction of the railway system had ruined the German economy by October 1944. We also know that the Combined Strategic Targets Committee (CSTC) were sitting on ULTRA intercepts that told the true story from October; they had 20,000 intercepts a week...

@CalumDouglas1 @GoodClearTweets @militaryhistori ...they either didn’t have an interest in or the staff to deal with, and it is now known that had we gone on hitting at those nodal centers in a concentrated way, that we had been doing in the last quarter of 1944, the Air Forces would have played a greater part in ending the...

@CalumDouglas1 @GoodClearTweets @militaryhistori ...war than in fact they did.

The whole "Panacea Targets” theory was a bust.

I have read nothing better on this theme than Lord Solly Zuckerman's first hand account (in From Apes to Warlords) of the target theory fickleness of the highest British-American targeting committees.

@CalumDouglas1 @GoodClearTweets @militaryhistori This is the RAF Historical Journal I got that zuckerman quote from:

rafmuseum.org.uk/documents/Rese…

@CalumDouglas1 @GoodClearTweets @militaryhistori @threadreaderapp unroll