Forgot to say this, too...
While Jambo's figures are accurate, he did omit some important ones. Yes, military equipment and munitions production did go UP near the end of the war... but I feel that was in spite of Allied efforts, not because the efforts by the Allies were a ruse de guerre to draw out German fighters. After '43, Germany moved much of its production facilities to remote locations in the east... away from Allied bomber range (and into what would become the Soviet sphere of influence, by the way) AND (very important) much closer to Polish and Romanian coal fields, were there were still ample sources of fuel.
Allied strategic bombing had made the delivery of coal (the primary fuel of German industry) utterly unavailable for delivery by either rail or waterway by the end of the summer of '44 (call it September) anywhere in the Ruhr valley. It is this shortage of coal that was responsible for so many civilian deaths later on, when the millions of homeless Germans had no means to keep warm through the winter of '45-'46. If we failed to actually destroy factories and munitions plants... we certainly succeeded in destroying the means by which those factories and plants operated effectively, and that cannot be ignored, can it?
Monday, March 21, 2011
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