The Strategic Bombing Offensive

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The Strategic Bombing Offensive
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Topic overview

• Introduction
• What were the aims of the Strategic Bomber
  Offensive ?
• How effective was it ?
• Historical debates
• Did bombing constitute a second front against
  Nazi Germany or was it a waste of resources ?
• What were the moral and ethical implications of
  the Strategic Bombing Offensive ?

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The Allied bombing of Germany dwarfed any German
attempts to inflict similar damage on the UK.
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Aims
King George VI and Queen Elizabeth visit Sir
Arthur Harris, Head of RAF Bomber Command.
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Sir Arthur Bomber Harris
The Germans have sown the wind. They are about
to reap the whirlwind. There are those who say
that a war cannot be won from the air by bombing.
My reply is that no one has tried yet and we
shall see. You destroy a factory and they will
rebuild it. Kill the factory workers and it will
take twenty years to replace them.
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Harris remains a controversial figure of WW2. A
statue of him was only unveiled recently and was
soon after splattered with red paint.
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Aims of the Bomber Offensive

• To inflict wide-scale damage on German military
  and industrial targets.
• To de-house the German industrial workforce.
  Civilian deaths was seen as an acceptable part of
  this strategy.
• To undermine German civilian morale.
• To open a second front against Germany when
  there was no other way of striking at Germany
  itself.

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Early stages (1940-41)

• RAF Bomber Command had limited striking power in
  the early stages of the war.
• Bomber craft were inadequate to carry heavy bomb
  loads.
• Night navigation and radar devices were
  primitive.
• Bombing accuracy was severely limited by wind and
  cloud conditions.
• Losses of bomber crews and aircraft far
  outweighed damage done.

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1942-45

• The RAF bomber offensive was stepped up in 1942.
• 1,000 bomber raids were launched against civilian
  centres such as Cologne and Hamburg.
• Improvements in Radar technology (H2S) made night
  navigation more accurate.
• Larger aircraft enabled significant bomb loads to
  be dropped.

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The Avro Lancaster
The RAFs heavy bomber enabled serious bombing
raids on German targets to be carried out.
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Handley-Page Halifax
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Part I city (area) Bombing
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Cologne after the RAF raid.
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The aftermath of the Hamburg Raid. Fires burned
for three days afterwards.
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Hitlers Minister of Armaments Production, Albert
Speer, said of the Hamburg raid that if the RAF
had carried out six more raids on that scale
Germany would have been knocked out of the war in
1943.
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Dresden
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The remains of the Baroque masterpiece, Die
Frauenkirche.
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The restored Frauenkirche today.
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Part II pin-point bombing
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Targeting the Ruhr Germanys industrial
heartland
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Dam-busters
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Highball, a cylindrical bouncing bomb designed
by Barnes Wallace to breech the dams of the Ruhr
valley.
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Penemunde Island
Penemunde Island was Germanys top secret rocket
research facility where the VI and V2 rockets
were developed. It was attacked by the RAF in
August 1943.
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Wehrner Von Braun, Germanys chief rocket
scientist who later worked for NASA and helped
put a man on the moon.
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Ploesti
The United States Air Force led the raid on the
Ploesti oil fields in Romania, Germanys key
source of oil.
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Grandslam the earthquake bomb
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The Farge U boat pen after a direct hit from a
Grand-Slam bomb in early 1945