The Bombers and the Bombed: Allied Air War Over Europe 1940-1945

by Richard Overy

As in the British case, the critical factor was the distorting effect that bombing had on German strategy once it became necessary to divert large resources to the military combat against the air offensive. Bombing, as Speer recognized, really did come to constitute a “Second Front” by 1943, preventing German military leaders from using airpower effectively at the fighting front as they had done in all the campaigns from 1939 to 1941. Failure in Russia, in the Mediterranean theater, and against the Allied invasion of France owed a great deal to the fact that German fighter aircraft, guns, ammunition, and radar equipment were tied up in the Reich. This had not necessarily been the Allied intention, which focused on unhinging the domestic war effort, but it undoubtedly contributed to the military outcome at the fighting fronts throughout the last three years of war and compensated for whatever weaknesses might have existed in Allied combat experience or skills.