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

by Richard Overy

Yet Kaldor was not wrong to argue that a cushion existed. The index of armaments output showed that German production increased threefold between 1941 and 1944, despite all the bombing; some individual categories of weapon expanded more than this, fighter aircraft by a factor of thirteen, tanks by a factor of five, heavy guns by a factor of four.167 As a result of the conquest of much of continental Europe, Germany had access to large resources beyond her borders. Although this also involved economic costs to Germany, occupation meant that over 119 billion marks were contributed to Germany’s war budget, one-quarter of all the costs of the armed forces; 7.9 million forced workers and prisoners of war were compelled to work in Germany, while an estimated 20 million more worked on orders for the German war effort in the occupied zones.168 Moreover, German technical and organizational ingenuity made it possible to find substitute products or productive capacity even for “bottleneck” industries like ball bearings, where, as Kaldor argued, the target had “run away” by the time the Allies attacked it again in 1944.169 The German economy, wrote the USSBS economist John Kenneth Galbraith in an early evaluation, was “expanding and resilient, not static and brittle.”