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

by Richard Overy

The Hungarian émigré economist Nicholas Kaldor, a member of the USSBS team, argued that the critical factors in choosing economic targets were the degree of “cushion,” the degree of “depth,” and the degree of “vulnerability.” The first was governed by the existing elasticity of the economy in terms of finding additional or substitute resources for those lost to bombing; the second measured the extent to which a particular product or resource was close to actual military use, since the farther back in the production chain, the longer the time before bombing would affect military performance; the third was governed by the extent to which concentrated, and relatively inflexible, capital industries could be effectively destroyed from the air.165 Kaldor and his economist colleagues argued that for most of the war period Germany had a large cushion of resources of capital stock, labor, and raw materials that could be allocated to sustaining war production. His conclusion was based partly on the assumption, now generally regarded by historians as invalid, that Hitler did not order full-scale mobilization until 1944. The degree of allocation of productive resources to war purposes was in fact high from the start of the war, but many of the economies of scale characteristic of large-scale industrial production became effective only by 1942–43, while the unanticipated length of the campaign against the Soviet Union distorted war production plans at a critical juncture in 1941–42.