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

by Richard Overy

Given the artificial concentration on war production at all costs, the chronic stress on the workforce laboring sixty to seventy hours a week, and the rapid contraction of the European supply base, there were limits to how far the German war economy could be pushed, even without the effects of bombing. The economist John Kenneth Galbraith, drafted to assess the German economy at the end of the war, judged that in 1944 German production, bombing or not, was approaching “what might be called a general bottleneck.”221 The weight of attack from September 1944 on a taut economic structure confirmed that the German war economy had reached its limit. There was a sudden increase in the number of firms reporting air-raid damage. In July there were 421, of which 150 were totally or severely damaged; in September there were 674, with 253 in the worst categories; in November 1944, 311 out of 664 firms had suffered total or severe loss.222 The economy kept going during the last eight months of war using accumulated stocks to compensate for the slow decline in the supply of basic materials—steel, iron, aluminum, machine tools—and the cumulative effect of the loss of rail and water transport for the supply of coal. As a result, peak wartime production for artillery, armored fighting vehicles, and fighter aircraft was actually reached in the last three months of 1944.223 After that, production collapsed rapidly as the encircling armies and the enveloping air fleets tightened their noose a...