Asked By: * - 8/29/2009

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker

Approximately 120,000 American Airmen took part in the bombing of Germany.

Hundreds of thousand died in the bombings. Necessary deaths in my opinion

All aircrew were volunteers, some suffered varying degrees of mental health problems but the majority felt they had done a good job.

I am British and this view is held by the majority of well read Britons

The bombing of Germany made material gains in the conduct of the war.

The biggest problem with dealing with the matter of the bombing of Germany is that it is judged against modern morals and standards of behaviour.



Civilians have suffered during war from the beginning of time. When the barbarians sacked Rome they slaughtered men women and children. When the French stormed Spanish towns during the peninsular war the citizens inside were killed and the towns raped and pillaged. The powers during the 19th century and the early 20th laid down ever more stringent rules about conduct during war trying to prevent these excesses but until the Geneva Convention came along there were no hard and fast "rules of war".



To those who claim that it did not stop production because there were rises in production from 1941 to 1944 please understand this.
In 1941 Germany`s factories worked 5.5 days a week. 8 hours a day and half day on Saturday

In 1944 they worked 24/7 with every slave labourer they could get inside working away. Production did not increase by 350?Bombing made a difference.

Many people have criticized Arthur Harris over the years for his views on bombing to such an extent that he has been personally blamed for the policies of bombing the Reich.

I like how people on this answer have blamed the RAF for the bombing of Germany. I think you will find that the USAAF had something to do with it as well and the first person to make a statement about pickle barrels needs to see me after class about bombing accuracy in the real world

The first directive that the RAF and USAAF followed, issued by the Joint Chiefs of Staff from Great Britain and America in June 1943, was "The Pointblank Directive". This stated that their aim was to, and I quote "to accomplish the progressive dislocation and disruption of the German military, industrial and economic system and the undermining of the German people"

To do this required that the factories and rail yards were bombed in a methodical fashion.
Within Europe we did not have the "industrial areas" afforded to towns in the New World. The factories were in and around the areas where the workforce lived. One side of the street would be the factory wall; the other side of the street would be the workers houses. Unfortunately this lead to what, nowadays, is called "collateral damage"


The RAF and USAAF, using area bombing methods continued this campaign to such an extent that German production was reduced by and I quote "I would say thirty percent". This quote comes from the records of an interview with Hitler's armament minister, Albert Speer. These interview transcripts are held in the Imperial War Museum London



Can you imagine the calamity if the Germans had had 30?ore Guns along the D-Day beaches?

How much difference would 30?ore German guns and tanks have made on the Eastern Front?

These, of course, are only the guns, tanks, U-Boats et al. that were not produced. The best artillery piece of the war was, without a doubt, the German 88mm weapon yet 75?f these weapons were used to defend the Reich against the bombers, both British and American. How much difference would these have made in the campaigns mentioned above used in their original artillery mode?

As someone else has stated above. All those pilots and planes defending Germany against the bombers were not causing havoc over Stalingrad or Normandy

To quote Albert Speer again after the bombing of Hamburg in 1943. "Six more raids like that in quick succession would have crippled the will to sustain armament manufacture and war production and bought about a rapid end to the war."

If Harris had had the resources to do that (which he didn't) and end the European war in two months would we still see him as a butcher? Or would we see him as a man who, although willing to attack the enemy hard, managed to end Germany's resistance so that "our boys" didn't have to invade and take hundreds of thousands of casualties? It is an interesting conundrum

The men who carried out these acts did so in the desire to make a world in which their descendants and countrymen, of whom I am one, could live in freedom from persecution and with a freedom to ask questions and form their own opinions. To those of you who feel it necessary to label them war criminals may I ask if you think that you could have asked a similar question under Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan?

Answered By: Ray W - 8/30/2009