Fabs
Posts: 444
Joined: 6/5/2000
From: London, U.K.
Status: offline
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The war effort necessary to defeat Nazi Germany needed to be balanced across a number of areas.
I am not sure what benefit the Allies would have gained from deploying lots more armored divisions in North West Europe in 1944-45.
The war was being fought on two fronts anyway, and the Russians had plenty of armored punch.
Would the Western Allies have got to Berlin faster than the Russians if they had deployed more armor on the ground at the expense of the strategic air campaign fought over Germany?
I doubt that their logistical infrastructure, that struggled to keep supplies flowing to the forces that were actually employed once the pursuit got under way, could have been expanded in key areas such as the build up capability of the available port facilities.
The greatest controversy about the conduct of the war in the west after the breakout from Normandy concerns how resources were allocated to sustain the pursuit.
Montgomery argued that supplies should be cocentrated to sustain a deep armored thrust on a narrow front.
He screwed up by having the vanity to propose that he should command that operation.
He should have realized that by that time the Americans had become the senior partners in the effort, and allowed Eisenhower to pick an American general. Patton would have done nicely. But Monty was not going to have any of that.
Eisenhower had to take into consideration that he could not snub his British partners too severely, while placating his own feuding generals, and was left with no option but to rule that supplies would be divided equally across the front and pursuit would be conducted on as broad a front as possible.
This controversy shaped the reast of the campaign for 1944 and probably delayed the end of the war. Stalin was, by that time, delighted.
There are many arguments about the real effects of the bombing on the German war effort.
Some of them are suspect in the sense that they aim to throw a bad light on the Allies by discounting the impact on military and industrial targets and claiming that the real intention was to kill German civilians.
The supporters of this argument conveniently forget that it was the Germans who started using air power as a terror weapon. Thus, they sowed the seed and eventually reaped the whirlwind.
That terrorising the German population was an important element in the bombing effort is undeniable.
The war had become total, and any method available had to be used to accelerate the disintegration of the support systems that were keeping the Nazi war machine going.
Knowing that their relatives were being killed at home would have had an important effect on the morale of German troops at the front.
This was often said to be a strengthening of resolve, which was probably true initially, but eventually it must have contributed in great measure to the rapid collapse of the German will to continue fighting.
Having said all this, one thing is undeniable, and it has been been pointed out by Kev.
Weapons, men and materiel had to be held back in Germany to defend against the marauding Allied planes. In particular, this kept the skies over the battlefields free from German aircraft.
I also believe that the chaos caused by the bombing must have crucially hampered the German military and industrial effort.
I can not agree with people who over-emphasize the importance of the strategic bombing campaign to the point of asserting that it alone could have got a result, but I accept that it played a detrmining role alongside the other efforts.
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Fabs
[This message has been edited by Fabs (edited 07-11-2000).]
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Fabs
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But I believe that this illustrates my point.
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Fabs
[This message has been edited by Fabs (edited 07-07-2000).]
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