Speer Told Hitler: Six More Raids Like Hamburg Would Collapse Germany

Speer Told Hitler: Six More Raids Like Hamburg Would Collapse Germany
London, Air Ministry headquarters, August eighteenth, nineteen forty-one, zero nine hundred hours, and David Butt, a civil servant analyst working for the War Cabinet Secretariat, placed his report on Sir Charles Portal's desk knowing the numbers inside would shatter every assumption Bomber Command had made about their effectiveness against Nazi Germany, a statistical analysis showing that in operations with poor visibility or significant haze, fewer than one bomber in twenty was placing ordnance within five miles of the assigned target, meaning ninety-five percent of British bombs dropped at night were hitting nothing but empty German countryside, French farmland, or Belgian forests, while crews returned claiming direct hits on factories, rail yards, and military installations that aerial reconnaissance photographs proved remained completely untouched.
Portal, Chief of the Air Staff, read the Butt Report three times that morning, each pass through the data making the situation more undeniable, because the photographic evidence attached to crew reports told a story of systematic failure, with claimed aimpoints marked on maps showing hits that reconnaissance frames revealed to be miles away from any strategic target, and the worst cases involved entire bomber streams dropping their loads on decoy fires the Germans had lit in empty fields, dummy installations built from wood and canvas that drew British ordnance away from actual industrial complexes, while the Krupp steelworks in Essen, the Daimler-Benz plants in Stuttgart, and the submarine yards in Kiel continued operating at full capacity despite being listed as heavily damaged in operational reports that bore no relation to reality on the ground.
The crisis extended beyond mere accuracy, because even when bombers found their targets, the concentrated bombing required to destroy hardened industrial facilities demanded that hundreds of aircraft place their loads within a tight area over a short time window, but without reliable navigation aids or marking systems, British bombers arrived over target zones scattered across thirty-minute intervals, dropping ordnance across square miles rather than concentrating on specific factories, allowing German firefighters to contain blazes before they could spread, enabling rapid repairs that had facilities back in operation within days, sometimes hours, of raids that cost the Royal Air Force dozens of aircraft and hundreds of trained aircrews for results that barely registered in German production statistics.
Portal understood immediately that this represented an existential crisis for Bomber Command, because Winston Churchill had staked Britain's offensive strategy on the proposition that strategic bombing could cripple Germany's war machine and break civilian morale without requiring a cross-Channel invasion that would cost hundreds of thousands of Allied lives, but if fewer than five percent of bombs were hitting anywhere near their targets, then the entire strategic concept collapsed, leaving Britain with no viable path to victory except grinding attrition on multiple fronts that the island nation lacked the manpower and resources to sustain, while Germany's industrial output continued growing despite thousands of bomber sorties that

Видео Speer Told Hitler: Six More Raids Like Hamburg Would Collapse Germany канала WWII Battlefield Memoirs