You're right, you're already the worst, how can you be get worse?
No u.
You claimed that wasn't part of their doctrine, I showed it was in the manual;
A manual isn't doctrine. Doctrine is a collection of procedures and "best" practices which a military generally follows. It does not need to be something so formalized as to be specifically written down. If relentless target restriking was never
practiced by the Germans, then it can not be said to be part of their doctrine. There is much to be said for doing a thing rather than talking about doing a thing.
Furthermore: your cited manual does not, in fact, call for relentless target restriking. It calls for concentration of effort, which is not the same thing (as that involves discussions on the use of resources in a raid, rather then how many raids should be launched). Now if it did something like call for concentration of
focus, then maybe that could be construed as relentless target restriking.
when they didn't utilize that part of doctrine there was generally a reason why, you cited a bunch of examples incorrectly and out of context.
No, they are all perfectly in context: they were all strategic bombing campaigns and in none of them did the Germans practice relentless restriking. You then try and come up with all sorts of excuses for
why they did not do so, but that does not change the fact that they did not do so. The answer really boils down to two possibilities: they were either incapable of doing it (a lack of resources) or unwilling to do it (a lack of doctrine). An analysis of the situation shows that they had the resources in most cases, so it really comes down to lack of doctrine.
In the context of hitting a target repeatedly they did it with London,
A city is not a target. Something within the city generally is. What targets within London did the Germans consistently (try to) hit, day after day, for the entirety of the campaign? Or were they constantly hitting a different target each day? The first is relentless restrike, the second is just constantly shifting focus.
did it with Conventry on the night of the firestorm,
Hitting a target multiple times in a single night is not relentless restrike, it's an air raid. Now if the Germans had started hitting a target in Conventry and kept hitting it, repeatedly, day after day, until the campaign ended... then you would have a point. But they did not: they launched a single raid on the night of November 14th, but did not launch another major raid on the city until April of next year, nearly 6 months later.
they did it against Warsaw throughout the Polish campaign, and they did it later against Moscow before deciding it was not worth the effort.
In both cases, the Germans occasionally attacked this or that target within the city, but not in a consistent and constant manner. The only time they did do so was in direct support of the ground troops but at that point we are talking about CAS, not strategic bombing.
The radar issue is debateable, they felt it was more important to their goal of bringing the RAF to battle to not degrade it. Their lack of focus during the BoB was a function of trying to find a target that would enable them to fight a decisive battle against a big wing of fighters so they could finish them off, rather than a grinding series of skirmishes with a handful of fighters.
"Goering had more to say about targets. He wanted to focus entirely on the RAF and the aircraft industry [rather than shipping]. Again, he stressed economy of effort. He wanted night and bad weather raids restricted to small groups of volunteer crews who knew the target well. These were nuisance raids designed to wear down the population, and should also be directed at the RAF. . .
"His most important remarks were lapidary and appear almost as afterthoughts. He questioned the wisdom of continuing to attack radar stations, as none had yet been put out of action, and the British had 'a lot of radio stations.' His comments are couched more as a suggestion than an order, as if he did not think the matter terribly important. However, he was quite explicit in ordering that airfields which had been 'successfully attacked,' one day should not be attacked the following day, presumably because he regarded it as a waste of effort.
-Stephen Bungay, "The Most Dangerous Enemy," pp.218-219.
Goering already had prioritized his targets: the RAF air fields and British aircraft industry. In both cases they practiced this by launching a few raids at a air field or factory and then switching to another airfield or factory. This is not relentless restrike. They found their targets, but they did not focus on them.
It's a plague on all air campaigns. NATO largely did the same with Serbia in 1999, continually switching the target set while flailing blindly. And while it wasn't limited just to bombing, the same mayfly attention span can be found at work in US targeting meetings in Afghanistan. There's just something fundamental in how air forces tend to rate success by how many targets they have hit that always seems to tempt them to this same, well known error. It's uncanny.
The problem has several elements. Firstly and most importantly, it's often very difficult to identify the key elements that the enemy's efforts rely on
that are vulnerable to your attack. In WWII for Germany that was oil. The Allies recognized the importance of oil to the German war effort, but they significantly over-estimated the robustness of German synthetic oil production, and so didn't consider it a viable target until late in the war. When they finally realized their mistake and started seriously targeting the synthetic oil plants the effect was immediate and catastrophic for Germany, but by then the war was almost over anyway, so it didn't have the effect it could have.
Beyond that, there's always the fear that if you just hit one target, and that one target is the wrong one, that you'll be wasting all your effort, so bets should be hedged. Also, since even against the proper targets effects are often not clear or immediate, there's a tendency to look for new solutions in new targets rather than assuming that it just requires more attacks (which don't seem to be working) against that same target. The American bombing of the Schweinfurt ball bearing plant in WWII very nearly crippled the German aircraft industry, but Speer was able to desperately patch things over and make do. The Allies saw the cost of the raid, and didn't see the effects they'd been hoping for, and so moved on. Related to that is the very human practice of seeing greater success in a wide array of achievements than just one done monotonously over and over. Basically, it looks better to be able to point to 100 targets you've attacked in a powerpoint slide, than one or two targets you hit over and over. That smacks of futility.
Ultimately, targeting is a real gamble, even with excellent intelligence. Because selecting a target set and prosecuting it to destruction is a highly command oriented practice, it critically relies on the senior military leadership making the right choice and then passing this down to all levels. It is
very easy for the leadership to guess wrong, or get cold feet partway and change their minds. The picture perfect case, again from WWII is RAF Bomber Command's Arthur "Bomber" Harris. Harris was in many ways a great leader. He tirelessly fought for the necessary resources for his command, kept morale up even during heavy casualties, and relentlessly pushed a plan for victory. Unfortunately his plan was the wrong one. Harris assumed that destroying German cities would break German morale, and cripple industry as a side effect of killing and scattering the population. Initially this was a strategy of necessity - the RAF couldn't hit anything more precise than cities - but fairly quickly other tools became available that would have allowed the RAF to change to more targeted attacks. Indeed, Bomber Command launched many impressive precision attacks during the war, of which the Dam Buster's raid is the most well known. But these were never a priority for Harris, and he always saw them as a distraction from the true war winning goal of flattening German cities, which he pursued relentlessly to the end of the war. Had he selected a more effective target and pursued it with the same single mindedness, he'd now be remembered in a much different light.
Basically, for all it's on paper potential, targeting is difficult to do because it relies on a great deal of accurate knowledge of the enemy, correct decisions by the leadership, and then nerves of steel to hold to those decisions against all doubts. And all three are something the Germans in WW2 rather lacked (except maybe for the last one, and even then it was usually in all the wrong areas).
Really, the Luftwaffe is better of trying to stop get into the strategic bombing game and sticking to close support of the army. There are plenty of things an enemy can do to defend against air attack
or ground attack, but several of these options are mutually exclusive, and it's exponentially harder to defend against both at once, which is why the Luftwaffe made it's biggest contributions to the war in France and Barbarossa directly supporting ground offensives.
There are no books on late war Soviet rail logistics in English that I can find that discuss the issue. Kind of hard to have evidence about it when there exists nothing in print on the issue, I don't read Russian, and the Soviet archives are basically locked down since the late 1990s. We don't know what effect it had because there is nothing published about it to show one way or another.
So you can not prove the example. Thus, it is useless in supporting your claim.
An extremely basic problem here is that you are approaching strategic bombing as if it is quick, easy, and only requires a modest expenditure of resources. History does not support this. History indicates that a strategic bombing campaign is inherently long, hard, and resource-intensive. In other words, three things that Germany in WW2 can not afford as they do not have the time or resources for a long, hard, and expensive campaign.