Attacks on the power grid are mentioned in
Brute Force: Allied Strategy and Tactics in the Second World War – John Ellis
P218/219
The other main missed opportunity was the German electricity grid. Even at the beginning of the war there was no surplus electric energy in Germany – indeed, 10 and sometimes 30 per cent reductions in supply were quite common – and efforts during the war to increase supply proved unavailing (it was impossible either to build the plants, redistribute or increase coal supplies, or build hydro-electric facilities (79 per cent of power stations burnt coal and the rest were water-powered)). As these efforts grew more and more desperate, greater demands were placed on the grid. This grid was extremely vulnerable – as had been sensed by the Americans very early, when the AWPD-1 Plan made electric power the prime target in Germany – in that only 0.2 tons of bombs per acre could knock out a generating station for up to 3 months, whilst 0.4 tons could nullify it for up to a whole year. Moreover, any station knocked out would represent an immediate loss to the system for which it was impossible to compensate, given the simple but crucial fact that electricity cannot be stored. There were in Germany 8,257 generating station in 1939, but most were of little consequence, with only just over 100 providing 56.3 per cent of all current generated and a further 300 bringing that percentage up to 81.9. The location of these plants was known, as was the relative ease with which electric generating (and transmission) equipment could be seriously damaged, much of it being of a fragile nature. If just 5 of these plants had been put out of action, the German system would have suffered a capacity loss of 8 per cent; if 45 had been destroyed the loss would have been 40 per cent: and if 95 had been taken out a more than 50 per cent deficit would have resulted. The very survival of the German war economy would then have been in doubt; for Speer later testified that the loss of around 60 per cent of capacity would have brought German industry to a standstill (Transformer stations were also extremely vulnerable, since blast alone was sufficient to wreck transformers for good. A German document written in 1944 reckoned that two or three nights’ concentrated attacked on only 30 transformer stations could ‘paralyse decisively the German power grid (USSBS, The Effects of Strategic Bombing on the Germany Economy). An ideal ancillary target would have been the four factories that produced most of the high-tension transformers).
In the event, however, the power grid was almost totally ignored by the bombers; Eighth Air Force expending only 316 tons of bombs (0.05 per cent of the total dropped) and Bomber Command only 532 tons (0.07 per cent). One cannot help but feel that the following remark by a German observer questioned by the USSBS, though it only applies to one city, permits and extrapolation concerning the whole German war economy; ‘If the Allied airmen had concentrated on knocking out the two big power stations in the outskirts of Berlin, the city would be just as dead as it is now after months of heavy bombing of the entire city.’
before that it mentioned ethyl fluid plants
P217/218
Ethyl Fluid, this was ‘an indispensable constituent of high-grade aviation gasoline. The addition of ethyl fluid in very small amounts to gasoline is so beneficial that no modern aircraft is operated without it. It was made from tetraethyl lead and ethylene dibromide, and production of the former was limited to only five plants in Axis Europe, two in Germany, two in Italy and one in Occupied France. Only the products of their own and one Italian plant were ever available to the Germans, and these were barely adequate to supply the tetraethyl lead for their needs. Plans to construct two new plants in Germany and to expand production of the others never materialised. Ethylene dibromide was supplied by only a single plant in Germany. The USSBS points out that production of aviation fuel was thus ultimately dependent upon four plants, the location and purpose of each of which was known. The Survey crisply concludes: ‘These plants were not bombed, although the equipment and the processes used were such as to make then highly vulnerable to air attack … A major opportunity in the Allied air offensive against oil was unexploited.
