The interesting aspect here is that a bunch of German generals seem to have understood exactly that message. A misunderstanding on their part?
Keynes said it best: better even a bad government than a bomber overhead.
The problem the WAllies had was, they were targetting the wrong morale. The issue was, was Hitler going to quit? Could the Nazis be induced to surrender? To achieve that, the WAllies had to take a different approach, one that, in effect, said, "Overthrow the Nazis, & we stop."
I notice two things. One, they seem not to have noticed til Germany started losing. Two, they seem not to have done much until it was rather late.The interesting aspect here is that a bunch of German generals seem to have understood exactly that message. A misunderstanding on their part?
I notice two things. One, they seem not to have noticed til Germany started losing.
Two, they seem not to have done much until it was rather late.
Fair enough. So put it to the Allies: what did they do to let the generals know an overthrow would be supported? AFAIK, nothing. That may've been because the generals wanted to keep what they'd conquered, which was a non-starter, or it may be the Allies bungled; IDK which.If no attempt whatsoever (however late, bumbling, base on wrong premises and unsuccessful) at such a thing had been done, you'd have a point.
I did quite like one explanation as to why anti-morale bombing didn't work very well - because destroying civilian housing makes people more dependent on the state.
Are you familiar with Tooze? He talks of the Ruhr campaign severely impeding the expansion in production and causing a crisis in subcomponent delivery. He actually puts it much stronger "Bomber Command had stopped Speer's armaments miracle in its tracks".
Clearly this can't be a war-winning effect, but what could be? The criticism that bombing failed to "severely damage" the German economy again seems vulnerable to the fallacy of looking for absolute reductions in output, as Wiki doesn't define what it means by "damage". Or "severe", for that matter.
The criticism that bombing couldn't interrupt production of a vital item is valid, but this is more a reflection of the impossibility of accurate bombing of specific industries, rather than the ineffectiveness of bombing. If we take Tooze's interpretation as correct, then the Ruhr campaign did cause significant damage to the German economy, but that damage could never manifest itself as severe disruption to specific items, only as general degradation of a system.
Irrespective of the moral issues, was anti-civilian morale bombing actually effective in WWII?
Except the Brits weren't so much trying to do anti-morale bombing, they were trying to dehouse workers and disrupt their sleep so they couldn't work as much or as hard. The bombings like Dresden and Hamburg, and to a lesser extent Coventry, DID actually badly effect morale (Speer said 5 or 6 more like Hamburg and the war is over) and production. The Germans didn't love Hitler all that much by 1942; his peak was in 1940 after defeating France, but that came after a major trough from the war even having been started (the American Journalist William Shirer recounts being in Berlin and how shocked and upset the public was about the war starting and no one showing up to Hitler's speeches). Then his approval dropped over quickly once Barbarossa dragged out and ended in the Soviet winter offensive. The Gestapo secret files about public morale and approval of Hitler survived the war and are available to historians like Kershaw. Hitler was becoming very unpopular by 1943-44. The thing is what kept the Germans going is what kept the Brits and Soviets going: hatred for the enemy, desire for revenge, and fear of the consequences of defeat. People were willing to endure mostly because they had no choice (secret police forces and fear of the enemy winning) and bombing in some cases actually made the regime more popular. There is a book that came out about Berlin during WW2 and how due to being a very working class city it was actually pretty anti-Nazi and they'd boo Goebbels when he gave speeches, but after substantial bombing they public would actually start cheering Goebbels especially when he gave speeches about striking back.Coventry, Dresden, Hamburg - it did not worked. The British were united behind Churchill and the Queen. The nazi populace loved their Hitler. Same for firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945, with 110 000 dead, changed nothing. And it killed more people than the atomic bombings altogether.