Quote:Effect of the strategic bombing[edit]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_warfare_of_World_War_II
Typical bomb damage in Hamburg, Germany 1945
Germany and Japan were burned out and lost the war in large part because of strategic bombing.[103] Targeting became more accurate in 1944, but the solution to inaccurate bombs was using more of them. The AAF dropped 3.5 million bombs (500,000 tons) against Japan, and 8 million (1.6 million tons) against Germany. The RAF expended about the same tonnage against Germany. US Navy and Marine bombs against Japan are not included, nor are the two atomic bombs.
The cost of the US tactical and strategic air war against Germany was 18,400 aircraft lost in combat, 51,000 dead, 30,000 POWs, and 13,000 wounded.
Which, inexplicably, gave us this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsXrpxo4uC0
Against Japan, the AAF lost 4,500 planes, 16,000 dead, 6,000 POWs, and 5,000 wounded; Marine Aviation lost 1,600 killed, 1,100 wounded. Naval aviation lost several thousand dead.[104]
One fourth of the German war economy was neutralized because of direct bomb damage, the resulting delays, shortages and roundabout solutions, and the spending on anti-aircraft, civil defence, repair, and removal of factories to safer locations.
The raids were so large and often repeated that in city after city, the repair system broke down. The bombing prevented the full mobilization of German economic potential.[105] Planning minister Albert Speer and his staff were effective in improvising solutions and work-arounds, but their challenge became more difficult every week as one backup system after another broke down.[106] By March 1945, most of Germany's factories, railroads, and telephones had stopped working; troops, tanks, trains, and trucks were immobilized.
About 25,000 civilians died at Dresden Feb. 13–14, where a firestorm erupted.[107] Overy estimated in 2014 that in all about 353,000 civilians were killed by British and American bombing of German cities.[108]
Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister, was disconsolate when his beautiful ministry buildings were totally burned out: "The air war has now turned into a crazy orgy. We are totally defenceless against it. The Reich will gradually be turned into a complete desert."[109]
The Dresden raid was to be dwarfed by what was to hit Japan starting less than a month later—as initiated by General Curtis E. LeMay, a series of firebombing raids, launched with the first attack by some 334 American B-29 Superfortress heavy bombers on the night of March 9–10, 1945, codenamed Operation Meetinghouse, burned out some 16 square miles (41 km2.) of the capital city of Japan and turned out to be the single most destructive bombing raid in all of aviation history, even greater in initial loss of life (at 100,000 lives lost at minimum, and up to 1.5 million people homeless) than the August 6 & 9 atomic raids, each taken as single events.[110]
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