Bomber Boys- BBC 1.

[Chugalug2]

pr00ne, you can quote Harris all you like, but it isn't what he said that counts so much as what he did, and that was to carry out the directives of the Air Board. Dowding believed he could communicate with his deceased pilots, so what? He ensured that Fighter Command won its decisive battle. Harris's battle lasted years, not months, and had to be fought by night. Try taking out ball bearing factories, critical railway junctions, or isolated oil facilities by night in WWII, it would result merely in wasted bombs and wasted crews. BC wasn't exactly going to make a point of the fact that the only target it could be relied on to find and hit was cities, so it was dressed up as a virtue in its own right, de-house and de-moralise the population and you disrupt war production. Of course you did, and it was worth it for that alone, but it would have been better of course to target the factories, rail junctions, warehouses, fuel storage tanks, etc etc specifically. He couldn't, but at least there was a fair chance of hitting a lot of those if he went for the cities anyway. By putting in so many attacks, night and day, the Allied Bomber Offensive tied down huge German resources to defend the cities which could otherwise be sent East. In that way alone they ensured Russian success there. As for the old canard of German Wartime Production rising, that was scarcely surprising, the factories initially worked one 12 hour shift. They only had to make that 24 hours to double production. They only had to mobilise women to increase it still further. They only had to transport large numbers of people from the occupied territories as slave/guest workers to push it up even more. They only had to work concentration camp prisoners to death for yet higher output still. The limited and unbalanced increased output that Speer did manage is a result of, not a failure of, the Bomber Offensive. As Danny 42C rightly says, Harris and BC would have prefered a rapier. They were handed a club, but wielded it to great and devastating effect. We should commend them, not only for their courage but in ensuring that success in the East and the West, and hence Victory, was possible. Like all aspects of Air Power, that is not immediately to be seen, but should be upon reflection, and certainly by those whose profession it is.