Thank heavens we are free to speculate about whether or not saturation bombing worked.
Over 50,000 Bomber Command men died as part of the price of buying us that freedom.
Hear hear. But what a shame that all those brave men - never mind all the German civilians - were lost pursuing a flawed strategy. Think of how much harm would have been done to Germany's military power had the British bombers joined the American ones in focusing on military/industrial targets.
Alber [
sic] Speer discussed the bombing of Hamburg when he was interrogated in July 1945....
"We were of the opinion that a rapid repetition of this type of attack upon another six German towns would inevitably cripple the will to sustain armament manufacture and war production. It was I who first verbally reported to the Fuehrer at that time that a continuation of these attacks might bring about a rapid end to the war."
And in this, he was manifestly wrong. There were plenty more large scale strikes in the 22 months after the Hamburg raids, none of which affected the will to sustain armament manufacture etc. German war production increased steadily until Allied and Soviet ground forces began to over-run the territory where the various German production facilities were sited. His views were not echoed in any of the Enigma transcripts, which did provide clear evidence that the attacks on the German oil industry were having a huge impact on Germany's ability to wage war. But let's not hold this error against Speer - he was an architect, after all, who happened to end up in Hitler's inner circle.
Albert Speer reckoned the Air Defence operation it [sic] was costing Germany badly by 1944 - before that maybe not so bad but the diversion of manpower and resources started to hurt big time in the last 2 years of the war
On this point he may well have been right, but most of the defensive effort was against the American offensive, not Bomber Command.
You're also playing a game of "what if?" if you try to make a general argument that strategic bombing was ineffective
True, but has anyone actually tried to make this argument?
There has often been a tendency (not least amongst the Russians themselves) to see WW2 as a titanic struggle between the forces of Soviet communism and German fascism, with all other participants merely a sideshow, but the Soviet struggle was facilitated to a very great extent by the efforts and sacrifices of the air forces (and navies) of the West.
This is inaccurate. By the time the bombing campaign had got into its stride, and by the time a useful quantity of munitions was arriving in Russia from the West, the Russians had already brought the German advance to a halt and started the process of recapturing lost territory. Yes, the enormous sacrifices made sending munitions to the Russians helped them, but 'a very great extent' is over-stating it. Other participants a sideshow? One only has to look at German force dispositions a month after Overlord started to see where the Germans thought the 'titanic struggle' was taking place.
'The B-17 dropped one third of all the bombs of WWII'.
This was not justified at all, and seeing as how late the B-17 was brought into the European theatre and how well know it was for its poor bomb load, can anyone confirm, justify or repudiate this?
I have no proof either way, but would suggest that it might be true (in terms of numbers of bombs rather than tonnage). You say that the B-17 was brought into the European theatre late, but in fact it carried out operations for nearly half the European war (first raid over Europe: 17th August 1942), and it had been dropping bombs in the Pacific since December 1941 (admittedly, there were never many B-17s in the Pacific). By contrast, the B-29 didn't fly its first mission until June 1944, and for the first months B-29 ops were severely restricted by the problems getting bombs and fuel over 'The Hump' to the Chinese bases used until the Marianas were available. And whether or not the programme's statement is accurate, people seem to judge the B-17's bomb-carrying ability too harshly - it was, after all, meant to be a twin-engined design (cf the Douglas B-18) which ended up with 4 engines. And it was available at the start of direct US involvement in WWII and bore the brunt of the 8th Air Force's campaign