The camps weren't bombed because the bombing technology of the time didn't permit the accuracy we now enjoy 60 years later. Back then you dropped hundreds of large,dumb bombs in the hope that a few of them might hit the large building or bridge which is the target, only to learn later that every one of them missed. The same goes for rail junctions and yards, but in those cases even if you caused damage, it was easily repaired or bypassed.

People who blame the Allies for not doing enough are either totally ignorant of the subject, or are hiding a political agenda which includes discrediting any and all Western accomplishments. And, as you point out, bombing the camps would have only resulted in dead Jews.

In a few years we'll be reading similar things about North Korea. Of course, they'll have more of a point this time, since we are more than capable of freeing everyone in that country-wide concentration camp whenever we choose...except for those who need killing, of course.

Related historical note: it's all England's fault that the Germans loved Hitler, too.

You know you are truly disgusted when you find yourself glad a parent is no longer here to see something.

Peter: Extremely well-said.

Old story. Jewish organizations did ask for the camps to be bombed. The strategic bombers (RAF & USAAF) refused on the grounds that they needed every single plane to win the war by attacking German cities (RAF) or industry (USAAF).

Both air forces refused for YEARS to release a few (a dozen or so) Very Long Range patrol bombers (B-24s) to Coastal Command to provide air cover for convoys in the Atlantic.

It turned out the air force leaders were dead wrong. But it could not be proved at the time.

When the VLR bombers were finally provided, they immediately made a big difference in the U-boat war.

It is not clear whether this report is simply ignorant or dishonest, or both. I'd say, both.

The world would be a lot better off without any Germans in it.

More revisionist history, but in this case I'm afraid that the Germans are more right. Jews and Jewish groups begged for the camps to be bombed. My father, who was involved in the effort, says that the reason that the camps were never bombed had a lot to do with the Americans and British were content to allow the Germans to do their grisly work.

He may go a little far, but there is no denying that at least part of the reason the death camps were never bombed was good old hate. In any case, making excuses for allowing the camps to continue their work does nothing to illuminate a dark period of human history. Revising history, saying that no one knew what was going on in those camps, or that Bomber Command could not spare the bombers, requires more than a bit of credulousness. During that time it was not uncommon for single attacks to be comprised of a thousand heavy bombers, day and night. Saying that they could not spare a few to level Auschwitz is not believable.

Especially now, in these times when the Jew Haters and killers are again finding the courage to crawl out from under the rocks under which they so recently hid, it is no time to sweep under the carpet a dark period in our history, one in which Bomber Harris could find eleven hundred bombers with which to level Dresden, which had not a single military target in it, but he could not find twenty four planes to bomb the death camps, with the excuse of possible collateral damage? Of Jews?

If we had leveled Auschwitz, killing all the Jews in it, how long would it have taken the Germans to build a new furnace elsewhere?

I find it hard to believe bombing the camps would have been an effective way to save Jews.

Well, let's not be any more paranoid then we have to be. The requests were to bomb the railroad, not the camps. As noted above, it probably wasn't the most effective plan.

The idea that the Americans and British were perfectly happy to see the Jews anhilated is just nuts. Remember that the Germans were tying up thousands of men and a significant portion of their rolling stock with the Final Solution. I'm sure that the allies did have the thought that if your enemy is willing to spend men and treasure on something that has no military benefit, you might as well let him.

oj: You may not believe that it would have been effective, but those who were involved did. Whose opinion do you think matters?

David: My father was there, begging. I don't know where you get your information, but you were not there. You give aid and comfort to the revisionists with your comment.

I say it again: the Jews wanted the camps bombed. The government refused. Draw your own conclusion as to their motives, but please do not try to rewrite history. Trainloads were being gassed every day. Even one day of a halt would have meant more survivors after the war ended.

Postwar bomb assessment shows that none of the bombing was effective.

I give aid and comfort to the revisionists? What the heck does that mean?

With all due respect to your father, the only contemporary arguments I've seen were for bombing of the railroad and for good reason. Bombing of the camps would have been nuts.

Also, we shouldn't lose track of how late in the war we're talking about. Bombing the eastern camps wouldn't have been practical until the allies controlled Italy in early '44. Without the bombings, Auschitz' gas chambers shut down in October.

But I do think you're misreading my post. The allies were more or less indifferent to the camps, for some creditable reasons and some less creditable reasons. But it's paranoid to think that our indifference was caused by antisemitism or makes us complicit in the Holocaust.

Michael:

You may be righter than many of us are comfortable believing or you may not. Everything I have ever read shows Allied knowledge of the Holocaust was gleaned from anecdotal sources smuggled out of Europe or Ultra, to which access was very severely restricted. By mid-war they knew there were mass executions and deportations, but that is not the same as saying they understood the full extent or inevitability of it.

I am old enough to have seen popular blame extend from camp officials to the SS to all Nazis to all German officials to all Germans and then on to the churches, Vichy, the West, Churchill, Switzerland and Holland, etc, etc. . When you do this you condemn the perpetrators and those who didn't do enough to stop the perpetrators on the same basis. That proposition will simply not be accepted by many for reasons that have nothing to do with anti-semetism.

Also, risking military lives for non-military objectives and bombing camps full of innocents whatever the big picture are bona fide moral quandries, the answers to which are by no means obvious and which do not divide us neatly into good guys and bad guys.

Peter - No, we don't divide neatly at all. But the point of this thread was originally that the Germans blaming Bomber Command was a bit creepy. My experience of Germans (over 30s) is that WWII is more real to them than it is to many Americans. They feel a very real guilt over what happened, in general. When they throw a bit of light on the culpability (of whatever degree) on the Allies, it should not become a battle over turf, and protecting "our own."

There is a lot of pressure to disbelieve that these things happened at all. Your statement that "Allied knowledge of the Holocaust was gleaned from anecdotal sources smuggled out of Europe or Ultra" may be true, but the New York Times carried a story about "death camps" on the front page in 1943. In spite of what we might be more comfortable believing 60 years later, it was not a secret, to those who were willing to believe that these things were possible, and read the newspapers at the time.

Equally, saying in 2003 that the America of 1943 was incapable of wishing horrendous harm to come to Jews is a revision of the truth. Jews were institutionally barred from holding jobs in entire industries. I myself remember seeing a sign, in a public toilet on a trip to Washington D.C. in 1955, that said "NO dogs NO niggers NO jews." Some people may be able to revise that out of their memory, but I can not.

Michael --

I'm trying hard not to resent this, but you are accusing me of something pretty reprehensible.

I am not blind to the antisemitism that was common, and commonly accepted, in the United States prior to WW2. It was, of course, a large part of the argument against getting into the war in the first place. But to compare anti-Jewish quotas at good colleges, or white shoe law firms, or country clubs, with the Holocaust is, at best, irrational and, at worst, a form of Holocaust denial.

The Germans aren't pariahs because they went a little overboard with the antisemitism they shared with the rest of the West -- very much including the United States and even more so Britain. They are pariahs because they adopted as their national ethos the systematic extermination of every Jew, man, woman and child, they could get their hands on. To suggest that the camps are just one small step removed from signs saying "No Jews need apply" is, well, wrong.

And even then, to suggest that failure to bomb the camps in any way makes the allies complicit in the Shoah is contemptible.

Michael:

If they felt guilty they wouldn't be so diligently trying to portray themselves as victims of the war, which the "Why didn't you stop us before we killed again" theme certainly contributes to.

OJ:
The strategic bombing campaign worked far better than you know, for a couple very non-intuitive reasons. It is the reason why we had air supremacy at Normandy, and not because of reduced aircraft production.

Everyone:
The night-bombing RAF could scarcely hit its fundament with both hands, which is why they went after the biggest targets they could find.

The AAF was a lot more accurate, but defensive formations dictated that lots of bombs missed, even if lead scored a shack.

After Normandy we could have used P-47s and P-51s in low level strafing missions against guard towers/quarters, etc. But that would have meant fewer aircraft going against rolling stock.

As for the rest, David, as usual, says it all.

Dresden was a marshaling center and a legitimate target. (As was Hiroshima, and for the same reason; and the widespread belief that both were not military targets also arises from the same deliberate slander campaign.)

As for whether bombers could be "spared," Michael is simply wrong. All through 1942-43, neither Bomber Command nor 8th Air Force was willing to spare even tiny numbers of planes for pressing military targets.

The argument at the time was that the fastest way to win the war was to press the strategic bombing campaign and ending the war was the fastest, surest way to save the Jews.

That the Jews didn't buy it is not surprising, but it does not make the arguers insincere.

They were, in fact, incorrect; strategic bombing cannot be shown to have shortened the war. But that is wisdom after the fact.

Jeff:

Did not post-war bomb assessments show that bombing failed to limit industrial production and unified the populace behind a relatively unpopular regime?

Until the attack on Pearl Harbor, the debate in America was split on whether or not to enter the war. And this occurred as the intentions of Hitler vis a vis the Jews could not have been more clear.

David, it may make you feel supremely justified to show such umbrage. Methinks you doth protest too much. Relax. I am not attacking you. It was not your fault. But to say that, of the majority of American voters who opposed American entrance into the war, or who could not decide which side we should take if we would enter the hostilities, there was no fraction of American opinion who quietly (or not) cheered on the work of the crematoria, is to have your head deeply in the sand, or up your butt.

And when you speak of our allies, remember how Stalin steered his troops around Warsaw so as to not interfere with the Nazis' liquidation of the ghetto uprising, which was covered in the world press at the time. Stalin was our ally at the time as well. I could go on, with some choice transcripts of Parliament debates, but you no not want to hear anything that would deflect any iota of demonization that you would heap upon the German people. Just as there were Americans and British who quietly cheered the crematoria, there were at least a few Germans who would just as soon not have been supportive of their grisly work.

The world is full of shades of grey. I am sorry that I got your panties in such a bunch, but there it is. If, as you say, my suggestion is contemptible, then your overreaction is revealing.

Michael:

You're not even making any internal sense anymore. On the one hand: "the New York Times carried a story about "death camps" on the front page in 1943" On the other: "to say that, of the majority of American voters who opposed American entrance into the war, or who could not decide which side we should take if we would enter the hostilities, there was no fraction of American opinion who quietly (or not) cheered on the work of the crematoria, is to have your head deeply in the sand, or up your butt."

Yet, in December 1941 even America First and Charles Lindbergh came out in favor of war.

Hey, we're making progress. We've moved from an argument that the military refusing to bomb Jews because of their officially sanctioned hatred of Jews to an argument that some Americans were happy to see Hitler taking care of business.

Well, no sh**. We also have Americans who cheer with each successful suicide bombing and others who are arming themselves to take on the ZOG. Individual Americans believe all sorts of fruitcake things, as we prove around here on a regular basis. I think there is still room for me to draw moral distinctions between Nazi Germany and the United States.

You did get me on the allies thing. I should have made clear that I wasn't referring to our antisemitic Communist dictatorship allies of convenience. The Brits, on the other hand, are antisemites, but in that special low-key British way that has also resulted in Britain being a sanctuary for Jews for the last couple centuries.

As for why I care: My grandfather left his father's one room dirt floor farm house, the product of who knows how many centuries in the Pale, early last century, came here, started work as a cooper and built a life for himself and his family until he lost everything in the Depression. In his forties, he went back to manual labor to support himself, his wife and his six children. Starting from scratch, he again built himself up. My father, born in 1931, was able to go to Yale and then Harvard Law School, despite your rampant antisemitism morally equivalent to genocide. I'm not suggesting that their path wasn't made harder by prejudice (though mine hasn't been). I'm suggesting that comparing that experience to the experience of the many relatives who didn't leave the Pale and didn't survive the war is delusional.

Finally, as long as we're inviting each other to indulge in self-criticism, you really might want to think about what in your own life lies beneath this attempt to shift blame for the Shoah from the Germans to the Americans.

(By the way, it was WWI in which there was a real question about who the US would support. There was no serious movement towards supporting the Axis in WWII and, of course, FDR had been tacitly supporting the allies for years before 12/7/41.)

The Strategic Bombing Survey showed that very, very few bombs hit their targets.

The direct attacks on industrial centers never worked. Toward the end of the war, when the strategic bombers were redirected to transportation (the so-called "Oil War"), the results began to interfere with industrial production and, at the very end, even though production was still keeping up, its products could not be delivered, which was just as good.

The initial bombings may have steeled morale in Germany and Italy, as they did in England, but by the end the bombing was negatively affecting both civilian morale (as revealed in Geobbels' diaries) and military morale (as revealed in any number of military memoirs and diaries).

The question is not so much whether endlessly bombing a country can bring it down. At some point it must. But whether WW2 strategic bombing campaign was efficient.

Hard to quantify but that doesn't mean it hasn't been tried. According to one version, the air assault absorbed 25% of Allied resources but the German air defense absorbed only 17% of German resources.

Harry, OJ:

You are right, but wrong. After the fact, it seems pretty clear the bombing campaign would have been much better spent attacking electrical facilities. But that is another argument.

At the time, after we developed long range fighter escort, the German Air Force started suffering horrendous attrition rates they could in no way sustain, but it wasn't in airframes, but rather, pilots.

By using asymmetric warfare, we forced them to move, rather than husband their resources. When they moved, too many of them failed to come back. By the time of Normandy, the average GAF pilot had about 35 hours under his belt. That is, in normal times, well shy of a private pilot certificate. It got so bad, their attrition due to clouds took care of a great many we missed.

So, by Normandy, there was no GAF worthy of the name, because we had targeted their critical node.

Unwittingly, but effectively, nonetheless.

What's that have to do with strategic bombing?

It released a lot of fighter pilots to spend their time doing low-level attacks, which made it, for example, impossible for the German army to move armored formations in daylight.

Strategic bombing never had any real impact on the panzers. Tactical bombing did.

OJ:
The presence of the bombers--whose mission was strategic bombing--forced the GAF out of their airfields to engage. Prior to Normandy, for us that was essentially the only game in town.

There was a huge fight shortly after we developed the ability to do long range escort between the bomber and fighter commands. The bomber guys wanted to tie the fighters to close-in escort; the fighter pilots wanted the ability to range far more widely. Ultimately, the fighter pilots won the day, and the GAF attrition rate skyrocketed.

In essence, it was a classic interdiction campaign, even though no one really recognized it at the time. In successful interdiction, you have to force the enemy into a high tempo of operations--our bombers flushed their fighters--in order to provide an opening for attack.

So by Normandy, as Harry noted, our fighter pilots had nothing better to do then pester the heck out of German airfields, columns, and rolling stock.

Thus, we used bombers to attack fighters, a neat example of asymetric warfare. Although, I think most would count that as an unintended consequence of the bombing campaign.

So the bombing had nothing to do with it--we could have just flown passive bomber formations over Germany to get their fighters to come out.

OJ:
If we didn't drop bombs, they could have just stayed on the ground and watched the airshow.

If they decided that, since our bombing was ineffective, they might just as well stay on the ground, then we would be able to give up the defensive formations that guaranteed many bombs would miss their targets, thereby causing our bombing to become much more effective.

They were damned if they did, damned if they didn't. We forced upon them a war of attrition they couldn't possibly win. Given the results of the Strategic Bombing Survey, though, it is a shame we didn't mix that largely unplanned war of attrition with more attention to the electrical infrastructure.

How would they have known when we were going to bomb and when not? We could have sprinkled Motzah all over Germany and achieved the same results because they'd have had to respond to the overflights.

Hoist on your own petard, there, Orrin. You claim the USSR was militarily negligible.

Same argument.

Harry:

I agree. In fact, all we did was announce that Star Wars tests had worked and the Soviets fell apart. Quite possibly the greatest military deception of all time.

OJ:
You are making a serious hindsight mistake. At the time we assumed we were far more effective than we actually were. Besides, less effectiveness, than assumed, and no effectiveness at all, are two entirely different things.

Except that's what the military told them at the time--it was civilians like FDR and what not who wanted to keep it up anyway, even though counterproductive.

The military knew the results were not those predicted, but since this was the first strategic bombing campaign in history, trial and error was bound to be part of the game.

And while less productive than desired, it is hard to see how the campaign was counterproductive. The Germans were, for instance, forced to move their aircraft production plants underground. That means two things: one, they had to divert effort from other uses; two, we had to be hitting something--otherwise, why bother?

Production increased despite the bombing and the German populace was unified--effectively prolonging the war,

You have missed my point. The strategic bombing campaign was a success because it completely depleted GAF's supply of pilots before Normandy, which meant our troops continuously operated under friendly air supremacy, and the German Army continuously operated under enemy air supremacy.

That effect was pivotal, and was obtainable in no other way.

It is true production increased despite the bombing, but it increased less than it would have done otherwise, and far less than it did if you consider the resources diverted to such things as AAA guns and gun crews. None of that stuff came for free; it was all at the expense of something else the Germans would rather have done.

If you want to prolong a war, give up air supremacy.

Yes, that point is elusive:

We had air supremacy.

We used it to bomb, which had no effect on the industries targeted, but did stiffen the backbone of a reluctant nation.

But we did maintain the air supremacy with which we were accidentally aiding Hitler and prolonging the war.

Happy days...

We most certainly did not have air supremacy prior at the start of the Strategic Bombing campaign--the horrific losses we suffered prior to long-range escort amply attest to that.

Our escort fighters were the means to develop air supremacy prior to Normandy, because the GAF could not husband their air defense aircraft in the face of our bombing campaign. So, by the time of Normandy, the GAF attrition rates so far exceeded their replacement rates that it flat didn't matter how many airframes the Germans produced, because they scarcely had any qualified pilots to fly them.

Our bombers flushed their fighters, our fighters attrited their fighters at such a rate that by Normandy, the GAF was a spent force.

That outcome would not have obtained absent the strategic bombing campaign. As a result, the skies over Normandy were virtually completely devoid of enemy air.

Before you assert that our bombing had no effect on the targeted industries, perhaps you could compare what happened with what would have happened absent the bombing campaign.

Jeff:

The same mindset that required that we punish Germany by pointless and counterproductive saturation bombing prevented us from working with the German military to topple the Nazis from within.

OJ:

That is as may be, and likely a very valid point. But that is an entirely different discussion from whether, and why, the Strategic Bombing campaign was effective. And why it would have been murderously stupid to bomb the concentration camps--we would have been doing the SS' work for them.

It was the first ever sustained bombing campaign that aimed at strategic interdiction; it was therefore bound to be far less than perfect, in ways that couldn't discerned at the time. We should be thankful that despite all that, we stumbled upon the correct answer to a nodal vulnerability analysis we scarcely knew needed doing. We spent the entire war trying to stop them building airplanes and only partially succeeding, not realizing we were directly attacking their greatest vulnerability--pilots.

So it wasn't a "mindset." It was part and parcel of the fog of war, self deception, luck, bravery, skill, and a revolution in military affairs.

Absent all that, Normandy might well have turned out to be a bloody failure, killing far more of our infantry than we lost in the skies over Europe.

To me, that's a win.

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