The correct metric on which to evaluate the bombing is not overall production, but overall production minus the amount production devoted to defending against the bombing. And by that metric, it was massively successful. the defense of the reich was an enormous resource sink. By 44 it was consuming pretty much the entire luftwaffe and 1/5 of all german ammunition production. It meant that hundreds of thousands of personnel and tens of thousands of artillery pieces were shooting at allied planes instead of russian tanks and soldiers. Add in the indirect costs of the dispersal of industry that the germans undertook to avoid bombing, and the costs are incalculably high.

You are definitely correct that speer should not be taken at face value though, everything he said was designed to keep him out of Spandau. Fortunately, we have Adam Tooze’s amazing Wages of Destruction, which I would rate as the single best book on WW2 in existence.

Grurray: “Had Hitler not been so crazy and incompetent to attack Russian urban areas and used the same blitzkrieg strategy that defeated France, we’d be talking about something completely different.”

The only place Hitler did that was Stalingrad, and while it was a costly mistake, it was hardly war ending. If by some miracle Operation Blau had achieved all of its objectives, it would not have knocked the Soviets out of the war. The Germans still would have been overextended and vulnerable to something like Operation Saturn. At most, it would have extended the war, and extending the war just leads to atom bombs dropping on Berlin. The ultimate fact of all counterfactual analysis of World War Two, at least all analysis that starts after december 7th 1941, is the ticking clock of the Manhattan Project.

Had Hitler not been so crazy and incompetent to attack Russian urban areas and used the same blitzkrieg strategy that defeated France, we’d be talking about something completely different. Turkey would have entered the war on the Axis side, and Stalin wouldn’t have been able to call in Turkic reinforcements.

We can see that it was impossible now, but that’s because we have access to the true dispositions and capabilities of both sides as well as a half century of post-war analysis.

For example, the British also feared a German invasion of their homeland. Who wouldn’t, with the Nazi juggernaut having just trounced every serious army in Europe? And the Nazis began seriously planning for it, too. In reality there was no chance that such an operation could have been more than an abortive disaster for the Germans, even if they had somehow won the Battle of Britain (another hopeless effort, in hindsight).

Yet this is exactly what the British feared, and they fought the French for control of the Middle East to stop it. We can comfortably say this sitting back in our armchairs 75 years later, but multinational armies fighting and dying in battles on multiple fronts proves us (you, that is) wrong.

Deprived of air cover, the Germans had to launch operations like the Battle of the Bulge under sustained cloud cover. If they’d tried such a gambit where conditions allowed Allied air power to see their build up, the Bulge would have been a Small Bump. As it was, American artillery superiority over the Germans helped blunt the Bulge and, when the clouds cleared, the German position was doomed.

Kirk, what’s interesting is the contrast between the Germans in WWI vs. WWII. In WWI they rather effectively integrated captured industrial and agricultural capacity into their war-time economy, especially in the East.

Wait, in WW1 they were starving due to the blockade, while in WW2 they were at least adequately fed until the very end.

“There was no Syria Vichy in 1942 that was dealt with by the British invasion of Lebanon and Syria in summer of 1941. Likewise the British were not defeated in Iraq.”

That is correct. The Rashid Ali Gaylani government in Iraq was installed by coup at the start of April 1941 and the political/military standoff that saw Habbaniya RAF station besieged was resolved by British military intervention by the end of May. No British ‘defeat’ was involved and the situation was resolved quickly by modest military action. Similarly, the Syria-Lebanon campaign, a somewhat larger effort, was largely confined to June-July 1941 and, as Lucklucky said, no Vichy Syria existed in 1942. It was gone.

1942 was the year of Rommel’s greatest success and closest approach to the heartland of Egypt and of British control in the region. By that time, there were no potential allies waiting for him in the Levant or Mesopotamia. None that would have been useful or already controlled territory, at any rate.