BRITAIN 1939 – 1945: THE ECONOMIC COST OF STRATEGIC BOMBING

[parsifal]

Hi Timpa

The trouble with only attributing 3-4% of the fighter budget because only a small propotion of fighters were night fighters, , overlooks the fact that only a proportion of the raids were carried out at night. A proportion of the fighters, both day fighters, and Night fighters, were retained in the West after the invasion of the Soviet Union. I will give more accurate figures tonite when I get home, but just speaking very roughly, around 2900 combat aircraft out of a total of roughly 4000 available were committed to Barbarossa.

For the fighters, if memory serves me, about 800 fighters were committed to the attack in the east, whilst about 500 or so were retained in the West (excluding Med) . Approximately 150 were Night Fighters, and about 100 were day fighters retained in the Reich. About 180 or less were deployed into Western Europe. The rest were scattered allover the place. All of these fighters retained in the west werre there for one reason, to combat the bombing attacks of BC (mostly- BC was at this time attacking by day and by night, and IMO its a bit arbitrary to simply exclude units like 2 Gp, simply because technically they were not part of BC).



Huge amounts of the LW R&D budget were being spent in setting up their radar systems, and their ground organizations to support their Night Fighter forces. Development of Night Fighter technologies and ground based supporting infrastructure were THE major ticket items for the LW in 1940-41. And the jump in the amount of money being spent on the LW between 1940 and 1941 was all about increasing or enhancing the fighter arm, not about the bombers. So, whatever proportion of the budget was being spent on bombers in 1940, remained more or less the same in 1940, whatever was being spent on fighters in 1940 (lets assume 10%, which is a guesstimate based on airframe weight), jumped to more than 30% of the National income....thats a threfold increase in the resources being spent on fighters....remember, the amount of the budget jumped from 30% in 1940, to more than 50% in 1941, and nearly all of that has to be due to fighters and R&d into Fighters and establishing a defence network for the nightfighters (either that or the cost of bomber production per unit produced skyrocketed). So, even though I cannot give you an exact figure, the amount of the budget being sucked into establishing the nightfighter organaization (and an air defence system generally) , is not going to be 3-4% of the budget, its going to be by more like 20-30% of their overall budget.

If you are saying 3-4% of total resources (which is what you actually said in your last sentence), then that means, you are saying approximately 10-15% of the defence budget. At this time about 30% of total resources were being spent on Defence spending, so 3-4% of total national resources equates to 10-13% of the defence budget in Nazi germany. If thats what you are saying, then thats probably fair enough....however if you are in fact saying that the proportion of the defence budget being spent on air defence was only 3-4%, not a chance. Even on the straight numbers, that doesnt add up.

[krieghund]

I just finished this very interesting book. In one area discussing what if the German ground forces continued their march towards Dunkirk and prevented the BEF from evacuating, how would Britain have used the resources it historically used to build Bomber Command? It postulates that it is very likely the war planners would have opted to rebuild the lost forces and the rest of Britain's plans for the Med would have been severely curtailed.

But the main victim would have been Bomber Command whose development would have stiffed or completely changed at the expense of other pressing defense needs.