A Lesson From Albert Speer and Stupidity From The Pentagon

Our supplies of diesel fuel is being compromised in Pakistan: apparently our fuel is delivered to Afghanistan by truck through Pakistan with only light Pakistani security. Whether the Taliban forces are actually applying military history lessons or they are just taking advantage of our weakest point, their latest tactic can possibly bring our war effort to a grinding halt. This tactic was outlined by Albert Speer in his memoir "Inside The Third Reich".

Albert Speer joined the National Socialist Workers Party in 1931, he worked his way up the ladder as an architect and became part of Hitler's inner circle. Extremely talented, Speer was given the responsibility of getting different industries back up and running after Allied bombing destroyed the different armament facilities. He was so proficient it defied the imagination, the allies would bomb a refinery and Speer would have it up and running in a few days, he did the same with tire factories, ball bearing factories, and munition factories. He was so good at battling the effects of Allied bombing that he extended the war by months if not years. Although his efforts were not war crimes; using slave labor to rebuild the facilities caused Speer to be sentenced to 20 years at Spandau Prison.

It doesn't take an Albert Speer to qustion the competence of any command that allows its vital logistical trains to be jeopardized by exposing them deliberately to compromised foreign interests. This is a recipe for--well, just what we are getting--battlefield scale disaster.

Imagine if Ike had told Patton the gas for his Third Army was being entrusted to the Vichy French. The "redball express" was bad enough. If Petraeus is such a genius with his Princeton PHD and all, maybe he can explain allowing our fuel supply to be handed over to subversive elements and acting as if we really expected the supplies to get to the men.

According to Speer, the Allies bombed one target after another or one industry after another, rather than concentrating on one industry like ball bearings. If the ball bearing facilities would have been bombed every time he rebuilt the facility, the war would have literall ground to a halt in thirty days.

This isn't quite what Speer said. He did point out that while he was fervently arguing in favor of dispersing the ball-bearing industry, the head of RAF Bomber Command was just as strenuously arguing with the Americans against targeting ball bearing factories on the grounds that they must already have been dispersed. BTW, his memoirs were written surreptitiously and smuggled out and not released for years because former Nazis are specifically not allowed to write their memoirs in Spandau.

Speer's reasonable argument to Hitler and the other Nazis was, would you rather try to stop an entire river or one little stream. He then listed the key vulnerable industries and urged to have them dispersed, as they indeed were. It turns out Speer told the Allies nothing they did not already know: The Allied target prioriities more or less matched Speer's list. The difference was that Speer at least took credit for drawing up the list himself, the Allied list was the product of teamwork among many experts and reviewed and discussed by a number of leaders.

In the event, about 10% of Allied raids target the petroleum and synthetic fuels industries and were responsible for about 50% of the reduction in industrial output.

John K. Gailbraith lead a team of economists who performed a post war assessment of the effects of Allied bombing on the German economy. They minimized its effectiveness, an opinion that became fashionable in academic circles. This conclusion was in line with Soviet propaganda which was dismissive of the Western Allies in general, and the air campaign in particular.

In point of fact, German air defenses tied up 2,000,000 well armed and well equipped men, roughly the equivelant of 150 divisions. If the men and equipment used to fight off the Allied Air Forces had been available on the Eastern Front, the battles of Stalingrad and Leningrad might have been much different. Without air supremacy, D-Day would not have been possible and hundreds of Wehrmacht divisions tied down in the defense of the western coasts of Europe would have descended instead on Moscow.

Air defenses aside, the effects of the air campaign, especially against synthetic fuels and petroleum facilities was actually very effective. According to a Rand study report, by the end of the war German artillery shells were loaded with half salt and half high explosive, for instance. Many American, British, Canadian and Soviet infantry survived the war because of the ineffectiveness of German artillery at the end of the war.

During the Battle of the Bulge, the German plan explicitly depended on refueling tanks with captured petroleum. (Hell of a logistics system you got there, Adolf.)

Soviet behavior belied their propaganda. They made an exact bolt for bolt, nut for nut copy of the B-29, based on models which had been interned in the Soviet Union after making emergency landings after raids on Japan. (The Russians didn’t enter the war against Japan until after Hiroshima. Thanks for the help, fellas.) Stalin was all too aware of the decisive role of air power (even without atomic bombs) and wanted to discourage the U.S. from widening its lead and advantage over the Soviets.

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