Please read what actually happened.....he said we should have bombed the RAILROAD TRACKS! Let us assume you destroy seven entire miles of track. How long would that take to repair?
as the U.S. discovered in Korea and Vietnam, the simplest thing in the world to repair is a rail line. Far simpler than a paved road, particularly if you've got plenty of slave labor that you don't mind overworking. Fill in the craters, toss a layer of gravel on top, lay down the ties and rails, and you're back in business in less than a day. And in fact, rail lines leading to Auschwitz (though not the spurs going to the camp itself) were hit a number of times, to no discernable effect on the Final Solution.
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The Miles Per Day Contest The competing companies raced to Promontory Summit, each trying to top the other's daily progress. Workers of the Central Pacific, who had measured progress in feet per day through the Sierra Nevada, zipped across easier terrain, laying six miles of track in one day. In response, Union Pacific workers built seven miles in a day. Then the Central Pacific regrouped for one last massive effort and laid down an astonishing ten miles in one day, April 28, 1869.
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Each B-17 had a crew of ten. How many B-17 bombers and how many American airmen were worth sacrificing at the extreme range of the B-17 where they would be sitting ducks without their long range fighter escorts so that those seven miles of railroad would be out of use for a single day?
Eaker launched the most daring offensive of the war, sending over one thousand bombers into the air during a one-week span in mid-October, 1943. This week culminated with the second attack against the ball bearing factories in Schweinfurt, Germany, in which over sixty B-17s and six hundred men never returned home. Despite the high losses and unspectacular bombing results, the raid on Schweinfurt did help the war cause by making the policy makers finally realize the urgent need for long-range fighters to escort the bombers deep into enemy territory. Without these fighters, particularly the P-51 Mustang, the bomber losses would continue to grow to the point at which the Eighth Air Force would be unable to continue the successful targeting of vital war assets in Nazi Germany.