This was one of many similar gambles. That book stressed how most key events of the war were done right before Germany ran out of one thing or another: foreign currency, steel, oil, alloys. I was surprised to learn the extent of their brinksmanship. The economists saw the writing on the wall far before the military.
> A curious point developed. German morale in the higher grades was worse than in the lower. ...
This unusual situation arose from the fact that the National Socialist propaganda machinery was still working on the masses of the troops. The political officers still made speeches. The troops were given pep talks, ...
In contrast with common troops, the officers had the professional skill to understand the advantages possessed by the Allied armies. The officers knew enough about global and continental strategy, about the immediate strategy of the Western front, about economic factors and so on, to see that the situation was genuinely bad. Furthermore, the officer class had been less indoctrinated in the first place...
A common Landser, tough and ready in a whole division full of well fed, well armed men, could not be expected to undergo despair because freight-car loadings hundreds of miles away had dropped to zero. He might see that the Luftwaffe was less in evidence; he might grumble about mail, or about having to use horse transport, but as long as he could see that his own unit was getting on all right, it was hard to persuade him that defeat was around the corner. In World War I, the German troops at the time of surrender were much better off than most of them thought they were; in World War II, they thought they were better off than they actually were. The Germans may not have been in perfect shape, but they were incomparably better off than the starving scarecrows with whom Generalissimo Chiang was trying to hold back the Japanese in West Hunan or the Americans who had fought despair, fever and Japanese—all three at once—on Bataan.
I have read that strategic bombing was ineffective, done mainly for propaganda purposes. Having seen the OR tools that came out of that war, or were published a decade later, I would not be surprised to learn that they had in fact been doing (at least rudimentary) min-cut analyses for target selection, and that alleged ineffectiveness (of the mathematics or of the kilotons) is itself propaganda.
