Just before Bodenplatte

[Uriah]

I saw this at the Smithsonian and it made me think of Bodenplatte.  But it was nearly a year earlier.

[Finkeren]

I pretty much agree: On the strategic level the Luftwaffe ceased to be an effective defensive force sometime in the first half of 1944 largely thanks to the Allied bombing campaign. It had ceased to be an effective offensive force on the operational level after Stalingrad.

 

That doesn’t mean that the Luftwaffe couldn’t be a formidable opponent on the tactical level, when force concentration was optimal, but as a strategic factor the Luftwaffe was done by summer 1944, around the same time the Wehrmacht stopped being a coherent strategic force.

Edited January 15, 2018 by Finkeren

[Tomsk]

Yes if people are interested in the topic, I recently read “Big Week: the six days that changed the course of World War II” by Bill Yenne, and really enjoyed it.

[EAF19_Marsh]

Big Week: the six days that changed the course of World War II

 

 

That's quite a claim, but I will try to get hold of it

 

The Middlebrook Schweinfurt / Regensburg and Price Berlin Raid book are also very good, BTW.

[Tomsk]

That's quite a claim, but I will try to get hold of it

 

The Middlebrook Schweinfurt / Regensburg and Price Berlin Raid book are also very good, BTW.

 

It is quite the claim, quoting from the book:

 

 

[After El-Alamein Churchill said] "Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning"

Big Week was the beginning of the end.

It was not so much a turning point as it was a tipping point.

As defined by the physicists, a tipping point is a threshold, the point when an entity is displaced from a position of established balance into a new equilibrium significantly unlike what has existed previously. A tipping point is a moment of critical mass.

 

Thanks, I shall keep a look out for the other books you mentioned