Holocaust Denial

[Anomalocaris]

How could that be? What were the British bombers doing for years if not degrading German industrial capacity?

Was it all squirreled away in the Bavarian mountains?

The British were destroying German industrial capacity.  But so much more of German industrial capacity was idle compare to the amount the British was destroying, the Germans easily replaced any amount of the British destroyed, so the total capacity dedicated to war production didn't go down because of the bombing.   In fact, the Germans were able to progressively bring far more idle capacity online for war production than the capacity the British and Americans were destroying by bombing from 1942-1944, that German war production not only didn't suffer, it went up dramatically over the same period.

In fact, the limiting factor of German war production prior to end of 1944 was not damage to its industrial capacity by British and American bombing.  It was shortage of manpower.  The manpower demands of the german army on the Russians front was by far the more important factor in creating the manpower shortage in German war industry compared to anything the British and Americans were doing.   It was this shortage that forced the Germans to employ concentration camp slave labor on a epic scale to facilitate ramping up of their idle industrial capacity from 1942-1944.

The bottom line is the battles in the east did far more to destroy Nazi germany than the battles in the west.   This is not to say the contribution of the Americans and British were insignificant.  But it does say the most important military battles for understanding the overall course of the war were not the ones the British and Americans fought.  It could be argued the single most important contribution the western allies made to defeating Germany were not the bombs dropped or the battles fought, it was the enormous amount of lend lease war material that the United States provided to the Soviet Union.   For many critical war materials, like cross country trucks that enabled a mechanized army to move, or locomotives to enable the war industry to function, the United States provided those to the Soviet Union in volumes that were several times greater than the total production of those materials by Germany during the entire war.

It is not unfair to say the western allies used Russians as cannon fodder to defeat the Germans, we supplied much of the materials, while the Russians supplied most of the blood.