Steel

By mid-1944 the air war had entered a new phase. Its most important feature, apart from mastery of the air, was the greatly increased weight of the attack that could be brought to bear; in the second half of 1944, 481,400 tons of bombs were dropped on Germany as compared with 150,700 in all 1943. The RAF and the United States Army Air Forces during this period were teamed in a fully coordinated offensive and the RAF was returning to the attack of specific industrial targets. A target that was attacked with poor results in 1943 might have yielded major returns in 1944 for the simple reason that an attack in 1944 was certain to be enormously heavier. With improved bombing techniques it was also likely to be considerably more accurate. Increased weight was a major feature of the raids that reduced the German steel industry.

Germany began the war with approximately 23,000,000 metric tons per year of steel capacity, about 69 percent of which was in the Ruhr. The 1940 victories added another 17,000,000 tons principally in Lorraine, Belgium and Luxembourg. However, official records and those of the industry for the war years, supplemented by interrogation, show that the 40,000,000 tons theoretical capacity was never reached. Production in the occupied countries was always troublesome and deficient. In spite of the considerable efforts to develop low-grade ores in Germany proper and medium grade ores in Austria, Germany throughout the war continued to be. primarily dependent on Swedish, Norwegian and French ores.

Unlike the United States, Germany did not have to find steel to build a large merchant fleet or for a program of heavy naval construction. Nor did she have to build a complete munitions industry in the middle of the war. For these reasons the German steel supply for finished munitions was only slightly less liberal than that of the United States. Although steel was considered a bottleneck by the Germans, a detailed examination of the control machinery together with interrogation of officials in the Speer ministry and its predecessor organizations, reveals that the trouble was partly an insufficient allocation system and partly, in the early years of the war especially, an unwillingness to cut out nonessential construction and civilian consumption. German industrialists were also found to have had a marked propensity to hoard steel.

Throughout the war there was considerable debate whether the German steel industry was a desirable target -- and especially whether steel mills were vulnerable to the type of attack that could be made. In 1943 the RAF made a modest attack on the steel industry of the Ruhr but the attack .was given up because it was believed to have been too costly for the results achieved. Production records taken by the Survey show, in fact, that it had some effect; production in the Ruhr declined by approximately 10 percent during the attack and did not fully recover during the remainder of the year. German steel producers were required by the government to keep records of production losses and their causes. These records show that air raid alerts in 1943 were a more serious cause of the lost production than the actual damage from the raids.

During the last half of 1944 both the cities and the transportation system of the Ruhr were the targets of extremely heavy attack, primarily by the RAF. Production of steel in the Ruhr was reduced by 80 percent between June and the end of the year. Loss of production of high-grade steel in the Ruhr was greater than the loss of Bessemer steel and high-grade steel became a bottleneck by the middle of 1944. German steel production for all the Reich and occupied countries declined from 2,570,000 metric tons in July to 1,000,000 metric tons in December. Of this loss about 490,000 tons was the result of loss of territory.

Examination of the steel plants showed that, although the attack damaged some blast furnaces, open hearths and rolling mills, it was primarily effective through damage to utilities (electricity, gas and water) and communications within the plants and to utilities and transport supplying the plants.

Although steel production had been reduced to critical levels by the end of 1944 and continued to fall until the end of the war, Survey studies do not indicate that the steel shortage (unlike the oil shortage or even the ammunition shortage) was decisive. It might have been decisive if the war had continued, and if this specific shortage had not been overshadowed by the disintegration of the whole economy. As it developed at the end of the war, certain German industries had inventories of steel that ranged from comfortable to generous.