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Originally Posted by Adm.Lee
As I read it, the real keystones that collapsed the German war machine was the transportation infrastructure and power grid. Once the fighters were turned loose on the railnet and the Rhine River barges (used to move coal and iron ore to the Ruhr) were attacked, that's when the wheels came off. To avoid the factories getting bombed, the Germans dispersed them. That came back to bite them when the rail & barge net went down, and whatever pieces couldn't be assembled.
Modern bombing analysis has found that the power grid is an easy soft-kill, as the Serbs and Iraqis found out in the 1990s.
A really good book on this is Stephen Budiansky, Air Power. In there, it's related that the easiest-attacked link in the supply chain is between factory and supply depot, not depot to unit or at the factory. Of course, wars are always different, as this is why the USAF spent a lot of time working over the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
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Never said going after oil would not be easy...but going after the refineries, the storage depots and yes even the trains and barges hauling the stuff (not to mention the coal) had a dramatic effect on the Nazi war machine.
The failure of the Allied bombing campaign lay in the stuipid, silly and out right lunatic pre-war ideas on the conduct of strategic bombing. "The bombers will always get through", "speed is safety", "no fighter can stop a well armed heavy bomber", "bombing the cities will end the war"....