If anyone has any recommendations I’d greatly appreciate it. Currently reading Richard Overy’s ‘The Bombing War’.
Overy is one of the best overall accounts. Tami Davis Biddle's Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare is a comparative account of the genesis of strategic bombardment among the British and Americans. Biddle tacks to a standard historiographic line of the overall ineffectiveness of bombing (hence the title). The relevant sections of Adam Tooze's The Wages of Destruction challenge this orthodoxy by contending there was considerable disruption of supply chains and cracks were starting to show in the German industrial effort. Donald Caldwell's The Luftwaffe over Germany covers the travails of the German day fighter force as it tried and failed to stem the American bombers. Stephen L. McFarland and Wesley Phillips Newton's To Command the Sky: The Battle for Air Superiority Over Germany, 1942-1944 is a fascinating examination of American escort tactics and how it was not simply a matter of developing long-range fighters. For an examination of being at the receiving end of bombing, Death from the Skies: How the British and Germans Endured Aerial Destruction in World War II by Dietmar Suss is a good comparative history.