I agree completely however I was discussing the disposition of resources on both sides. If the RAF had just a single raid with one stream of 1000 bombers then the LW only have to find that stream and put all resources against it. That is three times as many targets in one area with up to three times more defending fighters.
Aerial Bombing Question
- Thread starter Zipper730
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Quite so. In the early/mid war years Bomber Command could get away with simply overwhelming the Luftwaffe night fighter system (as based on the 'box' of himmelbett ) but the Germans were not daft and adopted their tactics to counter those of the British. Later several raids taking widely different routes to and from the target in combination with spoof raids, intruders and increasingly sophisticated counter measures were adopted by Bomber Command for the very reason you give.
Gebhard Aders rather old (late '70s) book "History of the German Night Fighter Force 1917-1945" is still the best book when seeking to understand the evolution of the Luftwaffe's night fighter force.
Theo Boiten's "Nachtjagd" of a slightly more recent vintage (late '90s) is a good read too.
Cheers
Steve
No, the Schweinfurt raid followed the normal tactics. Here's a photograph of some aircraft of the 306th BG over Schweinfurt on 14th October 1943, maintaining their formation in very heavy flak. This Group lost 10 aircraft on the raid.
I have never read an account which mentions the use of a different formation, nor that the German fighter or flak defences succeeded in breaking up the formations.
Just 88 of the 1,222 bombs dropped actually fell on the five plants attacked. The largest plant (Kugelfischer) suffered a limited loss of production for a six week period.
This for the loss of 60 B-17s and 600 men, another 142 fortresses returned with various degrees of damage, 5 crashed in England and another 12 were destroyed in crash landings at their airfield or were written off. 121 of the damaged bombers eventually returned to service. Another 5 fatalities and 43 wounded airmen were recovered from the returning bombers.
On the positive side, American gunners claimed 186 Luftwaffe aircraft as destroyed. The Luftwaffe in fact lost 38 aircraft shot down (eventually another 21 seem to have been written off or 'recycled') of the 670+ that made contact with the US formations, losing 29 pilots KIA or MIA and another 20 WIA.
In four full strength missions in seven days in October '43 (Bremen, Marienburg, Munster and Schweinfurt) the 8th Air Force lost 148 bombers, 50% of its daily average operational strength. This was the final nail in the doctrine of unescorted day time bombing, but at what a cost.
Cheers
Steve
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Yes, even on a cloudless day there were problems with haze, and then of course the Germans operated very effective smoke screens over sensitive targets, though I don't know if any or how many generators were available at Schweinfurt.
That photograph also illustrates the density and accuracy of German Flak in late 1943.
Cheers
Steve
The problem with getting your history from a TV documentary, is your assumption that all the film clips are from the subject being depicted.
They're just stock film clips. To most film editors, one B-17 is the same as another, one airplane is as good as another.
I've seen a TV documentary about Midway, complete with Hellcats and Corsairs.
I've seen Zeros shot down over Europe, i've seen Fw190's shot down in the Pacific, on TV.
Don't get your history from TV.
No history of the Battle of Britain is complete without a shot of a Fw190 being hit and a squadron of Spitfire Mk Vs flying past. Germany's success in Barbarossa can easily be understood when you see all the Tiger and Panther tanks they had to send to Russia.
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Those bloody Bf 109 Es on a delivery flight, still wearing their stammkenzeichen, which feature in almost every documentary about the air war, often shown with footage of US daylight formations in 1943 or later! If I could burn that piece of film I would
Cheers
Steve
Robert Porter
Senior Master Sergeant
The real shame to me is there are 1000's of hours of unpublished real footage, including gun camera footage, and most of that is being lost to age and degradation and improper storage. Most will never ever be seen again due to lack of funds as the technology to transfer and even enhance the content is readily available.
With the recent anniversaries there were a couple of documentaries on the Battle of Britain that managed to be less informative and less accurate than the movie "Battle of Britain and neither had Susannah York either.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTC4M-jh42g
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTC4M-jh42g
fubar57
General
As a 12yr old, that was my favorite part of the movie
They frequently refer to "industrial haze" as if the smoke comes from the industry itself, even non industrial areas had this "haze" due to most people using black or brown coal and wood for heating.
It was one of the things that the Canadians, based up in Yorkshire, had to deal with. It obviously had an effect on visibility for their bombers taking off or landing in daylight over the surrounding higher ground. The bases were relatively rural, but not so far from major industrial areas. Think of all those cities in the southern half of the West Riding from Sheffield up through Leeds, then further north you have Middlesborough and the industrial centres of the North East.
Bomber Groups based further south in East Anglia enjoyed better conditions in their rural surroundings, further from industrial areas.
Cheers
Steve
Bomber Groups based further south in East Anglia enjoyed better conditions in their rural surroundings, further from industrial areas.
Cheers
Steve
I live in Stockton which is next to Middlesbrough and under the flight path to/from what was Middleton St George bomber airfield. In the 1960s before the clean air act I remember every house throwing up plumes of smoke which hung above the region, from the Eston Hills nearby all you saw was a bank of grey.
Airframes
Benevolens Magister
With regards to 'TV History', I was recently given a boxed set of a DVD and book on the Battle of Britain, produced, or at least released, by the History Channel.
The DVD is almost reasonable, but with the usual stock footage, but the book isn't worth the paper it's printed on - not one of the illustrations in the book is from the BoB period, let alone the Battle itself !
The DVD is almost reasonable, but with the usual stock footage, but the book isn't worth the paper it's printed on - not one of the illustrations in the book is from the BoB period, let alone the Battle itself !
A bit of a cheek when Widnes had smoke generators in peacetime, easy to forget how chronic pollution used to be. When I started work Middlesbrough had 8 blast furnaces operating but the steelworks in nearby Stockton and Hartlepool had already closed.They don't call Middlesborough fans 'Smoggies' for nothing
Cheers
Steve
A target for bombing was always a railway marshalling (switching)yard, it is easy to forget that all the shunting was done by steam locomotives which unlike express trains stay in one place in a cloud of smoke. I read a long time ago that the railways on Teesside were electrified but in the 1930s this was changed back to steam because a single raid on the electricity supply would cripple the system. There is still evidence of this electrified system close to my home, they look like white salt hoppers.
I waded through a completely idiotic documentary showing "dramatic new evidence" of how "the Germans missed the chance to beat the British" by not understanding their recon photos of Chain Home stations. They were clearly visible on German recon photos but the dull Germans were just too plain dumb to understand what they were. This completely ignores what I knew in the 1960s, that the Germans knew all (or most) about the Chain Home system and did try to attack it but were not successful in most cases and even when they were successful they didnt know it or take advantage.
The whole program was complete BS, I have no idea why anyone would make it let alone allow its broadcast, it was in modern phraseology "fake history".
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- #139
Wait, I was talking about 8/17/43 not 10/14
