B-17 Bomb Run Procedures

My original post was asking about the 8th Air Force Procedures for missed bomb runs. No body seems to know what , if any procedures were established at the time.. Case Closed

Dave Kelly said:

My original post was asking about the 8th Air Force Procedures for missed bomb runs. No body seems to know what , if any procedures were established at the time.. Case Closed

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The event you quoted misrepresented what happened.

PBEHN- I disagree with your assessment and comment. I am not asking about what happened on a mission. My question was about established 8th Air Force procedures and if they existed at the time .

Dave Kelly said:

PBEHN- I disagree with your assessment and comment. I am not asking about what happened on a mission. My question was about established 8th Air Force procedures and if they existed at the time .

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If instructions didn't say "don't stooge about above the Cherbourg peninsula looking for a silo through cloud because you may suffer 10% losses to add to your 50% damaged" then they should have.

Dave Kelly said:

Thanks again for your thoughts on this incident. I felt the Wing or Group Commander had the authority to order a 2nd run and make all possible effort to destroy the target. This was a " NO BALL" mission. The target was the V-1, V-2 rocket sites and the submarine pens in Sottevast, France. Given the fact that V-1 and V-2 rockets were smashing London, and killing thousands of civilians at the time, I would think justification for a 2nd run may well have been warranted. The Group Commander may have felt the risks were worth taking regardless of what the aircrew thought about the 2nd attempt on the target. The after action report seemed to indicate that the new Group Commander did not have the combat experience to lead and make such a decision. I disagree with that assumption.

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A point of note: NO BALL attacks on V-1 launching sites all had high escort cover numbers as they were dominantly coastal targets in range of London. I haven't read of a mission to Berlin or Magdeburg or Leipzig where the escort tip of the spear for target escort was low in numbers, and the Wing Commander called a re-run.

drgondog said:

A point of note: NO BALL attacks on V-1 launching sites all had high escort cover numbers as they were dominantly coastal targets in range of London. I haven't read of a mission to Berlin or Magdeburg or Leipzig where the escort tip of the spear for target escort was low in numbers, and the Wing Commander called a re-run.

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The target Sottevast was a storage silo for V weapons on the Cherbourg peninsula. Sottevast - Wikipedia

Dresden, February 1945 there was negligible German defence from flak or fighters, this may have been a factor in the decision of that one unit to go around and make another run. There certainly does not seem to have been a set of procedures covering a missed bomb run, though secondary and tertiary targets are always listed in every set of operational orders I've seen. I'm confident that this at least was standard.
The secondary targets were intended as back up if the primary was obscured (unless the primary target was also to be attacked by radar) or not found. I obviously don't know exactly what happened at Dresden but in the case of the late arriving squadron of the 305th, I suspect that for whatever reason the lead bombardier missed or mis-identified his initial point, meaning he was never set up correctly in the latter stages of the bomb run. The only choices were to dump the bombs somewhere in the region of Dresden, fly on to a secondary target, or go around and try again. Whoever was in command of that squadron took the decision to have another go.