Bomber offensive vs. Gemany: you are in charge

For the same reason large organisations often do: the justify their own existence. The air force lobby was strong in Britain, and I think it goes without saying that self-evaluations are hardly the most objective assessments..

If I were in charge, I would have demanded more Mosquitoes to be made and used them as both day and night intruders attcking with precision rather than the carpet bombing used by the heavies.
I am not decrying the efforts of those who served, but it is what I would have done!

I would also have had the Westland Whirlwind fitted with Merlins as used to attack any ground targets within range.

If the Luftwaffe aircraft were just waiting for troops to land, then i'll ask the same question that a lot of German troops in Normandy, June 44 asked.
Where is , or was , the Luftwaffe ???

Tante Ju said:

For the same reason large organisations often do: the justify their own existence. The air force lobby was strong in Britain, and I think it goes without saying that self-evaluations are hardly the most objective assessments..

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So what would you make of the oft quoted USSBS?

Cheers

Steve

vinnye said:

I would also have had the Westland Whirlwind fitted with Merlins as used to attack any ground targets within range.

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I like the Whirlwind and think it got a bit of a raw deal but it was a small airplane (smaller than a Typhoon) and was too small to be fitted with Merlins. You could make a "Whirlwind type" of fighter with twin Merlins but it would share very few actual parts with e Whirlwind.

stona said:

So what would you make of the oft quoted USSBS?

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Its a useful source of primary data and it is generally much more cautious in drawing conclusions.

It is also very different compared to your source, which only seems to present an opinion, that the USSB also presents the factual basis on which the opinion was formed.

Tante Ju said:

It is also very different compared to your source, which only seems to present an opinion

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That is simply not so.
The British conducted their own survey,to which the report refers. It was published as "The Strategic Air War Against Germany 1939-45".

Anyway,off topic and I can see we'll have to agree to disagree.

Cheers

Steve

I had not realised that the Peregrine engine was so different than a Merlin. I knew that the Peregrine had its problems - which detrarcted from the overall package. Thats why I said I would have put he Merlin in - to make it reliable. The plane was often described very favourably by those who flew it, so with reliable engines - it may have had a larger role to play?

We have other threads on this, Basically the unreliable part is way over blown. Two squadrons of Whirlwinds continued to operate for 1 1/2-2 years after the engine went out of production, Replacement engines and aircraft being drawn from existing stocks.

Decision to stop production of the Whirlwind and Peregrine had been made before they really saw any operational use. No other aircraft used the Peregrine and none were likely to, R-R had too much on their plate to bother with updating a 80% Merlin.

This newbie has been thinking.

A way to victory by bombing Germany: engineer a moral collapse of the will to fight on.

Prime ref: Bombing States and Peoples in Western Europe 1940-45 Editors, Baldoli, Knapp, Overy.
Continuum 2011 New York.

The book includes an account (chapter 3) of spontaneouos evacuations in Italy and names some determinants : disrespect for the authorities, bungling, miscommunication, conflict, difficulty of consensus in a dictatorship, presence of the Germans.

Getting to the point, to make a start, keep the raids as historically occured but change the bomb load. No incendiaries, all HE. But instead of impact fuzes, use chemical timed type 0-6 days delay type M123 and variants and developments, a problem to handle (contains glass capsule) but.. time setting : random. Would last longer than 6 days in the winter.

Advantages of a parallel kind.
You only need (guess) an area attack, about 1 500lber per 200m radius to pose a critical psychological threat to all civilian life - but no killing actually required. 'Clear air' bombing first to last, no smoke, little dust, no updraft no turbulence,

Purpose
My aim is to provoke civilians to evacuate but not to disperse industries (100% lost productiion of a whole town/city for a week, again and again and again) using less bombs and raiding more towns at once - civil authorities overwhelmed, no intact cities to evacuate to temporarily, civil transport to city hubs disrupted, no trams no trains, train systems are usually built around city centre terminii so freight would be impaired too. asssuming train drivers wont walk to work through a 'random minefield'

and all over in a week, rinse and repeat....

1000 bomber raid can attack 10 primaries maybe 20. Low losses, drop at max height max speed, drop blind on Gee/Oboe if necessary. Render expensive concrete civil defence bunkers obsolete overnight. Put population at odds with authorities. Their adoption of same tactics on say London is not effective on morale and unlikelly to persist. (Britain did not invest in mass shelters. UK Government never posed as infallible and invincible. Center of allied production is US not UK. Non lethal weapons - incompatible with Nazi revenge philosophy. They would not laugh, we would - a lot.)

Counter measures, Uxo teams, are expensive and take time to train en masse. The Reich might take months to invent and deploy a way to deal quickly with a novel attack like this.

More to follow if anyone is interested. Apologies if this is old hat.

The trouble with using something like the M123 too much, the enemy will develope a countermeasure.
As it was the bomb disposal units when confronted with a unexploded bomb didn't know if the dealing with a dud, a long delay bomb, or a long delay bomb with a antidisturbance fuze. The M123 was of the last type, and targeted bomb disposal teams. But if they were up against M123 fuzed bombs often they would have eventually come up with a disarming procedure.
There was a disarming prodical for the M123, but it was still classified in the early 70's, might still be for all I know. I was a munitions specialist in the late 60's, I had my suspicions of what some of the precedure was, but the exact prodical was above my classification.

Thank you. Your expertise is what i had hoped for. My uninformed guess was about 3-4 months in war conditions to train a mass of uxb teams to clear up say 10 cities containing 10,000 M123 bombs in total in under a day or so. Would you care to comment on how far adrift i am in that 3-4 month estimate? My hope was that the initial professional response would be to protect the bombs in critical areas with piles of sandbags and just leave the rest for 6 days. That would be enough to get an evacuation effect going, i think.

Interesting theory, bbear, but I don't believe that even your suggestion would have the desired result. Area bombing was a false prophecy (not to mention a waste of resources) and was not going to sway the population into giving in. This has been raised in another thread, but worth doing here (if it hasn't been done already - I'm not reading through every post; I just don't have time); the best solution is targeting specific works, factories, airfields etc and destroying them in precision raids using sophisticated radio navigation aids to improve accuracy. In my opinion, the use of small, fast, high speed bombers (i.e. Mosquitoes) would be more profitable since they could get to and from the target areas faster and with a greater measure of success in numbers than heavies. Not to forget that when one is lost, just a crew of two went with it, not seven or more individuals.

Delayed action bombs have to be dropped with precision close to vital targets, or they're wasted.
In a lot of cases they will be deep underground, with their tailfins tore off and at the surface. Impossible to miss, plus informing even ordinary troops what size of bomb is underground. The SOP for such situations is unless it's close to something vital, just condon it off and blow it up in place. Even a 750 bomb going off 10-12 feet underground will not do a lot of damage.

Yes, I understand and in fact readily agree to both of the last comments. As far as demolitiion effects go. (The thread has dealt with area and precision and B 17s and Mossies - probably twice. Parsifal made the telling summary that the effort in the CBO over Germany was worth the costs - but only known to be so with hindsight (my words i hope i did the summary justice). I am aware of the 'hot threads' on a similar vein elsewhere.

I am... unsettled .. by the lack of popular support for the bomber boys so I'm looking for a more positive account of strategic air power potential in WWII. Thats my motivation.

What i'm trying for is not a demolition effect. I just remembered that you would probably call it a form of Psyops -depriving the enemy of the will to fight on. I think thats actually not psyops as such but one form of strategic victory in conventional theory ?

stage 1 was to unsettle his mind and social cohesion, the power to provoke spontaneous evacuation at a time of our choosing was one way to demonstrate this. The time fuse idea my meddling too deep in matters i don't know enough about. But for understanding by this group i needed an actual suggestion not a blank space. The possible short drop in industrial output was a benign by-product on an intermediate aim not the end objective in itself - i'm looking for capitulation.

Now i've said psyops on a technical forum we can probably draw a line under this. I hope it was fun not annoying. Thanks again.

A way to victory by bombing Germany: engineer a moral collapse of the will to fight on.

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I think the war showed that this is a failed option. I believe moral increased in Britain during the BoB. And Berlin did not lay down even after Hamburg and Dresden.

I think some of us are forgetting how moral was "encouraged" in Germany.
It was a capital crime to listen to foreign broadcast during the 3rd Reich. A lot more Germans than just Sophia Scholl and her other White Rose friends went under the guilotine for the treason of handing out flyers or posting placards critical of the Nazis. We're talking numbers of over 16,000 in Germany and Austria.

Just a careless word overheard by the wrong person could end up with you undergoing some tough questioning in the local Gestapo headquarters.

Such measures tend make it hard to determine just how good the average Germans moral was.

Bombing as a means of breaking morale and then surrender did not work. that should be obvious. But bombing of the civilian population did not solely rely or was carried out for that purpose. area bombing had an effect on productivity, how much is harder to quantfy. People made homeless, people forced to undertake civil defence, people manning flak guns are all people not building or producing things. That adds to the inefficiency of industry. Bombing was successful in that regard. It just depends on how much.

Psychologically, bombardment does affect morale. Conflicts during and since the war (eg the invasion of Iraq) shows that the general population will generally not overthrow their leaders and seek peace terms. But during the war, I think it entirely plausible that peoples productivity would suffer because of bombing. so too would the quality of the production undertaken. The debate should centre on how much.

During the war, some very competent Germans made what they believed to be accurate estimates for production target. For example, the Armaments ministry estimatedd they could produce 600 tanks per month. The best month achieved was 370. It was a critical piece of kit, so one can reasonably expect the Germans would give its production a very high priority. Why werent its production targets met. A whole bunch of reasons, many of which have nothing to do with bombing. Also, there might be a 10 or 20% discrepancy because production capabilities were overestimated. but at least some of that shortfall was due to bombing. In the case of the panther, at least 5 months of engine production was ost for example, because the engine factory was so heavily bombed. How much lost production, or reduced production was there because people were busy repairing their hous, or looking after injured relatives or similar. I think there was an effect, and I think it was substantial

parsifal said:

I think there was an effect, and I think it was substantial

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I agree but it is almost impossible to quantify,despite the best efforts of the USSBS.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. We should be asking what all those graphs and histograms representing German production might have looked like had there been no bombing.

Cheers

Steve

Exactly