Effectiveness of Heavy Bomber defensive fires vs LW Fighters

[Readie]

These heavy bombers were like a flock of geese flying in formation. Would improving their firepower have made an appreciable difference versus these fighters? I doubt it. That wasn't their problem. You send any non-fighter aircraft into a zone like that on a mission and they have to be fighter-escorted. That was their problem.

I have often wondered if having 'gunships' ie a heavy bomber armed to the teeth with cannon / .50 mg but, no bomb load could have acted as a better bomber stream defence rather than arming individual bombers...
What do you think?
Cheers
John

 

[CobberKane]

I have often wondered if having 'gunships' ie a heavy bomber armed to the teeth with cannon / .50 mg but, no bomb load could have acted as a better bomber stream defence rather than arming individual bombers...
What do you think?
Cheers
John

I believe exactly this was tried with the YB40. It didn't work - one of the problems was that after the standard B-17s had dropped their bombs the gun and armour -laden YB40 was unable to keep up.

 

[VBF-13]

I have often wondered if having 'gunships' ie a heavy bomber armed to the teeth with cannon / .50 mg but, no bomb load could have acted as a better bomber stream defence rather than arming individual bombers...
What do you think?
Cheers
John

I liked the idea, John, until I read CobberKane's reply. Now I'm in doubt.

 

[Milosh]

I believe exactly this was tried with the YB40. It didn't work - one of the problems was that after the standard B-17s had dropped their bombs the gun and armour -laden YB40 was unable to keep up.

The YB-40 did result in the the chin turret, offset waist gun positions and improved tail gunner station, usually nicknamed the "Cheyenne", after the Cheyenne modification center for the B-17G.

 

[stona]

As Cobberkane has already noted the YB 40 simply didn't work as planned.
The few that did enter service only flew as far a Germany a couple of times,the rest of the time joining missions already well within the range of fighter escort. The timing mitigated against any attempt at developing the concept as by the time the first examples were entering service long range fighter escorts were becoming available.

It is slightly reminiscent of the early German Zerstorer concept in which heavily armed twin engined turret fighters would blast a path for the bombers. The Luftwaffe soon realised that some of the proposed zerstorer were going to be slower and less manoueverable than the bombers they were supposed to protect!

Cheers
Steve

 

[Tante Ju]

reality is bombing civilian targets made perfect sense, remove the workers from thier houses, from thier jobs, take away thier skills either by driving them away, killing or maiming, and you remove the ability of your enemy to produce weapons that kill your people!
why should the people who make the weapons that kill your people be immune from attack?

Firstly because nations have agreed to the principle in several international treaties that the people who make the weapons that kill your people (aka civillians) should be immune from attack. There are several moral and practical considerations to that, but it largely works because when you start to do that, the other side will start to do that to you as well. Since wars rarely last forever, its actually more advantageous to everyone to trade with the guys you did not kill in the previous war.

Secondly because it just not works, its not a viable military strategy, and never was since the stone age. From the cold and calculating POV randomly killing people, the workers includes is a lot harder to do than destroying the industry itself. The Allies have killed about half a million German civilians, more than half of them women and children who did not contribute much, if anything to the war. How many German workers were killed - 10.000, 50.000, maybe even 100.000 at worst? How many of them were working in the armament industry, and just how irreplaceable they were? That is the cold hearted approach but IMHO it shows the impracticality of such strategy. Randomly killing a couple of Krupp workers in every raid on Essen for years seem to be very very ineffective compared to just ground the Krupp factory itself. Of course if you can't hope to hit the factory at all (which was Bomber Commands situation until about 1942), random terror bombings were still better than nothing.

 

[Tante Ju]

The 8th AF certainly wasn't "enthusiastic" about bombing civilians, though. At the time they admitted to area bombing cities, and the orders and post raid reports show that, but by the end of the war they were using the euphemism "marshaling yards" to hide their area bombing raids, and their post war reports made no mention of the area bombing attacks they had ordered.

That is because a marshaling yard is an easily identifiable target, and does not equal to what Bomber Command referred to as 'area (=terror) bombing' of city centres. Marshalling yards are not in the most densely populated city centers to start with, but further out, well before the large 'head' RR stations typical of the era. They are also perfectly valid targets (and in fact the most vulnerable part of any RR system).

 

[stona]

See below....dunno what happened!

 

[stona]

Terror was not the intention of any British or US raid,that was left to weapons like the V-1 and V-2. The allied raids were attempting to hit valid targets and obtain valid objectives. De-housing German workers might seem a dubious objective to someone sitting on the moral high ground with seventy years of hindsight but at the time it was not the case.

The raids resulted in the diversion of huge amounts of men and materiel from the other active front in the East and caused considerable dislocation and cost to the German economy.We can argue about the figures until the cows come home but it was significant.
I return to my original question,the one we should be asking....."What would the German economy have achieved if there had been no bombing?"

If I was running the bombing campaigns with the tools available at the time I hope I would have the courage to do what was done back then.

BTW the major marshalling yards here in Birmingham are most certainly surrounded by extensive housing and other facilities. The Luftwaffe bombed them causing considerable casualties. The main marshalling yards were built over the river Rea just to the East of the city centre and the Goods yards were next to the old Curzon Street station which,by any measure,is in the city centre.

More than 2,000 tons of bombs fell on my city destroying 12,391 houses, 302 factories, 34 churches, halls and cinemas, and 205 other buildings. Thousands of other properties were damaged. I'd happily repay that with 20,000 tons on a similar industrial city in the Ruhr.

Steve

 

[Tante Ju]

Terror was not the intention of any British or US raid,that was left to weapons like the V-1 and V-2. The allied raids were attempting to hit valid targets and obtain valid objectives.

"It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed. Otherwise we shall come into control of an utterly ruined land. ... The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing. ... I feel the need for more precise concentration upon military objectives, such as oil and communications behind the immediate battle-zone, rather than on mere acts of terror and wanton destruction, however impressive."

- Prime Minister Winston Churchill Memo to the Chiefs of Staff Committee and the Chief of Air Staff, March 28, 1945, Max Hastings, Bomber Command (NY: Dial Press, 1979), p. 344.

"The destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers, and the disruption of civilized community life throughout Germany [is the goal]. ... It should be emphasized that the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives; the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale; and the breakdown of morale both at home and at the battle fronts by fear of extended and intensified bombing are accepted and intended aims of our bombing policy. They are not by-products of attempts to hit factories."

- Air Marshal Arthur Harris to Sir Arthur Street, Under Secretary of State, Air Ministry, October 25, 1943. quoted in Tami Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare: The Evolution of British and American Ideas about Strategic Bombing, 1914-1945 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 220.

Weapons like the V-1 and V-2 were weapons of retaliation in kind, as the name implies.

 

[stona]

You are missing the point.The objectives listed by Harris were therefore considered valid targets.They had been since Rotterdam,unless you can give a plausible explanation or other purpose to that raid.

We were attempting to bomb the Germans into surrender. Noone knew that this wouldn't work because,as Harris said,it had never been tried before. Harris' generation were haunted by memories of the land warfare of WWI,something they sought,ultimately unsuccessfully,to avoid at any cost.....any cost.

To apply a modern morality to the mindset of early 20th century commanders is nonsense.

Do you have relatives slaughtered on the Western Front? Have you picked your way through the ruins of the City of London,Coventry,Belfast,Liverpool etc? Their moral compass was calibrated quite differently from ours.

Churchill's comment was ill considered and an attempt,late in the day, to cover his own arse. He was never forgiven for that by either Harris or many other senior Bomber Command officers,not to mention the men who did the work. It's not atypical of the man,loyalty,personal or party was not exactly his strong point. At least we had the sense not to re-elect him when the fighting was done!

Steve

 

[CobberKane]

As has been mentioned earlier this discussion is all a bit off-subject in respect to the original thread, but I'm glad its been allowed to continue because there have been some thoughtful and considered views expressed. I think Stona made a good point - Bomber Command was perhaps a bit more honest with themselves about what they were trying to do than the USAF. I suspect that might have been a function of the fact that they had been in the war a couple of years before the US got involved and were past the initial hand-wringing.
Some previous contributors maintain that the US bombing was, for all its technical shortcomings, genuinely directed towards industry and infrastructure rather than civilians. I would respond that if it could be demonstrated that a given tonnage of American bombs killed fewer civilians than the same weight of British bombs, possibly. But the fact is that in the prosecution of the war all sides in the ETO did the same things to one another, irrespective of the language they used to describe what the where doing. Allied bombing killed far more German civilians than did German bombing Allied civilians. Did this represent greater malignancy on the part of the Allies? Of course not - it represented greater technical and industrial capacity in pursuit of the same objectives. The United States became the first nation ever to utilise a weapon of mass destruction - the effect was no worse than what was possible
given the conventional weapons of the time, just much more efficient. This did not reflect US moral inferiority but US technical superiority. Everybody was looking to crush the opposition by whatever means necessary. Today, should we really be telling ourselves that the thousands upon thousand of German civilians killed by the USAF were unavoidable accidents, or that the thousands upon thousands of Bomber Command aircrew who died in a campagin that required such enormous resources from their country are less deserving of memory than the heroic Spitfire pilot who went down in the Battle of Britain?
War makes monsters of us all.

 

[Readie]

We were attempting to bomb the Germans into surrender. Noone knew that this wouldn't work because,as Harris said,it had never been tried before. Harris' generation were haunted by memories of the land warfare of WWI,something they sought,ultimately unsuccessfully,to avoid at any cost.....any cost.

To apply a modern morality to the mindset of early 20th century commanders is nonsense.

Do you have relatives slaughtered on the Western Front? Have you picked your way through the ruins of the City of London,Coventry,Belfast,Liverpool etc? Their moral compass was calibrated quite differently from ours.

Churchill's comment was ill considered and an attempt,late in the day, to cover his own arse. He was never forgiven for that by either Harris or many other senior Bomber Command officers,not to mention the men who did the work. It's not atypical of the man,loyalty,personal or party was not exactly his strong point. At least we had the sense not to re-elect him when the fighting was done!

Steve

Well written and again I completely agree with you Steve.

You should add Plymouth to your list of heavily blitzed British cities. My in laws were youngsters in the blitz and they don't have a lot of good things to say about our previous foes.
Within my lifetime I have seen the gradual rebuilding of Plymouth which was only fully completed a few years ago when the last 'bomb-site' car parks gave way to student accommodation buildings.

The one thing that occurs to me is why we British feel we have to defend our actions in WW2.
Have the Japanese acknowledged their treatment of POW's ?
Do the American's feel guilty for the A bombs? or, are they pragmatic enough to say 'war is war' ?

Surely we have not reached the situation where the victors feel guilty?

I do wonder why BC is so easily held accountable, both on this site and on others too while the reasons for the bombing campaign are conveniently over looked.
Churchill was a man of war, not peace and his treatment of Harris and BC is a disgrace.
John

 

[Hop]

]Hop - what I said, and what I stand behind, is that USAAF-ETO did not Target citiy population centers, absent some perceived strategic site, as Doctrine.

As doctrine? Don't quite know what you mean, but the 8th AF did target German cities, both as the assigned objective and as secondary targets.

The first ordered 8th AF area attack on a German city was against Emden on 27 September 1943. According to Richard G Davis, they carried out an average of 1 assigned city area attack a week for the rest of the war.

First - the commanders weren't sending 1000 bombers, crews, bombs and fuel at low value targets.

1,000 bomber raids were rare for either the RAF or USAAF. The 8th AF tended to carry out multiple attacks by hundreds of bombers at a time. What's a "low value target"?

Second - USAAF was lousy at radar bombing on small targets selected as high value within a populated area But the target briefed was the target they were trying to hit via radar - and given a briefed radar location signature - would attempt to bomb on that target.

That target was frequently a city. The radar simply didn't give a good enough return to target a specific building.

Even if it had, knowing that bombs will fall almost randomly over an area of many square miles means designating an individual factory as the target, rather than the area of the city you are actually bombing, is semantics. The Germans theoretically aimed every V-1 they fired at London at Tower Bridge. Was the bridge the real target? Of course not, London was the target.

Third - there Were published guidelines regarding targets of opportunity when Primary and Secondary targets were completely obscured with no radar signature and the mission commander had the authority to direct the force to bomb them.

The standing orders I posted were for secondary targets, not targets of opportunity. The orders basically amounted to: bomb any city in Germany.

but rather to the target Selection - namely ball bearing factory, etc. versus 'any and all other as long as there was a concentration of German people to be had'.

That's exactly a description of 8th AF bombing instructions.

No towns or cities in Germany will be attacked
as secondary or last resort targets, targets of
opportunity, or otherwise, unless such towns contain
or have immediately adjacent to them, one (1)
or more military objectives. Military objectives
include railway lines; junctions; marshalling yards;
railway or road bridges, or other communications
networks; any industrial plant; and such obvious
military objectives as oil storage tanks, military
camps and barracks, troop concentrations, motor
transport or AFV parks, ordnance or supply
depots, ammunition depots; airfields; etc.

It has been determined that towns and cities
large enough to produce an identifiable return on
the H2X scope generally contain a large proportion
of the military objectives listed above. These centers,
therefore, may be attacked as secondary or
last resort targets through the overcast bombing
technique.

Look at what that says: any town large enough to show up on radar can be assumed to be a military target. What else does that mean but bomb anywhere there is a concentration of German people? What else is a town but a concentration of people (and buildings)?

Put it another way, can you find a deliberate RAF attack on a German town that does not fit that USAAF description of a "military" target? I certainly don't know of any.

 

[Hop]

Seperating this from RAF practice is simply splitting hairs. I would argue that the RAF was simply being a bit more honest about its capabilities. It had a couple of extra years to assess what could and couldn't be done.

I agree. Bombing a town is bombing a town. You could possibly make a distinction if those in charge didn't realise how inaccurate their attacks were, but claiming to be bombing a factory when a: you can't see the factory, only the town, and b: you know the vast majority of the bombs you drop are going to hit the town, is just trying to hide the truth. It's like saying the RAF didn't set out to bomb Dresden because the aiming point was a sports stadium in Dresden (chosen because it would be easy to identify)

 

[riacrato]

You are missing the point.The objectives listed by Harris were therefore considered valid targets.They had been since Rotterdam,unless you can give a plausible explanation or other purpose to that raid.

We were attempting to bomb the Germans into surrender. Noone knew that this wouldn't work because,as Harris said,it had never been tried before. Harris' generation were haunted by memories of the land warfare of WWI,something they sought,ultimately unsuccessfully,to avoid at any cost.....any cost.

To apply a modern morality to the mindset of early 20th century commanders is nonsense.

Do you have relatives slaughtered on the Western Front? Have you picked your way through the ruins of the City of London,Coventry,Belfast,Liverpool etc? Their moral compass was calibrated quite differently from ours.

Churchill's comment was ill considered and an attempt,late in the day, to cover his own arse. He was never forgiven for that by either Harris or many other senior Bomber Command officers,not to mention the men who did the work. It's not atypical of the man,loyalty,personal or party was not exactly his strong point. At least we had the sense not to re-elect him when the fighting was done!

Steve

You are essentially contradicting your previous post, no? Yes, TERROR was one of the goals of many of the bombings. Even if not for the sake of terror itself but to shorten the war by making the enemy give up. If you consider that acceptable, that is your choice. Are acts of German bombing of British civil population acceptable because they essentially had the goal of making Britain leave and stay out of the war?

 

[Readie]

You are essentially contradicting your previous post, no? Yes, TERROR was one of the goals of many of the bombings. Even if not for the sake of terror itself but to shorten the war by making the enemy give up. If you consider that acceptable, that is your choice. Are acts of German bombing of British civil population acceptable because they essentially had the goal of making Britain leave and stay out of the war?

Aerial bombardment goes back to WW1 where civilians where targetted for 'terror' purposes.

We cannot judge actions in WW2 by modern PC standards.

What we can truthfully say is that in desperate times anything goes... no quarter given or expected.

John

 

[Hop]

Much is made of the area bombing of Germany but, I had yet to see German aircrew being held accountable for the death and destruction they rained on Britain during the Blitz....

Since the 1950s most German historians have sought to portray the Luftwaffe as fighting a "clean" war, the RAF in contrast is claimed to have carried out war crimes against Germany. It seems to me to simply be an attempt to mitigate German war guilt.

Most modern German historians still practice this. If you look at Horst Boog, for example, he simply glosses over earlier Luftwaffe attacks in an effort to portray Britain as having started area bombing.

For example, one of Boog's claims:

The Luftwaffe made its first raids on military and economic objects in England only about seven weeks after the conclusion of the French campaign.

That's contrasted with British bombing of Germany in May, June and July 1940.

The Battle of France ended on 25 June 1940, so Boog is claiming the first Luftwaffe attacks on Britain were in mid August 1940. Granted the first attacks on the Orkneys etc in early 1940 are not well known, and the first larger scale attacks on the 5/6 June are usually overshadowed by the BoB, but no historian could possibly miss the much larger scale of attacks that were underway in early July.

The truth is that the Luftwaffe bombed Poland, then Norway, then France, Belgium and the Netherlands, and got around to Britain when it had finished with its closer enemies. In each of those countries it carried out large scale bombing of towns and killed hundreds or thousands of civilians.

 

[Tante Ju]

More than 2,000 tons of bombs fell on my city destroying 12,391 houses, 302 factories, 34 churches, halls and cinemas, and 205 other buildings. Thousands of other properties were damaged. I'd happily repay that with 20,000 tons on a similar industrial city in the Ruhr.

Hitler had exactly the same reasoning on 4 September 1940 in the Sportpalast, stona, as you do.

Ich habe drei Monate lang das nicht beantworten lassen, in der Meinung, sie würden diesen Unfug einstellen. Herr Churchill sah darin ein Zeichen unserer Schwäche. Sie werden e3 verstehen, daß wir jegt nun Nacht für Nacht die Antwort geben, und zwar steigend Nacht für Nacht. Und wenn die britische Luftwaffe 2000 oder 3000 oder 4000 Kilogramm Bomben wirft, dann werfen wir jetzt in einer Nacht 150 000, 180 000, 230 000, 300 000 und 400 000. Und wenn sie erklären, sie werden bei uns Städte in großem Ausmaß angreifen - wir werden ihre Städte ausradieren!


I see Boog is mentioned. One of the interesting thing Boog mentions about the 'bombing war' was how the War Cabinet was using the bombing of the besieged Rotterdam as an excuse to launch bomber attacks on German cities in order to draw the German bombers away from the collapsing front lines. It was expected that the Luftwaffe would make reprisal attacks on British cities. The idea of city bombing was already considered in automn 1939 by the War Cabinet, but was shelved for fear of German reprisal attacks.

When Churchill became PM, such considerations were put aside. The plan didn't work though (but it explains the 'Ich habe drei Monate lang das nicht beantworten lassen...' part, which was a reference to April-May 1940 RAF bombings on German cities).

Out of curiousity, I just found this Luftwaffe recon picture of the Orkney Isles.

 

[Readie]

Since the 1950s most German historians have sought to portray the Luftwaffe as fighting a "clean" war, the RAF in contrast is claimed to have carried out war crimes against Germany. It seems to me to simply be an attempt to mitigate German war guilt.

Most modern German historians still practice this. If you look at Horst Boog, for example, he simply glosses over earlier Luftwaffe attacks in an effort to portray Britain as having started area bombing.

For example, one of Boog's claims:



That's contrasted with British bombing of Germany in May, June and July 1940.

The Battle of France ended on 25 June 1940, so Boog is claiming the first Luftwaffe attacks on Britain were in mid August 1940. Granted the first attacks on the Orkneys etc in early 1940 are not well known, and the first larger scale attacks on the 5/6 June are usually overshadowed by the BoB, but no historian could possibly miss the much larger scale of attacks that were underway in early July.

The truth is that the Luftwaffe bombed Poland, then Norway, then France, Belgium and the Netherlands, and got around to Britain when it had finished with its closer enemies. In each of those countries it carried out large scale bombing of towns and killed hundreds or thousands of civilians.

Exactly Hop. Well said. The revisionist rewriting of modern history is a corrupt attempt to hide the truth.
John