Ad: This forum contains affiliate links to products on Amazon and eBay. More information in Terms and rules
Didn't they also carry the occasional Cookie to bust water mains while the incendiaries played their merry havoc? Or were those in the main force bombers?
The 'cookie' and other HE bombs were intended to blow open roofs and knock down walls, allowing the incendiaries to spread fire more easily.
The main force carried similar loads. Only the Pathfinder force carried a different load out, with some of the HE and/or incendiaries replaced with target indicator bombs and/or flares.
It's a shame indeed that us Americans and the Brits couldn't co-ordinate more closely on a combined objective that we could probably just murder. I think we got as close as hopeful with the targeting of fuel and railway resources.
It took time for the Allies to realize that a target would have to be hit repeatedly to knock it out and keep it out.
I appreciate the pull-up. I'd always thought, for some reason, that the cookies were specifically to break underground water mains. It's good to have misconceptions removed.
I knw HE was used to break buildings and provide more burning surface, but I'd always thought the heavy bombs were specifically to break underground pipes.
I'll definitely be googling some more reading tomorrow, thanks!
Most of the lack of cooperation can be laid at Harris' feet. While he was instrumental in forging Bomber Command into a potent weapon, he really should have been replaced by the fall of 1944, if not earlier. But by then his stature had grown to the point that the political will to do so wasn't there.
Speer in his memoirs makes exactly this point, that had the Allies coordinated and practiced closer follow-up, their raids would have been more effective. If I remember he points out that Bomber Command attacked Peenemunde rather than following up on our useful -- but disastrous -- American raid on Schweinfurt.
Yeah, I remember some of it as well.
He remarked on a number of critical nodes that were never subject to sustained attack. Chemical production, for example: certain chemicals were vital in the production of explosives. I recall also how he thought it odd the Americans went after airframes more than aircraft engine production, since if there aren't enough aircraft engines it doesn't matter how many more airframes are produced.
For the USAAF, airframes got priority because the aero engine plants were harder targets to locate and hit as compared to airframe production.
For all our bluster about pickle-barrel bombing, we too had a hard time hitting a bull in the ass with a bass-fiddle. Burying the relevant city day-and-night for a few days would likely be much more useful, all humaneness set aside for another conversation.
Well, the Germans shrugged off Hamburg, Cologne, Dresden, the RAF Ruhr program, and so on. -109 production rose in 1944 despite our specific targeting of that.
The increase in German military production is often trotted out as proof that the strategic bombing campaign failed. However, that's an overly simplistic assessment. It ignores the challenging question of what German production COULD have been if it WASN'T affected by the Allied bombing effort. Clearly, that's almost impossible to quantify but, without doubt, strategic bombing hurt the German war effort and kept production levels in check.
I'll definitely be googling some more reading tomorrow, thanks!
British bombs in WW II. The 4000lb cookie was essentially a metal can full of HE. This one has a drum tail attached to the left end.
This is the nose. there were different noses.
It had great blast effect but ability to penetrate hard surfaces was not great. Even bombs with thicker walls sometimes split open before detonating.
Speer in his memoirs makes exactly this point, that had the Allies coordinated and practiced closer follow-up, their raids would have been more effective. If I remember he points out that Bomber Command attacked Peenemunde rather than following up on our useful -- but disastrous -- American raid on Schweinfurt.
Peenemünde was an important target.
Still, a raid against Schweinfurt even a few weeks after the August 17 raid could have been very effective.
I would not make an equivalency of bombing enemy civilians behind enemy lines to racially targeted mass murder in territory Germany had conquered and occupiedThe einsatzgruppen work in Russia and the Ukraine sort of make all that "bombing of civilians" stuff moot, don'tcha think? The Germans certainly didn't spare any civilians during Barbarossa, so I don't think they have any room to squeal about it. Maybe the Allied efforts should have tried to spare civilians more, but hey, Germany started the whole war mess, and should have forseen that "what goes around, comes around".
Peenemünde was an important target.
Still, a raid against Schweinfurt even a few weeks after the August 17 raid could have been very effective.
The increase in German military production is often trotted out as proof that the strategic bombing campaign failed. However, that's an overly simplistic assessment. It ignores the challenging question of what German production COULD have been if it WASN'T affected by the Allied bombing effort. Clearly, that's almost impossible to quantify but, without doubt, strategic bombing hurt the German war effort and kept production levels in check.
The Science of Bombing by Randall Wakelam examines the role of the Operational Research Section in making the bombing campaign more efficient. Might be worth a look.
If I had access to my regular computer, I could suggest quite a few other books to consider. But just going to Google Books and searching will often turn up plenty of potentially interesting reads, and frequently with enough free preview pages to give a good idea of the content.
When the National Archives in the U.K. was offering free downloads of much of its digital collection, I took the opportunity to download a large number of Bomber Command squadron ORBs for those squadrons which regularly reported the bomb loadouts. Eventually I'm going to turn that data into a database of sorts.