Nusiance Bombers

[William T. Anderson]

Not to slight the RAAF, they were also active equipped with Catalinas and Hudsons.

Sorry but away from forum. Did anyone respond to the Black Cat questions directly? The US Navy used PBYs in the South Pacific as long-range bombers flying mostly at night deep behind JA lines.They operated from austere forward bases as pictured in attached. They used a British RADAR system to assist in navigation and locating targets. There are several good books on operations. My father was CO, VPB-33, that set a record for tons of shipping sunk for 1 month in September 1944.

 

[swampyankee]

I guess it depends on the meaning of "nuisance".

Going from the "washing machine charlies" which used a single plane (minimal resource/effort) to try to effect moral and/or readiness by sleep deprivation to large raids (large resource/effort) as part of a misdirection program which would result in the enemy shifting his resources to different areas.

Whatever the intent of of the Doolittle raid it did have the latter effect. The Japanese kept more aircraft/AA guns "at home" than prior to the raid.

Possibly something more akin to what is being thought of as a nuisance raid would be the Japanese Balloon Bombing offensive, but to be a nuisance people would have had to notice it, and there would have had to be a response. As an aside, the definition I'm using of nuisance raid is one which is designed to be annoying, not damaging.

 

[muskeg13]

I'm in the middle of reading "Mission to the Kurils" by John Cloe which chronicles air and naval operations from the Aleutians against the Kuril Islands from August 1943 until the end of the war. Kuril operations amounted to a protracted series of nuisance raids. USAAF 11th AF and rotating Naval Air land based bombers maintained a sustained deception plan to fool the Japanese that American and Canadian forces were planning to invade the Kurils from the Aleutian Islands and thereby tie up a great amount of air and ground resources that couldn't be employed in the central and south Pacific. Small numbers of B-24s, PV-1s, PV-2s, and Catalinas (initially) attacked Japanese installations often singly and blindly to keep the enemy "on their toes." Even the occasional fleeting naval bombardments could be considered nuisance raids.

 

[parsifal]

Japanese used night raids, by types such as the betty to harass USN carriers at night. They had some success with these techniques, as they were fully intent on hitting the carriers if at all possible. They are in the category of nuisance raids, because the numbers of attackers involved in these nuisance raids were always small

In the jungle, the IJA did not use aircraft, but they would use individual soldiers to play on the fears of the GIs who made generally poor jungle fighters, usually spooked by the terrors of the night and the unknown green hell as they referred to it.

The Japanese were very aggressive jungle fighters, and played on this US timidity. They had a harder time against the Australian army, which had proper training programs underway for jungle fighting at places like the Jungle warfare school at Canungra (from november 1942), the gureilla warfare school at Forster in Victoria, the special forces warfare school on Frasier island, much of the training work pioneered and worked out from the beginning of the war in the pacific at the mobile Forces HQ based in Darwin. The Japanese had established similar training schools before the war on the islands of Formosa and Palau, and later on Sumatra and the PI. the US lagged behind these pioneering efforts which made life difficult for their general entry recruits in the jungle. These difficulties did lead to a change in strategy by the Americans, After their brutal experiences on guadacanal, the central solomons and New Guinea, they all but abandoned aggressive patrolling. They would capture the facilities they needed, let the remainder "wither on the vine", whatever the hell that was supposed to be, and then move on. as a strategy it worked, kind of, but it was driven, in part by the poor showing and lack of confidence in the jungle, that in part was brought on by the effects of these nuisance attacks on their untrained troops.