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They built 1200 of the non-functional He177s during WW2. Having it work in the form of the He177B and they are good to go; the real issue if fuel though.In the lead up to the war, a shortage of resources and bottlenecks within the aircraft industry in Germany forced a choice on the Luftwaffe leadership, either a large tactical bomber force or a smaller mix of tactical and strategic bombers, but not both.
So the question on whether the Germans should have built a strategic bomber force is redundant, they were never in the position of being able to build a large enough strategic bomber force capable of achieving any significant results.
Couldn't agree more about the fuel, but 1200 heavy bombers even if they were available at the same time instead of over a couple of years is nowhere near large enough to form the basis of a effective strategic bomber force.They built 1200 of the non-functional He177s during WW2. Having it work in the form of the He177B and they are good to go; the real issue if fuel though.
Couldn't agree more about the fuel, but 1200 heavy bombers even if they were available at the same time instead of over a couple of years is nowhere near large enough to form the basis of a effective strategic bomber force.
They built 1200 of the non-functional He177s during WW2. /QUOTE]
But put that in perspective. The British built 14,000 Lancasters and Halifaxes, which functioned very well. In addition thousands of other bombers bombers which could be considered strategic were produced.
Now add about 23,000 B17s and B24s and you have a total bomber production of well over 30,000. Not all operated against Germany, but a large majority, particularly the British types, did.
People still argue today about just how effective this massive investment was in hampering German war time production. 1,200 strategic bombers even if you could get a reasonable serviceability rate, is nothing more than a pin prick. You haven't just got to produce that force, you have to support it, something the Germans failed to do even on this limited scale.
Cheers
Steve
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You haven't just got to produce that force, you have to support it, something the Germans failed to do even on this limited scale.
Cheers
Steve
Training the thousands of crew needed.....
They built 1200 of the non-functional He177s during WW2.
But put that in perspective. The British built 14,000 Lancasters and Halifaxes, which functioned very well. In addition thousands of other bombers bombers which could be considered strategic were produced.
Now add about 23,000 B17s and B24s and you have a total bomber production of well over 30,000. Not all operated against Germany, but a large majority, particularly the British types, did.
People still argue today about just how effective this massive investment was in hampering German war time production. 1,200 strategic bombers even if you could get a reasonable serviceability rate, is nothing more than a pin prick. You haven't just got to produce that force, you have to support it, something the Germans failed to do even on this limited scale.
Cheers
Steve
Bombing Germany is not bombing the USSR; the Soviets were highly concentrated in production of everything, including electricity, so were highly vulnerable in a way that Germany was not with its dispersed production.
The targets for Eisenhammer were near clearly identifiable physical features; the targets could be hit by daylight and the Soviets lacked an integrated defense system, so would only have point defense by some of these targets. I've read the planning documents for Eisenhammer, as they have been published in English by Richard Muller in "The German Air War in Russia" and "The Luftwaffe's Way of War". It was certainly doable with 120 strategic bombers had they been available in June 1943. Especially as the He177B would have been able to use its full warload of 6 SD1000 bombs on all of these targets from bases available at that time due to the relatively close proximity. Add in a Geschwader or two of Ju188 or Do217s with incendiaries to follow up and the targets would have been taken out.This is simply not true. Even if the targets are relatively concentrated they still have to be hit. The further the bombers flew, and the less able they were to rely on electronic aids the less likely they were to find the targets, let alone hit them. Even in 1944/45, on longer raids, the RAF and USAAF were occasionally bombing the wrong cities not the wrong factories. That was with the benefit of many years experience.
120 He 177s would have had no significant effect whatsoever on Soviet production in my opinion. The occasional inconvenience for sure, but in terms of total Soviet output, irrelevant. It would certainly not have been enough to force the Soviets to jump through the kinds of hoops that the Germans did to disperse and protect their production facilities, nor would it force them to commit the vast resources to air defence that the Germans did.
Cheers
Steve
The plan of the operation was created in 1943 by Professor Heinrich Steinmann (1899–1969), an official at the Reich Air Ministry. A bombing raid was to destroy twelve turbines in water and steam power-plants near Moscow, Gorky, Tula, Stalinogorsk and under the Rybinsk Reservoir, as well as to attack certain substations, transmission lines and factories. If the attack were to succeed in destroying just two thirds of the turbines it would have knocked out about 75 percent of the power used by the Soviet defence industry. Only two smaller energy centers behind the Urals and in the Soviet Far East would have been left intact. At this time the Soviet Union had no turbine manufacturing capabilities and the only repair facility (in Leningrad) had been heavily damaged.
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Even if the targets are relatively concentrated they still have to be hit.
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The word "concentrated" has a different meaning in Russia than in Europe: where in U.K. or Germany factories occupied a couple of acres, tens, in the best case, in Russia factories occupied hundreds, if not thousands of acres, with lots of void space in between. Space is not a problem in Russia.
So I seriously doubt that 120 flying bombers ( that means at least 240 on the front line, that means a capacity factor of 50%, extremely high in a front like Russia in war conditions, with airplanes that never went out of theeting problems: and not to speak of training) could have obtained the necessary bombing saturation not to destroy completely the factories, but just to do significant damage.
And that in the best possible condition; daylight, not efficient A.A. or fighters, perfect identification of the targets etc.
Luftwaffe made simply a multiplication: how may bombs per acre to destroy the XY target? How many acres?
The result was a very conspicuous number......
And this was mainly the reason why Germans so much insisted on dive bombing, as a better accuracy implies less bombs and less airplanes. The result of this doctrine are well known.
The whole of the 8th A.F. could not succeed in destroying the Schweinfurt ball bearings factory completely.....
In Regensburg all six main workshops of the Messerschmitt factory were destroyed or severely damaged, as were many supporting structures including the final assembly shop. In Schweinfurt the destruction was less severe but still extensive. The two largest factories, Kugelfischer Company and Vereinigte Kugellager Fabrik I, suffered 80 direct hits.[23] 35,000 m² (380,000 square feet) of buildings in the five factories were destroyed, and more than 100,000 m² (1,000,000 square feet) suffered fire damage.[24] All the factories except Kugelfischer had extensive fire damage to machinery when incendiaries ignited the machine oil used in the manufacturing process.[25]
Albert Speer reported an immediate 34 per cent loss of production,[26]
A small number of aircraft, which is all the Luftwaffe could have fielded, would have been very lucky to do any significant damage even to such a target, assuming that they could find it.
The British and I assume the Americans, did similar calculations to those mentioned above and it was the basis for the decision to employ ever larger numbers of bombers. By dropping literally thousands of bombs they had a reasonable, they thought, chance of actually hitting something that mattered. When this didn't work very well the solution was to burn down whole swathes of a city by dropping ever higher percentages of incendiary munitions.Again this assumes that the attacking force has succeeded in navigating to the correct place, by no means a given.
There is a general tendency to over estimate both the radius and level of damage caused by high explosive bombs, particularly against machinery and factory installations.
Cheers
Steve
Your framing is a-historical; the British resorted to burning cities down when they couldn't operate by daylight anymore and it was thought that dehousing workers would wreck production and moral better than going after production itself; yet by 1944 the oil and transport plans were by daylight once escorts with range were available, as were continental airbases making the trip shorter; the precision missions by day against those targets wrecked the German economy in a matter of months. That was against a much more decentralized economy. The USAAF never focused on burning cities down other than participating in the Hamburg and Dresden raids, though these were even against specific targets in those cities. US precision bombing of German factories had a large impact on the German economy throughout 1943-45 and they never wavered; it just took them time to find the pressure point to cause an economic collapse, which they found in 1944 with oil and transportation. For the Luftwaffe, they had identified Soviet electrical generation as the pressure point, which the Soviets agreed after the war would have collapsed their production; the key was that destruction was unnecessary, rather damage to the machinery was all that was needed, due to it being irreplaceable except by foreign companies, which would take at least 1 year to start receiving replacements; in the meantime something like 75% of Soviet defense production would be out of power; they lacked domestic electrical engineering production, so pre-war sourced from Germany, which gave Germany a deep knowledge of Soviet electrical infrastructure, as they had built and installed most of it in the 1920s and 30s. So the standard of effectiveness is much less for German bombing of Soviet electrical infrastructure than of USAAF and RAF bombing of German industry or electrical infrastructure.A small number of aircraft, which is all the Luftwaffe could have fielded, would have been very lucky to do any significant damage even to such a target, assuming that they could find it.
The British and I assume the Americans, did similar calculations to those mentioned above and it was the basis for the decision to employ ever larger numbers of bombers. By dropping literally thousands of bombs they had a reasonable, they thought, chance of actually hitting something that mattered. When this didn't work very well the solution was to burn down whole swathes of a city by dropping ever higher percentages of incendiary munitions.Again this assumes that the attacking force has succeeded in navigating to the correct place, by no means a given.
There is a general tendency to over estimate both the radius and level of damage caused by high explosive bombs, particularly against machinery and factory installations.
Cheers
Steve