Top ten Allies bomber

[Schweik]

One issue with an "Operational" or "Tactical" type air raid would be dealing with the AAA. Another difference between an air strike today vs. WW2 is that today we have many more tools to use against ground based air defenses, like radar tracking missiles and yes the JDAMs and laser guided bombs and so on. Drones.

I know a rule of thumb for fighter bombers in WW2 was to never make more than one low-level pass over a German target (like an airfield). They had very good AAA and once it 'woke up' it got a lot more dangerous. Sometimes on raids if there were multiple waves the second or third wave got wiped out.

For a raid like this to work they would either have to take out a lot of the AAA guns and vehicles in a first wave, and / or do the whole raid very quickly. Either way it would require a lot of preparation and careful planning. But, so did the raids on Gestapo HQ, the Dam buster raids and so on. Bomber command was pretty good at that.

 

[GrauGeist]

I think it could have been possible to target all of those military and military-industrial or logistical assets without incinerating the city and general population to the extent that was done.

The city was on a medieval layout, so infrastructure had grown into the city's layout.
It had a river that ran through it, intersections of major roads and rail yards - all choked with German troops.
As noted earlier, it also had a large concentration of administration facilities.

The bombing was intended to cripple the war effort just like any other city, however, two factors came into play:
One, it was crowded with older buildings that were highly flammable.
Two, the river in the middle of town provided the cooler, heavy air that promoted convection that fanned the flames into a maelstrom.

As a result, there was a much higher body count that say, a town like Cologne or Hamburg, plus many of the casualties were refugees caught out in the open.

 

[Schweik]

It wasn't just that buildings were flammable, they were dropping incendiaries.

I say hit the bridges, hit the rail yards, hit the administrative buildings just like they did with Gestapo HQ and prisons and so on with earlier Mosquito raids. Bomb and strafe the troops on the roads. But you don't need to burn the city. That kind of thinking is counterproductive in my opinion. I hope it's time has come and gone.

 

[GrauGeist]

Isn't this well past the tipping point in the war though?

What could we rationally say that the "tipping point" of the war was?
Operation Matterhorn was in early 1944, a year before the invasion of Iwo Jima and Okinawa and a year before the bombing of Tokyo (which made the bombing of Dresden pale in comparison).

 

[GrauGeist]

It wasn't just that buildings were flammable, they were dropping incendiaries.

I say hit the bridges, hit the rail yards, hit the administrative buildings just like they did with Gestapo HQ and prisons and so on with earlier Mosquito raids. Bomb and strafe the troops on the roads. But you don't need to burn the city. That kind of thinking is counterproductive in my opinion. I hope it's time has come and gone.

But all that was layered inside of a crowded, medieval city that was heavily defended by AA and several Luftwaffe bases.

 

[Schweik]

How strong was the Luftwaffe in Feb 1945? They had 784 Mustangs on the actual raid, at least according to Wikipedia. Luftwaffe bases should be the first target.

 

[TheMadPenguin]

To bring this into a history-coherent perspective, you'd need a map of the area and surroundings, with all ALL all the targets clearly marked. Then we'd give you a set of round stickers to put on the targets you want to hit. Then you'd see that the smallest stickers represent a 100-yard wide circle of bomb damage, the larger stickers are a mile wide, the largest are 3 or 4 miles in diameter. When you're done putting circles on all the targets that need hitting, there won't be that much city area left un-stickered. Then, recalling that the Germans (who are as smart as we are and as dedicated to victory as we) put smudge pots on the upwind side of probable targets to obscure our aim and degrade our bombing abilities, we must figure on replacing each sticker with one the next size larger. Finally, we know the war is over, the Germans know the war is over, they are just in a stupid grade of stubborn (or stubborn grade of stupid) and refuse to surrender even knowing the war is over. Accordingly, we pull out the bigger hammer and say "burn it all", and it's the right thing to do warfare-wise. My opinion.

 

[GrauGeist]

I don't recall specifics, but the RAF lost 6 Lancasters and the USAAF lost at least one B-17. I do know that there were a handful of Nachtjagers actively challenging the Lancs, but I'd have to look that up for actual numbers.
The initial raid by the RAF crippled the AA batteries, rendering the city defenseless, the Luftwaffe strength at the time was worn thin, as the Red Army was advancing from the east and along with it, the VVS.
By late winter 1945, lack of fuel, pilots and support was taking it's toll.

 

[TheMadPenguin]

By late winter 1945, lack of fuel, pilots and support was taking it's toll.

This was true a year earlier as well: late winter 1944.
NVM I see the error of my calendar keeping: late winter is Feb/Mar, and late Winter 1945 is before war end.

 

[Schweik]

To bring this into a history-coherent perspective, you'd need a map of the area and surroundings, with all ALL all the targets clearly marked. Then we'd give you a set of round stickers to put on the targets you want to hit. Then you'd see that the smallest stickers represent a 100-yard wide circle of bomb damage, the larger stickers are a mile wide, the largest are 3 or 4 miles in diameter. When you're done putting circles on all the targets that need hitting, there won't be that much city area left un-stickered. Then, recalling that the Germans (who are as smart as we are and as dedicated to victory as we) put smudge pots on the upwind side of probable targets to obscure our aim and degrade our bombing abilities, we must figure on replacing each sticker with one the next size larger. Finally, we know the war is over, the Germans know the war is over, they are just in a stupid grade of stubborn (or stubborn grade of stupid) and refuse to surrender even knowing the war is over. Accordingly, we pull out the bigger hammer and say "burn it all", and it's the right thing to do warfare-wise. My opinion.

Well you can make excuses and you are entitled to your opinion that intentionally incinerating all the civilians was the correct move, but I'd say pick a lane. The reality is they did targeted strikes (with fast bombers like Mosquitoes), daylight semi-targeted strikes (with B-17s etc.), and day/night incendiary strikes (with B-17s and Lancasters etc.), and the casualties from the latter were an order of magnitude more severe.

For example, ion 18 Dec 1944, the 8th AF sent 157 B-17s which bombed the railway infrastructure around Mainz, also an ancient medieval city with a dense town center. They dropped 430 metric tons of bombs, 89 people died. Big difference from A) targeting the whole city indiscriminately and B) dropping incendiaries. This is smaller than the scale of the attack, (and arguably the needed attack) against Dresden, but you could multiply that by 10 and you still are at just a fraction of the grisly massacre we actually had.

Operation Carthage against the Gestapo HQ in Copenhagen killed about 100 civilians, plus another 50 Danish cititzens working for the Gestapo. This was with 20 Mosquito bombers escorted by 30 fighters. Multiply that by 25, for roughly the scale of the Dresden raid, it would be about 10% of the casualties of the actual event. And I bet they would have gotten the job done.

 

[Schweik]

I don't recall specifics, but the RAF lost 6 Lancasters and the USAAF lost at least one B-17. I do know that there were a handful of Nachtjagers actively challenging the Lancs, but I'd have to look that up for actual numbers.
The initial raid by the RAF crippled the AA batteries, rendering the city defenseless, the Luftwaffe strength at the time was worn thin, as the Red Army was advancing from the east and along with it, the VVS.
By late winter 1945, lack of fuel, pilots and support was taking it's toll.

Exactly. So you could use the precision bombers in daylight. The fast bombers like Mosquitos and A-26s, and fighter bombers.

 

[GrauGeist]

The firebombing of London saw twice the civilian casualties than Dresden.

The firebombing of Tokyo saw more casualties than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

We have the luxury today of being critical of how leaders in the past made decisions, but those decisions were made based on what they knew at the time.
And at no point in history, have civilians been exempt from the cost of war, WWII was certainly a high-water mark for that sad truth, but definately not an exception.

 

[Schweik]

The firebombing of London saw twice the civilian casualties than Dresden.

Can you give me a source for that?

The firebombing of Tokyo saw more casualties than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

I certainly agree with that. The firebombing was actually worse than the nuclear attacks.

To me they were all grisly mistakes, from Guernica to Rotterdam, Coventry, Hamburg, Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Tokyo, and all the others IMO.

We have the luxury today of being critical of how leaders in the past made decisions, but those decisions were made based on what they knew at the time.
And at no point in history, have civilians been exempt from the cost of war, WWII was certainly a high-water mark for that sad truth, but definately not an exception.

Again, I'm not trying to assign blame or put a guilt trip on anybody. I know what kind of price aircrews of the heavy bombers paid. To me that is another reason why the strategy should be questioned. We all like WW2, and we are all aware that ultimately, it was about killing and destruction. I get that war is that way to civilians as well as combattants sometimes. But WW II was indeed an outlier, actually the whole 20th Century was, you have to go back to the 30 Years War before you saw anything that bad in Europe, and before that to Genghis Khan.

We do a lot of second guessing about tactics, strategy, equipment, training, design and every other aspect of (at least the Air) War in this forum, so I think it's worth exploring the Strategic bombing as well, even though I know it is sensitive.

 

[GrauGeist]

Can you give me a source for that?

I don't have my books or computers available yet, so I can't provide any authors on the casualties of London, however, I do recall their numbers were in the 40,000s range compared to Dresden's 20,000's.

Hopefully, one of the other members might be able to provide that as it'll be a few months before I get this #&!*$ remodelling done here...

 

[Vincenzo]

from wikipedia "By the war's end, just under 30,000 Londoners had been killed by the bombing, and over 50,000 seriously injured,[1] tens of thousands of buildings were destroyed, and hundreds of thousands of people were made homeless. "

 

[TheMadPenguin]

We do a lot of second guessing about tactics, strategy, equipment, training, design and every other aspect of (at least the Air) War in this forum, so I think it's worth exploring the Strategic bombing as well, even though I know it is sensitive.

Here's my exploration: Suppose we spent the money & manpower on P-47's instead of B-17's (3:1 ration in aircraft cost) and mosquitoes instead of Lancasters (dunno the cost ratio there). Suppose we targetted power, transport, and government "critical points" instead of factories or cities. In what ways could we have fought the war better? What things (that were vital to victory) would we be unable to do?

 

[Schweik]

I don't have my books or computers available yet, so I can't provide any authors on the casualties of London, however, I do recall their numbers were in the 40,000s range compared to Dresden's 20,000's.

Hopefully, one of the other members might be able to provide that as it'll be a few months before I get this #&!*$ remodelling done here...

That's for the whole blitz, not one raid like Dresden. The Germans lost 20,000 in one night (Hamburg). German casualties from the Allied bombing were roughly 400,000.

So the Germans lost 10 times as many civilians killed.

The estimates of Japanese civilians killed in city-bombing ranges from 240,000 to 900,000, so between 6 and 22 times as much as in Britain.

 

[Schweik]

Here's my exploration: Suppose we spent the money & manpower on P-47's instead of B-17's (3:1 ration in aircraft cost) and mosquitoes instead of Lancasters (dunno the cost ratio there). Suppose we targetted power, transport, and government "critical points" instead of factories or cities. In what ways could we have fought the war better? What things (that were vital to victory) would we be unable to do?

I'd say go ahead and bomb factories that is fair game - along with communications infrastructure, radar, oil refineries and other petrochemical assets, power plants, command and control, and all military targets - but civilian homes and centuries old city centers, why should we?

I believe it would have accomplished the same results better, faster and more efficiently, and it would have saved the lives of a lot of our own airmen- bomber command suffered an appalling casualty rate, Wikipedia says they lost 55,000 killed out of 125,000 aircrew. So more killed than were lost in the bombing raids on London and that works out to a 44% death rate.

The 8th Air Force was almost as bad with 26,000 dead (approximately half of the casualties suffered by the USAAF during the war.

I believe those heavy bombers were highly vulnerable (with the possible exception of the B-29, which didn't have as high of a loss rate), they can down in droves. I think once we achieved rough technical parity, with aircraft like the P-51, P-47, Spitfire, Tempest and Mosquito, these fighters and fast bombers were less vulnerable. They still got shot down of course, but I don't think as often (per sortie) overall. And they were generally speaking more accurate so that meant fewer sorties per target.

Ultimately the only thing that made the heavy bombers viable, and the element that really won the attrition war in the skies over Germany was the fighters. So just stick to fighters and fast bombers.

 

[GrauGeist]

So do you avoid factories, rail yards and other vital infrastructure if there happens to be homes nearby (which was quite common) and what if the factory had shifts on the clock, plan only for holidays when workers would be gone?

The basic point of warfare is to defeat your enemy.
We live in an age where "smart" munitions can pinpoint the ventilation duct in a bunker and spare collateral damage, but 80 years ago, heavy bombing was the solution.
P-47s and Mosquitoes provided a valuable service during the war, but Germany and Japan refused to see the writing on the wall and heavy bombing was the only way to bring the war to an end.

As sad as it is that German and Japanese civilians perished, their numbers pale in comparison to the Russian and Chinese lives taken during those two nation's days of conquest.

 

[Schweik]

So do you avoid factories, rail yards and other vital infrastructure if there happens to be homes nearby (which was quite common) and what if the factory had shifts on the clock, plan only for holidays when workers would be gone?

I fully recognize that what the Americans today call "Collateral damage" is inevitable, however, as I pointed out upthread, there is a big difference between killing a few hundred civilians in a strike on a railyard or a factory vs dropping blockbuster bombs to blow the roofs off of entire city blocks followed by incendiary cannisters which set the air on fire, killing tens of thousands of civilians in a single night. I just don't see how the latter really helps the war effort very much, if at all.

The basic point of warfare is to defeat your enemy.

Warfare has always, going back to pre-history, included significant degrees of moderation. We tend to be aware of the atrocities but forget or gloss over the steps taken the ameliorate the savagery of war. 600 years ago at the Battle of Grunwald, after a bitter series of wars with the (mostly) German Teutonic Order, the Poles and Lithuanians won a great victory, smashing their army. In the aftermath of that event, King Jogaila of Poland had 14,000 prisoners. He could have killed them all, like the English did their French prisoners after Agincourt 5 years later, and perhaps saved himself further headaches. He could have very easily sold them to the Mongols or Ottomans into a life of permanent slavery.

Instead he 'paroled' them, after making each one swear an oath not to go to war against Poland (knowing full well it was an oath many of them would later break). Later on, Germans from several cities in Prussia rebelled against the permanently belligerant Teutonic Order and joined with Poland instead, under much better terms. Over the years, even though they continued to fight with them, the Poles even found that they needed the Teutonic Knights as allies against the Mongols or the Muscovites. So the decision after Grunwald paid dividends.

Even during WW2, we had rules in place between some of the combatants. If a British or American airman was captured by the Germans, or a German airman by the British, some of them were killed of course, but most were put into POW camps, were they were fed and kept out of the elements and taken care of, more or less, albeit not in any luxury or comfort. Many many of them, something like 90,000 Americans alone. Again, they could have been killed, but then the other side would have done the same thing. So what is the point? Did Japan benefit by their much harsher policies toward POW's? I would say no. Did the Germans benefit, ultimately, from their harsh, cruel policies against the Soviets? Obviously they didn't.

I think the pre-war theories of Douhet etc. which influenced the terror bombing were similarly crazy and bloody minded mistakes, to put it frankly. I can understand their logic - they were hoping through increased violence to avoid the grinding horrors of the extended industrial stalemate of WWI, but as Dan Carlin put it, in their logic they were insane. And unfortunately I think there are echoes of their thinking still around.

We live in an age where "smart" munitions can pinpoint the ventilation duct in a bunker and spare collateral damage, but 80 years ago, heavy bombing was the solution.

I don't believe that is true, but even if you accept that notion, they still debated during the war between the degrees and nature of heavy bombing. At night with incendiaries or during the day with (not very effective) gyrostabilized bomb sights. Ultimately the latter proved to be the more effective policy if only because the Americans were eventually able to escort their bombers with long range fighters.

P-47s and Mosquitoes provided a valuable service during the war, but Germany and Japan refused to see the writing on the wall and heavy bombing was the only way to bring the war to an end.

I don't think we actually know that. I don't for example think there was any chance that Germany was going to be able to stop the Red Army after say, 1944, probably much earlier than that.

As sad as it is that German and Japanese civilians perished, their numbers pale in comparison to the Russian and Chinese lives taken during those two nation's days of conquest.

As I said above, I don't think the atrocities by the Axis forces did them any favors. And I think while the Italians were not exactly gentle, their somewhat lesser reputation for gratuitous cruelty probably saved some of their lives.