Ad: This forum contains affiliate links to products on Amazon and eBay. More information in Terms and rules
After D-Day, did the USAAF have enough aircraft and crews that they could run a day and night campaign concurrently?
I ask, because the 8th AF had their idea of targets, and BC (ie Harris) had theirs.
Would running day and night be too difficult, and weaken the day bomber effort?
Could the USAAF have effectively adopted the RAF techniques for night marking and bombing?
Or would it have been easier to get Harris and Spaatz on the same page?
In hindsight the combined Planning for Operations would have been more effective if they reported directly to Eisenhower and priorities/conclusions regarding which targets to hit day and night should have been enforced - or fire the footdraggers.
harris is the one I had in mind. Spaatz, when told to stand down on the Oil Campaign to focus on tactical targets, did so with a salute and a 'Yes Sir".. Harris, wellllllllll.
Bill, I was suggesting after D-Day.
I think we could say the USAAF always had 'enough' a/c and crews to fly both day and night missions, but the day missions would have had to have been smaller than they were in actual history if the same command had pursued night missions at the same time. I don't see any reason or point in time where this would not have been true, ie there was never AFAIK any bottleneck besides available number of planes/crews in the process of conducting day raids that would allow the day campaign to be just as big if some of the a/c and crews were assigned to night missions instead.After D-Day, did the USAAF have enough aircraft and crews that they could run a day and night campaign concurrently?
I asked because sometime after D-Day the 8th AF had 2000+ heavy bombers on strength, and 2 crew for each bomber. Did they ever send all bombers on one mission?
I believe that 1000 bomber raids were quite common in early-mid 1944.
The Army Air Force Statistical Digest has 1786 B-17s and 2440 B-24s on hand (first line) vs Germany at the end of June 1944. (Table 88 )
Wuzak, look at this link The USAAF in WWII for the number of a/c in USAAF missions.
Milosh - at the end of the war the 8th AF still had ~ 50% more B-17s and B-17 BG's than B-24. The above number must include 15th AF to reach those totals.
1. Again, I don't see any evidence the USAAF ever left bombers idle just because there were 'too many'. Thus a night effort would always subtract from a day effort. This was clearly the case with B-29 round the clock operations against Japan from ca. April 1945. If a full effort or certain groups were night bombing or mining, they weren't available for a day mission till next cycle (of crew rest, maintenance and preparation of the plane etc). Night operations weren't a way to send more bombers in total, but rather night tactics were more cost effective against particular targets using particular methods: again mainly mining and area bombing. Neither of those mission/targets were on the menu for USAAF ETO/MTO in 1944.1.I asked because sometime after D-Day the 8th AF had 2000+ heavy bombers on strength, and 2 crew for each bomber. Did they ever send all bombers on one mission?
I believe that 1000 bomber raids were quite common in early-mid 1944.
Could some of the remainder - say 500+ bombers have been used in follow up night raids.
2. For example, if the 8th bombed an oil facility during the day it might be worth following up with a night raid - disrupting cleanup, repair and firefighting efforts. Sometimes BC would follow up, but usually Harris was following his own agenda. The 8th could do the follow up themselves.
BC had from the end of 1942 the ability with Oboe to achieve comparable accuracy at night to the practical capability of bomb sights in daylight in some circumstances but with two key limitations:IIRC BC had ability to usually hit a synthetic oil plant, not always but usually, in later part of 44, and when they hit the results tended to be damages more difficult to repair than those after USAAF raids because of BC used generally heavier bombs.
Juha
BC had from the end of 1942 the ability with Oboe to achieve comparable accuracy at night to the practical capability of bomb sights in daylight in some circumstances but with two key limitations:
-the system could only guide a handful of a/c at a time, so either a few Oboe equipped Mosquito's would drop bombs themselves, or more often against major targets they's drop target markers for the main bomber force to drop on. But the pathfinder/marker system introduced the possiblity of low cloud obscuring the markers, and sometimes the Germans managed to lay out correctly colored decoy markers in time to confuse the main force.
...But it was used against all kinds of point targets in that area, and was by far the most accurate method of night bombing widely used in the European war. However at longer ranges methods like Gee and LORAN radio navigation and picking up ground targets with H2S radar were still only really good for hitting a city-size target...
IMHO H2S was adequate if there weres high radar contrast areas near the target, for ex coastline, lake, river etc, so BC could bomb fairly accurately certain targets well outside the Oboe range, as was shown for ex in Peenemünde raid in Aug 43. I recall from BC War Diaries that BC made a number of effective attacks on oil targets during the Allied oil campaign in 44, some raids however were complete failures. I cannot remember exact targets, so I cannot say, how many of the oil targets were outside Oboe-range.
And as wuzak noted, not surprisingly, knowing weather in UK, British had developed sky marking systems.
Juha