carguychris
New member
Agreed. Speaking of which...pathdoc said:It has, true - but some of the stuff along the way has been fascinating.
FWIW many military analysts and historians have argued that the joint US/UK heavy bombing campaign was largely ineffective at crippling German industrial production, or at the very least, was very inefficient in terms of Allied lives lost and resources expended.ChrisTx said:Two reasons...daytime American bombing, and nighttime British bombing.
The basic problems were that precision targeting was unfeasible using the technology available at the time, forcing the Allies to rely on volume instead, but this didn't work well either because of the technical limits of the aircraft being used. The amount of fuel required to reach the targets limited the bomb load, and the Americans made things worse by weighing down their bombers with lots of gun-wielding crewmen (who would prove to be very ineffective at warding off attacking fighters). Although the number of Allied heavy bombers built during WWII seems staggering in hindsight, it was never enough to put more than a few bombers over a few targets at any given time.
The bombing campaign didn't become effective until relatively late in the war when the Allies finally began fielding effective fighter escorts at around the same time that the Luftwaffe had to start fighting off the American and Commonwealth land invasion. Another reason for the increase in effectiveness was that the Luftwaffe (and the Japanese) never effectively dealt with the fact that it's easier to replace airplanes than to replace pilots; by this time, their aircrew training resources had been stretched past the breaking point, and they were sending increasingly younger and less experienced pilots against seasoned Allied aircrew.* IOW the bombing campaign didn't begin working until German defeat was becoming inevitable regardless of the bombing.
Ironically, many analysts have concluded that the bombing campaign probably hastened the German defeat for a major but unplanned reason: the Germans attempted to defend their cities with thousands of AA batteries, but the Allies could only bomb a few cities at a time, so tens of thousands of men and light artillery pieces spent most of their time silently guarding an empty sky rather than shooting at Soviet tanks on the Eastern Front.
*On a related note, in terms of lives lost and resources expended versus damage inflicted, the oft-maligned Japanese "kamikaze" anti-ship suicide attacks were actually MUCH MORE effective against the US Navy than conventional air attacks. Besides requiring less pilot training, an airplane can carry more bombs vs. fuel when it doesn't have to come back, and an attacking airplane presents less of a target when it approaches a ship head-on and doesn't leave, rather than flying over and away, thereby giving the gunners more chances to shoot at it!