I recall reading of that; they slowed the planes down and made them more vulnerable, but the people in charge insisted the guns remain for morale reasons.
Well, that was the theory. It seldom if ever seems to actually work like that though until you escalate to the level of using nukes.
The good citizens of London might not agree with this.
You know what’s worse than hearing a buzzing noise and them a loud explosion? Not hearing any noise at all and a loud explosion.
Make no mistake, it was demoralizing to have your neighborhood blown to bits.
Demoralizing, certainly. But Morgenstern said it “destroys moral,” and I don’t think that’s proven. Even the Japanese, suffering vastly more from bombing than the British or Germans, retained the spirit to resist.
Not until the advent of nuclear war has strategic bombing attained the power to win a war by itself, solely by dint of sheer destruction.
I first saw the debate over tactical vs. strategic air power in the Dunnigan/Pournelle letters, many years ago… I don’t even recall who was on which side…
My opinion is that emphasis on tactical air power would have shortened the war, by moving the front lines forward faster.
Also: if you blow up a factory, well, most of the parts can be put back together fairly swiftly. The tools are still right there. But if you let the enemy build their tanks, put them on flatcars, and ship them all the way to the front lines…and then destroy them…you’re making them do more work for no benefit.
I think most people now realize that Londoners were demoralized by the bombings. So the Germans and Japanese citizens were demoralized by the bombings they went through.
What the bombing advocates missed was thinking demoralization would have some huge effect on the outcome of the war. It turned out that demoralized people kept doing their jobs pretty much the same way they had been.
But how many tanks can you take out of the war in one go if you bomb a factory compared to bombing tanks on or near the frontlines?
Certainly, there is some economy of scale. Outside a factory, it is rather rare for the enemy to line their tanks up in one compact target zone. Tactical air power requires more, small-scale strikes; strategic power relies on single, high-density strikes.
But factories are fairly easy to get back in working order. Again, the tools, spare parts, power supply, everything is right there. Scattered about some, but right there.
If you scatter a tank around near the front lines, the enemy has to drag the parts back to a repair depot. Spare parts and tools are not normally found at the front lines.
Tactical air strikes are an indirect drain on the enemy’s transport.
Also: strategic air strikes had a record of being expensive. A lot of bombers got shot down. Tactical air strikes are harder to defend against. The most obvious reason is that they don’t penetrate deep into enemy territory, but hit right at the front lines, or close behind them. You don’t give the enemy hundreds of extra miles of opportunity to shoot at you!
I’m certainly not saying that 100% of the air effort should have been redirected to tactical air power. But I do think that the actual apportionment of force was wasteful, and that tactical air power should have had much more support.
Im surprised the Mosquito took so long to be mentioned.
They made a pretty good case for being a better alternative to heavy bomber, from the Wiki entry above:
“They were also used as “nuisance” bombers, often dropping 4,000 lb (1,812 kg) “Cookies”, in high-altitude, high speed raids that German night fighters were almost powerless to intercept.”
“Post war, the RAF found that when finally applied to bombing, in terms of useful damage done, the Mosquito had proved 4.95 times cheaper than the Lancaster.”
Otara
Except that high altitude night time bombing = throwing a dart blind folded. I’ve already made a case that it was cheaper to operate different aircraft but they simply didn’t fulfill the task.
As an aside note. The P-61 I mentioned earlier was the first US aircraft specifically designed as a night time interceptor and was the first aircraft to be built from scratch to use radar. It was a scrappy bit of aircraft in it’s day.
Tactical airstrikes were a direct drain on enemy transport and supply lines. Most tactical airstrikes weren’t on the front lines or even particularly close to them; they were strikes against supply and transport targets behind enemy lines. Developing a doctrine for close air support and getting it to actually work didn’t really happen until near the end of the war. Up until around mid to late 1944 the last thing Commonwealth or American ground troops wanted to see were Allied aircraft on attack runs; they were as likely to be bombed themselves as the enemy was.
Additionally tactical airstrikes could be very expensive as unlike high altitude strategic bombing low altitude strikes exposed them to a great deal more anti-aircraft fire from light guns that couldn’t reach the altitude that strategic bombers operated at.
As an example of how just how costly tactical strikes could get, there’s this on the RAF tactical bombers during the fall of France. Admittedly not near the norm on loss rates, but as an example of how bad it could get, just from the first few days:
The problem is that, by and large, fighter-bombers flying CAP missions just weren’t very good at blowing up tanks.
They were if you trust the pilots - which it should be noted scored a very impressive kill tally: by the end of the war, Allied fighter bombers on the Western front alone had, on paper, destroyed the *entire *German armoured contingent thrice, and more than a few claimed more kills with iron sighted machine guns and dumbfire 200lbs bomblets in one day than modern A-10 pilots can muster in one week using Maverick TV-guided antitank missiles and radar+IR-enhanced murderguns. They just don’t train 'em the way they used to, huh ?
In the field of fact-based reality however, most of those “kills” either missed entirely, were barely winged, threw a track for about an hour’s delay in their operations, were actually friendly fire and so forth. I think we can authoritatively assert that the entire Heer was not destroyed once, let alone thrice. As for .50 cals, those simply don’t kill tanks (although they could do a number on half-tracks, particularly the open top kind the Germans used. Assuming the pilots could actually hit them zooming by at 100+ mph)
This also ignores the fact that dive-bombing or low altitude strafing Jabos give AAA operators a chubby, and the Germans were very diligent in putting up reinforced AAA towers everywhere they went, to say nothing of the large numbers of Flakvierling tanks they fielded (those were just as good at cutting infantry to ribbons, so…)
Finally, fighter bombers didn’t exactly boast the same operational range and fuel efficiency as flying fortresses. You try firebombing Tokyo with P-51s 
Strafing causes negligible damage, except to people, who are very replaceable, and is very costly in terms of aircraft lost.
Precision bombing with Mosquitos using OBOE was, in retrospect, probably the most cost-effective, though it was surprising OBOE remained as unjammed for as long as it did, and of course the guidance system could only handle one aircraft at a time.
For an accessible and very good overview of this question the OP should read Stephen Budiansky’s Airpower. Despite the subtitle, it tracks the idea of Airpower from before the Wright brothers up until now.
Lumpy’s post basically summarises Budiansky’s conclusions about WWII.
I’m not entirely convinced a factory can be put back together that easily. Surely there are plenty of things, especially machinery and precision tools, that cannot simply be put back together like Lego. The buildings certainly can’t.
The factory workers are a more obvious target.
That sounds interesting. A quick google didn’t come up with much. Do you know where i can find more about this?
I searched also, and couldn’t find it. It was MANY years ago, in a series of letters between Jerry Pournelle (I believe this was before he was a published science fiction author) and James Dunnigan (it was very early in his career as a military boardgame designer.)
If memory serves, the letters were in the Avalon Hill General, a board wargaming magazine. One of the two men took an extreme view in favor of tactical air power, claiming that an emphasis on it would have shortened the war by a year(!) The other held a more traditional view, favoring the historical mix of strategic and tactical air power. (Damn my eyes, I wish I could remember which was which!) Worse yet, the letters were heavily abbreviated in editing, and so lost a lot of cohesion.
Lum! I know! Gimme a couple days, and I’ll write Pournelle and ask him!
Is thisit?
Dang! I’m impressed! (I LOVE THE INFORMATION AGE!!!)
However, no, not quite: that was a different exchange (I believe; God, it was a long time ago) where they were arguing about the Origin of WWII, in the context of the “Diplomacy” boardgame of that title. They differed about appeasement, Anschluss, the Finnish/USSR “Winter War,” and other things.
(The game is an interesting one, and kind of fun. The “teachable lesson” is, essentially, that if all the other countries worked together to contain the Nazis, they could have prevented the war. But since every country was busy pursuing their own national goals, and failed to unite in a meaningful way, Hitler pretty much got what he wanted. I’ve played the game, and, if it has any meaningful accuracy at all, then, yes, the war could have been averted. But…does the game have any real historical value? Pournelle and Dunnigan disagreed on that!)
The answer is much more obvious than anything brought up so far, though people have hinted at it: the Allies didn’t have any fighters capable of reaching German industrial centers until the Mustang arrived late in the war.
The Hurricane, Spitfire and Airacobra, et al. could only escort bombers about halfway to Berlin, let alone fly there and back with a bomb load.