Add to that the fact that the between-the-wars infighting among American planners was vicious. Limited budgets meant weapons were puffed and lies told. Lots of them. Everybody had their turf and death to anyone who threatened said turf. Just look at the clusterfuck that was US torpedo production and development in the first years of the war. People needed to be shot for that disaster. So it went with strategic vs tactical bombing in the Army Air Corps.
I’ve long been of the opinion that had the US focused on low-level tactical strikes instead of high altitude strategic bombing, the war in Europe would have been over sooner and with less loss of life.
Yeah, but that was mere ground attack against tactical targets, something the strategic “purists” insisted was a distraction from a bomber’s TRUE mission.
That was more or less the conclusion of post-war analysis which discovered that tactical ground attack aircraft had had the highest ratio of destroying enemy assets per amount of resources devoted, operational interdiction bombing the next highest, and strategic bombing the lowest.
AIUI “area” rather than wouldbe “precision” bombing was precisely the point for at least the UK’s bomber commander - dehousing and demoralising civilians was supposed to be winning the war. Plus simple retaliation - “They have sown the wind, now they reap the whirlwind”.
Of course it is – you have to calculate the point where the target will be when the bombs hit. If your target is a point on the ground it’s not going anywhere. But if your target is moving relative to the ground, you have to hit the point on the ground where it will be in 30 or 40 seconds. It requires both the extra computation (not trivial in WW2) and introduces new ways you can miss like incorrectly assessing the course or speed.
It would probably take at least 30 seconds to calculate the intercept point for a competent bombadier with a slide rule, by which point everything has moved so much that your calculations were out of date. Some of the first electro-mechanical computers were used for exactly this sort of calculation, and that was done on submarines and ships that were moving far less relative to their targets.
If I understood LSLGuy’s point correctly, hitting a ship (moving at constant course and speed) reduces to the same problem as hitting a stationary target. If the ship is moving west at 15 knots, and the true wind is from the west at 10 knots, you dial in 25 knots of wind from the west, and target the ship as if it was standing still.
Think in terms of the frame of reference. In an earth-cenetered frame of reference, it’s a complicated problem. But the bombsight is operating in a plane-centered frame of reference. All that matters is the location of the target, and the speed and direction of the air in between.
I was surprised what a dud Gladwell’s book was. Throughout the book he contrasts American bombers aiming at specific targets with British area bombing, giving the impression that the British thought bombing houses (rather than aircraft factories) was the best way to win the war. No doubt the British actually thought bombing factories was a great idea – what they didn’t like was trying to bomb factories, and failing to destroy them, and losing 10% of your bombers in each attempt.
According to Gladwell, in the 1930s the Bomber Mafia thought Douhet was right: the bomber would always get through. I’ve never read Douhet’s book, but it’s hard to guess how anyone could have believed that. The British and Germans had learned better by December 1941, and had given up on massed daylight raids – hence, night bombing, which means area bombing.
Another annoyance: Gladwell quotes the 15-ft-square Norden claim without raising an eyebrow.
By the way: was “The ________ Mafia” really an expression in the 1930s?
The reality about the hackneyed “the bomber always gets through” comment is that some of them always do get through. So the folks in the target area are going to receive some ordnance. Which means you need target hardening, camouflage, civil defense, etc. The idea that air defense interceptors and cannons and later missiles can stop an attack in detail doesn’t work.
Which really got bone-chilling once nukes came on the scene. It was simply statistically implausible that any massed nuke-armed bomber raid would be stopped cold. At least some leaker(s) would make it to their target(s) with devastating results.
To reiterate, another factor was the presumption that bomber attacks could come from any direction with zero warning. The role of radar in giving interceptors time to scramble, people on the ground to man AA defenses and take cover, and to direct interceptors to where the attacking bombers were changed the equation completely.
But on top of all that, it simply turned out that aerial bombing was crappy at destroying an enemy nation’s capacity to fight on. The resiliency of ground targets was often astonishing. If Hitler could have presciently begun constructing the fortified underground manufacturing facilities well before the war (when Germany had the time, men and materials to do it), they would have been all but invulnerable to direct destruction.
I have no idea where you’re getting this but it’s simply not true. The Allies bombed the hell out of Germany’s war production. the factories were egg crates. It is the reason Hitler tried to build underground.
Hitler was a one-man woulda-coulda. He killed more people building his underground facilities than from the machines they built. The ME-262 factory in Walpersburg killed 2000 enslaved laborers building it but only 20 or thirty planes were built. It was a plane that could have been constructed using cottage-industry methods which eliminated the need for large factories. They did this towards the end of the war.
The V2 underground facility in La Coupole France consisted of a 2 km tunnel system supporting a complete rocket launch site. It never fired a single missile. There were similar facilities destroyed. Hitler spent $2 billion in 1944 dollars on that project which is what the US spent on the Manhattan Project.
Germany built these mountain facilities using slave labor which would not have been available before the war started. So it borders on a moot point to suggest it was an option.
Roughly summarized: bombing was a decisive but qualified success. But don’t expect it to work as well in the future. (Then the US flattened North Korea and much of Vietnam anyway, with diminishing returns)
Two participants of the Survey were John Kenneth Galbraith, a great contrarian; and George Ball, who knew his own mind far more than was healthy for life in Washington.
Yes, but it worked poorly compared to destroying actual military assents, and was really just an example of how people dehumanized their opponents. The Germans were bombing the British after all, and notably that didn’t demoralize them and make them lose the war; it made them angry. All they had to do was apply their own experience to the Germans and they’d have realized how counterproductive that is as a strategy. Both in the sense of making the enemy more determined to fight, and in being a highly inefficient way of expending ordnance.
But leaders on all sides refused to do that, they looked down on their opponents as weak or cowards and used tactics that they knew wouldn’t work on them, because they were sure of their own superiority to the enemy.
And so a lot more people died than would have died otherwise because the leaders had the idea that if they just indiscriminately killed and destroyed enough people and property, the weak and cowardly enemy would surrender. Which didn’t work on anyone, what worked was destroying military assets, boots on the ground, and in the case of Japan the sheer shock of nuclear attack.
Another factor is that both the United States and Britain were separated by ocean from potential enemies; any war they were realistically going to fight would be “over there”. So long-range (for the time) strategic bombing got more of a start there than in Europe for example. For an extended period from the fall of France until D-Day, bombing was the only thing the Allies could do against Germany directly. Especially in the case of the United Stats aerial bombing was a way to put its huge industrial capacity to work while no other direct option available.
As it turned out, the bomber could always get through. High-level Mosquitos controlled by OBOE were pretty much uninterceptable, and the accuracy was, by the standard of the time, phenomenal. The limiting factor was that OBOE could only control one aircraft at a time.
Surely, you could control the lead aircraft of a group through OBOE, and then have following aircraft delay their drops by the same amount as the delay they were flying. I’d expect that the scatter caused by that would be less than the scatter caused by the bombs falling through imperfectly-modeled air.
It should be a warning to those who place all their eggs in a single basket, and then try to silence any competing voices. (It won’t, of course, but we can all hope.)
A few points:
The Norden was tested in the Texas desert, which has mostly clear skies. This compares to Europe and Japan which have far more cloudy and rainy days.
Daylight strategic bombing failed in Japan because the jet stream made the bombers travel too fast for the bombsight to compute. They eventually had to switch to nighttime firebombing of cities from lower altitudes.
It was believed by the Bomber Mafia that B17s could protect America shores from foreign navies. There’s quite the history of how the Navy had to fight to protect its budget and to develop carriers. (See more about the B-17s below.)
This hints at one of the reasons people drank the Kool-Aid: it was so much cheaper than building a real military. Investing in bombers make it look like we were doing something, without busting the bank.
Fortunately, the US went ahead kept developing other aircraft, including better fighters and dive bombers.
Back to the question of B-17s and costal defense. One of the major miscalculations that got American into the war with Japan was the misguided belief that bombers on their own could defeat ships. The US had 35 B-17s in the Philippines, out of a total of 155 (22.5%), and there were those who thought that the B-17s would deter Japan from starting the war.
On paper, it seemed like a damn good idea. The B-17 had the range to attack Japan in Formosa (as Taiwan was called then), and to shut down all the resources shipped from Southeast Asian.
The United States Army Forces in the Far East (USAFFE) was caught on the ground in the Philippines and were decimated. The US bases only had 3" AA, and the Japanese bombers could fly low enough that they were much more effective. The US was flying obsolete or inferior fighters and didn’t have an effective radar coordination.
Without fighters to defend the bases, the US was forced to withdraw the remaining bombers to Australia.
The Japanese bombers did really well in the Philippines, and other locations. Among other accomplishments, they blew up the building where 200 torpedoes were stored.
In the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese relied on the carrier based Nakajima B5N bomber for level bombing of the BB on the inside row, as they could not be attacked by torpedoes. For the raid, the IJN made special armor-piercing bombs, modified from 16 inch naval artillery shells. They attacked at 10,000 ft and managed to get eight hits on BB from 49 bombers, and sank the Arizona, and damaged several others.
Bombing for the Japanese worked well, but only because America was caught unprepared, without effective AAA or fighter opposition.
Had the British not stopped the air attack from Germany in the Battle of Britian they would have no air support to stop an invasion by sea.
Had the British not retrieved the bulk of their army in operation Dynamo they would have no standing army to fight an invasion.
Had the British not destroyed the V2 rockets it would have been the destruction of London. It was an extremely demoralizing weapon that made no sound as it descended supersonically. Germany was close to raining these down on London uninterrupted.
If Hitler wasn’t so hell-bent on screwing himself in the ass it would have been an entirely different war. He had all the assets needed to defeat the British and pissed them away on a second front with a much larger country.
