Had he focused on this one mega-weapon and used mobile launch sites it would have been a very demoralizing weapon. Instead, Hitler wasted a tremendous amount of resources on underground facilities for a variety of his assets. His best weapons were the fighter jets he already had in large numbers and the introduction of the ME-262 jet. But he demanded it be made into a bomber and also insisted they build underground facilities that delayed it’s production.
A lot of resources went into stuff like the long rail gun that required a stupid amount of resources, special tracks and individually sized shells because each shot wore away the barrel. It was used once effectively and then it was junk until the barrel was replaced. and that never happened.
Probably his best mega weapon was the V3 cannon that used explosive charges along the barrel to accelerate the projectile. Again the British found the first ones and destroyed them and he abandoned them. This was probable the cheapest weapon of all his mega weapons and he could have scattered hundreds of them all over France. That would have been an around-the-clock assault on England.
The B17 was obsolete before it was introduced. Boeing was desperate to find any application that would return its’ investment, the coastal defense fiasco offering a possibility. The British tried to use it in combat, but found it useless without major modification.
The Transportation Plan and close ground support would have been more successful on all counts, but they did not meet the need. FDR and Churchill needed big. bold stuff for propaganda, Boeing needed contracts and the Air Corps wanted to break off from the army. To do that it needed a unique mission.
Add to that Psycho Harris and you get ineffective strategic bombing.
The issue in the air, at the point of contact, was tactics. When the bomber mafia first got a good look at a B-17, they saw all those guns and concluded that any enemy fighter which tried to attack an entire box of these bombers from behind would inevitably get shredded.
That was actually the Germans’ conclusion too, so they looked for a solution, and found it in head-on attacks. A fighter (single engine at least) is so small as compared to a buff that the former can line up their run on the latter, let loose a single second burst, and either kill the pilot(s) or damage the engines if not the control surfaces, while the gunners would have just a couple of seconds to line up and shoot at the tiny dot as it flashes by.
The B-29 never saw combat in Europe, but if it did I don’t think it would have fared any better: yeah computerized gunsights would have helped, but a 29 was an even-bigger target than the 17 and 24. The rational thing would have been to license a bunch of reverse-Lend-Lease Mosquitos (whose bomb load wasn’t much smaller than a 17’s but who only needed 2 crewmembers), but the Mafia would never have countenanced that even if some had the foresight to predict the high losses in the 2nd half of 1943.
A number of IL-2 vids on YT show just how deadly and efficient the head-on attacks were (I’d search one up but I have an 8 hour drive ahead of me today).
The B29 flew 5-8000 feet higher and 75-100 mph faster than the B17, so it would’ve been much harder to get ahead of for a head on attack. It would cover much more ground from the point of radar detection to intercept both because it was faster and the climbing times would be longer. Fighter performance is worse at that altitude so there would’ve been less leeway for flying past/ahead of the bombers to get head on passes. They wouldn’t have been invulnerable but they would’ve been a lot more interception resistant.
The head-on or other front-quarter slashing attacks have a second downside for the fighters. Having gotten positioned advantageously above and ahead of the incoming bomber formation, now you make your attack and get shots at one or at most 2 bombers on the way through their formation. Now what?
You’re behind the formation, below it, and going the other way. You need to turn around, climb, pass the formation, get far enough ahead of it to turn around again, then you can attack again.
Given the difference in speeds between bombers & fighters, that whole process will consume 50 or 75 miles of bomber forward progress. Which, given the typical early warning times of the era, is probably most of the way to their target.
Bottom line being each fighter you launch gets to take one slashing pass ant the formation and is mostly, if not entirely, irrelevant to the air battle after that. If there are waves and waves of bombers coming, that’s an opportunity for more attacking. But if not, not.
This is wrong. First, that was not what “the leaders” believed. (I believe this is the case for the European theater as well, but my field of interest has been the Pacific war so I will discuss that.)
The objective of the US strategic bombing in Japan, first was to destroy the means of production for the warm machine.
Unfortunately, for real reasons I stated above, they were not able to do accurate daytime bombing, and consequently they switched to the massive firebombing of Japanese cities.
While the United States Army Air Force leadership believed that they could bomb Japan into surrendering, it was not as you suggest. There was never the logic that the cowardly Japanese would surrender because they are being bombed and this morally inferior race will quit the moment it gets a little painful. Rather, because of the extensive campaigns in the Pacific, most of the US military leadership wasn’t expecting it to be a cakewalk.
Gen. LeMay and other USAAF leaders believed that they could actually destroy enough of Japan that it would become impossible for them to continue to wage war in the face of an invasion. The means of production, the workers and their housing were getting destroyed at a pace that they believed was unsustainable for any country to continue.
This was no different than the Navy’s belief that unrestricted submarine warfare and mines would disrupt the raw materials required for the production of weapons, ammunition and other means of conducting war, as well as basic food.
In April, ‘45 the USAAF, at the request of the Navy, conducted an extensive naval mining operation. Code name: Operation Starvation. It wasn’t a random name, it was an intention.
Japan would not have surrendered had it only been the atomic bombs without the firebombing campaign prior to them.
(Also, another key factor was the entry of the Soviets in the war as well.)
The Imperial Japanese Army was prepared to continue fighting, despite the firebombing, the atomic bombs and the Soviet entry into the war.
The Imperial Japanese Navy was split, and the Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister were in favor of surrendering. The Big Six, the Supreme War Council was hopelessly split and couldn’t made a decision.
The Emperor took unprecedented, extra constitutional step of interjecting his opinion on the formal proceedings and made the decision to surrender.
A major factor of his decision was the collapse of the morale of the population, in a large part because of the bombings, and the submarine warfare and naval mining.
They considered dropping herbicide on the Japanese rice fields to wipe out the rice crop, dooming much of the population to death by starvation. Cruel, but given the fanatical resistance the Allies had faced up until the atomic bombs were dropped, anything that would spare Allied lives was considered on the table.