In Kafka on the Shore there was a mention of children watching something in the sky that was curious because it looked like an Allied bomber but in fact wasn’t.
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If it were me, I’d say that’s the actually the best thing, as you have a bit of advance warning and awareness of the general target area.
noise cuts off=close to you=bad
noise doesn’t cut off=close to somebody else=good (for you anyway)
A lot better than the V2, anyway, where the engine cut out somewhere over Belgium and landed on London with no warning.
I’ve seen a house damaged like that, it looked like it had been shaken up and dropped on the ground after a terrorist bombing of a hotel opposite, the house beside it was barely scratched 
If there are fighters harrasing bombers over you, you are in danger of falling bombs, a hit bomber would ditch it´s bombs before atempting to limp back home; besides, of course, there´s danger from bombers and fighters going down (with or withouth bombs) and tens of thousands of bullets and cannon runds flying around (most German explosive cannon shells of the kind used on planes didn´t have self destruct fuses)
Of course the probability of getting nailed by a bomb or plane debris is not great, but it´s there to keep you underground.
The very first V2 to hit London landed not far from where I live now, in Staveley Road, Chiswick on the 8th of September 1944.
I used to work with an old bloke who had been a signal-cabin boy at Harrow-on-the-Hill on the London Underground during WW2. He used to regale us - often - with a story of him watching a V1 fly towards him, with a fighter (Hurricane? Spitfire?) in hot pursuit, trying to nudge it with his wing to deflect it towards a less populated area. As the name suggests, Harrow-on-the-Hill is at a pretty high point to the north-west of London, so he would have had a good view of it all.
A mate who worked at the same place, roughly my age (i.e. born mid-50’s), was fascinated with the V weapons and knew almost by heart the locations of every strike. You’d be walking along a street and he’d point to a gap in the houses or a new building and proclaim something like “V2, 15th January 1945; 12 killed”. A right nutjob!
More likely a Gloster Meteor jet. According tothis site the V-1 traveled at about 350 mph. I doubt that any of our piston engined fighters could maneuver into position and maintain that speed in level flight long enough to nudge the V-1 wings.
I’ve heard similar stories about attempts to flip V1s, but they’re equally-questionable when you look at the hard facts. However, the high points around London were certainly somewhere you’d see the things flying low - my same source as earlier worked out of Shenfield for a while, and saw quite a lot of V1s at low levels.
It was a touch-and-go affair, but it could be done.
Ordway and Sharpe’s old The Rocket Team (Heinemann, 1979) has a good chapter on the British defences against V1s. According to them, types of plane involved were Tempest V, Sptifire IX, XII and XIV, Typhoons and Mosquitos. None of these could catch a V1 in level flight, but available tactics including diving down onto it to briefly get enough speed or lining yourself up so you could make your attempt as it overtook you. The planes were also stripped down and the maximum speeds squeezed out of the engines. Variations involved trying to deflect it by shooting at it or merely getting close enough that turbulance would destabalize it.
Along with the speed, the geography meant you’d only get one go at it. It only took a few minutes for the V1s to get from the coast, where the interceptors were waiting, to the belts of AA guns around London. That’s what seems unlikely about seosamh’s mate’s tale. The AA gunners were told to hold fire if the V1 was being pursued when it reached them to still give the pilot his chance, but I can’t quite see one managing to stay in pursuit all the way across the city to get to Harrow-on-the-Hill.
I think I just didn’t read far enough to get there. I picked it up at my campus bookstore and read it a couple of times in store without buying it–when I last put it down (and forgot about it for a couple of weeks) the runaway boy was discussing jelly with some lady at what seemed to be the Japanese equivalent of a truck-stop. There was a good deal of commotion about the kids dropping like flies after (what looked like) Allied bombers flew overhead, but I don’t think I got far enough to find out that they actually weren’t Allied bombers. As weird as that particular book is, the thought never crossed my mind. I’ll have to find that damn jelly page and pick it back up…
Incidentally, I meant to add the comment that the most famous spectator of the Blitz was Churchill, who was often in the habit of watching the nighttime raids from the roof of the Foreign Office or Air Ministry.
Yeah, I suppose it’s a little too much to say that it couldn’t be done. I would guess that the success rate would be what, 1 in a couple of thousand? Unless an airplane is designed to operate for extended periods at 350 mph but rather at lower speeds the controls get awfully stiff at 350. This has a bad effect on precision maneuvers.
But, what the hell, if haven’t got much else why not give it a try?
The interceptors were actually doing rather better than 1-in-a-1000.
Cumulative numbers quoted by Ordway and Sharpe over the campaign between 13/6/44 and 1/9/44 are that, of those that reached the English coast, 3765 were destroyed by different means, compared to the 2340 that actually made it through successfully. (The British estimates for those others that fell harmlessly into the Channel of their own accord were necessarily vague, but that was actually probably the fate of most launches.) Of those 3765 destroyed, 1912 were downed by aircraft, 1575 by AA fire and 278 by barrage balloons. Granted that 1912 figure isn’t then broken down by tactic and so will also include cases where the intercepting plane shot them down as well as those that were deflected into crashing, but it does indicate that fighters were able to successfully intercept incoming V1s for long enough to stand a good chance of destroying them despite their speed.
These cumulative figures however hide some significant changing patterns. Basically, the fighters started off being about twice as effective as the AA guns, but there were several major improvements in the way the latter were used as the summer wore on. The Germans were also unhappy with the effectiveness of the British defences and so switched to launching at night, which put the interceptors at a particularly severe disadvantage. During the brief final series of attacks in March 1945 the relative success rates were thus very different: then AA fire got 86, fighters got only 4 and 13 got through to London.
Stalin seems to have taken time out of his busy schedule to observe at least a few of the raids on Moscow. On at least on occasion, his guards collected ‘still warm’ fragments and gave them to Joe as souvenirs.
I wonder though how many people in Europe even looked up after (say) four years of war. At some point, it must have gotten old.
According to Adolf Galland in The First And The Last, Hitler felt that fighters were defensive weapons and insisted that bombers be built because they are offensive weapons. Hitler would just not see that Germany needed to have a strong fighter force to have air superiority. His insistence that Germany have bombers resulted in the ME-262 being kluged as a fighter-bomber – a role for which it was ill-suited. Instead of building up the fighter force, Hitler and Göring set up the Himmelbett system. This was a series of Freya radars from Denmark to France that covered zones of about 30 by 20 km. Each zone had a primary and secondary night fighter, plus antiaircraft artillary and searchlights. The radar would direct a primary searchlight to the target, and theother searchlights would converge on it. Brightly illuminated, the bombers were supposed to be easy prey for the night fighter. The British changed tactics though, sending aircraft through single-file. This way each Himmelbett zone had hundreds of bombers in it, but only the two night fighters.
Daylight bombers were eventually escorted all the way to their targets by long-range fighters. Galland pushed for ME-262s and other fighters to counter them, but Hitler would have none of it. The relatively few fighters that were available were to go after the bombers, but that was difficult with the Allied escorts. Eventually Galland pissed Hitler off one time to many and was demoted. He was to form an ME-262 squadron with his choice of pilots. It seemed from his book that he was given the jets as a ‘hobby’ and to shut him up. The squadron did prove its effectiveness, but it was too late. Hitler’s insistence on bombers delayed the ME-262 for 18 months. There weren’t enough of them to turn the tide, and the Allies were raiding synthetic fuel plants. There were more aircraft built for the Luftwaffe in 1944 than ever before, but their tanks were empty. Perhaps ironically, the jets could still fly since jet fuel is a much lower grade of fuel than aviation gasoline.
I don’t want to seem snarky and I realise you’re just trying to be logical, but you are missing the true horror of this period.
My parents really don’t like to talk about it, but bear in mind that for years during WW2 you could come home to find your home / street / heighbourhood had been devastated. Family, friends, neighbours killed.
Your children were evacuated to the countryside and put in the care of strangers.
Husbands went off overseas and had to rely on censored letters for communication.
The Germans had massive successes in the early years and it was clear Britain could be invaded. Imagine how it felt to have the prospect of permanent Nazi rule.
So when we talk about civilians watching dogfights, bear in mind the air-raid sirens would be going, air raid wardens would be shouting at you to get off the street and you’d probably be running for cover hoping your family would be safe - wherever they were.
No idea about WW2 , but I was talking to a serbian chick on ICQ just after that unpleasantness with slobo , and she mentioned that it was a surreal time to be in , watching the greatest air show happen with the NATO fighters/bombers from several miles away , I would imagine.
Declan
Many of the people I’ve heard talk about this aspect say that the only way they dealt with it was by shutting out the horrific aspect of it. If you allowed yourself to worry about it, you’d never get through the day, or the night. So Paul in Saudi is at least metaphorically correct, that many people did just keep their heads down and get on with their routine, which of course included several trips to a shelter most days.
All true, but my mother has a slightly different perspective. Morale in England was high, and the failure of invasion threats raised it higher still. There was a real and widespread sense of “We’ll show the Hun what the English are made of.” To the extent that the bombing was intended to undermine resolve for victory, it was an abject failure.
When the bases were finally overrun and the threat of all bombing had ended there was a strong sense of relief - and just a touch of wistful regret that their time on the stage, during which they knew they’d conducted themselves honorably in difficult circumstances, was now at an end.
This has always puzzled me about bombing campaigns and civilian moral. When it was very apparent to both Churchill and the RAF that the Germans weren’t crushing the spirit of the British population by bombing them, why did they think that doing the same thing to the Germans would have any effect on them?
Partly because we had a better heavy bomber force, I should think; the German bombers were indifferently suited to the purpose; ours were better, although as has been mentioned before on these boards, we might have got even more of a bang-per-buck (and bang-per-body) ratio if we’d used more unarmed Mosquitos and fewer heavies. Partly because it helped morale at home to think that the Hun were getting a taste of their own medicine. Partly to hand out some payback for the London blitz, and for Coventry, Rotterdam, Warsaw and some others. And partly to take some of the heat off the Soviets; we couldn’t mount an effective invasion, much as Stalin was (with reason) crying out for one, but we could keep fighters and eighty-eights away from the Eastern Front to a limited extent. Finally, it wasn’t all about German civilian morale but about damaging the German economy.