Why weren’t heavy bombers used in WWII to bomb enemy battlefield positions?
In reading the history of strategic bombing in WWII, I was impressed with the tremendous losses, suffered by the USAAF and RAF, as the attempted to knock out German war-making capacity. Would it have made more sense to have used heavy bombers as battlefield support? Suppose you used a heavy bombing barrage to support Patton’s advance through the Rhineland? Would concentrate bombing from high altitude been an effective tactic? At least, the bombers would not have been facing g heavy flak/anti-aircraft fire; and German fighter support would probably been inadequate.
As another issue, did the allies ever concentrate on rail transport? It would seem (to me0 that destroying rail yards and train stations would be an effective way to cripple the German war economy.
Wouldn’t work. Strategic (area) bombing was woefully inadequate, accuracy-wise. Add to that the fact that many places, the enemy is mixed in with or in close proximity to French/Dutch/friendly civilians and you have a big problem.
Strategic bombing had a different mission. Tactical bombing, OTOH…
Bombing fast-moving targets that can shoot back with lumbering, giant bombers is a waste of effort. Your bombers are freight movers–it’s just that their freight happens to be highly explosive and meant for the enemy.
Tactical fighers for close air support were more appropriate because they could keep up with your moving friendly forces, keep up with moving enemy forces, and could more quickly adjust fire should the target or coordinates change. Also, the tactics involved in bombing discrete (near pinpoint) targets are better done by nimbler aircraft, and not by the ‘lumbering giants’.
Further, the CAS has less of a supply/logistical tail, meaning their bases of operations could move faster than those of the bombers–all the more easier to keep up with the moving lines of battle.
Tripler
It’s all about speed. You don’t want your valuable bombers being shot at and downed.
The Allies used heavy fighters, such as the P-47 Thunderbolt and the Hawker Typhoon for ground attack. Trains were favorite targets. If you ever have a chance to catch a rebroadcast of A Fighter Pilot’s Story on your local PBS station, that will tell you everything you want to know. Lots of gun camera footage of trains being blown up.
Heavy bombers were used as an opening bombardment in Operation Cobra.
Note that some of the Allied troops were roughly a mile from the target point, and still got hit by “friendly fire”.
Heavy bombers are good for large payloads, but divebombers and fighterbombers are (generally) more accurate. Heavy bombers make for a big AA target, DB/FB’s are smaller and can fly “nape of the earth” better.
Heavy bombers need not move their bases. They have the range to be far behind enemy lines and could also loiter longer than a smaller plane could. Heck, B2 Stealth Bombers attacking Iraq flew from and returned to the US on each mission (yeah I know they had nothing like that capability in WWII…just illustrating the point).
But as said heavy bombers were far too inaccurate and too easy a target to really use in this manner.
What heavy bombers generally do was the responsibility of heavy artillery which was much more useful and far more effective in that role on an actual battlefield. Dive bombers and such were for precision strikes on targets of opportunity.
Among the killed was a large percentage of the young male population of Wilmington, North Carolina. Spared was David Brinkley, absent for having been taken out of his hometown outfit so that his typing skills could be better used elsewhere.
Operation Cobra is argued-over as either a success or a dismal screw-up (Brinkley and Paul Fussel weighing in on the screw-up faction), but significantly, this tactic wasn’t repeated.
The most intensive railway bombing campaign was that against the French railway system at the time of the Normandy landing, to prevent the Germans reacting effectively to them. Of course, Arthur Harris considered this a tactical, rather than a strategic, use of Bomber Command and hence a waste of what he’d designed it to do. And made this complaint known at the time.
But German railway yards were also always a popular strategic target, not least because they made for a conveniently large one to hit. The most obvious case of them being central to a raid’s planning is at Dresden, but - as the recent scholarship on that raid has emphasised - that was a fairly typical bit of such planning.
The whole point of (conventional) strategic bombing of logistical and industrial capacity is to prevent the enemy’s forces from having the means and tools to fight under the concept of “total war”. A company of starving men with no ammunition isn’t much of a threat, and it also prevents your opponent from surrendering and then quickly re-arming. Strategic bombing is typically done from as high an altitude as practical to limit the exposure of the relatively defenseless bombers; hence, accuracy, especially against concealed or mobile targets, is poor. Also, loading, fueling, and preping for a long range strategic bombing run is a massive endeavor; trying to coordinate this precisely with a large infantry or mechanized operation is not only very difficult, it also means that your ground op is at the mercy of weather and (common in WWII) flight navigation errors. If your bombers hit the wrong city or installation–a very common occurrence–then your ground attack has to be aborted.
Tactical bombing is a different beast entirely; it usually involves a wing or two or smaller, more agile craft carrying substantially less bomb load but about to fly lower and hit a specific target, or in the close air support regime, bomb and strafe the opponent’s ground forces. Close air support is generally called in when artillery and indirect fire is insufficiently responsive or otherwise can’t provide cover, and just prior to an engagement with ground enemy forces.
With the advances in target designation and precision guided gravity bombs, accurate short range ballistic and cruise missiles, and UAVs, strategic bombing is a somewhat deprecated mode of combat. It is hugely expensive and often produces less target-specific damage than desired, and also has an inevitable large collateral damage effect, as witnessed in the firebombing campaigns in Germany and Japan, and the later gross damage wrought in the massive carpet bombing campaigns in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.
As for trains, yes, the Allied forces targeted major rail lines and depots; this was, in fact, the major reason for fire bombing the city of Dresden (even though the largest depot and barracks were some miles from the city). Germany was quite dependent on rail for transportation. This seriously damaged Germany’s ability to move large amounts of materiel around, limiting their ability to respond to Allied advances.
I loved doing that in Operation Overlord, partly because I hate trains and partly because I love that gun camera footage of the trains going up with that sudden column of stream and smoke going straight up.
Fighter sweeps to shoot up basically anything that moved were called “Rhubarb” missions (another favourite in the game).
The heavy bombers were also used in the earlier British operations CHARNWOOD and GOODWOOD. At best success was mixed. With WW11 technology it was very difficult to co-ordinate an attack by hundreds of heavy bombers in support of a ground attack. The target areas had to be picked in advance to brief the pathfinders and had to be chosen as easy to locate. The result in CHARNWOOD - the attack on the north of Caen - was that there were few Germans in the area! There was also the major problem that the bombs ripped up the ground and left craters that slowed down the advance.
Using the Strategic bomber force was also a political decision. Harris and Spaatz, the commanders of Bomber Command and the 8th Air Force, had built up their own empires serving the one true goal of bombing the enemy into submission without concerning the ground forces and had the political clout to prevent most attempts to divert them from the attack on Germany.
Yes, you are right (I see your point), but even B-17s had to be shifted between theaters when the Germans surrendered. If your front lines do move that much, you want to move your bombers somewhat closer for several reasons: transit time and sortie generation.
[gettin’ into the weeds and seeds]
Part of the reason we kept B-52s over the Pole in the Cold War was to A) have a somewhat omnipotent airborne deterrent, and B) a quick-response (IIRC 30 minutes) nuclear offensive force that provided a recallable option. Because those bombers were ‘forward deployed’, they were more effective. It’s no different now when we move B-52s or B-2s from Whiteman, Barksdale, or Minot over to Andersen or the BIOT–we’ve moved the bombers closer to the front lines (albeit at a safe distance from them).
[/weeds and seeds]
Tripler
Man, I wish I could forward deploy to the BIOT. I hear it’s nice. :smack:
(Not to start a Great Debate on Dresden, that I’m not sure I’m really capable of conducting, but)
There’s as much, if not more, evidence that Dresden was bombed to destroy Germany’s morale, not it’s trains.
From that second link,
“It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed. … The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing. …
The Foreign Secretary has spoken to me on this subject, and I feel the need for more precise concentration upon military objectives, such as oil and communications behind the immediate battle-zone, rather than on mere acts of terror and wanton destruction, however impressive.”
draft of a letter from Churchill on area bombing.
Just in case this isn’t explicit for some readers, this campaign was terribly effective. Although the strikes did not come close to destroying the rail network, they caused it unending headaches. The effort to attack the railways proved to be a good way of keeping German engineering units employed as well as a perfect way of frustrating logistics officers.
I don’t have my books with me, so I cannot cite this, though hopefully somebody else will, but if I recall correctly, another effective use of strategic bombing was striking ball bearing plants. Although seemingly insignificant, ball bearings were / are used in a multitude of equipment. Moreover, only a few ball bearing manufacturing plants existed under German control in WWII. What limited the effectiveness of this strategy was that it was not carried through over time and the Allies never realized the implications that their strikes were causing the German army.
The heavy bombers used in Cobra and Goodwood et. al. did have difficulty hitting their targets and did cause friendly casualties (including US General Leslie McNair).
Neither of those factors means that the tactic was ineffective, nor was either the reason it was not used again.
Actually, in places, the bombardment was terribly effective. One German writer (I can’t find a cite) said that his position looked like “the surface of the moon” after the heavies came over, and complained of being unable to get responses from the chain of command. Wikipedia concurs, for whatever that’s worth:
The Germans recovered rapidly because they were trained to recover and fight back after crises, not because the bombers were bad.
The reason that using heavy bombers for tactical battlefield assault did not become the norm is the same reason it was so hard to get the heavies freed up for Cobra et. al. in the first place: both the American and British air commands were absolutely determined to show they could win the war through direct strategic attack on the enemy’s homeland, and regarded tactical uses as both ineffective and – most threateningly – unlikely to give the glory to their arm of the service. This was their big opportunity to prove Douhet’s thesis and earn their rightfyul place as the pre-eminent service arm, and they weren’t going to waste it just to save some infantrymen.
They fought tooth and nail against any “diversion” of the bombers from their “true role,” and demanded a free hand to operate strategically. And they got it.
Oh, I completely agree; the destruction of Dresden was to demonstrate that no city in Germany, regardless of its historical merit, would be safe, and also in tit-for-tat retaliation for the German destruction of historic cities like Rotterdam and Belgrade, the Baedeker raids on England, and of course the devastating bombing and rocket attacks on London and Manchester.
The nominal reason for the horrific firebombing Dresden, however, was because of the rail yards (not too far from the city center) and the smatterings of industry located in and around the city. This was the moral claim by the Allied forces for targeting Dresden despite its historical significance. It was clear that Churchill had reservations about such “terror bombings”, but there was also necessity of a Western advance before the Soviet Allied forces took all of Germany, gaining a strategic advantage in the obvious (to Churchill and Eisenhower) post-WWII conflict between the Soviet Union and Western Europe.
Aside from being a railway terminus, was Dresden in any way a heavy industrial city? i read that the Allies were shocked to hear of the massive civilian casualties (mostly refugees escaping the advance of the Russian armies)-they had no idea of the civilian population of the city.
What made Dresden worth all those bombs?