For an idiot like me, what are the ranges of these and similar weapons?
I don’t know if there are any more recent ones, but the AIM-54 Phoenix has a range of about 200 kilometers. Even a “short range” missile like an AIM-9 Sidewinder has a range of 35 kilometers.
NATO’s standard weapons are the radar-guided AIM-120 AMRAAM, which has a range of 55 to 150 kilometres depending on the variant, and the AIM-9 Sidewinder, a heat-seeking weapon, which has a range of up to 35 kilometres. Soviet-made weapons have similar ranges.
An aircraft-mouted cannon has an effective range of maybe one to two kilometres.
So in other words, a bomber with a gun is bringing a peashooter to a rifle fight.
You have to remember that people at the time didn’t have the same information we did. The generals fighting WWII weren’t able to read histories of WWII.
So you’re conducting a strategic bombing campaign. You probably have reasonably good information about how many of your own planes and crewmen you’re losing. You might have some information about what’s causing the losses and your country’s ability to build more planes and train more crewmen.
But you’re guessing on things like whether or not your crews are improving or getting worse. Maybe now that your men have some experience, your casualty rates are going to drop in the next six months. Or maybe now that the enemy has some experience, you casualty rates are going to go up in the next six months.
You lost ten planes in your last mission. Was that an average amount to lose? Was it higher than average or lower than average? Was it due to some factor like the weather or a defective part? Or maybe it was just a fluke.
Maybe the officer in charge of the squadron was bad at his job and replacing him would reduce your losses. Or maybe the squadron officer is good and replacing him would increase your losses. Or maybe it’s your pilots who are a problem. Or maybe it’s your gunners. Or your navigators. Or your ground crews. Are they getting better or worse? Who do you replace and who do you keep in their jobs?
And you don’t know how many losses the enemy had. On that mission where you lost ten planes, maybe he lost fifteen. Or thirty. Or three. Maybe he can afford to lose fifteen planes. Or maybe he can’t afford to lose three.
How effective is your bombing campaign? You can look at your losses and see that your air force will break down within eighteen months. But what if the bombing makes the enemy surrender within six months? You’ll have won the war. If you call off the bombings, the war might last five years and maybe your side will lose.
The Phalanx Gatling gun, as installed on USS Denver has an effective range of 4000 yards - can’t get the link to the cite right down because the wiki page will not load up.
Problem here is that to carry is would need a dedicated airframe, and this would end up causing lots of compromise in the aircraft designed to carry it. Remember that you still need the targeting sensors so you’d end up with a very large system, radiating lots of give-away information, and you would also have issues with fields of fire, do you mount it at the rear to protect your ass, in which case the attack comes from above or below or maybe carry two of them - just how do you protect your aircraft with reasonable certainty and yet carry out your bombing mission?
The recently retired AIM-54 air to air missile has a range in excess of 100 nautical miles, designed as a main weapon for the Tomcat - point being, that is now old and slow. You probably would not even need to have a fighter aircraft to carry it, just fire from 100 miles away and turn around for home.
It is not hard to google this sort of stuff up.
As illustrated by the difference in the effects of the bombing of the Germans and the Japanese. One of the reasons that the campaign there was such a success was that the Allies had 3-4 years experience in Europe which to bring to the table, the Japanese did not.
I heard 1942&ff Germans armament production chief Albert Speer say
on a TV interview, in English, that the Allied bombing campaign was
“the equivalent of another front”, and IIRC those were his exact words.
I see no reason why Speer would have lied about it, and he was certainly
in a position to know the truth of the matter.
The bombing campaign probably tied down perhaps as much as half the
German Air Force, providing the US and UK with something like a 30-1
advantage in combat aircraft over the D-Day beaches. That is better than
superiority, it is dominance, and dominance was maintained in the West
for the durantion.
Another thing to consider if that the excellent German artillery of WW2
was multipurpose: The 88mm gun was equally effective in antiaircraft,
antitank and antpersonnel roles. The 1000s of those guns were aimed skyward
over Germany would have done considerable damage to allied ground forces,
had they been available.
Finally, although it is a well-known fact that German armanent production
increased vastly after Speer was put in charge, the bombing must certainly
have disrupted it, and prevented even greater amounts of weapons from
reaching the battlefield.
So for all its flaws it is reasonable to conclude that the US-UK bombing campaign
shortened the war and saved Allied lives.
I’m not necessarily disagreeing with him on this point but Albert Speer was notorious for telling people what they wanted to hear. And after the war was over, that consisted of telling the Americans and British what a good job they had done during the war.
Can you provide example of misrepresentaion by Speer of some military issue?
BTW the US and UK combination did a reasonably good job overall, and that does not
have anything to do with Western post-war chronic underappreciation of the role of
the USSR in tying down about 70% of Germany’s ground forces.
On the other hand, Speer’s statements are consistent with the facts. As colonial points out, a very large part of Germany’s limited capability to wage war was dedicated to stopping the bombers; at one point 25% of all German artillery shell production was devoted to antiaircraft defense. As pointed out, a substantial number of the artillery peices themselves were dedicated to AA, and of course a huge portion of the Luftwaffe.
Germany’s own response to the bombing campaign suggests it was, in fact, a significant military problem to Germany.
What differences were there in effect?- both countries’ major cities suffered
horrendous destruction and loss of life.
The effect on the attackers was what differed most because Japan’s air defences
were much weaker than Germany’s: in terms of gound AA fire, interceptor capacity,
and if Japan even had radar it was not nearly as good as Germany’s.
How many fighters did the bombers shoot down? I know that by D-Day that the Allies had air superiority. It’s always seemed to me that the real effectiveness of the bombers is that they engaged in a war of attrition against the Germans that the Germans could not win even with high kill ratios due to limited German production.
That’s a good question and the answer is probably out there somewhere in google land.
I think, however, that it was on the Eastern front where the German AF suffered its
greatest losses. The merit of the US-UK bombing campaign was more that it occupied
German AF resources than that it shot down large numbers of German aircraft.
Dogfights are fighter v. fighter. For pretty much everything else in the air the designers gave up on actually shooting it out with optimized hunter-killers equipped with 20-mile-range homing missiles, changing their basic survival tactic to use of countermeasures (the last B52 tailguns were taken out after Desert Storm; the last effective use of those tailguns was in Vietnam, when they took down 3 North Vietnamese planes; if your opponent is using equivalent guns and has to come virtually up your tailpipe to ensure a hit, yeah, it helps, but that’s hardly likely these days).
Besides the issues with the physical installation of defensive armament, there’s also the small matter that it requires seat for a tailgunner. Surely one could eventually design an airborne automatic CIWS like those used on ships (*as of today *those are huge heavy mothers you’re not going to stick in the back of a stealth airplane any time soon) but that’s weight, points of failure and production costs that you are adding. Modern non-fighter airplanes are tightly optimized.
Yes, because they fly faster and higher than any aircraft that could possibly threaten them. It’s not like Gary Powers would have been able to shoot down an SA-2 air to air missle at 70,000 feet if his plane had been mounted with a gun.
In case they “happen to encounter an enemy fighter” in some nation with barely an air force in skys controlled by American AWAC planes and swarming with NATO jets?
The destruction of Japanese cities was even greater than Germany’s, and done in a shockingly short period of time and with a tiny fraction of the loss. There’s no comparison at all in terms of the cost/benefit ratio.
As to why,
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As you point out Japan’s interceptor force was not on par with the Luftwaffe,
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Japanese buildings and homes tend to be made of wood and paper, since the greatest natural threat there is earthquake and a building made of wood and paper generally won’t kill you if it falls on you. But, consequently, Japanese cities burned really easily.
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The Americans used the B-29, which was far, far more advanced and powerful than any bomber built before.
In my readings of WWII, it seems that both the RAF and USAAF bomber commands changed their strategy several times during the war-each time, when staying with the current strategy would have brought victory. For example-the British achieved great success with the “skip” bombing of the Ruhr Dams-when they had knocked out the water supplies, why didn’t they follw up with incindiary bombing of the Ruhr cities? There was then no way to put the flames out.
Similarly, the USAAF was almost ready to shut down German industry (destroying the german ball bearing industry in the Schweinfurt Raids)-at the last minute, the campaign was dropped.
Had both forces concentrated on destroying German railroads, its hard to see how Germany cold have stayed in the war.
Or coal mining-German coal production drove all aspects of the Nazi war machine-without coal, steel couldn’t be made, railroads couldn’t run, and electricity could not be generated-plus the coal production was concentrated in small areas-why didn’t they bomb the daylights out of it?
They switched strategies for the very reasons you mentioned in the OP. The strategy they were using didn’t appear to be working well enough so they tried something different.
I don’t think you understand the purpose of the dam busting missions.
You are describing the concept of “bottleneck” bombing, and they absolutely did try it, and it failed.
Actually what they are gonna do is get down in the weeds and sucker the enemy in, when he is close enough, they are gonna drop a bomb and the fighter chasing it will fly into the bombs blast zone. Repeat , but higher altitude if the bomber is loaded with nukes.
Declan