Interesting, I knew they flew lower but I didn’t know it was that much lower. Yet B-26 Mauraders apparently outperformed the Flying Fortresses in terms of attrition.
“Ok, chaps. Our maps are a bit old, but here goes.
We want you to fly over Gaul, and drop your bombs just north of the Holy Roman Empire. Just above the ‘V’ in Land of the Visigoths”.
They used to go on about sabotaging ball bearing factories all the time on Hogan’s Heroes. As a teen my only knowledge of ball bearings was their use in bicycle wheel axles, so I always thought it was a more or less made-up gag. Glad to have the additional context, even if its decades late.
The TLDR version is that one of the reasons it took as long as it did to start to target transportation was the prewar strategic bombing doctrine called for selectively attacking key components of of industry, as has been posted above. This is a good summary:
From my earlier post, I found a something which backed up this point:
From a Master’s Thesis [Deconstructing the Myth of the Norden Bombsight](file:///C:/Users/user/Downloads/Deconstructing%20the%20Myth%20of%20the%20Norden%20Bombsight.pdf)
My bolding.
In addition, German AA was simply much, much better than anticipated prewar, which necessitated flying at higher altitudes. Other problems included the weather. IIRC, the Norden bombsight was tested in Texas where the number of days without cloudy cover are significantly greater than in Germany.
This again was a problem that (if I understand correctly) they really didn’t understand that well until after the war. They would take photos after the raids and it would show damage to the building, but they didn’t understand they weren’t getting as much results as they thought.
I think I read someone that Germany found that they could harden factories by having sandbags and such in key places in a factory. I don’t really remember much, so take it for all that’s worth.
It look a long time to convince the USAAF to drop mines around Japan but it was highly successful.
Even better than just mining the ports and straits, combining that attacks on the railways would have that much more effective.
The US made the mistake of not targeting tankers and refineries in DEI earlier in the war. They were not able to repair them as quickly as what Germany was doing.
Actually, it would be more rewarding if your bombs set off the bombs that they are making so that, in essence, they would be helping to bomb themselves! LOL
Filling bomb casings with explosive doesn’t usually take place in the same factory that makes them. The explosives and propellant factories are usually a good way from habitation.
Air Marshall Harris had an impatience with what he called ‘panacea’ targets which had at various times, been urged on him - supposedly vital industries whose disruption would cause the whole of German industry to fall over in an exhausted heap. Not least because it was beyond his powers to damage these industries significantly.
The real ‘panacea’ turned out to be oil - but only in the last six months did it have a significant effect and the ground war, which strategic bombing was supposed to make unnecessary, was already sweeping across the German border by that point.
Maybe not today, but during both World Wars and before that, manufacture of explosive ordnance was generally carried out in a single complex.
I have been to three sites in England and Wales. One was abandoned after WW1 and many of the buildings are still there, buried in sand as the whole site was built on sand. The other two are both now industrial estates. One, Rotherwas near Hereford. still has some of the now derelict buildings where up to 70,000 shells a week were produced during WW2
This is the real answer here. Basically until about the first part of 1944, the 8th AF was trying to hit specific chosen industrial targets in the thinking that they were bottlenecks or critical industries of some kind.
One thing that I read that got to why the rail campaign was so effective, was that it shut down German transport of coal, which is what their home economy was powered with. So not so much just shutting down goods transport, but starving the economy of coal powered energy.
That’s a mistake that has been made by every military in history, since the invention of war. We’re tough patriots whose resolve will only be strengthened by being attacked. They’re spineless cowards who will give up as soon as faced with any hardship.
So as I understand it, on the British side at least, it was down to “bomber” Harris. He thought (rightly, at the time) that they didn’t have the accuracy to bomb specific tactical targets like railways, and so the best way to use the British bomber fleet to affect the war was the mass bombing of entire German cities.
The irony is by the end of the war he was wrong, this was demonstrated by the fact that during the lead up to, and immediate aftermath of, D-Day Harris was overruled and, against his advice, the British bombers were used to attack targets like railroads in France. And the aiming technology and skills had advanced enough that the bombing of these specific targets was really effective, but rather than change strategy permanently to that kind of bombing, once D-Day was over bomber command went back to mass bombing of cities.