World War II Buffs: WWII Strategy?

Factual Questions
61

Certainly there was a school of thought that Germany had it coming after attacks on Rotterdam and Coventry. At the start of the war, Britain had had a policy of bombing only military targets and infrastructure such as ports and railways which were of military importance. While it was acknowledged that some civilian casualties were inevitable, the British government renounced the deliberate bombing of civilian property outside combat zones as a military tactic.

This policy was abandoned on 15 May 1940, one day after the Rotterdam Blitz, when the RAF was directed to attack targets in the Ruhr, including oil plants and other industrial targets which aided the German war effort. The first RAF raid on the interior of Germany took place on the night of 15/16 May 1940.

This view shifted by June 1941 to “area bombing” in response to German attacks on Britain during the blitz, to where not only factories but nearby housing and the civilian population were considered legitimate targets. RAF thinking had been reversed from seeing any civilian casualties as collateral damage when attacking a military target to deliberately targeting civilians in an attempt to destroy their morale. This was expected to reduce industrial production and therefore hinder the German war effort.

To this end, the allies researched incendiary bombs and the correct ratio of high explosive to incendiaries to cause the most damage. Thus such terrifyingly destructive raids such as Hamburg or Dresden should not be surprising. That said, I was stunned to compare the deaths from Rotterdam (900 killed) or Coventry (568 killed) with Hamburg (37,000 killed) or Dresden (25,000 killed).

Strategic bombing of Japan had a similar shift, to more destructive area bombing raids. USAAF doctrine had called for daylight precision bombing, and by 1944 they had the plane for the job, the B-29 Superfortress. Precision bombing had not been successful in Germany, though, and in Japan, where clear weather was rare and jet stream winds played havoc at high altitude, the opening phases of the bombing campaign were unsuccessful.

The USAAF switched to nighttime, low-level incendiary raids, lightened the planes ( by removing all defensive guns) to carry more bombs, and gave up tight formations, needed for precision bombing, for fuel savings and more bombload. On March 10th, 1945, Tokyo was bombed, destroying a quarter of all buildings and killing over 90,000. The USAAF continued these raids on Japanese cities until they ran out of incendiaries.

Although most thought the Japanese had it coming with its bombing and strafing of Chinese civilians and the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, the Strategic Bombing Survey after the war stated that most casualties were women, children, and the elderly. For a country that had condemned the indiscriminate bombing of civilians, this was something new and more terrible than the normal awfulness of war.

62

The ship was “totaled” for want of a better term, and ordered abandoned but not actually sunk. None of the bombs breached the hull so it remained afloat. For that, it required one the Japan’s own torpedoes, as noted above.

Naval doctrine took into account the amount of area of the ammunition (magazines), fuel and machinery (the engines and such) typical ships would have in order to calculate how much damage could be expected from bombing or guns.

I’ve posted before about the experience of my ex-wife’s mother and her family in that raid. She was a child. Her family and their neighbors fled together, until they came to a fork in the road. They went one way, the neighbors went the other and were never heard of again.

My ex-FIL was in another part of Tokyo and it was bombed later. They went to a little dugout shelter behind the family house and a six-pound M69 incendiary bomblet crashed through the little roof, but didn’t explode yet. (There was a fuse sent for several seconds after impact.) As the oldest son, he picked it up and threw it out into the street where it went off there.

The USAAF did not run out of incendiaries, but were running out of targets. This list here seems about right. It gives 67 cities.

The final cities firebombed came on August 14, the day before Japan finally surrendered, and five days after Nagasaki.

63

My mistake. The first firebombing campaign in March 1945 ended when they ran out of incendiaries, but they were quickly replenished.

64

Thank you, that is very interesting! In every naval movie battle I’ve ever seen, they always show the ship in question completely blown apart when the fuel/munitions are hit. I never realized that they got in wrong every time! I guess they do it that way because it’s pretty spectacular looking on the big screen.

65

In Hollywood everything is a Ford Pinto

66

If you want the best video documentary I have seen on the Battle of Midway see the video linked below. I queued it to just before the decisive attack on the Japanese carriers but the whole thing is well worth a watch.

It shows how the Japanese carriers were caught at the exact wrong moment by US planes and what happened to their ships. (or exact right moment from the US persepctive)

67

Thanks!

68

Had to share this (from the movie “Top Secret”):

69

There were a few capital ships that were completed destroyed by a hit to a magazine, notably the USS Arizona and HMS Hood. Arizona was hit by an armor-piercing bomb (converted armor-piercing shells) dropped from 10,000 feet that detonated in the forward magazine. Hood was sunk by a shell from Bismarck that detonated her aft magazine.

70

Barnes Wallis had spent many years trying to convince Harris (who deeply distrusted boffins) that deep penetration targeted weapons might be more destructive than carpet bombing - it was the success (as in two dams were breeched) of Chastise that convinced Harris that those weapons were worth developing and resourcing. Some of that precision bombing was also carried out by 617 squadron using Tallboys. The Tallboys (and later Grand Slams) penetrated deep into the ground and detonated, causing significant subsidence and destroying or damaging foundations. According to Wallis, the aim was always to slightly miss large reinforced structures, allowing the shockwave from the sides to do the damage. However, in some cases the bombs crashed through many feet of reinforced concrete, destroying U-boat and E-boat pens in the French ports of Le Havre and Brest. Bombs with shorter fuses detonated closer to the surface, forming a crater 30m deep and 24m across - ideal for putting a marshalling yard out of commission for an extended period of time.

71

Actually it sounds like the bombing was precise, but inaccurate

72

My recent go-to on naval stuff has been Drachinfel who covers just about anything WW2 and before relating to naval warfare and ships (including videos on aircraft launched from ships, design and building of ships and their components [ie engine’s, boilers, range-finding, guns, etc], to supply and more)

He did a recent video on Midway specifically with a author historian.

The sinking of USS Arizona

And one about HMS Hood’s sinking as well.

Good for curiosity, or insomnia as some of the videos get pretty long.

73

That looks like an older documentary. It repeats the now disproven story that the Japanese carriers were already prepared to launch the attack on the US carriers and the US attack came just at the very right moment. That account comes from the Japan aviator Mitsuo Fuchida who lead the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The first video that @omenran linked to shows an interview with Jonathan Parshall, of one of the authors of Shattered Sword: the Untold Story of the Battle of Midway which demonstrated that Fukuda’s account was a “whopper” and simply was not true. They were not ready to launch the strike.

The two authors of Shattered Sword carefully go through original Japanese ship documentation to show that it could not have happened that way. The paper I linked to gives a good summary of why that could not have been the case and further states:

Documentaries have their place, including introducing subjects in an approachable format, but unfortunately their accuracy or depth is not necessarily always the best.

74

So I have no feelings about which version is true, but I’m curious about this (though not enough to, you know, read their paper :slight_smile: ) What is there in the ship documentation that gives them so much confidence in this conclusion?

I release there are plenty of reasons a first person account might be inaccurate (I guess it would be much more palatable to believe they lost the battle due to a fluke of bad timing rather than being fundamentally beaten by the US on an operational and tactical level). But surely given a disagreement between a first person account (from both sides IIRC, aren’t there accounts from the US pilots of large numbers of planes ready to take off, as they completed their bombing runs?) of what happened, and what someone wrote on some form to satisfy the Japanese naval bureaucracy (presumably a while after the battle) with no particular strong reason to ensure it was an exactly accurate minute-by-minute account of the battle, you would choose to trust the first person account more?

75

It’s the classic distinction between a primary and secondary source. Sure, there is the possibility of the officer lying, sugar coating, in the official reports. A historian must take this bias into account - a primary source isn’t the word of God. Hopefully you have multiple sources and can cross check them for consistency. But there is a greater possibility of the facts getting muddied with in secondary accounts. As time goes by you naturally forget things, and then there’s still the bias factor. Plus if there is a conspiracy to change the account, you have time to get your ‘facts’ in order.

~Max

76

Random personal anecdote about this. My grandfather had a good friend on board the Hood, he was absolutely clear (after a drink or two) that all the officers knew there were design flaws that meant they would not likely survive an artillery duel with a German battleship. Surely enough that was the last conversation my grandfather had with him, and he went down with Hood.

77

Yeah I get that if this was some early medieval event where it is a single first person account by a monk with an axe to grind, versus a ton of tax records or whatever that say different. But this is an event with a huge number of first person witnesses who were (until recently-ish) alive to tell their version of the story. That seems like it should almost always win out over what was written on a form in the naval archives in Tokyo.

And it seems this wasn’t just “there are some records that could put a different spin on the first person accounts” is the “what the first person account says must be complete untrue because of what the records say” I’m intrigued as to what they say that makes them think that.

78

Just take something like the exact time an order was issued. What is more reliable, handwritten reports the day of, or your memoir ten years later?

~Max

79

Yeah I’d choose the first person accounts, over a time written in a log book on a burning aircraft carrier, by someone with a lot more to think about than recording an exact blow-by-blow of the battle for posterity (or some other sequence of events in the fog of battle that meant planes were fueled up and armed when the US bombs fell, as described by the eye witnesses, even though the order was not officially given until later).

80

There are a few photos from the battle, and only a few CAP fighters are on deck.

Ships logs are used. Much is based on the timing of the events–it would take 45 minutes to launch a strike, and between American air attacks, launching CAP fighters, and the returning Midway strike force, there was no time.

I encourage people with an interest in Midway to watch the Drachinfel video with Jonathan Parshall, and to read Shattered Sword.

I earned about Shattered Sword and the Ian Toll Trilogy from a different thread on this board, and I’m glad I did.