Author Topic: Were long range heavy bombers effective?  (Read 13729 times)

Offline DaveBB

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Were long range heavy bombers effective?
« on: May 21, 2015, 05:18:14 PM »
The U.S. Strategic Bombing Campaign was a failure.  It's aim was to destroy bottleneck industries, such as German ball bearing plants, and thereby grind production of all mechanical vehicles to a halt.  Obviously this did not work.  The bombing of German controlled refineries surprisingly only slowed production for a few weeks, and never fully put a refinery out of operation.  Only when the Russians overran the Romanian oilfields did Germans began to run low on fuel.  British and American bombing of cities did kill quite a large number of people, but this did not seem to have an effect on the German war effort or even morale.

I think that only tactical bombing with medium bombers and ground attack by fighters was truly effective.  Accuracy was far greater, more vulnerable targets were selected (trains for example), and German troop morale was directly effected (the destruction of a panzer battalion {even though that was by 4 engine bombers, it was still tactical bombing}].

Long range bombing did tie up a lot of Germans.  But it tied up more Americans.  At one point there were a shortage of gunners due to all the bombers being shot down.  And the immense amount of material and labor to produce B-17s and B-24s is astounding.

What are your opinions on the subject?
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Offline Arlo

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Re: Were long range heavy bombers effective?
« Reply #1 on: May 21, 2015, 05:44:12 PM »
To conclude that it was a failure simply because it didn't live up to it's full potential is a hasty conclusion, imo.

http://slantchev.ucsd.edu/courses/pdf/brodie-strategic-bombing-in-ww2.pdf


Offline Ack-Ack

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Re: Were long range heavy bombers effective?
« Reply #2 on: May 21, 2015, 06:02:47 PM »
Allied strategic bombing wasn't a failure.
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Offline bustr

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Re: Were long range heavy bombers effective?
« Reply #3 on: May 21, 2015, 06:59:33 PM »
You can look at the concept of strategic bombing to impact the enemy, was being evolved over three years, until they figured out how to flatten one city per bomber with a single bomb. Pretty rapid learning and development cycle if your goal was to deliver the most destruction for the fewest lives and platforms. Germany surrendered and it only took dropping two of those bombs to get Japan's undivided attention. 

The AAF losses tapered off after 43, while enemy war material production became dispersed and quickly lessening in quality. A sustained three year bombing campaign and Germany surrenders to boots on the ground a shattered wreck. If we had not bombed so ineffectively, a better quality and quantity of war materiel could have been produced. How many other advanced weapons systems would that have allowed Germany to field?

Then again look at Japan and our ineffective bombing campaign versus some of the surprises in technology they were still willing to work on that were found. The only direct setback vector to what they were working on was our bombers over Japan. And externally our taking the territories around the Pacific they held with raw materials aided by bombing.

People make money and Political\Ivory Tower names for themselves by using hind sight and current cultural expectations to judge parts of WW2 war strategies as failures. In the 40's it was what we had to hit the enemy with. When the war was over, we won, not the other guys. The realities of the time, men, and technology while being in the middle of a world war 70 years ago.   
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Offline Scherf

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Re: Were long range heavy bombers effective?
« Reply #4 on: May 21, 2015, 07:05:38 PM »
Campaign against German oil has been demonstrated to have been particularly effective. Many of Japan's major cities had been razed before the atomic weapons were used - highest casualty count from a single raid anywhere in the war was Tokyo, puts Dresden in the shade.
... missions were to be met by the commitment of alerted swarms of fighters, composed of Me 109's and Fw 190's, that were strategically based to protect industrial installations. The inferior capabilities of these fighters against the Mosquitoes made this a hopeless and uneconomical effort. 1.JD KTB

Offline Oldman731

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Re: Were long range heavy bombers effective?
« Reply #5 on: May 21, 2015, 07:42:30 PM »
The U.S. Strategic Bombing Campaign was a failure. 


*sigh*

"1. The German experience suggests that even a first class military power -- rugged and resilient as Germany was -- cannot live long under full-scale and free exploitation of air weapons over the heart of its territory. By the beginning of 1945, before the invasion of the homeland itself, Germany was reaching a state of helplessness. Her armament production was falling irretrievably, orderliness in effort was disappearing, and total disruption and disintegration were well along. Her armies were still in the field. But with the impending collapse of the supporting economy, the indications are convincing that they would have had to cease fighting -- any effective fighting -- within a few months. Germany was mortally wounded."

US Strategic Bombing Survey, available in multiple places, but here's an easy one:

http://www.anesi.com/ussbs02.htm#c

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Offline mbailey

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Re: Were long range heavy bombers effective?
« Reply #6 on: May 21, 2015, 07:48:25 PM »
I'm fairly certain Albert Speer would disagree
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Offline Triton28

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Re: Were long range heavy bombers effective?
« Reply #7 on: May 21, 2015, 08:10:53 PM »
Allied strategic bombing was as effective as it could have been given that German heavy industry was pretty much a spread out group of small cottage shops.  There simply wasn't that many massive complexes for us to destroy, which makes them harder to hit and harder to know about.   

Losing oil fields will choke out any country pretty fast.  That doesn't count.   :)
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Offline Oldman731

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Re: Were long range heavy bombers effective?
« Reply #8 on: May 21, 2015, 08:25:51 PM »
I'm fairly certain Albert Speer would disagree


He didn't.  In fact, he was one of the principal sources of the bombing survey.

Overy explained it more concisely than I can:


From Overy, Richard, “Why the Allies Won,” W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 1995, isbn 0-393-03925-0, page 131:

The stifling of industrial potential caused by bombing is inherently difficult to quantify, but it was well beyond the 10 per cent suggested by the post-war bombing survey, particularly in the cluster of war industries specifically under attack.  At the end of January 1945 Albert Speer and his ministerial colleagues met in Berlin to sum up what bombing had done to production schedules for 1944.  They found that Germany had produced 35 per cent fewer tanks than planned, 31 per cent fewer aircraft and 42 per cent fewer lorries as a result of bombing.  The denial of these huge resources to German forces in 1944 fatally weakened their response to bombing and invasion, and eased the path of Allied armies.

The indirect effects were more important still, for the bombing offensive forced the German economy to switch very large resources away from equipment for the fighting fronts, using them instead to combat the bombing threat.  By 1944 one-third of all German artillery production consisted of anti-aircraft guns; the anti-aircraft effort absorbed 20 per cent of all ammunition produced, one-third of the output of the optical industry, and between half and two-thirds of the production of radar and signals equipment.  As a result of this diversion, the German army and navy were desperately short of essential radar and communications equipment for other tasks.  The bombing also ate into Germany’s scarce manpower:  by 1944 an estimated two million Germans were engaged in anti-aircraft defence, in repairing shattered factories and in generally cleaning up the destruction.  From the spring of that year frantic efforts were made to burrow underground, away from the bombing.  Fantastic schemes were promoted which absorbed almost half of all industrial construction and close to half a million workers.  Of course, if German efforts to combat the bombing had succeeded the effort would not have been wasted.  As it was the defences and repair teams did enough to keep production going until the autumn of 1944, but not enough to prevent the rapid erosion of German economic power thereafter, and not enough to prevent the massive redirection of economic effort from 1943.  Bombing forced Germany to divide the economy between too many competing claims, none of which could, in the end, be satisfied.  In the air over Germany, or on the fronts in Russia and France, German forces lacked the weapons to finish the job.  The combined effects of direct destruction and the diversion of resources denied German forces approximately half their battle-front weapons and equipment in 1944.  It is difficult not to regard this margin as decisive.

At p 133:

There has always seemed something fundamentally implausible about the contention of bombing’s critics that dropping almost 2.5 million tons of bombs on tautly-stretched industrial systems and war-weary urban populations would not seriously weaken them.  Germany and Japan had no special immunity.  Japan’s military economy was devoured in the flames; her population desperately longed for escape from bombing.  German forces lost half of the weapons needed at the front, millions of workers absented themselves from work, and the economy gradually creaked almost to a halt.  Bombing turned the whole of Germany, in Speer’s words, into a “gigantic front.”  It was a front the Allies were determined to win; it absorbed huge resources on both sides.  It was a battlefield in which only the infantry were missing.  The final victory of the bombers in 1944 was, Speer concluded, “the greatest lost battle on the German side…”  For all the arguments over the morality or operational effectiveness of the bombing campaigns, the air offensive was one of the decisive elements in Allied victory.

Offline DaveBB

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Re: Were long range heavy bombers effective?
« Reply #9 on: May 21, 2015, 09:16:12 PM »
Quote
How did the theory of strategic bombing hold up in practice? The amount of resources dedicated to the combined bomber offensive was immense. As much as 40 to 50 per cent of the British war effort went into the RAF and the USAAF consumed as much as 25-35 per cent of US industrial output. The USAAF grew to 2.4 million men in June 1944, or over a third the size of the US Army. The operational costs were steep. RAF Bomber Command lost 8,325 bombers and 64,000 casualties among their aircrew. The USAAF lost 8,237 bombers and 73,000 crew members which exceeded total USN and USMC casualties in the Pacific.[9] Additionally, an estimated 600,000 German civilians died in the bombings. The effectiveness of the bombing is still being debated. The United States commissioned a study titled “The United States Strategic Bombing Survey Report” (USSBS) after the war. The USSBS report looked at both sides of the combined bomber offensive and came to the conclusion that strategic bombing was a failure. Among the many factors contributing to the conclusion was the fact that Germany had a great deal of slack industrial capacity so that even at the height of the bomber offensive in 1944, armaments production actually increased. Another critical factor was the strategic air offensive against Germany was not a constantly pursued, single-minded affair in its execution. Bombers were diverted to the battle of the Atlantic, to operations in North Africa, to prepare for the Normandy invasion and to support breakout of the allied armies in Northern France in 1944. In fact, the USSB report noted “It is of vital significance that of all the tonnage of bombs dropped on Germany, only 17 percent fell prior to January 1, 1944 and only 28 percent prior to July 1, 1944”.[10] The Combined Bomber Offensive did have successes however. The most important accomplishments were the destruction of the Luftwaffe in aerial combat by the introduction of long range fighters such as the P-51 that could escort bombers on deep penetration missions into Germany. Secondly, the strategic bombing campaign diverted resources from the German army to home defense. The draining of one million men to operate the air defense network of the Reich was the equivalent of opening another front. The bombing also absorbed not only manpower but industrial production to include scarce petroleum that could have been used elsewhere. The bombing’s impact on morale was the least understood and definable aspect of the campaign. Certainly, there was widespread hardship and misery inflicted by the bombing but German worker morale did not collapse as Douhet, Trenchard and Mitchell had predicted. German workers continued to produce weapons and German soldiers continued to fight almost to the very last. Did strategic bombing win the war? By itself, no but it was certainly a factor in Germany’s defeat.

http://www.militaryhistoryonline.com/wwii/articles/failurestratbombing.aspx
« Last Edit: May 21, 2015, 09:18:41 PM by DaveBB »
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Offline Arlo

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Re: Were long range heavy bombers effective?
« Reply #10 on: May 21, 2015, 10:31:21 PM »
The title of Colonel Patton's 2013 online article is "The Failure of Strategic Bombing and the Emergence of the Fighter as the Preiminent Weapon in Aerial Warfare." In spite of the author's experiences in modern fighter warfare I think he would have been better off focusing on the emergence part without the attempt to claim failure regarding strategies leading up to it. He obviously has a dog in this fight. Were he to logically take his premise a step further it would go on to describe the failure of manned fighter planes as they give way to drones (which is just as much a falsehood since technical evolution does not actually exemplify failure in the process ..... just a process).
« Last Edit: May 21, 2015, 10:36:36 PM by Arlo »

Offline Squire

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Re: Were long range heavy bombers effective?
« Reply #11 on: May 21, 2015, 10:34:34 PM »
You can ask at what level German production of tanks, ships, guns, planes, ect would have been had they not been bombed at all. I can't beleive that it would not have been at a much higher rate than it was by 1944. Not to mention the attrition cost to Germany of Flak guns and crews, interceptors, air defence radars, installations ect, disruption of road and rail.

Quote
By itself, no but it was certainly a factor in Germany’s defeat

Exactly.
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Offline Guppy35

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Re: Were long range heavy bombers effective?
« Reply #12 on: May 21, 2015, 11:07:26 PM »
Ask the guys on both sides in Normandy if the bombing campaign made a difference.  If for no other reason than it lead to the death of the Luftwaffe and skies full of Allied airpower it was a success.
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Offline bozon

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Re: Were long range heavy bombers effective?
« Reply #13 on: May 22, 2015, 02:47:44 AM »
The strategic bombing capaign was not a pure "failure". It did cause a lot of damage to German insudtry - no doubt about that. On the other hand it took a huge toll of human lives and resources from the allies as well. I mean that number of casualties and POWs was staggering (remember it was 10 men per bomber going down, plus the fighters) and the cost of so many 4-engined bombers that could have been spent on other weapons. So, the real questions are:

1. Was it worth it?
2. Was there a better way to achieve the same goals?

I do not have a clear answer. My gut feeling regarding #2 is that putting all those resources into a much larger tactical airforce and investing in precision bombers (i.e. low alt and dive bombers / fighter bombers) would have paid off a lot more and cost less lives. A handful of Mosquitoes at low alt could do the same damage to a factory deep in enemy territory that numerous squadrons of 4-engine bombers that scatter their bombs over miles could do - at a fraction of the cost and risk, during both day and night.

I don't agree with everything, but he gets the main point:
http://www.2worldwar2.com/mosquito-2.htm
Mosquito VI - twice the spitfire, four times the ENY.

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Offline mbailey

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Re: Were long range heavy bombers effective?
« Reply #14 on: May 22, 2015, 05:20:27 AM »

He didn't.  In fact, he was one of the principal sources of the bombing survey.

Overy explained it more concisely than I can:


From Overy, Richard, “Why the Allies Won,” W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 1995, isbn 0-393-03925-0, page 131:

The stifling of industrial potential caused by bombing is inherently difficult to quantify, but it was well beyond the 10 per cent suggested by the post-war bombing survey, particularly in the cluster of war industries specifically under attack.  At the end of January 1945 Albert Speer and his ministerial colleagues met in Berlin to sum up what bombing had done to production schedules for 1944.  They found that Germany had produced 35 per cent fewer tanks than planned, 31 per cent fewer aircraft and 42 per cent fewer lorries as a result of bombing.  The denial of these huge resources to German forces in 1944 fatally weakened their response to bombing and invasion, and eased the path of Allied armies.

The indirect effects were more important still, for the bombing offensive forced the German economy to switch very large resources away from equipment for the fighting fronts, using them instead to combat the bombing threat.  By 1944 one-third of all German artillery production consisted of anti-aircraft guns; the anti-aircraft effort absorbed 20 per cent of all ammunition produced, one-third of the output of the optical industry, and between half and two-thirds of the production of radar and signals equipment.  As a result of this diversion, the German army and navy were desperately short of essential radar and communications equipment for other tasks.  The bombing also ate into Germany’s scarce manpower:  by 1944 an estimated two million Germans were engaged in anti-aircraft defence, in repairing shattered factories and in generally cleaning up the destruction.  From the spring of that year frantic efforts were made to burrow underground, away from the bombing.  Fantastic schemes were promoted which absorbed almost half of all industrial construction and close to half a million workers.  Of course, if German efforts to combat the bombing had succeeded the effort would not have been wasted.  As it was the defences and repair teams did enough to keep production going until the autumn of 1944, but not enough to prevent the rapid erosion of German economic power thereafter, and not enough to prevent the massive redirection of economic effort from 1943.  Bombing forced Germany to divide the economy between too many competing claims, none of which could, in the end, be satisfied.  In the air over Germany, or on the fronts in Russia and France, German forces lacked the weapons to finish the job.  The combined effects of direct destruction and the diversion of resources denied German forces approximately half their battle-front weapons and equipment in 1944.  It is difficult not to regard this margin as decisive.

At p 133:

There has always seemed something fundamentally implausible about the contention of bombing’s critics that dropping almost 2.5 million tons of bombs on tautly-stretched industrial systems and war-weary urban populations would not seriously weaken them.  Germany and Japan had no special immunity.  Japan’s military economy was devoured in the flames; her population desperately longed for escape from bombing.  German forces lost half of the weapons needed at the front, millions of workers absented themselves from work, and the economy gradually creaked almost to a halt.  Bombing turned the whole of Germany, in Speer’s words, into a “gigantic front.”  It was a front the Allies were determined to win; it absorbed huge resources on both sides.  It was a battlefield in which only the infantry were missing.  The final victory of the bombers in 1944 was, Speer concluded, “the greatest lost battle on the German side…”  For all the arguments over the morality or operational effectiveness of the bombing campaigns, the air offensive was one of the decisive elements in Allied victory.

Good read Oldman, I believe the title of this thread has changed ( I believed stated It was a failure) and that was what I was responding too. Everything you posted regarding Speers comments and deficiency in war production from the bombing speaks to what I was getting at with my post.
Mbailey
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Ichi Go Ichi E
Character is like a tree and reputation like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.

When the game is over, the Kings and Pawns all go into the same box.