Pretty good stuff. Allied Pilots taking a few quick shots. Courtesy the UK: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencet...Allies-revealed-Hitlers-weapons.html?ITO=1490
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WWII Aerial Photos
- Thread starter Scruff
- Start date
Found this link in the comments. aerial.rcahms.gov.uk
After looking through some of the pictures, it's amazing to see the aerial views after a bomb run. The landscape looks like swiss cheese.
After looking through some of the pictures, it's amazing to see the aerial views after a bomb run. The landscape looks like swiss cheese.
Yep, it does especially when as many as 1000 bombers were sent after a target, but their Pk wasn't anything to write home about. So the swiss cheese often wasn't much more than churned up terrain like no-man's land between the trenches in WWI after countless artillery barrages. Forbidding to look at, but not directly related to damage to intended target.
Even with the vaunted Norden bombsight, winds at altitudes they dropped at were radically different from what was encountered on the way down so the notion of Daylight Precision Bombing advocated by 8th Air Force was a relative term. LeMay had same problem with B-29 raids on Japan so he resorted to firebombing (borrowing from British nighttime tactic) cities.
Fast forward to Vietnam and even Desert Storm, the B-52 carried an impressive load of bombs, but still had to deal with winds. The ground still looked like swiss cheese, but unless the target was hit, that's all you had with significant potential of collateral damage, which has been factored more and more into ROE.
For some perspective:
Source: THE US STRATEGIC BOMBING SURVEY of 1945
"In the attack by Allied air power, almost 2,700,000 tons of bombs were dropped, more than 1,440,000 bomber sorties and 2,680,000 fighter sorties were flown. The number of combat planes reached a peak of some 28,000 and at the maximum 1,300,000 men were in combat commands. The number of men lost in air action was 79,265 Americans and 79,281 British. [Note: All RAF statistics are preliminary or tentative.] More than 18,000 American and 22,000 British planes were lost or damaged beyond repair."
"In the wake of these attacks there are great paths of destruction. In Germany, 3,600,000 dwelling units, approximately 20% of the total, were destroyed or heavily damaged. Survey estimates show some 300,000 civilians killed and 780,000 wounded. The number made homeless aggregates 7,500,000. The principal German cities have been largely reduced to hollow walls and piles of rubble. German industry is bruised and temporarily paralyzed."
"In the wake of these attacks there are great paths of destruction. In Germany, 3,600,000 dwelling units, approximately 20% of the total, were destroyed or heavily damaged. Survey estimates show some 300,000 civilians killed and 780,000 wounded. The number made homeless aggregates 7,500,000. The principal German cities have been largely reduced to hollow walls and piles of rubble. German industry is bruised and temporarily paralyzed."
Source: THE US STRATEGIC BOMBING SURVEY of 1945
It's kind of hard to miss when you're target is a city.
Daytime USAAC high-altitude bombing was highly inaccurate. The RAF's Bomber Command's night-time raids generally weren't within 3 miles of their intended target when they dropped. Yet, the day & nighttime raids had to be escorted & fight their way to & from the targets - often with disasterous results in aircraft & aircrew lost. IMHO, never have so many many died (on both sides) for so little accomplished. I have always admired the Navy's relatively pin-point dive bombing tactics aimed at actual seen targets. This may not have been feasible in Europe due to the distances involved, but the way chosen was horribly inefficient also. JMHO.
Not quite everyone, but I would say too many believe the tenets laid down by Guilio Douhet and espoused by Billy Mitchell. I don't think you'll find too many Marines as part of that cabal as they have always argued for and employed a combined arms approach, but the ultimate deciding factor being "boots on the ground". Army would likely agree and uses air to support their ground forces. Then comes the Air Force and look no further than Desert Storm and OIF with modern day Douhet acolyte, Col John Warden, and his Checkmate team who believed they could force Saddam to cede control of Kuwait by airpower alone. They presented their plans to LTGen Horner, the senior Air Force commander in theatre who thanked Warden and sent him back to the Pentagon, but kept his bright Deputy, LtCol Dave Deptula (now a 3 star in the Pentagon). In the end, it took ground forces to convince Saddam to vacate Kuwait and the "Shock and Awe" campaign in 2003 did not convince anyone in Iraq to lay down their arms.
IMHO, we tend to be overpressed with the effects of our airpower at the strategic level. Despite the massive bombing campaigns over Europe in WWII and in other conflicts, there are few instances when airpower alone caused the opponent to raise the white flag.
I guess I was thinking about it in terms of industrial capacity (in so much as lots of folks like to describe WW2 as won by our ability to crank out Shermans and B-17s vs. that of Germany and Japan). BUT, then I always think it wasn't until late in the war that we finally knocked out the ball-bearing factories and panzers stopped rolling off the line, or something to that effect.
I suppose my question was more: to what extent did bombing campaign in Europe (especially in its early stages) effect the German capacity for war. My impression increasingly bends toward: not as effective as I may have once been taught.
Obviously it was a very different story with Japan, but regardless, the Japanese even more so drive home the point that willingness to surrender does not correlate with capcity to make war "evenly or effectively" against one's enemy. Possibily this is the root necessity for "boots on the ground?"
One more thought: We all learn that the Blitz only hardened the resolve, and I feel like I've read at one time or another that the bombing campaign similarly hardened Germany. Anyone else read anything to that effect?
/randomness
Well, that's not what you said and the aspect of industrial capacity is an entirely different matter. As to industrial capacity, under Albert Speer (Hitler's architect who took over as Minister of Armaments and War Production after death of incumbent in 1942), Germany transitioned to a war production mode and even in face of day bombing by the Americans and night bombing by the British, he actually increased production by skillful methods to disperse production and use alternative materials.
What you're alluding to however, is the War of Attrition that pitted our Industrial Capacity against theirs. Note: we had to crank out Shermans because it was no match against Panther or Tiger tank variants and it took as many as 4-5 to knock out the superior German designs. Regardless, having lot sof "stuff" to array against your adversary is impotant, but having people trained to use the "stuff" and combat experienced leaders to employ them is equally important.
There is still lingering controversy over the bomber offensive (Operation Pointblank) that targeted specific production facilities and whether it made any impact on production by hitting the Ball Bearing production at Schweinfort. The second raid by 8th AF B-17 Flying Fortresses was so disastrous that it became known as "Black Thursday" due to the 20% losses incurred by the 8th AAF when they hit Schweinfort's Ball bearing plants without fighter escort (77 bombers were shot down, crashed or were total writeoffs).
At that loss rate, they could scarely hope to win a war of attrition. Loss of aircrews was just as startling. The 8th AF ceased bombing missions beyond range of its fighter escorts at that point, which gave a daylight respite to targets in Germany that lay beyond range of the P-47 Thunderbolt. The answer was introduction of the P-51B, but it was not available in sufficient numbers until 1944.
I don't know how effective you thought it was. Plenty of material on Internet to read. Start with Strategic Bombing Survey and try reading Operation Pointblank as well as "Black Thursday".
I don't necessarily agree. Both countries were controlled by Military fanatics who had no prospects in defeat so they were loath to consider surrender or an armistice of any kind. Leaders like that aren't going to be disposed easily, just like Saddam.
It did in both cases. Remember, Hitler had an entire Propaganda Ministry under Joseph Goebbels managing expectations. In case of Japan. Bad news wasn't even passed on to the populace whenever possible (ie loss of all 4 aircraft carriers in their defeat at Midway). Even dropping of the first Atomic Bomb was not enough to convince them to capitulate. Hardliners wanted to continue to fight.
I think to add to this, tank vs tank or Sherman vs Tiger, I agree with your ratio, but for infantry support those 4 or 5 (or 3 or 2 even) Shermans beat that 1 Tiger- at least that what enough of our forefathers believed and planned for. There is plenty of historical writing about the decisions to go with that doctrine- and luckily for our side history favored those decisions...
I also agree about the ball bearing bombing raids-anything I've ever learned about those is that in hindsight they started out as good ideas and ended as face-palm debriefs. And I absolutely agree about training and leadership.
One last thing I have to add is to consider how much Axis resources were dedicated to countering the Allies' day-night/round-the-clock strategic bombing. As much as German industrial capacity improved how much of it went straight into "overhead" costs to distribute and protect the increased capacity, and how much of the net capacity went into their air defense system? Compared to the US and UK, a whole lot...
I would say "obviously," but this was not really something that factored into my own thinking until it was pounded out time and again on this website that its the "aircrew not the plane." I get the impression that WWII is often simplified to America's military-industrial weight uber alles (even in the face of of "superior German machinery and doctrine"), both in casual study, and in the high school classrooms it is covered in.
Oh no, we agree. Poor wording on my part.
And further to wonder upon any comparative examination of loss of seasoned aircrew as a result.
Whether it is obvious or not, it was a decision on part of United States to control length of combat tours and then rotate experienced aircrews back into the training environment to help nuture more aircrews and expand the ability to produce combat ready aircrews. These were decisions made early in 1942 and including contracting for flight gear as well to meet demands of pumping out 20,000+ aviators and expanding flight instruction locations across the country.
It's the principal reason you don't see the huge scores racked up by fighter pilots in Germany (or even Japan to a lesser extent) duplicated by the US pilots. In the long run, a distinct shift in relative experience was evident in skies over Europe and Pacific. Both German and Japanese pilots were eventually being thrust into the arena with ubsurdly little flighttime because they did not ramp up their training to meet the demands of a attrition war that steadily depleted their ranks of experienced pilots.
Conversely, Japan never ramped up its pilot training and then suffered loss of significant numbers of trained pilots at Battle of Midway in mid 1942. By the time of the epic Battle of the Phillipine Sea in June 1944, Navy fighter pilots devestated the attack waves of Japanese aircraft trying to attack Task Force 58. The lack of training on the part of their adversaries was so evident that it has become known as the "Great Marianas Turkey Shoot".
Ringside seats for the Great Mariana Turkey Shoot
The Japanese Naval Air Arm was so depleted at that point of aircraft and pilots that the surviving carriers that participated in the Battle of Leyte Gulf a few months later were used a bait because they couldn't flesh out their decks with enough aircraft or aircrews.
1943 was a real meeting point for the US against German and Japanese opponents. After a bloodletting in North Africa, US forces begain earning their spurs against Rommel himself and moved on to Italy. For a green army to best battle-hardened veterans so quickly is a tribute to all those who participated. Similarly the Pacific, the Solomons and air over New Guinea becaome real meat grinders matching hardware, tactics and sheer perseverence, but the allies were steadily introducing better hardware and gaining more and more experience while refining their tactics.
If you're basing any of your notions of what transpired in WWII or any other conflict on your High School classroom experience, then that's a large part of any misconceptions (or oversimplications you may have). First off, High School rarely devoted much time to the nitty gritty of what happened and few instructors are well read on the subject in the first place.
As to notion that German "machinery and doctrine" was superior, they had a head start on everyone dating back to the Spanish Civil War that became a proving ground for tactics and hardware.
The Germans developed the Me109 and FW190 as their mainstay fighters and the Me262 was belatedly introduced thanks to interference from Hitler himself. Hardly matches up to the US that fielded the P-38, P-40, P-47 and P-51 for the USAAF and the F6F and F4U.
In the realm of bombers, the US fielded an equal amount of excellent medium bombers that matched best Germans fielded. Oddly, the Germans failed to develop anything to match the B-17, B24 or B-29 (even though it was relegated to the Pacific Theatre due to success in Germany). The Brits fielded the twin engined Mosquito Fighter/Bomber/Recce that had no equal on the German flightline even though they tried to emulate it.
Not sure what you mean by doctrine, but if you mean a mix of strategy and tactics; again the Germans employment of Blitzkrieg and coordination of mechanized ground forces with air support allowed them to rapidly take ground in Europe when facing troops that were faced with the unexpected and ill-prepared for the onslaught. Patton gave them a taste of their own medicine later on.
Their doctrine didn't fare too well on the Eastern Front once they extended their lines and winter set in. In the epic Battle of Kursk, it was the Russians who prevailed in the largest tank battle in history to date and it wasn't because they threw superior numbers at the Germans. Their tactics were superb and it was they who had best counter to the storied and expected German counterattack.
The Germans launched scores of elite divisions such as this SS unit against the Soviet Army only to be bested in the end by superior tactics
For a generally isolationist nation leaning towards pacifism to have to play catch-up ball against the Axis powers (Germany, Japan and Italy) that had been engaged in militaristic "adventures" for years (and had conditioned their military and civilian populace to support such endeavors) was quite an achievement. This ability for America to rise to the challenge dates back to the Revolutionary War in which a poorly resourced bunch of farmers and shopkeepers took on a superpower and prevailed despite the considerable disparity in hardware and even doctrine. So as to WWII, I wouldn't oversimplify the relative merits of their hardware, "doctrine" or personnel. There is much more at play.
I try very hard not to and I do not mean to suggest anything to the contrary. It is simply my experience that people who believe themselves to be knowledgeable on the subject (or use it as some kind of talking point) like to reduce it down to industrial simplicity and inevitability.
Kursk is a great example. Visions of Enemy at the Gates; seem to dominate cultural understanding of the Eastern front. I think the idea that the Russians could have bested the Germans because of tactics and not by shear numbers alone would be unusual to many people.
I don't mean to be typing here asking for answers and the abbridged version; I've merely been thinking aloud (for better for worse
).