Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

I may mis-understand but my reading of "from apes to warlords" by Solly Zuckerman (who was a scientist informing the Bombing campaign) is that Bomber Harris, and others, completely misunderstood the imperative in targetted bombing which in any case they couldn't really do, and so dismissed the evidence that targetted strategic bombing of critical supply chain elements was very high value.

Instead, they insisted "morale" carpet bombing made more sense, despite mounting unsustainable losses.

When finally the Oil, Ball Bearing and "transport plan" bombing was shown to work, the beginnings of the end of Bomber Harris started. Late in the war.

Scientific analysis post D-Day on bomb effects were telling.

Basically, they had the right idea. Bombing Ploesti Oil fields and ball bearing factories and rubber tyre plants, and the Buna artificial oil plants was the right thing to do, but it didn't suit the people in control, so they didn't keep the path long enough to find out.

The British spent enormous effort bombing V1 launch sites. Hitler apparently knew that the random hits of the V1 on London had little military significance, but it caused an enormous diversion of British resources to try and stop the V1. Hence Hitler kept it up.

Sometimes I wonder why the Germans didn't simply create lots of fake V1 launch sites out of sticks and cardboard.

Nonsense, any attacks on V1 sites were performed by completely different ground attack aircraft, and not the strategic bomber force. While the British might have allocated some resources to their destruction, to say it interrupted their nighttime bombing campaign is ridculous.

"In the end, the Allies committed 68,913 sorties that dropped 122,133 tons of bombs on Crossbow targets without a great deal to show for it."

    "Impact" by Benjamin King, pg 321

There's a lot more, the book is a good read.

So what? I'm not arguing it was ineffective (it was).

V1 sites were dealt with by a completely different branch of the air arm, using ground attack aircraft.

They couldn't even hit them with the strategic bomber fleet, so they went on being infective with that on city sized targets. But to say that campaign was negatively affected by a focus on dealing with the V1s is both wrong and misleading.

"Over a quarter of the Combined Bomber Offensive's tonnage of bombs were used against V-weapon sites in July and August"

"Carl Spaatz, commander of U.S. Strategic Air Forces in Europe (USSTAF), responded on June 28[31] to 'complain that Crossbow was a 'diversion' from the main task of wearing down the Luftwaffe and bombing German industry' for the Combined Bomber Offensive, and to recommend instead that Crossbow be a secondary priority"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Crossbow

My cite was not about bombing effectiveness, but about the diversion of Allied effort towards bombing V1 sites, which made the V1 (unexpectedly) effective for the Germans.

Saddam Hussein's Scud missile attacks had the same effect. The US diverted a lot of its resources towards stopping those attacks, despite the Scud being so inaccurate it was militarily useless. (Ironically, the Scud missile is just an upgraded V2.)

The 8th AF was also pressed into bombing those sites, and the RAF also used bunker buster bombs on the concrete ones.

Besides, if you have X manufacturing capacity, if you build lots of bombs and ground attack aircraft to go after V1 sites, you're necessarily building fewer bombs and aircraft for Harris' carpetbombing program. The V1 defenses also diverted many squadrons of fighters on constant alert to shoot them down, and mass quantities of flak guns along the route to London.

Ground attack airplanes being prioritized for V1 launch sites weren't being used to attack other things, like railways, industry, etc.

They did also go on multiple huge raids bombing Peenemünde.

War being war they flew over the factories so they could bomb the scientists living quarters.

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