Allied Strategic Bombing Offensive Called to a Halt

The German submarines of the Kriegsmarine enjoyed relative success during the opening years of the war. This is a well known fact (and had gone so far as to be dubbed the 'Happy Times') , reflected by the impressive amount of tonnage sent to the bottom of the Atlantic.

Eventually, technological changes and innovations in anti-submarine warfare made the cost of continuing this once fruitful campaign too high for Admiral Dönitz, and the Second Battle of the Atlantic was virtually won by the Allies after this date.

Let us now speculate a reversal of this situation. The Allied Strategic Bombing offensive was one of the few western contributions to the war before the opening of the Western front. The Casablanca directive summarized the situation:

"Your primary object will be the progressive destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial and economic system and the undermining of the morale of the German people to a point where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened."

Most of us know the heavy toll that the bombing campaign took on Germany and occupied Europe. My small town of Mortsel in Belgium was targeted for its Luftwaffe engine servicing plant, and as a result 900 people died, most of them children.

Now here comes the 'What-If'. The Battle for the defense of the Reich was the German effort to protect German sites of military and economic value. We know that by late 1944 the Allies enjoyed absolute air-superiority over German skies, despite the brilliant advances made in turbojet and rocket technologies by German engineers. Quality was unable to catch up with the Allie's quantity. WHAT IF the Germans could force the USAF and the RAF to call off their attacks by the widespread use of the Wasserfall missile?

The Wasserfall Ferngelenkte Flakrakete was one of the world's first guided SAM missiles. Albert Speer stated that it could have 'devastated' Allied bomber fleets. In reality, the first Wasserfall to fire succesfully was done so on March 8, 1944. Imagine a complete cancellation of the V1 and V2 programs in favor of this defensive measure. A Wasserfall could reach speeds of 2,800 km/h in vertical flight as it climbed to the bombers.

From wikipedia:

The original design had called for a 100 kg warhead, but because of accuracy concerns it was replaced with a much larger one (306 kg) based on a liquid explosive. The idea was to create a large blast area effect amidst the enemy bomber stream, which would conceivably bring down several airplanes for each missile deployed. For daytime use the operator would detonate the warhead by remote control, while night-time use was to be by some sort of proximity fuze.

Since I always like to root for the underdog, I like to believe that employing the wasserfalls en masse, demobilizing much of the Luftwaffe and transfering the oil requirements to the mechanized/motorized forces could have made a substantial impact.

Let us say each city was defended by batteries of Wasserfals numbering ~20 missiles on standby. Let us say that 1/10 of these missiles would make it up to the bombers and detonate within a damaging radius, bringing down 1-10 planes each. Do these numbers sound realistic to you, would this have been worth it? Could there have been MANY more missiles on standby? More damage? I am not an expert in the practicalities of launching explosives skywards, or how damaging such a warhead burst could be to Liberators or Lancasters.

What do you think? Effective, or not so effective? :ac_p51b:

 

Hello SittingDuckBE,

even though I do agree in a certain way that the Wasserfall might have had a severe impact on the allied bombing effort - there are two major buts on my behalf.

1. But the Wasserfall could not have been deployed very successfully at night since it was still an optical guided weapon and not a radar guided missile.

2. But (The biggest "but" in any of those What if's) all efforts would have evaporated in view of several A-bombs being dropped on the original intended target in 1945 = Germany.

Regards
Kruska

 

If the object of the U-boat campaign in the early years of the war was to reduce the amount of merchant tonnage available to Britain, it has to be judged a failure. Between the beginning of the war in September, 1939 and the end of 1941 (28 months of warfare), the merchant tonnage controlled by Britain actually rose by almost three million tons, from 17,764,000 tons in 1939 to 20,693,000 tons in December, 1941. That's an increase of about 16.4% despite the depredations of Donitz's U-boats. (Blair, "Hitler's U-Boat War", Vol 1, Page 99)

Anyway, I fail to see what the U-boat war has to do with the Allied strategic bombing campaign, unless you are positing that Donitz might have been successful and thus curtailed the buildup of American aircraft, men, fuel and supplies in Britain.

I see several problems with this scenario. The "Wasserfall" missile was quite large as surface to air missiles go, about one-quarter the size of a V-2 missile, and quite complex; it would have been very costly and difficult to produce in any significant numbers. I think 20 missiles around very imporant targets would be the upper linit of Germany's capabilities in production of these missiles, and these targets would not include cities, but would be war production plants, refineries, airfields, military bases, etc.

The "Wasserfall's" guidance system was susceptible to jamming and for night time use, the missile required a proximity fuze, which the Germans had yet to develop, although ultimately, they were probably capable of it. The Germans used a very large warhead because of the inaccuracy of the guidance system. It's still unlikely that more than one bomber would have been damaged badly enough to cause it to crash, so the cost ratio of each kill would have been very high for the missile. And possible Allied counter measures come to mind; dispersing the bombers into smaller "boxes" which was possible because of Allied air superiority, and using them for "area raids" at night. Also increased electronic jamming would have been initiated by the Allies, as well as pre-emptive fighter-bomber attacks against the missile batteries.

I think the Germans foresaw these dificulties, and that is why the "Wasserfall" program was canceled in early February, 1945.

 

I only wanted to give an example how a large scale offensive on a particular war front (land, sea or air) was halted by a breakthrough technological change; trying to demonstrate how this 'what-if' is more feasible than you might think. (the success of the U-Boat war is beside the question here)

Just like the V2s, wasserfalls were *theoretically highly mobile, and any daylight reconnaissance photos would already be useless by nightfall, meaning 'pre-emptive' fighter-bomber strikes would find their targets not only missing, but swarming with low-level conventional AA brigades/installations.

Would the Allies have even recognozed what was happening? Would they have realized what needed to be done to jam these missiles? Could the Germans have adapted and improved the technology enough to counter these counter-measures? Lots of questions!

 

While they may not have 'won' the U-Boats were a serious threat. Winston Churchill stated "The only thing that really frightened me during the war was the U-Boat peril". This was just supposed to be an example! The success of the U-Boats wasn't even the key part of the example. The important part was that they were all but called off by 1943. I wanted to wonder if the same could have happened to the bomber fleets doing 'demoralizing' raids on German towns and cities.

Could fighter bombers accurately target objects the size of armor or artillery during the dead of night, even with the help of flares?

A V2 unit could set up and fire their missile in a matter of hours, and a Wasserfall was much smaller. The only movements of the missile would be during night, when they would go from concealed positions to a firing position, making them almost impossible to hit when idle. There is no way they could be pulled out and fired off right before an air raid, but standing at the ready during night time would have still been relatively safe, no?

I didn't intend to say that the SAMs would be moved during an air raid, but before.

 

Gents, keep in mind that this is a What If... scenario, so even though there are real no stats on the mobility etc, for this case lets just pretend that they would be mobile etc. The beauty of the What If... is that it ISN'T based on actual fact (thus the 'What If...' part).

Otherwise, carry on

 

Speaking of 'stats', the production of a V-2 missile was approximately 100,000RM, and was half that much when production ended. The production cost of a Wasserfall was 7000-10,000 RM, and this could have halved by the end of its theoretical production run. We could guess that about 5-7 Wasserfalls could have been constructed for each V2 (and 0.5 Wasserfalls for each V1).

With a total V2 production of 5200, and about 10,000 V1s, that could mean they may have been able to produce about 31,000 Wasserfalls. If they would have begun firing them in March 1943, they could have fired off about 40 per day up until the end of the war (if it still ended at the same time). If one major bombing raid was launched EVERY night, they could expect 40 missiles coming their way!

Oh, and let me direct you to this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vq-PZioXEuw&videos=0VZKbWFZI_w&playnext_from=TL&playnext=1

All you needed was 5 or 6 guys to shove that missile around .

 

Hello SittingDuckBE,

as I mentioned before, the Wasserfall "might" have......

This is due to the fact that the guidance system as such was not nearly perfected or able to perform effectivly.
It was a radio controlled missile with a very limited restricted ability to divert direct angles of approach - it was no way near to a remote or radar guided missile - as such no change of side angles.

Also as Devilsadvocate already pointet out the Germans did not posess the technology for an aproximity fuse. Therefore the missile would need to be detonated from the ground by radiosignal "which can be jammed" with an estimate reagarding its height and the target at an elevation at 10,000 m being visualized from the ground or with a ready set altitude fuse, such as the flak batteries.

The approximate weight for a 12,5 cm projectile is about 45kg and that of a 10,5 cm Flak is around 34 kg. So during an avarage airraid a total of about 1,500 rounds were shot/wasted of to the sky from a battery (4 guns) with more or less no results amounting to a total of about 50,000 kg of explosives hurled towards the enemy.

So how much damage could have been inflicted by 20 Wasserfall with a total of 6000 kg of explosives?? out of which 30% might not have even made it beyond the initial launch, especially at night were the ground teams could not even direct the missile??

Since it is not a Patriot were a radar dot/marker can be blotted??

Regards
Kruska

 

Since these missles were optically guided, they do have the problem of how do you aim them when its cloudy.

And I do suspect that in Europe, cloudy days are the norm.

 

Darn you syscom3

I reserved that argument to the last. How does one aim at a target that is at average about 4000m above cloud cover, no matter if sunshine, cloudy or at night.

Regards
Kruska

 

Hm. I believe this argument goes both ways. Bombing raids were often changed/redirected due to heavy cloud cover over the target area. How do you aim at something below cloud cover? (apart from radio triangulation methods, compasses and timers that could give you a general idea.) Don't forget, Kokura was originally planned to have the atomic bomb dropped on it, and bad weather forced the bombers to fly to Nagasaki.

I don't believe the two are comparable. Doesn't one 'huge' explosion have a higher risk of inflicting critical damage than hundreds of really small ones. Once a flak round leaves the weapon's barrel, it won't be guided anymore either!

Also don't forget the psychological aspect of both the new/unknown aspect of the weapon, and their perceived accuracy.

 

Hello SittingDuckBE,

Most of those redirected bombing raids were due to the fact that the Target (USAAF) were industrial targets and the civilian population was not supposed to be a wild target.
That a British bombing flight was called of or redirected is not known to me but it could be possible, however not likely due to the issue of the target being barley or not visable.

Quote "Once a flak round leaves the weapon's barrel, it won't be guided anymore either"

Exactly just as the Wasserfall, (try to calculate for yourself) the reaction time for a manual radio transmitted guidance change of a missile flying at 2800km/h trying to hit a target at 10,000m altitude. That a lucky shot/hit could have set 3-4 bombers out of action is certainly possible - just as the Flak did - but it wouldn't be enough to stop the Allied bomber offensive.

And the explosive detonation of a 45kg shell from an 12,8 is certainly not a "really small one".

Regards
Kruska

 

When a Wasserfall got moving, it did so at 770 m/s. This would give a guidance pilot about 13 seconds to guide his missile to a concentration of bombers. Let us say for the sake of the What If that the Germans also have a proximity fuse for the rocket.

A 306kg warhead makes your 12,8 shell look relatively small

Let me follow this up with a quote I completely forgot to mention, which is more about the scenario than the technicalities of whether or not this SAM could actually knock out bombers:

To this day, I am convinced that substantial deployment of Wasserfall from the spring of 1944 onward, together with an uncompromising use of the jet fighters as air defense interceptors, would have essentially stalled the Allied strategic bombing offensive against our industry. We would have well been able to do that -- after all, we managed to manufacture 900 V2 Rockets per month at a later time when resources were already much more limited.
- Albert Speer

Can we trust Mr.Speer?

 

Hello SittingDuckBE,

as for my part I don't mind going along with a "What if" as long as the basic key components/facts are upheld.

But: What If that the Germans also have a proximity fuse for the rocket.

is: What if the allies had developed the A-bomb by March 1944? What would have happended to Alberts Wasserfall program?

Regarding to your Quote from Albert, there is a lot of those says from these people in regards to the inevitable outcome of WWII. The one I like most is from the guy who finally blew his lights out with a 9mm, just 2 days after he fabulated about "if this thing is over we have to reconquer those Oilfields in the Caucasus".

Regards
Kruska

 

Hehe well, the scenario is not about if the wasserfall could have won the war for Germany (of course no :green but if it would have stopped terror bombing and '1000 bomber raids'.

 

Hello SittingDuckBE,

who knows , have fun and enjoy this Forum

Regards
Kruska

 

The allies were pretty quick to exploit axis technology. By the end of the war the US was producing quite a few copies of the V-1. If they adopt a version of the German missile but use it for air drop they can potentially increase the accuracy of their bombing by orders of magnitude and decrease the vulnerability of their bombers as well.

 

You do realize that they were replicating V1s because Germany had already been defeated for several months, and most of the German scientists and technology was transferred to the West (operation paperclip).

The allies already had ASM missiles, most of them unguided which were used on fighter-bombers.

 

My mission logbook for the 8th AF shows that total mission aborts due to bad weather was quite rare.

I will say though, that many times the bomb wings, divisions and groups had to hit secondary or targets of opportunity due to the primary being obscured.

But as radar equipped bombers became the norm, bombing under 10/10 conditions became the norm.

Whether they hit anything is another subject.