Which did more to win the war?

The Royal Air Force's Bomber Command had its theory of "area" bombing, while the USAAF persisted in its dream of "precision" bombing. Did one or the other have more influence on the final outcome of the war. For that matter, what effect did the strategic bombing campaign have on the war in Europe?

 

That has been a "debate" for decades, until true "precision" it is a moot point however. Even with out much "daunted" Norden bombsight our "precision" was far from it. The Norden might have been able to do the "pickle barrel" accuracy in the clear, dry, still air of the Southwest desert testing grounds (it really couldn't), but in Europe it was a bust. America's own Bombing Survey plays down the import of the policy, but then again it does sometimes use a jaundiced eye to do so.

For the ETO, Goto:

United States Strategic Bombing Survey: Summary Report (European War)

and for the PTO, Goto:

United States Strategic Bombing Survey: Summary Report (Pacific War)

 

The RAFBC was compelled to adopt nighttime area bombing as it could not sustain the losses in aircraft and aircrew that a daylight campaign would entail. The US had trained and equiped the USAAF for a daylight campaign, and in any event could not ever admit that RAF might be right. As it happened it worked out well as it would compel the Luftwaffe to split their resourceses between day and night threats to the Reich.

Niether force was able to achieve what it set out to do. RAFBC did not demoralize the German workforce, and the USAAF could not bring German production to a standstill. They did serve as a moral boost to the civil population of both allies while their armies could not get at Germany proper. They also forced Germany to expend resouces on air defence that could have gone elsewhere. Finally Allied bombing did reduce overall German production thus meaning fewer tanks,planes and ammunition the Soviet/Allied armies had to face.

If I were compelled to choose I would say the USAAF had greater impact. The daylight campaign forced the Luftwaffe back into Germany proper, thus meeting one of the preconditions for Overlord.

 

A tough choice. RAF Bomber Command was the sole instrument for nearly three years. That counts for something. The USAAF based in the UK certainly helped.

It seems a pity to confine the USAAF in the way I just have. The 15th, the ultimate manifestation of the MTO contribution, should be added, for they made substantial contributions that included western Europe amongst other places.

One thing seems certain, The war, whether it is appreciated or not, seems to have been won because of American resources. Without their equipment for air, sea and land, let alone the personnel, it would not have ended the way it did.

Michael

 

the RAF concentrated on night bombing, in order to "dehouse" the German civilian populace, to kill them and break their will to continue the war. The first two items were certainly done, the last one never was. While they were certainly badly effected by the night raids, the German people continued to support the war effort, continued to turn out war production and German civilian morale never collapsed. And while not much talked about, during or after the war, the night RAF raids were in actuality murder raids pure and simple.

The USAAF concentrated solely on daylight bombing and on actual military targets. There were many good targets but American strategists never seemed to have succeeded on picking one critical target then sticking to it. At first major priority was German fighter production (second after only u-boat construction and operations), and this was entirely logical. However Albert Speer succeeded in dispersing production so much that in 1944 German fighter production rose to all-time highs in spite of american bombing efforts.

In the book "Shot at and Missed", the author lt. myers, who flew as bombardier in B-17's from Italy from mid 1944 to early 1945, describes making many attacks in Austria, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia with the major targets being conventional and synthetic fuel plants and railway marshalling yards i.e. obviously the transport system was being systematically destroyed. His group flew many missions in support of the Russian drive west (and in fact flyers from his group were instructed to head for the Russian lines, if possible, if the plane was shot down). German descriptions from that campaign seem to have confirmed that these type of raids probably did severe damage to the Germans, as there are many accounts told by Germans on the Eastern front of vehicles and tanks abandoned and aircraft grounded for lack of fuel.

And this was just the B-17's based from Italy, the American b-17 and b-24 bomb groups in England were even larger and no doubt did even more damage.

The superior Norden bombsight and later the introduction of the first crude radar, did make a huge difference in bombing accuracy. American aerial reconnaisance was usually first rate and if a target was later found not to have been destroyed, a second or even third raid would often be undertaken. This was a powerful incentive for the American bombing crews to destroy the target the first time.

After the war, General of Fighters Adolph Galland expressed astonishment that the Americans had not attacked the electrical power system more extensively then they did. He recognized that without electrical power, almost nothing could be manufactured, and the German war effort would simply grind to a halt. it is said the reason for this is American planners thought the German power system was too de-centralized to attack effectively...they were wrong.

 

It's worth noting that while we can "measure" and see that the USAAF failed to halt German war production...we do have German opinions, and ones that have to be taken notice of too, that Bomber Command came very close to fulfilling its brief Both Speer and Goebbels (in his diaries) noted that the RAF came within a few massed raids of breaking the morale of the German working population...but was unable at that point in the war (late 1942) to maintain momentum.

By the time they could - the germans had a whole variety of support organisations working to re-house, feed, clothe and re-paper bombed-out civilians, rescue organisations were greatly expanded, and a largescale urban shelter prorgamme had been started - all the things that act to bolster civilian morale. Unlike "hard" production....morale is a matter of how people feel, after all - and sometimes the simplest of things keeps people smiling (thinking now of the mobile showers and laundry facilities set up in liondon and the Blitzed cities in 1940-41 by the big soap manufacturers in the UK) It's a far simpler deed to set up a couple of trucks or buses with camping shower cubicles than it is to install a new production line - but it's what keeps people turning up each day to that production line.

 

I believe that there were two main factors that makes the USAAF the more succesful of the two. First of all, once they concentrated on Germany's oil production they had a real effect on the war but I think more importantly, once Doolittle took over 8th AF he put more emphasis on defeating the Luftwaffe, in effect using the heavy bombers as bait to force the German fighters up and then shooting down large numbers of them, putting a strain on pilot losses that the the Luftwaffe could not sustain. I think the greatest accomplishment of the USAAF was the total defeat of the German air force.

 

The RAF raids were murder raids pure and simple????? The American raids I take it were an act of benevolance..

 

Carefull lads, the last time we went in this direction the tread got closed. The difference between the German Blitz and RAF night attacks was the economy of Scale. The Brits simply were better at it than Fritz.

 

So successful that as late as mid-April 1945 they were still having to be TOLD about synthetic fuel factories - five of them IIRC - by a defector (Heinrich Fey) Germany actually had quite a large amount of various grades of aviation fuel bunkered around Germany as of VE Day - the real problem was moving it around to where it was needed.

By definition - the British WANTED German civilians to survive the raids....to be hungry, ragged, their jobs gone, their homes destroyed, their ration papers gone. They wanted them to trek out of bombed cities and not go back there to work...and to riot when the Reich security services tried to turn them back

 

'Actual military targets' in USAAF speak was any town or city with a railway running through it.

Its far less impressive when you discover that only the lead bomber in a formation actually aimed its bombs, the rest of the formation merely dropped their bombs when they saw the bombs falling from the lead bomber.

The truth is, both the RAF and USAAF used the area bombing tactic, the only difference was the RAF was a little more honest in admitting it did.

 

The USAAF used the euphemism 'Marshalling Yards' to cover the fact they were area bombing civilian areas:

A summary in a working paper from a USSTAF file, “Review of Bombing
Results,” shows a similar dichotomy according to time period. From January
1944 through January 1945, the Eighth dropped 45,036 tons on “towns and
cities.” From February 1945 through the end of the war, this summary
showed not a single ton of bombs falling on a city area. Unless the Eighth had
developed a perfect technique for bombing through overcast,[ such a result was
simply impossible. Obviously, the word had come down to deemphasize reports
on civilian damage. For instance, when Anderson cabled Arnold about USSTAF’s
press policy on the Dresden controversy in February 1945, he noted, “Public rela-
tions officers have been advised to take exceptional care that the military nature
of targets attacked in the future be specified and emphasized in all cases. As in
the past the statement that an attack was made on such and such a city will be
avoided; specific targets will be described.

The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, although not explicitly listing a target
category such as cities or towns, had an interesting definition of “industrial
areas.” The survey placed three types of targets in “industrial areas”: (1) cities,
towns, and urban areas; (2) public utilities (electric, gas, water, and telephone
companies); and (3) government buildings. Given that definition the survey even
managed to describe RAF area raids as strikes against “industrial targets.”
The target category “marshaling yards” received more of the Eighth’s bomb
tonnage than any other, somewhere between 175,000 and 200,000 tons of bombs.
At least 25 percent of all the Eighth Air Force bombs dropped over Europe fell on
“marshaling yards.” One-third of the American incendiary bombs dropped over
Germany fell on the same system. As a matter of directive and policy for most
of the period between September 1944 and April 1945, the same period in which
the Eighth delivered 90 percent of the total tonnage dropped on the system, mar-
shaling yards had the highest nonvisual bombing priority. During that period the
Eighth Air Force dropped 168,038 tons of bombs, 70 percent (117,816 tons)
blind and 30 percent (50,222 tons) visually. Postwar research showed that
only 2 percent of bombs dropped by nonvisual means landed within 1,000 feet
of their aiming points. Rail yards as such, however, were poor targets for
incendiaries. If the fire bombs landed directly on or near rail cars, they destroyed
or damaged them; otherwise, they could do little harm to the heavy equipment or
trackage. The Eighth realized this. Of the 9,042 tons of bombs dropped on
French rail yards, mostly during the pre-OVERLORD transportation bombing
phase, when the Americans took scrupulous care to avoid French civilian casual-
ties, 90 percent were visually sighted and only 33 tons were incendiaries.
Even over Germany itself, during Operation CLARION, when the Eighth bombed
dozens of small yards and junctions in lesser German towns, it dropped, over a
two-day period of visual conditions, 7,164 tons of bombs in all, but less than 3
tons of fire bombs.
In contrast, using H2X, the Eighth pummeled marshaling yards and rail sta-
tions in large German cities with high percentages of incendiary bombs. For
example, rail targets in at least four major cities garnered the following percent-
ages of fire bombs out of all bombs dropped on them: Cologne, 27 percent;
Nuremberg, 30 percent; Berlin, 37 percent; and Munich, 41 percent.
“Marshaling yards” undoubtedly served as a euphemism for city areas. Because
the yards themselves were not good targets for incendiaries, the prime purpose
in employing such weapons was to take advantage of the known inaccuracy of
H2X bombing in order to maximize the destruction of warehouses, commercial
buildings, and residences in the general vicinity of the target. Large numbers of
planes scattering their bombs around their mostly unseen and unverifiable aim-
ing points surely would cause great collateral damage to any soft structures
located nearby.

Source
Carl A. Spaatz and the Air War in Europe by Richard G. Davis. Smithsonian Institution Press, , 1994.

 

It would be hard to call that one. For example, one of the things that the RAF's area bombing caused was flight from many cities by citizens. This got so bad that the Nazi government had to place travel restrictions on the population to keep them from fleeing. A collary result of this was a huge increase in absenteeism from work. Workers missed work to repair their homes. Injuries on the job increased due to missed sleep and increased tension. Workers that fled simply went elsewhere. By late 1943 this was spiking into the 40% range. Again the government stepped in and made it a capital crime to miss work.

The USAAF crippled the German transportation system. While the trains still usually ran they more and more rarely ran on schedule as most rail yards got bombed into craters. Repairing one or two through track got things running again but at very low efficency. This had a ripple effect on the economy. Parts from sub-contractors and suppliers got delivered late, if at all disrupting production of most goods. Given few alternatives to the rail system (trucks were in short supply, fuel was in short supply, etc.) this meant that production became spotty.

It becomes difficult to measure such things and their effect on the overall war. But, both air forces did have an effect and it was noticable.

 

It may even be relevant that U.S. officers selecting targets would have been more familiar with U.S. rail practices than European practices. The U.S. rail system is much more reliant on large classification yards (and was even then) thanks to the U.S. preference for running fewer longer trains. Which makes sense given local conditions.

A little explanation: "Marshaling" yards are what would be called in the U.S. "classification" yards. Cars are gathered together in them and sorted. I could go into how this works a little, but it's not terribly relevant here. Suffice it to say that when you operate longer trains you need more sorting capacity, which in turn requires bigger yards. So train sizes are heavily restricted by yard capacity. Line capacity, on the other hand, has a much more profound effect on the number of trains you can operate in a given time. This is overly simplistic, but in both cases more tracks roughly equates to more capacity.

In Europe, where land is at a premium but cities are close together it makes more sense to expand lines. (Less land acquisition, particularly in costly urban areas.) In the U.S., particularly west of the Mississippi, cities are often quite distant from one another, so expanding line capacity is often prohibitively expensive. But land is cheap, even on the outskirts of cities, so it's no big deal to build more and larger yards. The upshot of this is, of course, that yards are much more important with a long train mentality. I recall being stunned at how short European trains are. If your train is three cars long, you don't need much sorting capacity. So go ahead, blow up the yards. No big deal. We'll just go around. If you'd have done that in the U.S. during WWII it would have completely paralyzed us.

U.P. had a system wide meltdown in . . . 1997 or so? . . . when they changed the way that ONE yard in Houston was operated. The effective loss of one yard to a procedural problem caused something like 25% of all the rail traffic in the country to run late. For three months. (No kidding.) So it's not all that much of a surprise that the U.S. might expend a lot of ordinance targeting rail yards to little avail.

As to incendiaries on nearby industry: does it really matter whether you close the yard throat by putting a crater in it or by toppling a warehouse onto it? Closed is closed. And it will probably take longer to remove the debris than to simply fix the track, so the incendiaries in nearby areas even make sense. But only if shutting down the yard is useful. Which in Germany during WWII it probably wasn't. Mistaken assumptions about different systems will get you there every day.

 

I think that if the Allied Bomber Offensive had "no effect on the morale of the German people", then post-war bleating as to the "un-fairness" of it all would be zero.

The very fact that German citizens STILL complain loudly about this aspect of the war is a measure of the success it achieved in creating genuine war weariness amongst a people that in mid-1940 thought very much that they were going to not only win this round, but escape once again with the homeland intact. Fat chance, Fritz!

Not mentioned here, or elsewhere for that matter, is the tremendous effect that bombing of civilian houses had on the morale of the frontline German soldier. On leave from the terrible Eastern Front, it must have been disconcerting to return to a bombed out house, with one or two members of your family dead and buried. What effect this had in numerical terms is difficult to assess, but account after account that I've read by serving German soldiers makes comment after comment concerning just this aspect of their war effort. I would guess that this had a MAJOR effect on combat efficiency, and would have caused more than a few desertions.

Besides, put yourself in the shoes of Winston Churchill, and postulate what would happen to YOU if you called off the bomber offensive in aid of falling into line with Convention restrictions....you would have been turfed out of office and quickly replaced by somebody who would swiftly resume these raids. The British people were in no mood for mercy of this nature. I say this to people in the same vein as those who insist on trashing Douglas Haig. Had Haig bowed to pressure from those not wishing to resume offensive actions on the Western Front, he would have been swiftly replaced by somebody who would. Haig was dancing to the tune of his FRENCH masters, just as Churchill was bowing to public opinion that demanded to "GIVE IT BACK", in the full measure, night after night......and if old Grandma Schickelgruber in the house down the road copped it....well, that was just too bad.

 

We might also note that the daylight bombing strategy the USAAC/F had trained and prepared for was a failure. Unescorted heavy bombers could not fight their way through to targets without prohibitive losses and could not defeat the enemy air force. Purely by chance we had fighters which could be adapted for long-range escort. The airmen had never identified a requirement for a fighter which could escort bombers to their full range and never asked industry to develop one. The best escort fighter, the Mustang, was not even a USAAC project but rather a private proposal to a British purchasing mission which only became a top-rate fighter when the RAF fitted it with the Merlin engine.

One other bit of luck was that the design of both the P-38 and -51 compelled external fuel tanks to be two under the wings rather than one under the belly as carried by most fighters of the age.

 

You know, how would the RAFBC come to the conclusion that you could bomb the civilian population into submission? You'd think that they'd look at the Blitz of London and realize that that would never happen....

 

If you look elsewhere in the thread on bomber defensive fire....whatn happened within a very few years was that fighter armament jumpred from a couple of rifle-calibre MGs to multibank MGs and cannons - both of which allowed the fighter to cause more damage to a bomber than the bomber was capable of giving back.

UNTIL that point - the lesson of late WWI and the Spanish Civil War was that rifle-calibre MGs could hold off fighters....

What the USAAF failed to do was learn from the lessons of 1940, 1941 and 1942 and steamed on into their campaign with a huge faith in their now-suddenly outmoded defensive tactics

It might be worth - for the sake of this thread - being very specific about what parts of Bomber Command and the USAAF we're talking about; I presume its the strategic campaign that's being discussed...

Because through later 1944 and 1945, you have to remember that by far the greater damage to Germany's transport infrastructure at all levels was being done by both air forces' tactical assets, not strategic ones Once the RAF and USAAF could operate from bases on the Continent, tactical bombing and ground attack was capable of paralysing Germany far more - and did.

 

I must take issue with your premise. The USAAF did not go to war with the 'bomber would always get through' as its operational theory. It went to war without long range escort because none was available. Even in the early 1930’s it was recognized that fighter escort was inherently desirable, but no one could quite conceive how a small fighter could have the range of the bomber yet retain its combat maneuverability. The conventional wisdom stated that any fighter built large and heavy enough to carry sufficient fuel for long-range escort would have such poor performance that it would be uncompetitive in actual combat. This reasoning was not unique to the US, and the performance of the Bf 110 as a fighter did nothing to dispel this line of reasoning. However, work was started on this problem prior to US entry into the war. It was not until fighter efficiency was improved through drag reduction that the percentage of gross weight devoted to fuel did not extract a prohibitive cost in fighter performance.

The need for long-range fighters was recognized by the AAF pre-war. In a memo to Frank Andrews dated 14 November 1939, Hap Arnold wrote that the idea that "fighter craft cannot shoot down large bombardment planes in formation has been proven wholly untenable. It has been demonstrated recently beyond a doubt that the best antiaircraft defense is pursuit aviation." On 20 February 1942 [prior to any AAF missions in Europe] Arnold ordered the all-out development of auxiliary tanks for the P-38, P-47, and P-51 then under development. Even the earliest AAF missions in Europe were launched with escort to the limit of escort’s endurance. If they were completely wedded to the unescorted mission, why bother launching escort at all? In June '43 (prior to Tidal Wave, 1st or 2nd Schweinfurt) Arnold, frustrated with slow development, ordered Barney Giles to have long-range escort fighters available in 6 months "...to get a fighter that can protect our bombers. Whether you use an existing type or have to start from scratch is your problem. Get to work on this right away because by January '44, I want fighter escort for all our bombers from U.K. into Germany."

The AAF was NOT sitting on the 'bomber will get through' theory as you intimate, but it took time for technology to provide a fighter with both sufficient range and competitive performance.

 

Note where I've put the emphasis - for even in the early models of the Curtiss P.40 the USAAF had a fighter aircraft that had twice the range of the Spitfire MkI/Ia....AND the Bf109 A-D.

Not competitive in other ways, of course...but because of the U.S.' "colonial" concerns in the Pacific, range was always maximised in U.S. combat aircraft design. Of course to the detriment of bombload sizes in bombers too....