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DeusExMachinima posted:People get super mad about flying high and bombing inaccurately. There's the Op Tidal Wave counter-example to that, but I think it was Robert McNamara's "Fog of War" that basically said in Europe the 8th Air Force let bomber crews go home after 25 missions. There was a reason for this. Basically the AAF calculated (this was McNamara's job in WW2) that you had a 4% loss rate per mission, so their logic was that if you send a given bomber crew out there 25 times... For what it's worth, a 36% survival rate isn't great, it's pretty terrible, but it's a lot better than the naive math would suggest here.
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Aug 20, 2015 04:49
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Oh yeah, just to be clear the math isn't 100% death rate by mission #25, but losing 1/3rd of your bombers outright by the end of your tour is demoralizing. And that number doesn't take into account everyone who died in their bomber and had to be replaced even if the plane itself returned home. tl;dr you'd have to have a death wish to want to fly low level missions even if they would allow greater accuracy.
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Aug 20, 2015 04:50
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This poster loves police brutality, but only when its against minorities!
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Jack of Hearts posted:For what it's worth, a 36% survival rate isn't great, it's pretty terrible, but it's a lot better than the naive math would suggest here. That's a whole lot better than the 82 percent chance of dying in a U-Boat.
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Aug 20, 2015 05:10
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Jack of Hearts posted:For what it's worth, a 36% survival rate isn't great, it's pretty terrible, but it's a lot better than the naive math would suggest here. The problem was the attrition rate of low level bombing was horrendous, and proved early on in the war to be nothing but a slaughterhouse for both crews and machines. Its part of WHY we had so many bombers at the end of the war, initial estimates said that attrition was going to be extremely high for air combat losses. Naturally, that didn't happen, but the production level was kept high due to that anyways.
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Aug 20, 2015 13:47
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Apparently more British airmen died bombing German civilians than British civilians died in German bombings which I find tragically ironic. Cutting off your nose to spite your face in a nutshell.
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Aug 21, 2015 22:11
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Smoothrich posted:Apparently more British airmen died bombing German civilians than British civilians died in German bombings which I find tragically ironic. Why do you think those two figures would have anything to do with each other?
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Aug 21, 2015 22:15
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evilweasel posted:Why do you think those two figures would have anything to do with each other? It was a point made in Gwynne Dyers's War that I watched the other day. The UK escalated its bombing of German civilians because Germany started targeting British civilians first to encourage Britain to surrender with terror bombing and high death tolls. Instead it just made the British send even more of its citizens to die in retaliation. The whole thing is just hosed to justify since so many people died on both sides, in the air and on the ground. Strategic bombing is crazy and stupid. Edit: Unless you use nukes of course. Smoothrich fucked around with this message at 23:00 on Aug 21, 2015 |
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Aug 21, 2015 22:57
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Smoothrich posted:It was a point made in Gwynne Dyers's War that I watched the other day. The UK escalated its bombing of German civilians because Germany started targeting British civilians first to encourage Britain to surrender with terror bombing and high death tolls. Instead it just made the British send even more of its citizens to die in retaliation. This is a really bad analysis. First, you're confused (in a single sentence) about who began targeting civilians first - you can't 'escalate' bombing civilians in response to Germany doing it first. Most evidence suggests it's actually the British who first intentionally targeted civilians - the Germans were targeting military structures since they lacked strategic bombers and probably hit the first civilian structures by mistake. They then started attacking civilians because Hitler was livid the British dared bomb Berlin and tried to bomb London in revenge - a bad mistake because it weakened the attacks on the British air defenses. It's been argued that lost the Battle of Britain. That said, that point is dumb regardless of who started it. The British weren't conducting strategic bombing in revenge for the Blitz, they were conducting strategic bombing because they thought it would help defeat Nazi Germany. The amount of civilians killed in the Blitz is irrelevant. And it's not like the British didn't know the human toll their strategic bombing campaign was taking on their pilots so it's not like they woke up and went "whoa, our people are dying doing this?" - they knew the approximate death rate for their bombing runs and decided it was worth it. Now, there's ways to argue if that was right or not - I generally believe their actual attempts to destroy industry were well-worth it while bombing for the sake of breaking civilian morale was pointless - but British casualties during the Blitz aren't really relevant. Also, the strategic bombing campaign was mostly to try and weaken Germany's attack on the USSR - where they were murdering way, way, way more people than died flying bombers - as a replacement for the 'second front' that the Allies were unable to open up before D-Day. It's a bizarrely blinkered view of WWII: if there ever was a government worth sacrificing lives to overthrow, it was the Nazis, so I'm not sure why you'd look at it just in a "well have they stopped bombing London yet". I think you picked up on a line that was just a vague historical irony and one that surprises people today (who think the blitz was worse than it was and don't realize how many people died manning the bombers) and gave it meaning it was never meant to have.
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Aug 21, 2015 23:12
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Smoothrich posted:Apparently more British airmen died bombing German civilians than British civilians died in German bombings which I find tragically ironic. The aim of bombing Germany isn't old testament style "an eye for an eye" justice, but kicking the whole country's poo poo in so you can make it stop being a thorn in your side, period.
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Aug 21, 2015 23:52
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It's easy to say in retrospect that strategic bombing was ineffective and cruel, but that is hindsight. At the time, it was genuinely believed that it was the best way to end the war quickly and avoid a WWI type stalemate. Kind of like dropping the A Bomb itself. Every one of the combatants in the greatest war in human history would have dropped the bomb if they had it. It was seen as just another tool in the arsenal. Only in retrospect did everyone realize what a horrible pandora's box had been opened. Which is why it has never been used since.
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Aug 22, 2015 02:13
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evilweasel posted:Most evidence suggests it's actually the British who first intentionally targeted civilians - the Germans were targeting military structures since they lacked strategic bombers and probably hit the first civilian structures by mistake. Err, what? How about Warsaw and Rotterdam? Unless of course you're referring to the Battle of Britain.
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Aug 22, 2015 02:17
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blowfish posted:The aim of bombing Germany isn't old testament style "an eye for an eye" justice, but kicking the whole country's poo poo in so you can make it stop being a thorn in your side, period. Well except for the fact that, generally speaking, killing a huge percentage of a countries population doesn't cause capitulation. Crushing their armies on the battlefield does. For the industrial production required strategic bombing of population centers was a huge failure. Even bombing factories was fairly break even. The only unambiguously effective use of airpower in the second world war was direct attacks on military assets by CAS or interdiction. Bip Roberts fucked around with this message at 03:07 on Aug 22, 2015 |
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Aug 22, 2015 03:05
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:Err, what? How about Warsaw and Rotterdam? There is an earlier example... 
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Aug 22, 2015 04:23
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:Err, what? How about Warsaw and Rotterdam? They're referring specifically to within the timeframe of the Battle of Britain. German bombing of the Home Islands was limited to military targets, until some time in Sep 1940 when an off-course bomber ended up bombing a British township. The British used this as a pretext for attacking Berlin, and Hitler used the strike on Berlin as a pretext for shifting bombing to civilian targets.
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Aug 22, 2015 04:28
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Zeroisanumber posted:There is an earlier example... True, I was just referring to bombings done by the Luftwaffe proper instead of the Luftwaffe under a thing veneer of plausible deniability.
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Aug 22, 2015 04:45
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Zeroisanumber posted:There is an earlier example... Or even earlier, October 1915. 
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Aug 22, 2015 05:47
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:Err, what? How about Warsaw and Rotterdam? I should have been clearer - yes, that referred only to the Battle of Britain. The luftwaffe definitely conducted other terror bombings before that against other countries - ones that couldn't fight back.
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Aug 24, 2015 04:39
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Back to dropping atomic bombs, I only got a few pages into the 54 page thread so they might have already been covered, but I could have sworn I read somewhere that part of the reason behind dropping the bomb was that the U.S. was running out of money. Waging war in the Pacific was expensive and the United States was having an increasingly difficult time raising money via war bonds. I think I remember reading that in Flags of Our Fathers, regarding the importance of sending Iwo Jima flag bearers on bond drives. But I think I've seen it elsewhere, although I can't find a citation now. I didn't know if anyone else had heard that or had a source, because I'm curious to read more on it. Not that we couldn't have kept the war up with higher taxes and more debt. But after 4 years of total war, it was getting progressively harder to keep the war machine running. I can't even comprehend what it cost in men and materials to send 500 B-29's on one mission.
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Aug 24, 2015 15:14
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Frosted Flake posted:The moral equivalent of bombing ball-bearing factories. Gosh, we sure weren't so different from the Nazis afterall! Not to post off topic, but there has to be at least one person in the thread that might have missed the ball bearing reference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Raid_on_Schweinfurt
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Dec 18, 2015 14:39
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Krispy Kareem posted:Back to dropping atomic bombs, I only got a few pages into the 54 page thread so they might have already been covered, but I could have sworn I read somewhere that part of the reason behind dropping the bomb was that the U.S. was running out of money. Waging war in the Pacific was expensive and the United States was having an increasingly difficult time raising money via war bonds. Pretty sure that's not true. The cost of the war was huge for sure but the US was going to win after Berlin fell, it was just a matter of time. That meant the war bonds morphed from "give us your money" to "you might actually get your money back!" The real cost america might not have been willing to put up with is the bodies (if indeed Japan fought tooth and nail through the whole invasion, as seems possible-to-likely from the previous discussion).
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Dec 18, 2015 15:39
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