Anyone know how I can put the 11.5 rewrite in the thread-mark running order without re-doing them all?
AHC: Peerless Air Ministry
- Thread starter perfectgeneral
- Start date
sorry to cause you trouble perfectgeneral. Now that i have published the rewrite would it keep the thread mark if i simply copied the new version into the original and replaced it as an edit?
The UK capacity for wood working is going to get very strained. It would make sense to expand production of gliders and some of the transports to Canada.
Mosquito production is already scheduled to commence in Canada ASAP using the Packard Merlin. Production of wooden gliders and other aircraft in Canada will be an on going discussion. Aircraft like Gliders that cannot self deliver transatlantic are very inefficient in convoy cargo space, so the Ministry of Supply would argue that importing cut lumber or sheet plywood and utilising UK production facilities would be more efficient.That discourse will be for a later post. As of yet no production orders have been placed and that will also be a part of an upcoming post.
You can also click the pencil mark next to the old threadmark title to delete it, then add the new threadmark. You can then edit the order of threadmarks using the "Sort threadmarks" button and dragging them (there should be three stacked horizontal lines) around.
11.14 Bombs, Bombing and the Bombed
11.14 Bombs, Bombing and the Bombed.
With the night blitz continuing the calls for revenge on the Germans was becoming a rising clamour, not just in the popular press but also in the corridors of power that governed the country. Questions were being asked as to why the RAF were not dropping Luftmines on German houses. Here was laid bare one of the fundamental inconsistencies of the Government and the populations expectation of their Air Force. For just a few short weeks ago the instruction was ‘Do not Bomb private property’ or ‘Do not Kill civilians’, Now the demands were for bigger bombs to be dropped on German cities merely as a form of striking back, for want of a better word ,reprisal bombing. This harked back to the stark reality and acknowledgement of the meaning of a modern bombing campaign as expressed by the then Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin a decade previously , where he baldly that
“Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through. The only defence is in offence, which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves,”
In September the Prime Minister had stated in the House that: "We must develop the power to carry an ever-increasing volume of explosive to Germany, so as to pulvarise the entire industry and scientific effort on which the war effort and economic life of the enemy depend..... In no other way at present visible can we hope to overcome the immense military power of Germany.”
Sir Hugh had wryly noted to both the PM and AM that he was of the opinion that Fighter Command had just successfully refuted the opening statement in Stanley Baldwin’s quotation and that he had every intention that the RAF would be capable of waging this war without fulfilling the second part of that statement either..
The technical advances in aircraft had in recent years had resulted in the ability to carry bigger bomb loads, in the minds of the commanders of the RAF and in particularly Bomber Command that simply meant more bombs, not bigger ones . The RAF had entered the war in 1939 with bombs designed to meet the lessons of the Great War of 1914-18. In the first years of peace the RAF had used legacy stocks of bombs and there was latterly no money for the testing or development of new ordinance. It was not until 1922 that a new specification for bombs was written and issued and for simplicity this concentrated on one class of bomb. The General Purpose (GP) bomb that came from this specification had a case thick and heavy enough to ensure that the bomb did not break up no matter what it hit. Whilst this meant that as, it’s designation implied it could be used to attack any target, it had two major limitations. Firstly due to the thickness of the bomb casing the explosive content constituted at most twenty five percent of the bombs weight. Secondly when dropped on open ground the GP bombs had a tendency to bury themselves to a sufficient depth that due to the weak explosive charge they only caused a relatively small crater and little other damage. At the time due to peace time constraints very little practical investigation of the effectiveness of bombs had been carried out. In 1922 orders were placed for the production of four new bomb designs designated by their weight, these were; Fifty pounds, one hundred and twenty pounds, two hundred and fifty pounds anf finally a bomb of five hundred pounds, The fifty pound bomb was discarded early in the program leaving the RAF with three GP bombs that when introduced into service in 1935 none of these bombs had had any flight testing or drops.
Reports on the bombing of villages in the middle east by the RAF during their Colonial Policing role made by Flt Lt Horace Bowen in 1923 had made very sober reading as to just how ineffective the bombs had been at that time and the newer ones were proving under wartime conditions to be little better. One success however was the modern four pound incendiary bomb designed to be fitted into the small bomb carrier. This had at least been properly tested and was a great improvement over the earlier Baby Incendiary Bomb (BIB) and its problematic and erratic replacement the twenty five pound incendiary that had had a very troublesome gestation and was only now in late 1940 beginning to be a reliable weapon.
All of this had resulted in the AM in 1939 asking the CSSOAO to examine in detail what was required to provide the RAF with effective bombs. Subsequent events had somewhat overtaken the deliberations of the Bomb Effectiveness sub-committee. The onset of heavy bombing in the UK had given the engineers and scientist a great deal of real world evidence as to the effectiveness of bombing and what attributes made a bomb effective. One conclusion reached early on was that UXB’s could cause far more disruption than the same bomb did when it exploded. Also the German type 17 fuse used by the Luftwaffe that had a delay setting up to seventy two hours and this was an important factor in causing disruption. Any UXB which had or might have a type 17 fuse had to be left for three days prior to being dug up as there was no method of determining how long a delay had been set on the fuse. This waiting period caused massive disruption, as an exclusion zone appropriate to the estimated size of the bomb had to be maintained. As to the destructive power of bombs the effectiveness of the four thousand pound Luftmine was obvious but the scientist had worked out that the same explosive buried at an optimum depth, so as to produce the biggest possible crater would create greater damage that took far more effort to repair. It had been noted from recovered examples that the Germans had begun fitting their one thousand kilogram ‘Herman’ bombs with a metal ring around the nose to reduce the penetration. Careful interviewing of capture airmen had revealed that this device called a ‘Kopfring’ was designed to reduce the penetration of the ‘Herman’ size bomb from up to nine meters to around two, where it would produce a larger crater and a bigger radius of blast damage. Whilst the fifteen hundred pound sea-mine used for aerial dropping by the RAF had a fuse setting for land use, the scientists were coming to the conclusion that simply scaling it up into a four thousand pound thin walled blast bomb to match the German Luftmine would not produce the most effective weapon or results. A recent paper written by Barnes Wallace, an engineer working for Vickers and the designer of the Wellington bomber, had been presented to the CSSOAO. The basic premise of Barnes Wallasi’s paper was that as bombs got bigger and their explosive contents more powerful there came a point where the depth of penetration of the bomb became beneficial as two physical properties of a deep underground explosion came into effect. These two effects were in layman’s terms; The earth quake and the collapsing of the camouflet. His calculations showed that bombs of six thousand pounds weight if designed correctly could exploit this effect, However bombs of twelve thousand pounds or bigger would have a proportionately greater effect. Barnes Wallace had produced a sketch design for a Victory Bomber with six engines and the range to carry a twenty four thousand pound bomb as far as Berlin and a Twelve thousand pound bomb to anywhere in Germany or Austria from the UK.
The argument between precision targeting of important point targets or the wide spread destruction of area bombing was being pursued vigorously within both the military and political spheres of the British establishment. As the Blitz attacks on British towns and cities were continuing more and more empirical evidence was being collected and collated. An example was that less than half a dozen bombs hitting the power stations at Bank, Battersea and Fulham in London had caused more lost production and greater disruption than the bombing and burning of large swathes of London's East End. The CSOAO had combined evidence from many sources including the Department of Economic Warfare, former members of the Anglo-German Fellowship, as well as academic experts on German industry and technology into a report that would form the foundation of the Bombing Target selection criteria that would be adopted by the British Government. The contents of this secret report poured even more fuel onto what had become a burning issue, that of the British Government and the RAF’s response to the Luftwaffe bombing campaign. The gist of the scientific evidence was that accurate bombing of selected node points, be they, Industrial, Transport or Power, would in the long term have a far greater and increasing effect upon the Germans war waging capabilities than the virtually indiscriminate scattering of bombs over urban areas. The problem now was that in order to carry out precision attacks your bombers had to find and hit the requisite target. As things currently stood that was not yet achievable by the RAF in day light let alone at night. The efforts made to improve the navigation equipment and the techniques used were bearing fruit with most bombers now actually arriving over the correct target area. The problem now needing to be solved was how to reliably pinpoint and drop bombs onto a defined target.
There was not just a need for the correct munitions for Strategic bombing there was also a requirement for ordinance for tactical use. Here the effect of the German two kilogram butterfly bomb as used on a raid on Ispwich and particularly on the RAF base at Wattisham in October provided an object lesson.
RAF Wattisham was airfield used by Squadrons forming part of No 2 Group Bomber Command when it was attacked by bombers using what became euphemistically known as the ‘Butterfly’ bomb. The scattering of dozens of these little four pound monstrosities cause huge problems, as from the start every single one of them that had not immediately exploded had to be treated as a mini UXB. Also all of them had to be treated as if it had an anti handling device. The procedure used by Wattisam, after a number of Armourers had been killed was to surround the bomb with a cocoon of sand bags, place an explosive charge alongside the bomb and then detonate from a safe distance. The effectiveness of these ‘Butterfly bombs’ was such that a British equivalent area denial bomb became a priority project under a directive from Churchill.
With the night blitz continuing the calls for revenge on the Germans was becoming a rising clamour, not just in the popular press but also in the corridors of power that governed the country. Questions were being asked as to why the RAF were not dropping Luftmines on German houses. Here was laid bare one of the fundamental inconsistencies of the Government and the populations expectation of their Air Force. For just a few short weeks ago the instruction was ‘Do not Bomb private property’ or ‘Do not Kill civilians’, Now the demands were for bigger bombs to be dropped on German cities merely as a form of striking back, for want of a better word ,reprisal bombing. This harked back to the stark reality and acknowledgement of the meaning of a modern bombing campaign as expressed by the then Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin a decade previously , where he baldly that
“Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through. The only defence is in offence, which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves,”
In September the Prime Minister had stated in the House that: "We must develop the power to carry an ever-increasing volume of explosive to Germany, so as to pulvarise the entire industry and scientific effort on which the war effort and economic life of the enemy depend..... In no other way at present visible can we hope to overcome the immense military power of Germany.”
Sir Hugh had wryly noted to both the PM and AM that he was of the opinion that Fighter Command had just successfully refuted the opening statement in Stanley Baldwin’s quotation and that he had every intention that the RAF would be capable of waging this war without fulfilling the second part of that statement either..
The technical advances in aircraft had in recent years had resulted in the ability to carry bigger bomb loads, in the minds of the commanders of the RAF and in particularly Bomber Command that simply meant more bombs, not bigger ones . The RAF had entered the war in 1939 with bombs designed to meet the lessons of the Great War of 1914-18. In the first years of peace the RAF had used legacy stocks of bombs and there was latterly no money for the testing or development of new ordinance. It was not until 1922 that a new specification for bombs was written and issued and for simplicity this concentrated on one class of bomb. The General Purpose (GP) bomb that came from this specification had a case thick and heavy enough to ensure that the bomb did not break up no matter what it hit. Whilst this meant that as, it’s designation implied it could be used to attack any target, it had two major limitations. Firstly due to the thickness of the bomb casing the explosive content constituted at most twenty five percent of the bombs weight. Secondly when dropped on open ground the GP bombs had a tendency to bury themselves to a sufficient depth that due to the weak explosive charge they only caused a relatively small crater and little other damage. At the time due to peace time constraints very little practical investigation of the effectiveness of bombs had been carried out. In 1922 orders were placed for the production of four new bomb designs designated by their weight, these were; Fifty pounds, one hundred and twenty pounds, two hundred and fifty pounds anf finally a bomb of five hundred pounds, The fifty pound bomb was discarded early in the program leaving the RAF with three GP bombs that when introduced into service in 1935 none of these bombs had had any flight testing or drops.
Reports on the bombing of villages in the middle east by the RAF during their Colonial Policing role made by Flt Lt Horace Bowen in 1923 had made very sober reading as to just how ineffective the bombs had been at that time and the newer ones were proving under wartime conditions to be little better. One success however was the modern four pound incendiary bomb designed to be fitted into the small bomb carrier. This had at least been properly tested and was a great improvement over the earlier Baby Incendiary Bomb (BIB) and its problematic and erratic replacement the twenty five pound incendiary that had had a very troublesome gestation and was only now in late 1940 beginning to be a reliable weapon.
All of this had resulted in the AM in 1939 asking the CSSOAO to examine in detail what was required to provide the RAF with effective bombs. Subsequent events had somewhat overtaken the deliberations of the Bomb Effectiveness sub-committee. The onset of heavy bombing in the UK had given the engineers and scientist a great deal of real world evidence as to the effectiveness of bombing and what attributes made a bomb effective. One conclusion reached early on was that UXB’s could cause far more disruption than the same bomb did when it exploded. Also the German type 17 fuse used by the Luftwaffe that had a delay setting up to seventy two hours and this was an important factor in causing disruption. Any UXB which had or might have a type 17 fuse had to be left for three days prior to being dug up as there was no method of determining how long a delay had been set on the fuse. This waiting period caused massive disruption, as an exclusion zone appropriate to the estimated size of the bomb had to be maintained. As to the destructive power of bombs the effectiveness of the four thousand pound Luftmine was obvious but the scientist had worked out that the same explosive buried at an optimum depth, so as to produce the biggest possible crater would create greater damage that took far more effort to repair. It had been noted from recovered examples that the Germans had begun fitting their one thousand kilogram ‘Herman’ bombs with a metal ring around the nose to reduce the penetration. Careful interviewing of capture airmen had revealed that this device called a ‘Kopfring’ was designed to reduce the penetration of the ‘Herman’ size bomb from up to nine meters to around two, where it would produce a larger crater and a bigger radius of blast damage. Whilst the fifteen hundred pound sea-mine used for aerial dropping by the RAF had a fuse setting for land use, the scientists were coming to the conclusion that simply scaling it up into a four thousand pound thin walled blast bomb to match the German Luftmine would not produce the most effective weapon or results. A recent paper written by Barnes Wallace, an engineer working for Vickers and the designer of the Wellington bomber, had been presented to the CSSOAO. The basic premise of Barnes Wallasi’s paper was that as bombs got bigger and their explosive contents more powerful there came a point where the depth of penetration of the bomb became beneficial as two physical properties of a deep underground explosion came into effect. These two effects were in layman’s terms; The earth quake and the collapsing of the camouflet. His calculations showed that bombs of six thousand pounds weight if designed correctly could exploit this effect, However bombs of twelve thousand pounds or bigger would have a proportionately greater effect. Barnes Wallace had produced a sketch design for a Victory Bomber with six engines and the range to carry a twenty four thousand pound bomb as far as Berlin and a Twelve thousand pound bomb to anywhere in Germany or Austria from the UK.
The argument between precision targeting of important point targets or the wide spread destruction of area bombing was being pursued vigorously within both the military and political spheres of the British establishment. As the Blitz attacks on British towns and cities were continuing more and more empirical evidence was being collected and collated. An example was that less than half a dozen bombs hitting the power stations at Bank, Battersea and Fulham in London had caused more lost production and greater disruption than the bombing and burning of large swathes of London's East End. The CSOAO had combined evidence from many sources including the Department of Economic Warfare, former members of the Anglo-German Fellowship, as well as academic experts on German industry and technology into a report that would form the foundation of the Bombing Target selection criteria that would be adopted by the British Government. The contents of this secret report poured even more fuel onto what had become a burning issue, that of the British Government and the RAF’s response to the Luftwaffe bombing campaign. The gist of the scientific evidence was that accurate bombing of selected node points, be they, Industrial, Transport or Power, would in the long term have a far greater and increasing effect upon the Germans war waging capabilities than the virtually indiscriminate scattering of bombs over urban areas. The problem now was that in order to carry out precision attacks your bombers had to find and hit the requisite target. As things currently stood that was not yet achievable by the RAF in day light let alone at night. The efforts made to improve the navigation equipment and the techniques used were bearing fruit with most bombers now actually arriving over the correct target area. The problem now needing to be solved was how to reliably pinpoint and drop bombs onto a defined target.
There was not just a need for the correct munitions for Strategic bombing there was also a requirement for ordinance for tactical use. Here the effect of the German two kilogram butterfly bomb as used on a raid on Ispwich and particularly on the RAF base at Wattisham in October provided an object lesson.
RAF Wattisham was airfield used by Squadrons forming part of No 2 Group Bomber Command when it was attacked by bombers using what became euphemistically known as the ‘Butterfly’ bomb. The scattering of dozens of these little four pound monstrosities cause huge problems, as from the start every single one of them that had not immediately exploded had to be treated as a mini UXB. Also all of them had to be treated as if it had an anti handling device. The procedure used by Wattisam, after a number of Armourers had been killed was to surround the bomb with a cocoon of sand bags, place an explosive charge alongside the bomb and then detonate from a safe distance. The effectiveness of these ‘Butterfly bombs’ was such that a British equivalent area denial bomb became a priority project under a directive from Churchill.
Driftless
Donor
Regarding "the bomber always gets through" notion had some acceptance in both the civilian and political classes, along with military brass of that interwar era, correct? Those long engrained notions often take time to overcome the impact of reality.
So, how much did the British (and other allied) observers from every class understand that while the Germans were making a short hop across the channel for a brief, but violent incursion; compared to the far longer, and far more sustained defense that British air raids against Germany encountered? Basically, there was a "false equivalency" as the current saying goes, between the conditions the two bomber forces faced..
So, how much did the British (and other allied) observers from every class understand that while the Germans were making a short hop across the channel for a brief, but violent incursion; compared to the far longer, and far more sustained defense that British air raids against Germany encountered? Basically, there was a "false equivalency" as the current saying goes, between the conditions the two bomber forces faced..
Errolwi
Monthly Donor
Here's a handy review of newspaper usage of phrase.
It’s that quote again — V
So, to conclude my survey of the career of Stanley Baldwin's phrase 'the bomber will always get through' in the British press (or at least in the British Newspaper Archive), here's how it fared during the Second World War. Somewhat surprisingly -- given that the Luftwaffe was expected over...
airminded.org
Generally speaking in the period 1919 to 1939 it was a given that any bomber force would be able to rain destruction down upon an enemy and there was dam all that could be done to prevent it. That is why amongst other things the various iterations of the Peace conferences in this period seriously proposed international treaties banning bombers completely. Baldwins assertion that "the Bomber will all ways get through", was just a very public declaration of what the general population understood as being a fact of live, like MAD in the 1960's
The statement that 'the bomber will always get through' was pretty much proved in WW2.
The real issue was, of course, at what cost?
The real issue was, of course, at what cost?
The Myth of 'the bomber will always get through' was also linked to the theory and fear of the 'Knockout Blow', where one massive raid creates such devastation that the country attacked has no option but immediate capitulation. Both were touted by the 'Trenchardists' before the Second World War, both were proved false early on but that did not stop the Higher command of the RAF still touting the theory that air power alone could win the war. As Astrodragon so rightly put it, in trying to prove the truism of that infamous statement thousands of young men of the RAF were sacrificed.
I'd say that @Sbiper was also correct in his superb https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...-reap-the-whirlwind-story-only-thread.343760/ that whilst the whole 'the bomber shall always get through' was basically incorrect, it scared the UK so much that they put a huge amount of funding and research into stopping the bomber menace. Which gave the RAF its radar stations and the means and methods to control them.
Errolwi
Monthly Donor
The Airminded blog I linked to above is by Brett Holman, who's PhD (and academically priced book) is on perceptions of the knockout blow in the UK.
New Zealanders in Bomber Command Memorial by Errol Cavit, on FlickrAnd to put it bluntly......'how much damage can it do'...though that is not something that a politician is going to say.
Do you have a link to Brett Holman's PHD paper, that i would like to read in full.
The 'Bomber will always get through' was just part of Baldwins premise, for this is what he said:-
“Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through. The only defence is in offence, which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves,”
Personally i think some RAF leaders subscribed to the second part as much as they did to the first and in my very humble opinion they were so wrong on both counts.
The 'Bomber will always get through' was just part of Baldwins premise, for this is what he said:-
“Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through. The only defence is in offence, which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves,”
Personally i think some RAF leaders subscribed to the second part as much as they did to the first and in my very humble opinion they were so wrong on both counts.
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Follow the link @Errolwi gave https://airminded.org/2019/11/26/its-that-quote-again-v/ and click on downloads , One of them is a Thesis which I assume is what you are after.