DBWI an area bombing strategy by Britain

A guy called Harris had wanted to lead ‘Bomber Command’. He wanted to use terror tactics with large scale night time area bombing.


Would that has been as effective as the targeting of communication bottle necks.


For sure damage was always repaired. However every night a hundred key points were disrupted.


The Mosquito squadrons suffered appalling casualties with their dawn and dusk raids on railroad, canal and road links. This happened even after the Mustangs escorted them.


There have been moral questions about the use of delayed action bombs with leaflets. As we know numbers of Nazi victims were forced to work in this dangerous context.


Of course a great deal of disruption was caused by this strategy. Would more direct targeting of the Cities have been more effective?
 
It would never have been allowed by Churchill and the cabinet, remember that Great Britain isn't some dictatorship that would be willing to order such actions and I don't think any British officer would disobey his civilian superiors.
 
A guy called Harris had wanted to lead ‘Bomber Command’. He wanted to use terror tactics with large scale night time area bombing.


Would that has been as effective as the targeting of communication bottle necks.


For sure damage was always repaired. However every night a hundred key points were disrupted.


The Mosquito squadrons suffered appalling casualties with their dawn and dusk raids on railroad, canal and road links. This happened even after the Mustangs escorted them.


There have been moral questions about the use of delayed action bombs with leaflets. As we know numbers of Nazi victims were forced to work in this dangerous context.


Of course a great deal of disruption was caused by this strategy. Would more direct targeting of the Cities have been more effective?
Wasn't the early stage of the 'communications' strategy effectively 'area bombing' anyway, due to the bomber flights not having mastered the 'precision' part of 'precision bombing' at that time? Sure they actually started hitting their targets by something other than blind luck as the war wore on, but until the technology really started to deliver there were a lot of hits on things which were not canal reservoirs, railway viaducts, or major road bridges.

(edit: A possibly a bit-over-the-top piece of roleplay removed.)
 
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I don't see how they'd get enough aircraft to drop enough bombs to make area bombing effective. Not unless they managed to convince Churchill to downplay the u boat threat and absolutely gut Coastal Command in favour of vainly hitting back at the Germans.

I suppose such a strategy might provide a morale boost initially, but TTL'S Battle of the Atlantic is going to last at least into 1943.

I wonder if this strategy will delay the development of precision bombing techniques. After all, the constant failures of OTL were really the primary driving force behind better bombsights, tactics, and perhaps most importantly the Tallboy bombs. Area bombing might significantly retard these developments at the very least, perhaps robbing us of some of the more spectacular raids Bomber Command launched in OTL.
 

Deleted member 1487

See how such a strategy worked for the German in 1940-41. Given the greater Allied resources they probably could kill more people over a longer period and probably suffer even heavier losses than the Mosquitos did IOTL, killing how knows how many RAF flight crews, but they'd likely not have done more than knock down cities and kill civilians. Post-war they'd likely not have been hypocritical enough to try Luftwaffe generals for their role in the terror raids of Britain and other parts of Europe having done the same thing, but IOTL they had the moral position to do it. Just like they backed off of trying to hang Doenitz for USW because the US and UK did the same thing in the Pacific. Likely too the war would have lasted a LOT longer than it did IOTL as Coastal Command wouldn't get the resources it needed and by hitting cities they would have to focus their resources on heavy bombers for Bomber Command for the large payloads and leave the vital targets like communication centers and other industry pinpoint targets alone to get enough bombers for city attacks.
Can you image WW2 lasting late into 1944 or 1945? How bad would the Holocaust have gotten in the meantime? Or the Eastern Front for the Soviets??? Certainly a ton more people, especially civilians would have died if the target was cities, while the German military and industry had a free ride to continue operating. Though of course as it was there was a lot of suffering post-war in Germany because of how effective the RAF had been at smashing up vital infrastructure to make the nation function, namely moving food around via rail or barge or coal for that matter to power electricity. Of course given the Allied willingness to provide aid and reconstruction post-war because the German war effort collapsed before really heavy losses to Allied forces happened (I mean Wallied, the Soviets did get it on the chin until the German economy collapsed) and the Holocaust got much worse than it did. It was pretty awful anyway, but going by what documents were captured the Nazis had some pretty horrible shit planned beyond that; having had the time to execute it would have been even more horrific and the Allies far less willing to help rebuild Germany post-war. Of course FDR's desire toward Germany would have been to deindustrialze them even as humanitarian aid was provided and infrastructure rebuilt, but after he declined to run again for reasons of health in 1944 his successor was far less Teutono-phobic and that plan was scrapped. Frankly I don't know how Europe could have recovered post-war without Germany paying reparations with their industrial products or being a market for European goods; the Brits were really dependent on the German markets as were the French and pretty much all of Western Europe with the formation of the Steel and Coal commission.
 
I'm torn on this one. One of the big experiences from comparing the damage inflicted on Coventry (which was downplayed during the war and even now you have to dig through the reports in the national archives to see) to that in other cities is that the best way to take out the industrial production of a city isn't to bomb the factory but to destroy all of the supporting infrastructure - which mostly runs through the town centre. Reading Lindemann's papers it seems to me that the killer argument against an "area" bombing strategy was accuracy - to do so accurately enough to generate a conflagration like the one which destroyed Coventry you need hundreds of bombers to drop their loads within a few hundred yards of the aiming point, which in turn means bombing visually. If you can bomb visually, then the "communications strategy" could work too - and required far fewer bombers with highly trained and proficient crews.
That was the big problem with Harris' argument - he never developed a coherent narrative of what the purpose would be of scattering bombs at random over a big city when concentration is everything in effective area bombing. Having said that, when he did take over Bomber Command at the end of 1942 he did a superb job of implementing the strategy he had been ordered to (despite his disagreements with it) and turned Bomber Command from a joke into an effective fighting force.

And don't underestimate how brutal Churchill could have been if he felt the need - this is the same man who authorised preparations for Anthrax attacks on Germany and argued the use of Gas Bombs in Mesopotamia between the wars. I think the reason we didn't go down this route is that those in favour of bombing point targets won the argument (helped by some fairly misleading bomb damage assessment from the German attacks on Britain in 1940), not because he was appalled at the human consequences on noncombatants.
 
I wonder what effect a longer European War would have on the Pacific. IOTL, Japan only surrendered after having three cities nuked, Kyushu occupied by the Allies, and Hokkaido occupied by the Soviet Union.
 
I think Viking is right withdrawing LR Bombers from Coastal command from 42 or even worse not providing them in the first place (ASB?) would expose more Merchant Shipping to U-boat attack and delay the ultimate victory in the BotA - perhaps resulting in a delay to Op Neptune/Overlord and Dragoon into 1944 - which is unthinkable.

Also I am not convinced that terror bombing would have had that great an impact - look at London and other British cities during the Blitz - they 'took it' so to speak - I'm not convinced that the German people and industry would be any different - and I expect it would still require Tommy's and GIs celebrating Easter 1944 in Berlin to achieve victory

Better to win the BotA earlier and have the cross channel when they did rather than risk delay to the Cross channel and South of France invasions

Lastly I quite like my German friends and Work Colleagues - the idea that their Grand parents and parent might have been 'burned to death' or buried alive in fire raids like those massed bombing raids inflicted on Japan makes me feel nauseous.
 
I wonder what effect a longer European War would have on the Pacific. IOTL, Japan only surrendered after having three cities nuked, Kyushu occupied by the Allies, and Hokkaido occupied by the Soviet Union.
North Japan and South Japan might not even exist in this timeline.
 
I don't see how they'd get enough aircraft to drop enough bombs to make area bombing effective. Not unless they managed to convince Churchill to downplay the u boat threat and absolutely gut Coastal Command in favour of vainly hitting back at the Germans.
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To get that many long range bombers you' have to reduce models built for operational and tactical air support. Costal Command only used a couple thousand airframes over the six years of war. A effective area bombing campaign would require up to ten thousand such machines per year 1941-44 when combat and operating losses are figured in. Only by radically cutting into the light tactical aircraft is it possible to produce such numbers. Remember in terms of airframe material and engines four to six single engine tactical bombers, or 2.5 twin engined bombers translates to a VLR heavy machine. One of the Criticizms of of the RAF leadership was directed at the US AAF for building to many of the heavy B17, B24, & B29 heavy types. The colossal mass of tactical bombers was key in keeping Allied ground forces consistently defeating the Axis ground forces & the RAF leaders disliked having to loan over one hundred tactical support squadrons to the US armies to make up the difference in their tactical/operational support.
 
Leaving aside changes in the Atlantic battle, I can't see either the US nor Britain being that stupid to deny the navies a couple hundred VLR aircraft for harassing submarines & surface raiders. Lets consider how much actual damage a 'strategic' bomber force might do to either Germany or Italy? & increments the tactical & operational air forces might be reduced? Like some folks have already posted its not looking good, but I'm interested in seeing any numbers someone might present.

More to the point is how long this might go on before the senior leaders decide its enough and stop the reduction of the Support, or 'Strike Aviation' as the US called it. Everyone demonstrated how effective this sort of air support could be. It was recognized from 1941 by the Brits & then the US how you could never have too many tactical support squadrons & how the mass of these enabled the Allies to crush the Axis ground and naval forces.
 

Deleted member 1487

To get that many long range bombers you' have to reduce models built for operational and tactical air support. Costal Command only used a couple thousand airframes over the six years of war. A effective area bombing campaign would require up to ten thousand such machines per year 1941-44 when combat and operating losses are figured in. Only by radically cutting into the light tactical aircraft is it possible to produce such numbers. Remember in terms of airframe material and engines four to six single engine tactical bombers, or 2.5 twin engined bombers translates to a VLR heavy machine. One of the Criticizms of of the RAF leadership was directed at the US AAF for building to many of the heavy B17, B24, & B29 heavy types. The colossal mass of tactical bombers was key in keeping Allied ground forces consistently defeating the Axis ground forces & the RAF leaders disliked having to loan over one hundred tactical support squadrons to the US armies to make up the difference in their tactical/operational support.
Arguably it was the specialization of the two militaries that allowed for victory; the USAAF wasn't using their heavies for area bombing of civilian targets as is being proposed, but were using them for strategic bombing of industrial targets AND operational attacks on logistics as a supplement to British operational interdiction. We can argue the merits of the heavy long range bombers vs. the lighter British mediums, but they played off of one another and if the US tried to duplicate that effort it would have come at the expense of what they were already doing to do what the the RAF did less effectively as they were not specialized in that. It doesn't matter what nation you're talking about, services like to complain when ordered to act outside their desired scheme of action, so I don't put too much stock in their bitching. The results speak for themselves, the specialization of both the USAAF and RAF won the war about as quickly as possible and the Germans evaporated in the face of it whenever they tried to stand firm. Plus the USAAF fighter-bombers did their job very well, just as good as the British ones, but by the Brits opting for an operational air force like the Luftwaffe (albeit far better resourced) with tactical air support elements filled that role in the Wallied effort, which left the USAAF the choice of doing less well what the RAF was already optimized for or going for the untouched mission they were doctrinally, technologically, and industrially optimized for: strategic bombing of enemy industry. Of course this was used for area bombing in the Pacific, so we have an idea of the horrors that the RAF avoided involvement in in Europe.
 
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