Deleted member 1487
In that the understand they cannot put down a rail yard with a single raid for any period of time the only option is to keep it down is to hit it repeatedly, which they codified in 1943; I only have selected excerpts to work with, so perhaps it was codified even earlier based on experience in Poland and France, but I don't have access to those records. However the understanding was there that one raid was not enough and they would require multiple strikes to keep it down.I don't see anything in that doctrine calling for relentless restrikes or concentration of focus or anything like that. You can find pretty words similar to Wever's about concentration of effort and the need to strike at industrial and transport targets in manuals written by the USAAC or RAF in the late-1930s and early-1940s. But no concentration of focus or relentless restrikes. Nor did any of those words prevented them from falling into the same targeting trap. Wever is not some air power god, he is only just as human as every other air force general at the time.
Nonsense; putting down rail traffic through that line for 24 hours or more is dozens of trains that don't arrive where they need to go during a huge campaign. That has an impact. Doing it multiple times per week and you're creating a significant back up that didn't exist IOTL. It diverts resources, manpower, and attention to repairs and that pressure did not exist IOTL.What will happen, given that the Luftwaffe is only human and its planners are only human, is that this bomber wing will be hitting one target for a few days and then another target elsewhere for another few days. And so-on. Because of this mayfly attention span, the damage done is totally inadequate to change anything. Barbarossa goes on as per IOTL.
To totally put it out of commission and keep it down, but we are talking about the disruptions that come from 24 or more hours per raid and creates a back up of dozens of trains per day that aren't getting through on critical rails lines during a critical massive campaign.Even "multiple times a week" is not adequate enough. We're talking literally once a day, endlessly, with (since we only have a single wing to work with) no time to rest and maintain the planes.
Actually pretty well in June-August 1941 IOTL. They overran a lot of destroyed/backed up trains that were trapped because smaller raids by medium bombers had so badly ripped up yards and rail that the Soviets couldn't cope. As they pushed deeper and sorties became more limited due to supply and maintenance issues adding up they couldn't do it nearly as much. In the period I'm talking about from June-September they could do some noticeable damage to supply/mobilization.And how well did those work out, hmm?
No, in operational interdiction; the reason the French were unable to mass reserves against the Ardennes offensive was because of the LW so badly degrading rail and road movement to the point that the French could not move quickly enough until the situation radically changed:In tactical close air support, not in strategic bombing or logistical interdiction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_France#Central_front
The main task of German aviation was to provide close support in the form of the dive-bomber and medium bomber. In 1940, the Luftwaffe was a broadly based force with no constricting central doctrine, other than its resources should be used generally to support national strategy. It was flexible and able to carry out operational, tactical and strategic bombing effectively. Flexibility was the Luftwaffe* 's strength in 1940. While Allied air forces in 1940 were tied to the support of the army, the Luftwaffe deployed its resources in a more general, operational way. It switched from air superiority missions, to medium-range interdiction, to strategic strikes, to close air support duties depending on the need of the ground forces. In fact, far from it being a dedicated Panzer spearhead arm, less than 15 percent of the Luftwaffe was designed for close support of the army in 1939,[75] as this aspect was not its primary mission.[76]
On 11 May, Gamelin had ordered reserve divisions to begin reinforcing the Meuse sector. Because of the danger the Luftwaffe posed, movement over the rail network was limited to night-time, slowing the reinforcement, but the French felt no sense of urgency as they believed the build-up of German divisions would be correspondingly slow.
The OTL 1st prototype had a vertical bomb bay, I'm talking about a developed version with a horizontal one. I already addressed this issue on the first page so we don't bog down in this argument again: the Fw200 and Do217 are not made to provide the resources to make the Ju89B.So then we're not talking about the Ju-89 (which could only carry a payload of 1,600 kilograms, or 3 500 kg bombs) but some completely new bomber that the Germans have magicked up without sucking the necessary resources, factory space, machine tools, and personnel from some other part of their air, or ground, or naval force. Okay...
Both the Do217 and Fw200 entered production in 1940, instead with TTL its the Ju89 instead.
You need to prove your numbers are accurate, so let's get a source we can dissect.But guess what? That still only gives you a average of slightly less then 1.5 bombs landing on target in a 60 bomber raid.
Again you haven't proven that.Except for the fact that the Germans will just not be doing enough damage.
Wow, those are vastly different campaigns and I will need a source. The British 1941 raids had a 0% hit rate because they were bombing at night without navigation aids:US air raids in 1944-45 against both Germany and Japan, British air raids against Germany in 1941, and German air raids against Britain in both 1941 and 1944.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butt_Report
The German raids against Britain in 1940-41 and later Steinbock were night raids against cities that hit those cities. I've never seen any numbers about that either, especially not less than 1%.
You're USAAF numbers are off unless you can provide a source to back that up that we can dissect the specifics of.
You're talking about radically different things; the BoB (I'd like to see your numbers for that) and the Blitz/baby Blitz were by day against airfields, the latter at night against cities. Those cities were hit, what does that have to do with a lower altitude day raid against a rail yard?German level bombing during the BoB, Blitz and Baby Blitz (that last especially) was not any more accurate than American or British level bombing. During the BoB, German Heinkels regularly completely missed entire airfields and did so while bombing from much lower altitudes than the Americans and British would later use when over the Reich, so clearly that did not make as much of a difference as you claim.
RAF level bombing was night raids against cities, again what relevance does that have? Can you provide a source that has numbers for the accuracy of raids on rail years by the USAAF? Again all your claims are without numbers or source to back up anything you said, while conflating things that have nothing to do with what I'm talking about. Source or admit you can't prove your point.