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Bad ideas in war

Andy_Ross said:
Allied casualties averaged 11,333 every day during the war.


If the strategic bombing campaign shortened the war by just a week that's more lives saved than aircrew lost in the bombing raids.
If the raids hadn't happened at all and German industry was left to produce unhindered the casualty rate would have been higher as a all the troops and guns employed in AA would have been available for the front, all the fighters defending Germany would have been available and the unhindered industry would have been able to produce much more equipment.



D-Day would have been more deadly and complicated as the Luftwaffe would have been able to attack the ships and landings in a big way and the defenders would have had more and better equipment.
So anyone saying the effects were minor or it was wasted effort are just repeating ignorant mythology.

My last words on the subject.
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D-Day would not have been possible at all without the strategic bombing. The entire point of it in the months leading up to D-Day was to destroy the Luftwaffe. D-Day and the battle for Normandy that followed would have been next to impossible without complete control of the air.

However, the targets bombed weren't all that important from the perspective of destroying the Luftwaffe. The important thing is that the Germans had to send up fighters to defend against the bombers and this is what caused the majority of attrition, at least once the Allies had long ranger escort fighters.
 
Why did the Nazis waste their precious air force responding to bombers that weren't actually causing any problems? Were they stupid?

Why were the Allies so worried about getting bombed at Normandy, if bombers are so useless? Were they stupid?

/s
 
Why the allies wanted guaranteed air superiority in Normandy is a different discussion from the UK's bombing civilians. Don't get me wrong, I'm not against the strategic bombing campaign, but you're trying to conflate two very different uses there. It is very much possible that one works better than the other.
 
HansMustermann said:
Why the allies wanted guaranteed air superiority in Normandy is a different discussion from the UK's bombing civilians. Don't get me wrong, I'm not against the strategic bombing campaign, but you're trying to conflate two very different uses there. It is very much possible that one works better than the other.
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The point of air superiority is to enable unrestricted bombing, and to restrict enemy bombing. It has no inherent value otherwise.
 
Nevertheless, a Stuka is not the same as an Avro Lancaster, and is not used as one, even if both are called a bomber. It's very much possible to want to use one, but not the other, or restrict the enemy's use of one but not the other. You can't just tar everything with the same brush just because it falls into the same super-category of "bomber" or "bombing."

If all that matters is that it's called a bomber, then that also includes torpedo bombers, like those that crippled the Bismarck. But I can assure you that nobody was worried about stopping THOSE from getting to Berlin :p
 
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HansMustermann said:
Nevertheless, a Stuka is not the same as an Avro Lancaster, and is not used as one, even if both are called a bomber. It's very much possible to want to use one, but not the other, or restrict the enemy's use of one but not the other. You can't just tar everything with the same brush just because it falls into the same super-category of "bomber" or "bombing."

If all that matters is that it's called a bomber, then that also includes torpedo bombers, like those that crippled the Bismarck. But I can assure you that nobody was worried about stopping THOSE from getting to Berlin : p
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You don't think the Luftwaffe would have area-bombed the beachheads, if they were able?
 
theprestige said:
The point of air superiority is to enable unrestricted bombing, and to restrict enemy bombing. It has no inherent value otherwise.
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Not quite true.

Reconnaissance was/is also important.

But ignoring that. Just because one can bomb a target, it doesn't make it a worthwhile target. And nobody is disputing the importance of interdiction or tactical ground attack

There is the question about trying to bomb civilians after WWII. For example Russia using missiles against Ukrainian flats and kindergartens hundreds of kilometres from the front.
 
jimbob said:
Not quite true.

Reconnaissance was/is also important.

But ignoring that. Just because one can bomb a target, it doesn't make it a worthwhile target. And nobody is disputing the importance of interdiction or tactical ground attack

There is the question about trying to bomb civilians after WWII. For example Russia using missiles against Ukrainian flats and kindergartens hundreds of kilometres from the front.
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A lot has changed since WW2. Bombs have become more accurate, making it less and less tenable to say you're just bombing as close as you can to the real target. Too, it's been recognized that area-bombing the civilian labor force grants a marginal advantage, compared to bombing the military targets themselves. This has become especially the case in modern times, where only a very small part of the civilian labor force is actually engaged in war production. WW2 was a period of total industrial war between nation-states. That's no longer the case. And, of course, we now view bombing of civilians for morale reasons to be a crime against humanity.
 
theprestige said:
A lot has changed since WW2. Bombs have become more accurate, making it less and less tenable to say you're just bombing as close as you can to the real target. Too, it's been recognized that area-bombing the civilian labor force grants a marginal advantage, compared to bombing the military targets themselves. This has become especially the case in modern times, where only a very small part of the civilian labor force is actually engaged in war production. WW2 was a period of total industrial war between nation-states. That's no longer the case. And, of course, we now view bombing of civilians for morale reasons to be a crime against humanity.
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Which is why I was saying that the Russian.attacks on civilians in Ukraine at a far lower level than in WWII are a bad idea.
 
Actually, Germany also had a not particularly high percentage of Germans directly involved in war production. It did however use a staggering amount of slave labour. 7.5 million of them as of September 1944. I hope you're not going to propose bombing those to death too :p

Also because by the end of it, Germany had mobilized some 42% of its male population. So really most of those night raids were just killing women and children.

But really Germany was among the countries that were very slow to go war economy... sorta. Or not in the same way as the allies. They rather went the route of slave labour and basically looting, including from the murdered Jews, but not only.
 
Well, I think that leaving your home country undefended while you invade another country is probably kind of risky. (Armchair quarterback.)
 
Near the end of the war the Western Allies would use exhaustion tactics against the civilian population. They would send in fast fighter planes like Mosquitoes and P-38s over major cities. They would go in essentially unarmed and high enough to be picked up by radar. This would set off bomb alerts so all civilians would have to move to bomb shelters. Then they would buzz around at lower altitudes over the city. The AA was not well set up to attack these types of planes and if they encountered German planes they could just up the throttle and escape. They did zero damage of course, but these raids meant that no German worker was getting a good night's sleep.
 
HansMustermann said:
@ponderingturtle
Not really, no. Operation Chastise (aka, the dambusters raid) fit the old pre-war strategic bombing thinking that you'd find a strategic bottleneck in the enemy's industrial and logistics chain, and you could cause a cascade strategic effect by taking it out. Kind of the same as Britain at the beginning of the war patting themselves on the shoulder about attacking the German refineries... before discovering that they hadn't hit anything at all.

It wasn't perfect, mind you, but at least it had SOME kind of actual strategic objective in mind... as opposed to the Germans who still had no idea WTH a strategic objective even is.
Or as opposed to the Bomber Harris approach of, basically, eh, we'll just bomb their cities to show them who's boss.
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The blitz of London may not have had a military strategic objective, but the blitz of Liverpool very much did.
 
No, not really. Or rather, only coincidentally. Germany literally had no idea what a strategic goal even was.
 
@Roboramma
Well, we're going off target for this thread topic, but personally I tend to favour Richard Carrier's case for it. My simplified and adapted version goes kinda like this:

- what made an industrial revolution even possible was a massive increase in energy per person employed in that. Far more than water and wind mills could provide,

- the steam engine provided that,

- early steam engines sucked hairy ass (not his exact words;)), compared to other sources of energy,

- but eventually England's massive shipbuilding created a shortage of wood for, say, charcoal and created a massive market for mined coal. It wasn't an ideal source (see why we STILL need coking plants to sort coal from rocks, and convert coal into something as good as charcoal), but that still was cheaper, so hey,

- eventually they mined below the ground water level, and started to need to SOMEHOW pump that water out to keep mining coal, and

- steam engines were a convenient way to pump water out. Like, you wouldn't even need much infrastructure or supply lines or anything, you could just take some of that mined coal, put it into the engine that allowed you to mine more coal.

- eventually, steam engines would get a lot more powerful and useful, but they basically needed to be subsidized by the coal mine owners to get past that hurdle.

- but the conditions for that initial need for steam engines, just weren't there during Ancient Rome, or really, at any point before the 18'th century or so.
 
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jimbob said:
I read the autobiography of Charles Frazer Smith many years* ago. He was one of the inspirations for "Q"

One of the requests he received was ultimately from a French forced labourer who was making U-boat crew uniforms and wanted to harm them, and decided to ask for itching powder.

Frazer Smith said he wasn't sure what effect it had but had heard one report of a U-boat surrendering because of an outbreak of an unidentified skin disease


*Late 1980s early 1990s

ETA

https://www.abebooks.co.uk/servlet/...uecTQlxMkb_GZz_g2N_K-_TBY0eUvubwaAgfxEALw_wcB


Fraser-Smith, not Frazer
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There are other examples of low cost strategies that hd a far greater impact than might be expected. Operation Outward for example.
 
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