....and regarding the relative percentages - one OTHER thing to remember is that by Jan-April 1945, Bomber Command's Heavy Force wasn't carrying out area bombing as their foremost night activity anyway; they were doing a lot else, including a LOT of mining it seems! In fact, the last Heavy Force "raids" of the war were massed mining ops in the Skaggerak IIRC, trying to bar the way for a German evacuation from Kiel to Norway, the same strategic withdrawal that the FNSF's last op was designed to thwart, an actual raid ON Kiel.I think this shows that RAF BC diverted a considerable proportion of its effort to daylight raids (which is strange if night bombing was so effective at this late stage of the war) and that it was in fact main force crews who made the lions share of the contribution
Yes, exactly - THEIR side; but could they ALSO have managed "round the clock" ops, so that we would have no need to? As in -I will defend the 8th Air Force here – they were more than capable of doing ‘their’ side
WE continued to bother with OUR part of round the clock bombing because IF for some reason the Americans had had to do that part, they would have dropped a fraction of what the RAF could. That's my point. Bomber Command didn't stop BECAUSE they were still delivering by night far more than the Americans could.if night bombing was so good (as you claim) why would we bother AT ALL – after all, the USAAF were quite capable of fulfilling their side of round the clock bombing?
Mark - area bombing could and DID destroy huge amounts of German industry in single named Operations; look at the factory counts that came from area raids - five hundred and eighty factories/sites at Hamburg in GOMORRAH, for instance At least 23% of the 127 industrial units in Dresden in February 1945. Those are only two I've come across in the last 24 hours, just by chance. Area bombing could destroy German industrial capacity far easier and far quicker than precision daybombing. You couldn't for instance simply been able to find or target the 127 individual factory sites in Dresden; but a night and day of area bombing COULD obliterate a sizeable percentage of them. Precision raids against Hamburg? How many raids would it actually have taken to hit those 580 sites IF they could even have been accurately targeted?...my contention is that daylight bombing is more accurate – full stop. In which case, the size of the bomb load is less relevant. Now if that isn’t correct, as has been contended here, I would be grateful if someone would point me in the direction of evidence
It may be Wiki - but look at the list of raids against Hamburg before GOMORRAH - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of ... g#Timeline - thirty-five raids from 1939 to 1943; the point is that even if every one of these had hit their intended target, they'd only have destroyed 6% of what GOMORRAH did...