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Post by Gatewood on May 21, 2012 7:59:06 GMT -6
Richard: Doctrine yes. Reality No. If one considers it precision to be able to hit the country the target is in rather than the target itself precision, then it was precision. The "fib" was the fib of telling everybody who would listen at the time that we were destroying enemy industrial capacity when in truth we were in the earth moving business. The "fib" was the USAAF lying to itself that all that time they put into a flawed doctrine of daylight precision bombing was worth it.
Entirely correct. Patton notably called 'precision bombing' "an expensive way to plow a field", and the standard margin of error was something like 5 miles, meaning that, if a bomb landed within 5 miles of its intended target, we were doing good.
Several post war studies concluded that strategic bombing had been a net negative to the U.S. war effort - the resources and labor that it took to build a bomb, ship it across the Atlantic, build a plane to fly it over the continent on, man and maintain that plane, etc., etc. had a far greater drain on U.S. resources than any damage it did to German resources once dropped.
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Post by wild on May 21, 2012 8:05:55 GMT -6
Colonel The issue is the difference in bombing policy employed in Europe as against that employed against the Japs. Sending unescorted bombers across occupied Europe to daylight bomb ball bearing factories and be massacred for their trouble is some fib.[not once but twice] Regards
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Post by Yan Taylor on May 21, 2012 8:13:53 GMT -6
So much for the Norden Bomb Sight, the one which could drop a Bomb into a pickle barrel at 20.000 feet.
Is it true that the IJN were better at night fighting then the USN, I believe the Japanese placed a lot of time drilling there gun crews in the art of firing at night, and it paid dividends at Guadalcanal.
Ian.
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Post by Dark Cloud on May 21, 2012 8:15:22 GMT -6
But......but.......does that mean when a word is used, it may not be used correctly? Maybe, on purpose?
Does that mean a fascist calling his government socialist - say the Nazis - or the Soviets - might mean that they had zippo to do with socialism?
Does that mean calling something Democratic or Republican might indicate nothing whatever?
And is it possible that dressing up thugs in uniform with medals and saying they're heroes - say in Rwanda or Ireland - might not be true in any civilized sense?
The Air Force was ahead of itself: they could clearly see what we now have in their mind's eye, and they wanted it to be true. But much of the Nazi's bombs for London fell in the Thames and much of the Allies bombs for German hit our own men, somewhat equaled by the AA fire bringing down our own planes with regularity.
See, this is what I've been saying. What wild hopes to install as deliberate terror bombing - because that's what he would do - was carpet bombing to increase the chances of hitting the desired targets. He wants to call it 'precision' because that means we deliberately targeted all the civilians just to kill them for giggles.
He can't let that go, because by continually making that claim - as he has for years - he can portray the Allies as no better than Irish thugs setting off bombs in London stores to deliberately kill innocents. That wasn't the intent of the Allies, but it was the best they could do with an increased chance to hit tracks and factories, and they flew much lower and took more hits because of the effort to be accurate. And since it was terrifying and was sorta effective, you play it up.
But it was beyond us to be accurate, and for the same results the bombers probably could have stayed at maximum altitudes and saved a lot of our own lives.
It's what makes the photos of the Norden bombsight being carried by the two pilots and followed by an armed guy with a pistol pointed up and at the ready so amusing. A cardboard box with a hole punched in the bottom would have been as accurate.
In any case, the Japanese and Germans reaped what they had sown, as with poison gas, as with air attacks on civilians.
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Post by quincannon on May 21, 2012 8:24:27 GMT -6
OK Gatewood, I have resised for four pages now, but I can resist no longer - What color was the Arizona on 7 December 1941 - Dark Gray with light gray fighting tops, Sea blue with light gray fighting tops, or overall pink? The answer to this question has been fought over longer than precision bombing.
DC: You are correct. The idea of precision bombing predated reality by about seventy years, and I am still not sure if we are getting smoke blown up our ass.
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Post by Gatewood on May 21, 2012 8:37:54 GMT -6
DC: You are correct. The idea of precision bombing predated reality by about seventy years, and I am still not sure if we are getting smoke blown up our ass.
Don't know how true it is, but I once saw or heard somewhere that all of those videos that Schwarzkopf regaled us with of smart bombs flying through windows showed only the few that actually did and naturally didn't show the ones that failed to do so.
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Post by Yan Taylor on May 21, 2012 8:47:00 GMT -6
Chuck this is out of my field so I am only guessing, because the U.S. Navy destroyed all records relating to the Arizona after the sinking in 1941, it could be either Sea Blue or Dark Grey, according to the scale modellers handbook site.
Don Pruel has it as Sea Blue on his model shown in the Pearl Harbour Memorial in Hawaii.
Ian.
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Post by wild on May 21, 2012 8:56:48 GMT -6
Dark Cloud I note your inability to stand over your claim that other than dive bombing there was no precision bombing.
Precision bombing is attacking a precise target.It is sending your aircrews over enemy terrority to attack, as in the case of the USAAF, targets of military significance.Their failure to achieve a high degree of success does not invalidate the doctrine.
DC: You are correct. The idea of precision bombing predated reality by about seventy years, and I am still not sure if we are getting smoke blown up our ass. Precision bombing cost the US 20000 lives [guess]. If it was not carpet area bombing what was it?Why was it carried out in daylight?
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Post by quincannon on May 21, 2012 8:57:57 GMT -6
Ian: Yes I know, and the odds are she was still in dark gray. The possability also exists that she was in the process of a re-paint job, as the orders had gone out to get rid of dark gray about a month or so before. There are pictures of her in dry dock at Pearl being repaired asfter the slight damage she received crom her collision with Oklahoma. I think those pictures date from November 41. The re-paint does not ring true with me though as Arizona was scheduled to go to Bremerton on Monday 8 December for a re-fit and overhaul. Colorado was already there and getting a re-fit, and she remained in dark gray until the end of that refit when she was re-painted. This question has bee floating around since I started building model ships and that is so long ago I don't care to remember.
I have met Don. He is the curator of models at the USNA. It's hard to argue with him about models, and if you have ever seen his work you will know why. The man is a master of his trade. That model and the painting of Arizona by Tom Freeman, I think it is called "The Last Sortie" with Arizona leaving Pearl for a training exercise along with a four piper about a week before the bombing has added to, not settled, the issue.
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Post by quincannon on May 21, 2012 9:01:20 GMT -6
Richard: What happened was not carpet bombing. Different formations. Different sequencing. Different.
Why daylight: Because that is when doctrine said it was to be done, and doctrine writers and developers are never wrong. Just ask them.
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Post by Yan Taylor on May 21, 2012 9:22:59 GMT -6
Richard, the USAAF took over daylight bombing operations from the British who had switched to night attacks due to heavy losses.
Chuck, while we are on a modelling theme here, I made various model aircraft as a teenager, quite a few were Japanese.
The Japanese developed various models of carrier based aircraft during WW2:
Mitsubishi A5M (Claude) Mitsubishi A6M (Zeke) Nakajima B5N (Kate) Nakajima B6N (Jill) Aichi D3A (Val) Yokosuka D4Y (Judy)
The problem being though, they kept their most experienced pilots flying, instead of sending some of them back home to teach the next breed of green pilots the ropes, so when attrition took its toll on the veterans (they lost 300 pilots just at Midway alone), the rookie pilots were just thrown into the mix without being instructed in the way the U.S. fighters fought, thus these green pilots were just cannon fodder.
On average the Japanese pilots had only 100 hours of flight time after 1943 compared to the U.S. pilots 300 hours.
Ian.
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Post by wild on May 21, 2012 9:23:36 GMT -6
Colonel Failure does not define a doctrine. Nazism was a failure it was still a doctrine. Precision bombing was a failure it was still precision bombing. A case can be made that carpet bombing was a failure it was still carpet bombing. Regards
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Post by quincannon on May 21, 2012 9:35:54 GMT -6
Ian: When you have a seemingly infinate amount of good vs. a very finite amount of near perfect, the good will win every time.
Richard: I am at a loss to understand what you are trying to prove here. It seems more of a word game than anything else.
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Post by Dark Cloud on May 21, 2012 10:04:33 GMT -6
A characteristic of anything to be called "precision bombing" would be, you know, precision. Calling something precision doesn't make it precision. What the Air Force called precision bombing was bombing, but there was no accuracy at all except by accident.
So, yes: only dive bombing could be termed accurate, and even then it took great skill, but no dive bomber missed by five miles while another nine never even got that close.
By early 1941, the RAF knew that only ONE IN TEN bombers dropped their load within FIVE MILES of the target.
Germans were arguably worse. In the early raids on London, only half of the bombs hit land at all, only about 12% of those hit London, a large city, meaning they hit a large city with 6% of their bombs. Accurate. In 1940, a Lutwaffe bomber squadron bombed a German city by mistake. Of course, at night. Still.
14 % of our bombs were duds, which Fussell pointed out was about equal to our number of anti-tank mines that went off on a whim, sometimes while still in storage. Aboard ships.
We bombed in daylight, the British at night, and while it kept the Germans up and annoyed (which was a good thing) it did not do anything approaching what was claimed. Speer's production went up well into 1944.
But keep jumping up and down and shrieking that the term 'doctrine' is all important, and that if there was an announced doctrine that made it a fact. You can do little else, so do it.
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Post by wild on May 21, 2012 10:06:33 GMT -6
Colonel Precision bombing was the order of the day in Europe.Fire bombing was the order of the day with Japan. No word game just wondering why the different policies? Even after the use of the atomic bombs conventional bombing continued resulting in a further 15000 deaths.I mean why?
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