The Luftwaffe was inflicting heavy casualties on the British fighter command by knocking out planes on the ground and cratering the runways,

I have always been curious as to why the Allied air forces employed the tactics they did in 1942-1945.

The Germans lost (some would call it a draw)the Battle of Britain mainly because their fighter groups only could fly about 15 minutes above South-East England. --RuudSp

If the RAF had tried to destroy the German fighters first it would have suffered from a similar disadvantage.

--RuudSp

I have always been curious as to why the Allied air forces employed the tactics they did in 1942-1945. After Britain had endure the Battle of Britain, in which the Germans were inflicting heavy casualties on the British fighters while attacking the airbases in Southern England. Britain only won the battle of Britain after the Germans switched to bombing the cities. The Allies should have made it the first priority of destroying the German Air force, by direct attack on the airfields and radar sites. The Allies only won the air war after receiving the long range P51 and then turning the fighter groups loose to pursue the German fighters where ever they were found. A campaign to bomb the fighter bases, radar stations would have crippled the German Air force sooner. Has anyone seen a book detailing this mistake the Allies made?

There's an anecdote about the reaction of Churchill to the reports he received about the area bombing of German cities. Apparently, he was profoundly shaken by the scale of the slaughter inflicted, and blurted out " Are we beasts ? Are we taking this too far ? " .

I must try and find out more about this episode, and put it into context.

Regards, Phil
--phil andrade

PS: Your remembrance of those war movies is rather sad. Any pilot or aircrew in BC who rejected a target would be at least carefully noted and studied. Typically, he would be branded LMF and would either be cashiered or reduced in rank to serve in the worst of all tasks (e.g., cleaning latrines). The RAF was not nearly as kind with those who questioned Ops as the USAAF was.

One of Albert Speers comments was that the Allies would not repeatedly attack a target after doing damage on one or two missions. Bombing while the target was being repaired would have set back the effort and also destroyed the repair equipment.

I humbly submit that the Allied Air War was justified in the context of total war, a war for survival. Germany had to be taken head on and, without the means to open up a western front, the British and the Americans had to use what they could to hamper Germany. In my humble opinion, the Allies didn't do enough to seriously cripple German industrial output, which may have brought the war to a quicker conclusion.

Are you suggesting, Colin, that they didn't do as much as they could - and should - have done ?

Or do you think that the task was beyond them ?

The aim of Bomber Command was never simply to kill Germans. As Colin says, it was to carry the war to Germany. Nor were members of Bomber Command – either air crews or senior staff – mindless murderers and/or wartime thugs. They were using a rather crude tool (bombing from relatively great height in darkness) for cause war-related damage which would affect the German war effort.

Could RAF Bomber Command have been more effective?

Did RAF Bomber Command sufficiently explore alternatives to area bombing as a technique?

Were "average" bomber crews capable of better performance than they demonstrated?

Could training procedures have been geared to skills than those required for most Bomber Command assaults?

Did Bomber Command place too much importance on experience, at the expense of innovation?

Did the focus on building RAF "heavies" – i.e., Lancs and Hallys – dilute or minimize the effectiveness of raids by smaller a/c such as Mosquitos?

Bomber Command explored many alternatives and deployed them. I think "area bombing" as a term is highly misleading. It was coined early in the war, but became less relevant with dramatic improvement of the force. A typical bomber stream of about 300 heavy bombers would put 90% of the 1200 to 1500 tons of bombs within a circle of radius of a couple of hundred meters over a period of an hour or two of continuous attack. Bomber Command's main problem was that that was too often well away from the planned target, sometimes on the order of tens of miles. In contrast, the Eighth Air Force typical attack package was a wing originally with about 60 aircraft and later closer to 100. Multiple wings might attack the same target during the same day, but spaced in time, and often attacking from different directions. The typical wing would drop about 200 tons of bombers spread over an area of more than a kilometer in radius, but was much more likely to have the target inside that area than Bomber Command's attacks did. There are several simple physics reasons for it--the US bombed from 3 times as high, with lighter bombs, from formations that were already extensively spread. Thus, the US "precision bombing" was much more spreadout than the "area bombing" of the RAF, but it was also more accurate, meaning it was less likely to place bombs at a significant distance from the intended target.

Training was lethal. The aircraft used were worn out. My uncle was a navigator in Bomber Command, and he survived a crash while training ; he lost all his hair as a result - the experience was so terrifying. But he was luckier than eight or nine thousand of his comrades who did not survive the ordeal of that training.

Before the war, officials in the British MoD predicted that bombing would kill six hundred thousand British civilians and seriously injure about one million. In the event, this proved a ten fold exaggeration, even allowing for the horros of the V weapons. The experience of the Germans, however, conformed with the scale of that estimate.

Allied bombing of Monte Csssino and Caen in 1944 allegedly helped te German defendrs more due to the subsequent provisionm of post bombing rubble as cover factor-but that judgement too, is also 100 per cent hindsight/easy wisdom after the event -a luxury that those resposible for the Monte Casino /Caen bombings did not have or could not have had.
Given the military ground casualties-pre-bombing- in both cases it was an idea worth trying to resolve bloody stalemates in the ground battles.
--Toomtabard