Allied Bombing Campaign in WWII - A Failure....

[MrJonno]

Have to bear in mind the lost airmen were the highly educated types that could have been deployed elsewhere

[Mishakal]

"Area bombing of precision targets" v "Precision bombing of area targets".......

Question: Were they precise enough to miss Cologne Cathedral?

God did it.....

Nope, they didn't bomb the Cologne Cathedral so the night raiders would have a landmark that could tell them where the hell they were in the bombed out parts of Germany.

[klr]

...

Nope, they didn't bomb the Cologne Cathedral so the night raiders would have a landmark that could tell them where the hell they were in the bombed out parts of Germany.

Yup, I mentioned that earlier in the thread. Football stadiums were also good aiming points. Better still though were natural features like estuaries, which is one reason why Hamburg was such an attractive target to the RAF.

[JimC]

"If the British ever bomb Melbourne, you can call me Meyer!"

[klr]

"If the British ever bomb Melbourne, you can call me Meyer!"

[Hermit]

"If the British ever bomb Melbourne, you can call me Meyer!"

"You are in no danger of being called Meier. Melbourne is not worth bombing." - Göring

[mistermack]

On top of being an atrocious war crime, the bombing of the cities denied bombers to the fight against the U Boats.
So allied shipping and allied sailors were being sent to the bottom, when the U Boats could have been decimated.

That in itself undid any incidental benefit that the war effort got from bombing the cities.

As far as I'm concerned, Churchill and Harris should be named and shamed as war criminals.

[klr]

On top of being an atrocious war crime, the bombing of the cities denied bombers to the fight against the U Boats.
So allied shipping and allied sailors were being sent to the bottom, when the U Boats could have been decimated.

That in itself undid any incidental benefit that the war effort got from bombing the cities.

As far as I'm concerned, Churchill and Harris should be named and shamed as war criminals.

The U-boats were decimated before the bombing campaign reached anything like its peak. "Black" May 1943 to be exact. After that, the Allies were never in serious danger again from U-boats, because they devoted huge resources to keeping on top in the Battle of the Atlantic, as well as to strategic bombing.

The problems in the first part of the war were only partly down to devoting too much resources to aerial bombing and not enough to maritime warfare. There were also issues with not having the right type of aircraft (especially very long range aircraft), not having enough of the right type of escort vessels, not getting the convoy system quite right, getting the Americans to co-operate fully (even after entering the war) and so on. Then there was besting the Germans on signal interception, code-breaking, direction-finding, plus advances in radar, sonar, and many other areas of technology.