RAF Bomber crews remembered. Better late than never.

[Sternjaeger II]

Originally Posted by bongodriver

OK at this point I'm failing to see why there is disagreement to what I said Stern says?

come on Bongo, it's the way you say it, not what you're saying.

Don't you really see the contradiction in condemning the bombing of civilian targets when you're at the receiving end, but justifying it when doing it to others, and with further evidence that in fact doesn't work, but only causes death, destruction and loss of aircraft/aircrews?

[bongodriver]

come on Bongo, it's the way you say it, not what you're saying.

What's the point of sanitising such a brutal event?

Do we say the Nazis discreetly made a proportion of the Human race magically dissapear?
When you say Bomber command targeted civillians you are saying they deliberately murdered them don you? in which case what difference does it make how I say it?

[5./JG27.Farber]

Originally Posted by Blackdog_kt

Let's keep this civil guys.

I think these guys were neither 100% heroes nor 100% murderers, both terms get tossed around with too much ease nowadays. They were soldiers whose capabilities were used in a totally wrong and inefficient way by their commanders. Essentially, that is where the blame should go.

I once read a very interesting article on a quarterly aviation magazine (international air power review) about the Lancaster bomber. It concluded that post-war studies showed the bomber command campaign to be largely ineffective due to wrong priorities and assumptions.

It turned out that targeting civilians didn't really harm morale any more than it solidified their willpower to stand against what they perceived as a direct threat to their lives at any cost (the "rally around the flag" effect, if you are personally targeted you don't care that much about who runs your country but about surviving). It also resulted in loads of casualties (civilians and aircrews alike) for very small gains in terms of real operational factors. For example, German industrial production actually improved at some point during 43 or 44, in the midst of heavy bombings.

The article then described that bomber command's mistake was essentially using the right tools for the job, but a wrong job. Expensive 4-engined heavy bombers with crews of 7-10 men, who were vulnerable to flak and night fighters while lacking both the ability for precision night bombing and the defensive armament and durability for daylight raids (not to mention the lack of long range RAF escorts).

The final conclusion got me thinking, because it was a very obvious one but i hadn't really thought of it until that point. The RAF had a perfectly capable and highly versatile bomber that was precise (especially when using radio navigation equipment), fast, had long range and was much cheaper than the heavies, because it only had two engines and a crew of 2-3. The Mosquito which, along with the Ju88, probably ranks as the most versatile aircraft of WWII and one of the first truly multi-role designs.

If the industrial and human resources went towards building a fleet of Mosquitoes (it could carry as much as a B-17 by the way, so nothing to scoff at), the RAF would have probably twice or more the number of bombers than it actually had. Most of all, these bombers would be capable of accurately hitting industrial and military targets instead of leveling towns and killing civilians en masse, while at the same time if one went down the RAF was only 2 engines, some balsa wood and 2 men short, probably captured instead of dead thanks to it's docile handling.

In contrast, the Lancaster was designed with the sole aim of carrying as much as possible and was notorious for its abysmal crew survivability rates in the event of an emergency landing.

In the closing statement of the article, it was stated that the Lancaster was an indiscriminate bludgeon, while the Mosquito was a precision fencing sword.
It sure was one of the most interesting articles i've read in a while, i might go dig it up and reread it

Well said.

S!

[Bewolf]

Yes Bongo, it was, as you put it "deliberate murder", as far as the term "murder" is applyable in a war situation.

The bombing campaign was deliberatly aimed at killing civilians. Not as "collateral", but as a specific target all in itself.

Do you know the concept of a Firestorm?

[swiss]

I fail to see any connection between the holocaust and carpet bombing.

[bongodriver]

Originally Posted by Bewolf

Yes Bongo, it was, as you put it "deliberate murder", as far as the term "murder" is applyable in a war situation.

The bombing campaign was deliberatly aimed at killing civilians. Not as "collateral", but as a specific target all in itself.

Do you know the concept of a Firestorm?

Yes I know what a 'firestorm' is, even that has not been written out of history, but back to my question unless you are evading it deliberately?

do you say bomber command was created 'solely' for killing civillians?

[Sternjaeger II]

Well,in theory they're both a deliberate attack on a specific ethnic group with the purpose of annihilating it,although the Nazi agenda was surely on a different scale of horror.

Don't forget that US propaganda worked hard at de-humanising the Japanese during the war,which made the decision on dropping the atomic bombs even easier to digest.

[bongodriver]

Originally Posted by Sternjaeger II

Well,in theory they're both a deliberate attack on a specific ethnic group with the purpose of annihilating it,although the Nazi agenda was surely on a different scale of horror.

Don't forget that US propaganda worked hard at de-humanising the Japanese during the war,which made the decision on dropping the atomic bombs even easier to digest.

Ah no, very very different, the Allies agenda was 'not' to anhilate the Germans, it was to end the war and Germany had to pay a price.
argueably it's much the same situation in the pacific, even the atom bombs didn't anhilate an entire ethnic group, but they sure as hell ended the war.

[winny]

Originally Posted by Sternjaeger II

Well,in theory they're both a deliberate attack on a specific ethnic group with the purpose of annihilating it,although the Nazi agenda was surely on a different scale of horror..

They were not the same. Dropping bombs on cities in a country you are at war with is nothing like the extermination of members of your own society based on religious belief.

I find the Bomber Command argument a little strange.
The Allies and Axis used artillery on cities, this is much closer to carpet bombing than death camps are. Yet I never hear anything about that being 'murder' or that artillery crews were 'murderers'

Truth is that wartime Germany got what it deserved, no more, no less.
The one person who could have stopped it all was Hitler, sadly he cared a lot less about his people than he did his ego, so he didn't surrender and the bombing continued.

To blame the allies is missing the point. When you look at civillian casualties during WW2 Germany got off lightly.

I have yet to hear a convincing argument as to why the allies shoud not have bombed Germany.

[ATAG_Dutch]

Originally Posted by 5./JG27.Farber

Well said.

The flaw in Blackdog's theory is that it would take three Mossies and therefore three pilots to carry 12,000lb of Bombs to Germany, whereas one Lancaster only required one pilot.

With a limited number of pilots to go around, this would have meant a third of the tonnage of bombs would have been dropped. It's easy to say they could've been used in a more precise manner, but the low level pin-point Mossie squads were specialists with specialist training.
There wouldn't be either the time nor the resources to train every pilot in Bomber Command to this level of skill, or conversely, to produce three times the pilots.

Plus, the use of a heavy bomber force was a brand new weapon which no-one had experience of using, and therefore no-one had experience of its effectivity.
Again, it's easy to apply the wisdom of hindsight to the whole issue, but at the time no one knew what the effect would be.