Historical Sorties (Time, Size, Distance, Objective)

[csThor]

Originally Posted by 5./JG27.Farber

What you will find is the scale of the BoB missions are huge! Battles rolling throughout the day in different areas! For some of the missions you really could use the whole map and more!

Careful with that, Farber. That is, in a nutshell, one of the urban myths about the BoB. It may look huge when taking all aircraft sorties of one day but essentially individual missions were rarely flown by anything more than a Gruppe against a specific target, often even breaking further down to one Staffel. Not to mention that when Luftflotte 2 attacked in the morning and forenoon Luftflotte 3 was just waking up from a restful slumber, prepared for lunch and only became active in the afternoon - hours after the last aircraft of Luftflotte 2 had retired.

To give an example. On August 12 1940 KG 51 raided the Portsmough area with all Gruppen. In the end they struck at three different targets and the initially powerful formation of roughly 100 Ju 88 was divided into three formations of 30+ bombers plus escort. Given the bombloads in these days that is not really an attack with much destructive potential (in the strategic sense) anymore.

[5./JG27.Farber]

I suppose it depends on what you thought was big before you researched it. I was suprised at some of the sizes of the raids. especially when there was sometimes 3 major sorties in one day. I was talking of when they hit different areas all in the same day... If you recreate some of the events you can use the whole map and still not be able to do it all as you cant do the more northern attacks. So yes the scale is big, its bigger than the map we have!

Originally Posted by csThor

Given the bombloads in these days that is not really an attack with much destructive potential (in the strategic sense) anymore.

Dont think that matters when there falling on you.

[csThor]

Originally Posted by 5./JG27.Farber

Dont think that matters when there falling on you.

True ...