World War 2
Strategic Bombing
In 1940 the Luftwaffe's twin-engine bombers lacked the payload to level London and Britain's industrial cities. RAF Bomber Command was no better placed to win the war by bombing alone - the cherished hope of air stategists in the 1930's. Its aircraft flew blindly over a blacked-out Europe. Even on moonlit nights most of them were dropping their bombs miles from their targets.
Nevertheless, the bombing campaign remained the only way the British could strike directly at Germany. Things improved in 1942 with the arrival in numbers of four-engine bombers equipped with increasingly sophisticated radio navigation aids. This coincided with a change of policy. Although the destruction of precision targets remained an intermittent, and spectacular, feature of Bomber Command operations, most of the RAF's bombs would now fall on 'area' targets. If Bomber Command could not destroy German war factories, it would destroy the cities where the factory workers lived. Bomber Command's C-in-C, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, believed that the systematic destruction of Germany's cities would, by itself, bring an end to the war. All other targets, for example those linked with oil or fighter production, Harris dismissed as mere 'panaceas'.
Area bombing reached its climax in July-August 1943 when, in Operation Gomorrah, Bomber Command mounted a series of devastating raids on Hamburg. A subsequent attempt to 'wreck Berlin from end to end', which lasted from November 1943 to March 1944, was abandoned after losses of nearly 500 aircraft. However, German air defences were now becoming a wasted asset, while bomber Command's range of Pathfinding and target-marking techniques was concentrating the maximum number of aircraft over the target in the minimum amount of time. By the end of the war Germany's cities lay in ruins.
While the RAF bombed Germany by night, the US Eighth Air Force, which arrived in England in the summer of 1942, bombed by day. US airmen arrived bristling with confidence that bombing would win the war. At the core of the philosophy of the United States Army Air Force - USAAF, was the belief that high-level daylight precision bombing could destroy the key elements in the German war economy. The American bomber cheifs were convinced that, in the absence of a satisfactory long-range escort fighter, their bomber formations could fight their way to and from targets in Germany without suffering unacceptable losses. The Americans were not deterred by the fact that earlier in the war both Bomber Command and the Luftwaffe had employed these tactics and had failed.
In the skies over Germany the USAAF's theory was tested almost to the point of destruction. B-17 Flying Fortresses and B-24 Liberators, flying in mass formation, sustained increasingly heavy losses at the hands of the Luftwaffe's day fighters. By the late summer of 1943 average losses were running at 10% per mission, a rate that could not be sustained, and morale had nosedived.
The crisis came to an end in December 1943 with the introduction of the formidable P-51 Mustang escort fighter, powered by a Rolls Royce Merlin engine and capable not only of escorting the bombers all the way to targets deep inside Germany but also of forming fighting patrols to sweep the skies clear of enemy fighters.