Bomber Command research advice please

I haven’t read ‘Journey’s End’ but judging from Kevin Wilson’s other two books in his Bomber Command trilogy, ‘Men of Air’ and ‘Bomber Boys’, it is probably pretty good; I personally find his books most interesting for the first-hand accounts of the aircrew themselves (and slightly less balanced when it comes to judging the Bomber Command campaigns as a whole).

‘Journey’s End’ does however cover the final phase of Bomber Command’s war when many of its operations were carried out in daylight, in conditions of almost total air-supremacy and when the German defences had been rolled-back from the Atlantic coast by the advancing Allied armies; very different conditions from 1943 and early 1944. It also covers the period when target priorities had switched markedly (and rightly) toward the German oil infrastructure (as the targets that you list in your post very effectively demonstrates); synthetic oil / oil refineries by their nature are big targets and are not generally found in centres of urban population and they make better targets for lower-level (daylight) bombing. Again, very different from the targets of 1943 and early 1944.

There is rather a lot of information describing the names of the targets and their locations mainly in Germany. I’m re-reading “Journey’s End”, Kevin Wilson, which contains much useful information related to the OP’s question. In addition to those mentioned at #6 Wilson mentions the Merseburg/Leuma oil complex, the Nordstern synthetic oil plant in the Ruhr, the Gelsenkirchen oil refinery, and oil refineries at, Castrop-Rauxel, Rhenania-Ossag at Harburg, Hoesch Benzin synthetic, Dortmund, Wanne-Eichel, and Sterkrade, to name a few.

If we are talking about RAF Bomber Command night raids in the middle war years then I don’t think you will find much information on a specific ‘factory’ as a target. Of course it varied, especially if the target was in occupied France or Czechoslovakia, but Bomber Command tended to target worker’s housing and the city centre rather then go for specific factory targets.

For example, in the infamous ‘fire storm’ raids on Hamburg in July 1943 the RAF specifically did not target the docks or shipyards (building U-Boats) that were one of the primary ‘targets’ of the raid but placed the aiming points so that the ‘creepback’ would likely cause most bombs to fall on apartment buildings in the suburbs and the city centre; yes, individual ‘factories’ and workshops mixed-in with the residential sprawl were often destroyed, but none were targeted directly.

The attacks by the USAAF on Hamburg during July 1943 were targeted at individual industrial targets but these raids were much lighter than the RAF raids and the targets much harder to hit so consequently the results were less.

A few to be going on with.

Schweinfurt ball bearing factory on 24 February 1944. American B-17s were also heavily involved with this target http://ww2db.com/facility/Schweinfurt_Ball_Bearing_Factories

Not target related but may still be of interest on 27 January and 30 January trips to Berlin in “Ton up Lanc” DV 302.

A couple of railway junctions at low level, an ammo/fuel dump and the Berliet Motor Works at Vénissieux near Lyon. 28 April Fighter Affiliation with the 0.5 Rose rear turret.

Accurate bombing ?

Krupps, Siemens, Phillips, Messerschmidt, Ploesti to name but five that were on occasion, successfully attacked.

BC Targets

Hi Austernj673

If you’re looking at precise ‘targets’ for raids on cities I think you’re probably going to be unable to find much.

Leaving aside the numerous ops when there were specific targets to be destroyed (thinking here of things like U-Boat Pens, V-Weapon sites, capital ships like the Tirpitz, Peenemunde etc, and some of the precision raids by Mossies on things like Amiens Prison or Gestapo HQ’s) the city centres or main industrial conurbations themselves were often the targets for destruction.

So a particular factory complex or railway junction might sometimes be set as an ‘Aiming Point’ from which, allowing for factors such as fog, cloud cover, smoke, haze, navigational error, mis-placed markers, the avoiding of German flak, searchlights, nightfighters and mid-air collisions, plus creepback (the natural and understandable tendency to drop the bombs as quickly as possible – and often a fraction early – so that bombs aimed at fires or explosions below fell a bit short of previous ones which had done the same) the raid planners wouldn’t always set that Point (say ‘Factory X’) as the actual target but would instead set the initial ‘Aiming Point’ at Point Y (often on the far side of the target) with a view to damaging ‘Factory X’ in the general spread of bombs or in the creepback from Point Y. There would be no point in setting too precise a target because most of the time the bombing couldn’t be that accurate.

There has been much written about the achievable accuracy of bombing (US as well as RAF) and I think it wasn’t considered bad if bombs fell within a mile or two of the target! Many Squadron records will refer to crews bombing blind through cloud or smoke, or where they thought the target might be, or sometimes just onto an area of a town that wasn’t yet on fire.

Ian

The Reich Intruders by Martin Bowman is about RAF light bomber raids, and gives if I remember correctly some target information…

jack…

Some individual targets are named in the book ‘The Bomber Command War Diaries’ by Middlebrook and Everitt although mostly during the bigger city raids .
An excellent reference work on the subject .

Where do you start ? Probably the Public Records Office in London. I think that you will have a lot of reading to get thru’.

You could start with a favourite of mine: “Britains’s War Machine”, David Edgerton, Penguin History, ISBN 978-0-14102-610-7.