So, over 250 million cubic metres of rock, say 625 million tonnes of it…..where is it coming from and how much to shift it up there?

Even at €0.80 per tonne that’s half a billion Euros! Nope, I won’t be holding my breath! :rolleyes:

Ah … except you’d need to remove that sort of weight/moment.

Oops! 😮 Note to self: don’t do quick trim calculations at three o’clock in the morning…..go to bed!

Even so it still shows the small scale of the problem and that it could easily be trimmed-out on a Lancaster.

What is the effective range of .303 ammunition?

Depends what you mean by ‘effective range’…..it is usually quoted as 1500 yards. Maximum range is 3400 yards.

If fired vertically a 303 round would rise to a height of about 9000 feet (in about 17 seconds) it would then fall back, base first, and hit the ground (about 45 seconds later).

There is an interesting comparison in ‘The Berlin Raids’ by Martin Middlebrook between the survival rates of Lancaster crews from number 1 Group and number 5 Group during the Battle of Berlin.

———- Sorties — Shot-Down —- Aborted —– Killed — Baled-Out

1 Group — 2598 — 143 (5.5%) — 207 (8.0%) — 780 — 242 (23.7%)
5 Group — 3002 — 128 (4.3%) — 166 (5.5%) — 750 — 141 (15.8%)

These two groups operated the same aircraft type, in the same operations, but throughout the Battle of Berlin number 1 Group consistently loaded their Lancasters with the maximum possible bomb-load; a sample averaged 9317lb for 1 Group compared to 8986lb for 5 Group during the battle.

Some Lancaster crews took to jettisoning some of their bomb-load (including 4000lb ‘cookie’ bombs which could not be dropped ‘safe’ and therefore could be seen exploding) over the North sea in an effort to regain some of the performance and height of their aircraft.

It also seems that the chances of crew survival were affected by the morale of the crews and their willingness to ‘press-on’.

Canadian pilot Walter Thompson in his book Lancaster to Berlin recounts that his bomb-aimer used the front turret against some military looking ‘barracks’ in France on a low-level return flight. If memory serves (from twenty years ago) Thompson had disobeyed orders to return from the raid at extreme high altitude and instead returned at tree-top height figuring that there would be less danger if the fighters were concentrating on the rest of the bomber-stream. Presumably part of the return flight was in daylight?

I think the same pilot saw a Wilde Sau (‘wild boar’) single-engined fighter over a target. The fighter hadn’t seen them but was climbing through the bomber-stream in front of his Lancaster. Although the bomb-aimer ducked into the turret Thompson ordered him not to fire in case it should give their position away.

On another occasion at low-level when his Lancaster came across an unarmed Luftwaffe training bi-plane Thompson ordered his gunners not to fire on it.

Clearly front turrets were occasionally used but I think this must have been vastly outweighed by the number that were never fired.

Those data in Chorley’s Bomber Command Losses, are they perhaps in tabular form and/or in some other way relatively easily worked with?

I have Middlebrook’s BCWD, and whilst I agree that will supply some aggregates, it doesn’t include a breakdown of aircraft by mark or sqdn (thinking here of Halifax II, III, V etc.).

BTW I don’t share your memory of BCWD re. “most likely to die”, I thought Middlebrook said it was the pilot (typically last out after trying to hold the aircraft stable for as long as possible)…

Chorley records day-by-day, each bomber lost (including serial number) and, most poignantly, the names of all the crew and whether they became a POW, evaded capture, were injured or, in the vast majority of cases, were killed.

It is not really suited for easy analysis but it makes for very sobering reading as it is common to find a page with seven bombers listed from which not a single crew member survived. I think it is a very powerful format; listing the bombers and crews lost on the Nuremberg raid 30/31 March 1944 takes sixteen pages.

You could well be right about the most dangerous crew position…..it has been a while since I looked into it.

So here’s an open question to the forum … does anyone have, or have access to, aircraft and aircrew operational and loss data over the Battle of Berlin period?

Bomber Command Losses by W R Chorley has all the information that you need; it list aircraft lost by type, mark, serial, crew fates (and most interestingly crew function), operation, date, location and sometimes cause of loss.

A cross reference with The Bomber Command War Diaries: An Operational Reference Book 1939-45 by Martin Middlebrook and Chris Everitt will give you the numbers of each type of aircraft taking part in each operation (but unfortunately not other relevant information such as which wave or timings).

If I remember from Martin Middlebrook’s analysis of crew losses compared to crew function the bomb-aimer was the most likely to survive from either a Lancaster or a Halifax and his suggestion was that that was due to the bomb-aimer being nearest to the front escape-hatch and also in front of the fuel tanks and therefore relatively immune from the effects of fire. Conversely the tail-gunner was the least likely to survive due to the difficulty in escaping from his turret, donning his parachute (stored in the fuselage) and bailing-out.

I’ve had all the data in the books for years…..I’ve just never got round to doing some analysis of my own!