I’ve always wondered why the Germans would waste so much effort trying to stop an offensive that was causing so little ‘morale crushing and strategic material destruction’?

As has been said, the thousands of anti-aircraft guns, the millions of rounds of ammunition and the millions of men (women and children) to man these defences.

On the, disastrous, Nuremberg raid the Germans put up two-hundred-and-fifty night-fighters, about one for every three bombers, and most of them shot-down precisely nothing on what was the blackest night for Bomber Command. That is an enormous effort in aircraft manufacture, avionics (radar), crew-training, fuel and so-on.

Why bother if the Bomber Command offensives were causing little ‘strategic material destruction’?

Essentially I agree with your assessment that the bomber offensives could have been better directed but what military campaign couldn’t with the benefit of hindsight; why does Bomber Command always come in for such criticism over Dresden? Why does Bomber Command have to meet some ‘ideal’ that other commands, or commanders, don’t?

Basically in regard to the need for the Germans to concentrate anti-aircraft resources you are ignoring the USAAF daylight raids as well. The same guns can be used both at night and in daytime. The Luftwaffe was defeated by the daylight fighter escorted bombing offensive in a process of simple attrition, not by badly targeted raids at night – German aircraft production figures confirm that as we are all aware. Also I think you are simply regurgitating our wartime propaganda which despite its home front morale boosting qualities was shown after the war to have been somewhat less than accurate.

However you like to see it, in fact the Dresden raid was unnecessary and only intended as a sop to Stalin’s complaints about how the Red Army was taking enormous casualties in its push into the eastern Reich. The Soviet Union’s profligate use of its own soldiers is a different issue, but whether we like it or not the big event was happening on the ground in the east – if the Russians had not pushed their offensive in the way they did Bomber Command’s efforts would not have given us the final victory. Or to put it another way if Dresden hadn’t happened it would not have altered the final outcome.

I am not condemning the crews of Bomber Command who, when all is said and done, were simply doing the job they had been given which was to attack Dresden. I am simply saying that at that stage of the war the attack was unnecessary – the German Army was being over run and the Luftwaffe was a spent force. Dresden remains an emotive issue, so do the atomic raids on Japan – the latter demonstrated finally for the Japanese command that they had no hope, but Dresden demonstrated nothing and achieved very little. As I said blowing up civilians in a military and political dictatorship like Nazi Germany has little effect on the leaders and their policies. But when the Russians got into the suburbs of Berlin that sure got Hitler’s attention.

It is not a matter of hindsight to argue that RAF Bomber Command’s resources could have been used in different ways – there was quite considerable debate about it in the last years of the war. If they had it may well have been that losses may have been reduced. Yes the Bomber Command veterans deserved their own campaign medal and yes that memorial was obscenely late in coming however I do think that WW2 did show us that there are limits to what conventional bombing tactics can achieve against civilian targets. British civilians didn’t break under the Blitz and the German civilians didn’t break under the air assault. The strategic objective of the war was to defeat Nazi Germany and that was achieved by the rather conventional tactic of breaking the military power of Germany, not German morale despite the prophecies by the German leaders after the first of the 1000 bomber raids.

Not to mention the reallocation of literally thousands of the highly effective 88s from Germany to the Normandy and Eastern Fronts.

Moggy

But given the disproportionate losses suffered by Bomber Command at the hands of those Ju88s you are not seriously suggesting that throwing away RAF Bomber Command crew lives just to attract Ju88s was a serious strategic decision to curb the menace of the Ju88. A few well planned raids on the factories would have achieved that.

Edit: I misread you – how dare the Hun have an 88mm gun and a Ju88 😉 , but I think the same argument may still apply.

Did he not have something of a point? Also, to me, that statement appears to be questioning the conduct of the campaign rather than the conduct of the aircrews (And at the end of the day he was supposed to be in charge of it all) I don’t think that this matter is or ever was a black and white issue.

Indeed he did, by that stage in the war the bombers were, to use Churchill’s own phrasing, just stirring the rubble. Dresden was by any assessment a dreadful event – which is not a criticism of the crews but a criticism of the runaway planning at the upper levels that would allow such a useless and destructive raid.

But that terrible event was just another in a long series of terrible things that happened between 1939 and 1945. Certainly there was no alternative but for the Allies to destroy Germany by whatever means as the only sure way that was available to rid us of that aggressive despicable Nazi regime, however I wonder if after the D Day landing Bomber Command could have been used for tactical purposes rather than the continuation of the strikes against cities. That may have saved Bomber Command crews and allowed a reallocation of production resources away from the heavy bombers into less costly aircraft and smaller crews.

The additional problem is that the post-war studies clearly show that the tactics of Bomber Command were not having the morale crushing and strategic material destruction that was claimed. Perhaps if the commanders had reassessed their tactics, training and strategic objectives a lot of Bomber Command crews may have been saved. Objectively I see the incredible bravery and endurance of the bomber crews being wasted by commanders who believed despite growing evidence to the contrary that heavy conventional bombing of cities could win the war. Equally, of course, the German capacity to relocate factories and to effect quick repairs also made the effects of the USAAF daylight precision bombing somewhat less than the damage assessments by our side optimistically reported.

In the end it was the destruction of the Luftwaffe’s pool of experienced pilots in the daylight battles with the USAAF coupled with the irresistible assault by the Russians in the east and our land assault in the west that destroyed Germany. Our own experience during the Blitz showed that the Luftwaffe offensive against civilian targets while initially something quite terrifying, quickly saw the terror and fear replaced with anger and resistance. The Bomber Command offensive against the German cities had very much the same effect. Once the Germans began to disperse their production facilities it was inevitable that the unpreventably inaccurate broad brush approach would become something worth far less in strategic terms than the sacrifice of the crews involved.

The Americans showed that in the end it was necessary to ramp things up a notch with the atomic strikes in Japan before strategic attacks against cities could become a war winner in itself. But that quite correctly and morally is now considered a step too far. There comes a point when it is the simple tactical destruction of a nation’s fighting forces that must be achieved, as it was with the Allied land assaults on Germany, rather than wasting crew lives and valuable resources on civilian targets. Simply put, in the end civilian feelings have little effect on the strategic aims of political and military dictatorships. That isn’t a criticism of Bomber Command crews but a suggestion that once the means of achieving accurate bombing with aircraft capable of that then Bomber Command strategy should have been reassessed and its resources reallocated to better war winning objectives.

I know the downward seats in the bombay of the converted EB-66 worked. …

Except if you have to get out in a hurry close to the ground …… splat!!! 🙂

Superb.

Quite. I think the biggest danger is ingesting dust, so scratching away at the luminous paint is the last thing one wants to do. If the faces are OK, and the surface is stable, why mess with it.

And that is the core problem isn’t it – if the glass is damaged then the seal is broken and these interesting old antiques become quite lethal.

If that news report is correct then that is just a plain unspeakably miserable act by the British government.

I may be old (well i am) but not a bad thing to happen,with todays tv programes…and a good few radio channels as well…

That was the first thing that occurred to me – let’s face it, as a social experiment in enlightenment TV has finally failed. 🙁