How much would it have delayed the allied/soviet victory in Europe if the Allied powers had not conducted strategic bombing campaigns against Axis countries during WWII?
Pic not related.
>>909596
The problem with a question like that is that the Allies, especially the British, devoted pretty significant resources both into the bombing campaign and in creating an air doctrine around said bombing campaign.
Asking what happens if those bombers just suddenly disappear or miss every single run is way different than it is if those resources are redirected somewhere else.
But if it's the former, which is what I think you're asking, surprisingly little. Allied strategic bombing was hampered by poor strategy; up until the very, very end, they were trying this Trenchardian nonsense of attempting to demoralize the enemy into surrender, which pretty much never works.
They didn't start scoring significant industrial damage until 1943, and even then, German production was still rising throughout the conflict. Honestly, the biggest impact was probably how many German resources, in the form of flak and fighters (especially night fighters) needed to be kept over Germany for Reich defense, and how much of an impact those planes could make if they were on the Eastern Front shooting down Russians: But on the other hand, you have a lot worse logistical constraints out there, it takes a lot more effort to field a wing of fighters over Kursk than it does over Berlin, and you can't just do a 1 to 1 shift of all those assets to the Ostfront.
My gut guess, is something like 4-8 months, no more. And if you go for the latter, "they tried something else", you probably get no loss of time, maybe even a gain.
>>909648
OP here, thanks for the honest approach.
I actually find the "they tried something else" question very interesting, because for me this is a question of ethics.
My personal feeling on strategic bombing is nuanced; I think I support the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki both; but I find it difficult to justify the bombing of German targets in the strategic air war. I'm trying to think about whether or not more or fewer humans on both sides would have died, and whether or not there would have been as lasting of a moral impact on warfare, had the bombing campaigns not been done and those resources and men been allocated elsewhere, for both sides.
It is unquestionable to me that the bombing campaign was not entirely unsuccessful, but I feel that its success was probably not proportional to the damage it wrought. What you say generally supports this position, so we have to play devil's advocate against our own position:
is it POSSIBLE that the Axis, if relieved of the need to defend its skies against all but the most tactically-focused attacks (knocking out military targets and precision strikes on industrial targets), could have inflicted such losses on the Allies and the Soviets that ground forces from these nations would have behaved much more brutally toward the defending nations, resulting in a bloodbath of equal size but different means?
Maybe this is a totally unanswerable question, but comparative history might be of some use, if anyone knows of a good analogous event.
Another question: if you were the Allies, what would you have done instead of strategic bombing?
>>909719
>My personal feeling on strategic bombing is nuanced; I think I support the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki both; but I find it difficult to justify the bombing of German targets in the strategic air war.
I'm not trying to be accusatory here, but what are you basing this on? Hell, the air war over Germany was way, way more dangerous; for a lot of the war, sorties over Germany took a 6% loss rate, and while that doesn't sound like much, remember that it was 25 missions to do a tour of duty, statistically, you were far more likely to die bombing Germany than come home to your family, and at least for me, that balance of risk reduces a lot of the moral quandries, this is a more or less even fight, not just bombing helpless people to induce a surrender.
>
is it POSSIBLE that the Axis, if relieved of the need to defend its skies against all but the most tactically-focused attacks (knocking out military targets and precision strikes on industrial targets), could have inflicted such losses on the Allies and the Soviets that ground forces from these nations would have behaved much more brutally toward the defending nations, resulting in a bloodbath of equal size but different means?
Personally, I doubt it. I mean, the Soviets were plenty brutal already, and I can't see more resources diverted to Ostfront making them more so. What is more likely is that the war would have dragged on longer and more people would have died over the fields of the Ukraine and the forests in northern Russia, instead of burning in German cities.
>>909719
>Another question: if you were the Allies, what would you have done instead of strategic bombing?
That's a tough question, and hinges on so many variables I'm not even sure I can give a coherent answer. Especially again where Britain is concerned, her strategic interests mean that it's very hard to project power onto the Continent in any other method.
If I was in charge, what I would probably do isn't so much stop the strategic bombing, but do it differently. Drop some of Trenchard's core principles: Attempt to win air superiority, or at least advantage, before going ahead. Bomb industry, not population centers. Focus on navigation rather than accuracy; reducing your 50-50 spread from 1,000m to 600 m doesn't mean a damn thing if you've missed the entire city you're aiming at. Most importantly, beat it into Bomber Command's head that they're part of a team, and aren't there to try to win the entire war on their own with no involvement from ground or naval forces. Stop all those suicide runs on Berlin, focus on targets you can hit relatively easily and do repeat strikes on already buzzed targets.
A lot of the alternatives, especially a more tactically based bombing approach that the Germans did, require a degree of inter-arm coordination that the Western Allies really didn't have: attempting to do it without institutional changes, especially allowing lower ranked officers to make decisions on force allocation (and training them so they can make good decisions), would probably be as useless as the Soviet CAS performance in 1941-42.
>>909884
I like your style. Focusing on air superiority is an interesting idea, but really until late in the war Britain and America would just not have the capability to do this more than they already did in mainland Europe.
The rest of what you say I think is brilliant analysis. Yes, there SHOULD have been a bombing campaign, but it could have been more ethical AND more effective.
If you really wanted to try for air superiority, you could try for one of the more unusual ideas and get parasite fighters on large devoted carrier aircraft, such as large converted bombers or perhaps even rigid airships such as the Americans actually had in the interwar period. I imagine you might be able to mount a decent radar set in the nose of one of those...
>>909883
no offense taken. I think the attacks on german population centers were mostly useless; they didn't serve a purpose proportional to the evil committed. Yes, it was a dangerous mission, but 99% of the people your bombs actually killed had nothing directly to do with killing you, and their deaths didn't accelerate the peace process fast enough to justify their sacrifice.
That 6% loss rate and 25 sortie requirement is INSANE, btw. Doesn't that mean you were basically 150% likely to die before your tour was over? Fucking insane! I wonder if the Allied air command was so willing to throw their crew's lives away because it wasn't like a battlefield where you had to pick up the bodies and send them back in caskets most of the time...
Good analysis on the brutality bit, btw. I was probably just overthinking that.
>>910304
> Focusing on air superiority is an interesting idea, but really until late in the war Britain and America would just not have the capability to do this more than they already did in mainland Europe.
This is likely, but, if pre-war research had been focused on more efficient engines and better fuel tanks, it might not have been as much of a problem. For a lot of the war, the issue wasn't raw number of planes, it was planes that could fly far enough to get over Germany and back.
>Yes, there SHOULD have been a bombing campaign, but it could have been more ethical AND more effective.
Possible, but you could also make good arguments for other uses of airpower. Perhaps better safeguarding of the convoy routes would have paid bigger dividents, focus on sea control instead of land projection. And if you can make it work, CAS doctrines seem to get the most bang for your air bucks.
>>910319
>Yes, it was a dangerous mission, but 99% of the people your bombs actually killed had nothing directly to do with killing you, and their deaths didn't accelerate the peace process fast enough to justify their sacrifice.
I admit, my focus is almost purely on efficacy, not ethics. It's pretty hard to break populations by indirect bombardment, especially when it's a total war at stake.
>That 6% loss rate and 25 sortie requirement is INSANE, btw. Doesn't that mean you were basically 150% likely to die before your tour was over?
Not quite. .94^25 is 0.21291013729 if I did my math right, so you're looking at roughly a 21% chance of living through a tour. Still, your odds are not great.
> wonder if the Allied air command was so willing to throw their crew's lives away because it wasn't like a battlefield where you had to pick up the bodies and send them back in caskets most of the time...
Actually, in some ways it was the reverse. As bad as it was, it was still better than the Flanders meat grinder, which is what everyone was thinking when they started this whole plan of bombardment. IIRC, total Allied aircrew and pilot losses was something on the order of 175,000 men. Yes, your odds were bad, but it required relatively few people to keep throwing bombers, at least compared to all but the smallest of land campaigns, the real cost was in industrial output, those 4 engined bombers ain't cheap. And guys like Harris were always sure that just a liiiitle more bombing, and Germany would crumble, so we need more bombers, more resources, finish what we started.
>>909719
>CAS doctrines
This thread is very intresting, i'm happy to see some proper history discussion on this board! Anyway, I was wondering, why do you think you support the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? I don't really know if i'm for or against it myself, so I was wondering about curious reasoning!
>>910656
>I was wondering about curious reasoning!
Shit its getting late, I mean i'm curious about your reasoning.
>>910539
>For a lot of the war, the issue wasn't raw number of planes, it was planes that could fly far enough to get over Germany and back.
hence the "air-carrier" idea
>Perhaps better safeguarding of the convoy routes would have paid bigger dividents, focus on sea control instead of land projection. And if you can make it work, CAS doctrines seem to get the most bang for your air bucks.
But you don't appear to think so. Why?
>>910545
Jesus am I ever bad at math. I was assuming I could just add up the chances; it you have a one in ten chance of rolling a 10 on a 10-sided die, it seems intuitive that you would get a 10 at least once for every 10 rolls, statistically-speaking. I was thinking to myself - well gee, you'd HAVE to get one. WRONG. There's ALWAYS the chance that a totally random event will simply not occur, so it could never be 100% no matter how many times the die is rolled. It will approach an asymptote of 100%, but not the actual certainty.
sperging over... yeah that's a really shitty chance to survive.
As for the estimate of the casualties incurred, that seems like flawed thinking to me. Sure, they wanted to avoid a repeat of Flanders, but their air war was pretty much Flanders writ small. Why not just... NOT have those men die?
btw, not trying to condemn the generals of the day; they were doing things to the best of their ability and I'm sure if they had thought they could save lives, they would have done so. I'm just trying to get a lesson out of their experience.
>>910656
Thanks. I support Hiroshima and Nagasaki because it was a much more effective scare tactic. The nuclear bomb was such complete and utter overkill that Japan immediately realized the utter insignificance any effort to resist would have.
Interestingly, any large strategic bombing campaign would have been equally impossible to resist, but psychologically, the unknown threat of nuclear weaponry is scarier.
>>910656
From a utilitarian perspective, they involved less suffering for both sides.
A Japanese campaign would have made Okinawa seem like a cakewalk. You also have the issue of a bad harvest. Many people starved in 1946, even with American food supplies. A drawn out siege would have made this even worse.
Of course, the US had no losses from a Japanese invasion. And the Japanese people did not have to through an ordeal that would have left millions dead instead of a few hundred-thousand.
Remember that, while many planes were required for the defense of the Reich, not all of them were really all that useful outside of the niche strategic air defense role.
Assuming that you do free up all those fighters defending the Reich, they're not going to make much of an impact. Excepting the opening stages of Barbarossa, the Soviets were literally building planes faster than the Luftwaffe could shoot them down, and no matter how many planes the Luftwaffe could throw at the front, they really wouldn't be able to cause enough losses to maintain total air superiority.
>>914202
I don't think they would have built the same kind of planes, man. maybe not even planes at all. But imagine this: a CAS plane that can zip in, shoot the shit out of your tank column with 30mm API, and then fuck off before your air superiority even has a chance to do anything about it. Not a war-winner, but it would have been stunning to see, and the Germans could have done it.
>>914254
>a CAS plane that can zip in, shoot the shit out of your tank column with 30mm API, and then fuck off before your air superiority even has a chance to do anything about it
Not with the kinds of planes the Germans were using for CAS. Their options for CAS aircraft were
>Stuka
>Bf 110
>Various bombers configured with a cannon for tank busting
None of which were all that fast or agile. The shift towards using Fw 190s for CAS only happened after Kursk, by which point things were already thoroughly fucked.
The more significant thing you probably would have seen was that the Germans would have been able to secure air superiority for longer times over areas of the front due to more aircraft and supplies. Even then, however, the Luftwaffe never really had the ability to secure air superiority all over the front, even in the earliest days of Barbarossa.
The best you'd see is things like the Luftwaffe completely securing the skies over Novorossiysk, Krymskaya or Kursk, while still suffering greatly to air attacks everywhere else on the front.
>>914308
It's true it would have required a change of design principle for CAS, but they could have built something like the salamander, strapped rocket pods or 30mms on it, and sent it out as an uncatchable tank killer. The problem would be supplying the pilots capable of such a demanding mission; it would basically be like wild weasel except you're blowing up tanks while doing it, too.
>>914386
That's pretty much exactly what they ended up doing with the Fw 190. Problem is that production couldn't exactly keep up with demand to replace all the obsolete CAS platforms. The best you could really hope for is getting that change to start a couple months earlier and finish faster.
>>914469
Allied bombing efforts at the very least had a nominal strategic target, be it a factory or railhub or cottage industry conveniently dispersed through residential zones.
Luftwaffe bombing efforts, on the other hand, despite being much smaller in scale and destruction, were generally purely for terror (see: Rotterdam, Warsaw, later parts of the Battle of Britain, and the endemic bombing of Britain).
That being said, nobody was ever prosecuted for strategic bombing in the aftermath of WW2, even those at Nuremberg. By the standards of the day, they were not considered war crimes.
>>914503
because it would have opened the door to tu quoque reprisals from the defendants.
let's be serious here: if the Soviets hadn't been on the winning side, their top brass would have been hanged for war crimes at Nuremberg right next to the Germans
The attacks on the coal liquification plants in 1944 were pretty succesful and effectively prevented Germany from having a real alternative to petroleum.
>>914523
didn't they just burn jewsoline for fuel after that?
>>914432
OK, that's fucking neat. anyone got a pape-worthy pic or illustration of a Fw 190?
>>914523
that's pretty late in the fight, senpai
>>914623
Well, yeah. But I guess it accelerated the breakdown quite a lot.
How come the allies didn't just get air cover over the baltic established and then perform d-day from say, norway to berlin?
that's what I do in my Axis and Allies games.
>>914503
>By the standards of the day, they were not considered war crimes.
By the standard of the allies, that is.
It was made a warcrime a short time after the Nuremberg trials.
Very convenient, is it not?
>>914621
Not really, beyond just switching the Stuka-equipped Sturzkampfgeschwader to Fw 190-equipped Schlachtgeschwader.
It's little more than slapping some bombs on a Fw 190 and turning it from a fighter into a JaBo. They're not perfect, but they were pretty much the only way to provide CAS once the Luftwaffe lost air superiority.
>>915209
it's not so much the plane itself (although the Fw 190 is a hell of a looker if you ask me), but the doctrine and the idea of the plane's roll that interests me. Thanks for the pic!
>>915309
If you're just interested in the Schlachtgeschwaders, then from a cursory search I've found these two books:
https://books.google.com/books?id=aQkWAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA124&lpg=PA124&dq=SG+2+crimea&source=bl&ots=ZliR2BJlFn&sig=qhe1IgCheWVo3Cv1i2nwub3njbY&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiB3d-k7uvLAhVFWRQKHdJyCjkQ6AEIKzAD#v=onepage&q=SG%202%20crimea&f=false
https://books.google.com/books?id=UPNzp8-i63EC&pg=PA44&lpg=PA44&dq=SG+2+crimea&source=bl&ots=Zzqo1wp1bS&sig=sFmohzBaX4KIUXwEJFVBgkFHuPA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiB3d-k7uvLAhVFWRQKHdJyCjkQ6AEIKDAC#v=onepage&q=SG%202%20crimea&f=false
>>913976
>The nuclear bomb was such complete and utter overkill that Japan immediately realized the utter insignificance any effort to resist would have.
I have heard people argue that the real reason for the Japanese surrendering was that the Soviets declared war, leaving them completely surrounded. Did this have anything to do with the surrender, or is it just an argument that people who think that the nuking of Japan was wrong, for whatever reason, likes to use to make people believe they are right?
great thread, polite sage
>>915366
Not him, but generally the latter. The Japanese were already sending out peace feelers with the U.S. long before, and were haggling over terms. Furthermore, while a Soviet presence in the war would be disastrous for their empire in mainland Asia, the Soviets couldn't really get to Japan itself.
A more credible "it wasn't really the a-bombs" theory I've read (although I still don't really buy it myself) is based on just general infrastructure destruction and the very real possibility of famine should they not get food aid immediately, as well as the means that the Japanese lacked to bring food to the hungry.
>>914800
>Very convenient, is it not?
Indeed, one of the many benefits of being the winner.
>>915382
From reading your post, I will presume you are not the same person I asked before, so, do you support the nuclear bombing of Japan? Why or Why not?
>>915382
>The Japanese were already sending out peace feelers with the U.S. long before
Not really. The closest they got was their ambassador to Russia having a tentative discussion with the Soviets about the Soviets being an arbiter for surrender negotiations on the condition that the Japanese could keep the Emperor.
However, when the ambassador sent this proposal back home, it was unanimously rejected by the Japanese government. The Soviets never agreed to it, either, IIRC.
>>915397
I'm not the other anon, and I guess I have lukewarm support of it. But I'm not really a philosophy type, and my ethical notions are heavily grounded in acting in the benefit of the people of the acting agents. The Atomic bombings of Japan were justified for how it benefited Americans and saved American lives from not invading the home islands. Japanese lives don't enter into the equation.
>>914503
>Battle of Britain
I thought the Germans were bombing airfields for air supremacy?
>>916316
At first they were hitting airfields and strategic targets, but IIRC by the end they had switched to terror-bombing London and other cities.
>Would the allied armies have performed any less shitty with their zerg rush attacks against the quantitavely superior (albeit dramatically outgunned) axis forces if they had stopped indiscriminately bombing german civilian defenseless cities, exterminating the german population residing there in a genocidal and systematic deliberate fashion, also known as the 'bombing holocaust'?
Protip: No.
>>916424
You, good sir, sound like a fair and impartial student of history and not a demagogue at all.
And if the Germans are so good, why was their K:D ratio against American conscripts so awful?
>>916432
>>916432
>Accuses me of being a demagogue
>DUDE WE MUST BOMB WOMEN AND CHILDREN BACK INTO THE STONE AGE AND TO BLOODY BITS BECAUSE IT'S THE "RIGHT" THING TO DO. USA! USA!
Unironically kill yourself
>>909648
Good post
>>909719
>purposefully nuking 200,000 civilians in Japan is okay
>but strategically bombing industrial arms factories and industrial cities Germany with conventional ordance is wrong
Wew lad
>>916447
I see more shitty infographics, and not a damn lick of sense.
I mean, who the fuck estimates "one third of Dresden inhabitants" died, aside from Irving? All the municipal authorities are in the 20-25,000 range, which comes out to about 3% of the city's population.
To believe that "about half a million people died" requires you to come up with an explanation as to how the Dresden raids managed to kill about 20 times as efficiently as say Operation Gomorrah, which bombed with more tonnage, against a larger, more densely populated target, over a longer period of time, in better weather.
I can't tell if you're trolling, or just /pol/
>>916447
>naziboos complaining about terror bombing
It's like you don't even know who invented it
>>916447
>mfw my side won the war, and in any halfway civilized country, your life would be destroyed if you tried spouting this bullshit in public
>>914148
There was a good chance Japan would have surrendered in late 1945 with more conventional bombing.
The Emperor already was asking for a surrender and the military council almost was overruled in early August.
America had no way of knowing this though. The Japanese did not make it known that they were willing to unconditionally surrender as long as the Emperor could remain. The Americans demanded him to abdicate, but we reversed policy after the war.
I don't think purposefully killing 300,000 civilians was justified based upon the circumstances though.
>>915404
Umm yeah that's at least one. They also sent out more to America in early early August. It was the same surrender on the condition the emperor could remain.
We did not even respond because we were clear we wanted unconditional.
