Paging Nige

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Yes. And?

 

Yes, I think this is true.

I still think that more precision attacks would have been time, planes,
money and lives better spent, but at the time it really wasn't an
option.

 

Wasn't the whole point of the bombing campaign to lay waste to German
cities and piss off the population?

If the RAF hadn't been focused on beating the civilian population into
submission they wouldn't have dropped incendiaries on areas they knew
were civilian targets rather than military ones.

It seems fairly obvious now that the people planning the bombing
offensive knew that the Germans would have to use manpower (and raw
materials) defending those areas when those resources would have put
to a better use elsewhere.

I'm not criticising the way the allies went about winning the war but
precision bombing has only become a viable proposition over the last
20 years and if we (by this I mean NATO etc) believed that precision
bombing was the way forward we wouldn't have spent so many years
developing nuclear weapons and ways to deliver them.

 

Not if you're a Septic. They still couldn't hit a barn door.

 

I don't know what I was thinking of.

I could have been influenced by the fact that from 1983 to 1990 I
wasted my life working on weapons delivery systems because the stuff
we had prior to that was garbage.

I don't know what I was thinking of.

Obviously I was mistaken when I thought that senior engineers at a
slightly secretive establishment told me we needed to nuke targets to
be sure we hit them.

If you say so.

Give yourself a pat on the back, you've got it sussed.

 

Of course they could

Just not the right one ...

 

The RAF struggled to hit a runway on an island less than 30 years ago
and it's not as if they could claim they hit the wrong one. That alone
suggests they didn't have the capability to carry out precision
bombing to the level they required.

 

It took a Tallboy to destroy a viaduct with the best of RAF precision
bombing techniques of the day - actually missed the fucker too, and only
the size of the bomb and the resulting blast made it a successful
result.

 

That's what Tallboys were designed to do. The theory was that if you
put them in the ground within the right distance, the earthquake
effect would wreck the foundations of the target. A direct hit wasn't
required, that was the whole bloody point of such a large bomb.

 

Indeed. They were designed to go deep, and the explosion was
deliberately delayed until after the bomb had sunk as far as it could
in the ground.

 

Thanks, Mr Murray.

 

What?

You twat.

 

"It'll be all right on the night", eh?

 

Don't you think the claims of success regarding precision bombing were
more to do with propaganda and keeping the population happy than the
reality of it?

My point is that we wouldn't have spent so much time chucking bombs on
civilian areas if we'd been able to accurately bomb military targets.
We used HE to break things up closely followed by incendiaries to make
sure the debris caught fire and that caused sufficient damage to
ensure that the Germans had to try to defend cities but it wasn't
precision bombing.

 

snip>

Haphazard isn't a word I'd normally use alongside precision.

I'm perfectly happy with the fact that the RAF bombed civilians but to
claim haphazard bombing was precision bombing is stretching the
imagination a bit.

 

Yet when I said the RAF couldn't carry out precision bombing you had a
go at me?

My original post related to the RAF and it wasn't in answer to
anything you'd posted yet you felt the need to jump in with your ****
all out of ten comments. You're a bit fucked in the head at the moment
aren't you?

 

Ha ha, nice one. Haven't you got better things to waste your time on
than likening me to JackH?

 

Phase One: Markers, phosphorus/incendiaries to make target visible. A
few HE to do some structural damage, but mainly firestarter stuff.

Phase Two: HE and airburst benzol/petrol/rubber - to kill/maim
firefighters and rescue crews, disrupt comms and topple buildings.

Phase Three: (Often the second wave, 20-40 minutes later) HE and lots of
it, some delayed action (up to 48 hours) to **** over the poor cunts
trying to sort out the mess.

Brutal.

 

Proper War.
Last seen between Iran and Iraq IIRC.

 

I've just read the relevant chapter in Tail End Charlies on this very
subject.

The USAAF used the Norden gunsight but this was usually limited to only
the lead plane in the formation, due to the size of the formations they
used (particularly later in the war) they used the tactic of everybody
drops their bombs at the same time, so the lead plane might be over the
target, but 900 planes back they'd be miles away. It seems to be
accepted that both the USAAF and the RAF achieved pretty much the same
results but by claiming they were using precision bombing against the
RAF saying they were using blanket bombing the USAAF avoided much of the
PR flak that bomber command came in for.