On 19 Jun 2004 00:08:13 GMT, (No Such User) wrote:

They did what they could to target factories, but the technology to
do this accurately just wasn't there. American bombing was certainly
"precision bombing" compared to the British, nighttime bombing that
aimed for easily located targets like large cities.

There's a lot of irony he The British, by the end of the war, could
actually target precision targets with greater accuracy at night than
the US bombers could while bombing during daylight from high altitude,
but they did not, except for a very few missions, do so.

Arthur Harris insisted right up to the end of the war that his bombers
bomb city centers as the most effective method of bringing the war to
the Germans and shorten it, if not cause them to surrender.

He was mistaken. For instance, when Hamburg was bombed in late 1943,
Bomber Command managed to create the worlds first "firestorm" with
it's bombing tactics. The blaze wiped out the center of Hamburg and
killed many thousands of people. Gale force winds feeding the raging
fire were so powerful they literally ripped babies from mothers arms
and wafted them into the blaze.

But did the damage halt Hamburg from producing war materials? Maybe
for a week or two. A lot of people lost their jobs and their homes
because what got destroyed was center city businesses and residences,
but they were for the most part not producing war materials. The
survivors now turned to the factories which were barely touched, and
worked there instead. For the remainder of the war, Hamburg continued
to contribute mightily to the war machine.

Harris thought the decimation of Hamburg was a great victory. He'd
show visitors stereo pictures of gutted German cities, implying that
the roofless buildings indicated how effective his force of bombers
was. He called this type of bombing "dehousing" the German workers
and thought that they'd have to leave the cities to survive. Most of
the people who lost their homes did not die, they survived and turned
to the factories for work and shelter regardless Harris's conjecture.

The British bomber pilots and crew suffered enormously for their
effort. Too bad the concept was so flawed.

Corky Scott