"ArtKramr" wrote in message
...
Subject: How accurate was B-26 bombing?
From: (BUFDRVR)
Date: 2/29/04 2:13 PM Pacific Standard Time

Can we see some of your strike photos?


Sure old man.

To be fair, these two are actually the result of two 2-ships, but my
formation
hit it first.

Befo http://www.fas.org/irp/imint/990526-O-9999M-003.jpg

After:
http://www.fas.org/irp/imint/990526-O-9999M-004.jpg

This mission was very interesting...to say the least:
http://www.fas.org/irp/imint/b990514i.jpg

The rest of my strikes to make "news" were JDAM strikes. The one thing
you
will
notice is that mil dispersion pretty much ensures a few of your weapons
are
going to miss by a good distance, despite what you say. If you look at
the
Batajanica images, we threw a few M-117s out "in the weeds". We had
anticiapated this because some of the weapons were in pretty bad shape.
Unlike
you, we realized that sending a loader back to get us some new weapons
would
have interfered with the "hustle & bustle" of flightline ops, so we
pressed
on.


The runway was shutdown for the remainder of the conflict, although Eagle
pilots flying around probably aided in shutting down flight ops there as
much
as our weapons did.

Were you trying to make a point with your question?


BUFDRVR


YTHe point I was triyng to make was that we flew misison swith dumb bimbs
that
were sometimes as accurate as mision flown today with smart bombs.

LOL! Nope. Accuracy is usually guaged by CEP. Getting a single bomb, or two
or three, to hit the given aim point, while a laudable event, does not mean
that your strike was inherently accurate--because the other 200 bombs ended
up spread over a quarter section. Your CEP during WWII was abysmal compared
to that which was evidenced during Vietnam (with dumb bombs). Modern dumb
bomb delivery is much better than what you could have accomplished--toss in
PGM's and it's a whole new league altogether.

The B-26 was probably about as accurate as any level bomber could have been
during WWII in the ETO, largely due to the lower altitudes it typically
operated from (given that it had the same bomb sight as the B-17 and B-24,
that is about the only viable explanation). But even then it suffered its
fair share of bombs missing the aimpoint--the following is an account from a
USAAF crewmember who had been shot down and along with a couple of fellow
airmen was taken in by a brave French family until the allied advance later
mad it to their village:

"The next day, B-26 medium bombers bombed Chauny twice, once in the morning
and once in the afternoon. The station was almost destroyed along with many
buildings on rue Belmer, rue Amédé Evrard and rue Ferdinand Buisson."

The target for those missions was the railyard, not the buildings on those
streets within the village. A bombadier from the 386th Group recorded the
following results from the missions he flew in the B-26 in the ETO:

Results Unknown. We bombed through an overcast by Pathfinder.-- 1 time.
Mission Aborted. Due to bad weather or lack of fighter escort.------ 3
times.
Missed the Target -------------------------------------------------- 6
times.
Hit the Target. ------------------------------------------------------ 35
times.

So of the 45 missions they embarked upon they (allegedly--some exaggeration
was known to exist when it came to both bombing results and enemy aircraft
claims) "hit the target" 35 times. for a success rate of about 77%. If you
merely compare the "hits to misses" you get a success rate of 83%--again,
not bad, but not "we never missed", either. As the author's unit received a
Distinguished Unit Citation for, among other things, "maintaining the
highest bombing accuracy score" out of all of the B-26 groups serving in the
ETO, it would be hard to believe that Art's unit did *better* than what
these numbers indicate.

www.b26.com/html/people/ah/15.htm


In the PTO the B-26 did not apparently garner the same reputation for
comparative accuracy (the B-25 probably getting the laurels there among the
various medium/light bombers)--one account i read noted that troops referred
to the B-26 as the "coconut bomber", because they were alleged to be more
apt to hit innocent coconut palms than the Japanese targets they were
intended to strike.

Brooks

snip