Why was the Fokker D VII A Good Plane?

This will probably appear in the wrong place thanks to a buggy news server.

ArtKramr wrote in message ...
Subject: B-17's and Strategic Bombing (Was:Was D VII a good plane)
From: "Geoffrey Sinclair"
Date: 4/18/04 12:15 AM Pacific

Percentage of bombs dropped by the 8th Air force using visual sighting,

1943 56.5
1944 41.2
1945 41.5
overall 42.1

Translation, Walter will ignore visual bombing was a minority of the
8ths efforts.

You miss the point. Instead of not flying at all during bad weather we flew
radar mission . These added to the visual missions dramatically increased our
destructiveness.. Your classifying radar missions as not effective fails to
recognise that we did double the damage by flying both radar and visual a
missions.

Hello Art, my problem with the Walter presentation in this case is simple.

Would you like only the best results mentioned when it comes to recording
the history of what you did? That is the story your descendants will take
as an accurate idea of what you did and therefore an insight to the abilities
of military campaigns today?

I mean ignore the problems of take off, formatting, staying in formation,
navigating, finding the target and then bombing it on cloudy days?

I did not classify the missions done using non visual bombing as
"not effective", like all bombing raids the results could vary dramatically
but overall they were less effective because of the lower average accuracy.
In the 8ths case visual bombing was a minority of its effort, and visual
bombing in very clear weather less again.

The 8th had a hard time doing radar bombing, it had the biggest need
at the very time the USAAF had shortages of equipment and trained men.

If it is allowable to only mention the best results, then presumably it is
allowable to only mention the worst results.

Walter is right.

Walter is rarely right about the heavy bomber campaign.

Geoffrey Sinclair
Remove the nb for email.

Those who talk of the innacuracy of our bombing have never seen Germany in
1945. We left damn little standing.

Art, "leaving damn little standing" seems to me to be an
indication of inaccuracy, not accuracy...

The USAAF started out with an obsession about "pinipoint:" bombing,
"putting the bomb in the pickle barrel from 20,000 feet." That was a
major reason why, despite horrendous losses, the Americans refused to
join the British in switching to night bombing. (Later, of course, the
day/night division of labor served other purposes: making more room
available in British airspace, keeping the Germans awake around the
clock.)

The American turn to bombing through the clouds and from very high
altitudes was forced on them by circumstances, bad weather over
Germany and hellish flak. I think it's fair to say that if the USAAF
hit the factory it was aiming at, that *that* was the accident, rather
than hitting the farm ten miles away or Switzerland a hundred miles
away.

As I said, I lived in Frankfurt after the war. It had been rebuilt
(more quickly than London!) but there were mural photographs in the
railroad station. Out front of the station for several blocks to left
and right and a couple blocks straight ahead, there were literally no
streets remaining, just acres and acres of stone and rubble.

Of course it was the Hauptbanhoff that the bombardiers were aiming at.
Yet they never hit it. The one I used for bopping about Germany,
covering courts martial at Kaiserslautern and Darmstadt, was the same
iron and glass structure that survived all those raids without any
damage but broken glass.

A thousand feet from the aiming point is a *long* way in a city the
size of Frankfurt.


all the best -- Dan Ford
email: (put Cubdriver in subject line)

The Warbird's Forum www.warbirdforum.com
The Piper Cub Forum www.pipercubforum.com
Viva Bush! blog www.vivabush.org

I wondered about that myself. If it was a typo, Dan was consistant!

Subject: B-17's and Strategic Bombing (Was:Was D VII a good plane)
From: "Geoffrey Sinclair"
Date: 4/18/04 10:47 PM Pacific Daylight Time
Message-id:

This will probably appear in the wrong place thanks to a buggy news server.

ArtKramr wrote in message ...
Subject: B-17's and Strategic Bombing (Was:Was D VII a good plane)
From: "Geoffrey Sinclair"
Date: 4/18/04 12:15 AM Pacific

Percentage of bombs dropped by the 8th Air force using visual sighting,

1943 56.5
1944 41.2
1945 41.5
overall 42.1

Translation, Walter will ignore visual bombing was a minority of the
8ths efforts.

You miss the point. Instead of not flying at all during bad weather we flew
radar mission . These added to the visual missions dramatically increased
our
destructiveness.. Your classifying radar missions as not effective fails to
recognise that we did double the damage by flying both radar and visual a
missions.

Hello Art, my problem with the Walter presentation in this case is simple.

Would you like only the best results mentioned when it comes to recording
the history of what you did? That is the story your descendants will take
as an accurate idea of what you did and therefore an insight to the abilities
of military campaigns today?

I mean ignore the problems of take off, formatting, staying in formation,
navigating, finding the target and then bombing it on cloudy days?

I did not classify the missions done using non visual bombing as
"not effective", like all bombing raids the results could vary dramatically
but overall they were less effective because of the lower average accuracy.
In the 8ths case visual bombing was a minority of its effort, and visual
bombing in very clear weather less again.

The 8th had a hard time doing radar bombing, it had the biggest need
at the very time the USAAF had shortages of equipment and trained men.

If it is allowable to only mention the best results, then presumably it is
allowable to only mention the worst results.


Bad results are almost always the result of bad conditions. When bad results
are quored in a sneering tone as though the AAC did not have the capability
oif accuracy. That is a false and ignorant point of view. We could put a bomb
in a pickle barrel form 10,000 feet and I have done it many times. See my
website for photogaphic evidence of just how high our accuracy could be given
reasonable conditions. But the goeal was to hit the enemy imnder ALL
conditions, day and night, good weather and bad. Never let him sleep or rest or
recover. Hit him again and again If the target was missed by 10 miles and the
bomb load hit a farm destroying farm machinery and animals and grain storage
that deprived the enemy of food, that was a good mission. Then we would come
back and finally hit the prime target destroying it. Any attack on the enemy
is better than no attack. That is what war is all about.


Arthur Kramer
344th BG 494th BS
England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany
Visit my WW II B-26 website at:
http://www.coastcomp.com/artkramer

On 19 Apr 2004 14:40:45 GMT, (ArtKramr) sed:

On one hand....

That is a false and ignorant point of view. We could put a bomb
in a pickle barrel form 10,000 feet and I have done it many times.

....then on the other.

If the target was missed by 10 miles and the
bomb load hit a farm destroying farm machinery and animals and grain storage
that deprived the enemy of food, that was a good mission.

I suppose the Germans ran out of pickle barrels for targeting.


Enjoying digital hallucination

That is a false and ignorant point of view. We could put a bomb
in a pickle barrel form 10,000 feet and I have done it many times.

It was 20,000 feet in the boast. Some little difference there

In the event, of course, the B-17s found it unsafe to bomb from 20,000
feet and moved up much higher.

all the best -- Dan Ford
email: (put Cubdriver in subject line)

The Warbird's Forum www.warbirdforum.com
The Piper Cub Forum www.pipercubforum.com
Viva Bush! blog www.vivabush.org

Earlier in the posts:
We could put a bomb
in a pickle barrel form 10,000 feet and I have done it many times.

We could put a couple of 500 pounders or napalm into a suspected truck park in
a patch of three tiered jungle without a Norden sight. We did it numerous times
at night.
But of course it wasn't WWII, those suspected trucks were tough all the same.

Rick
MFE

That without this havoc wreaked largely by the USAAF, RAF Bomber Command
could
not have operated over Germany at all.

Wow! That was an eye-opener of a sentence, as opposed to accurate. Do you
realize that during the BoB, Bomber Command lost more men attacking
continental targets, including Germany, than Fighter Command lost? From
1940-1945, Bomber Command struck the Reich, including Germany itself, almost
without interruption. They were not there because of anything the USAAC was
doing!

v/r
Gordon
====(A+C====
USN SAR

Its always better to lose AN engine, than THE engine.

I wrote:

That without this havoc wreaked largely by the USAAF, RAF Bomber Command
could
not have operated over Germany at all.

Wow! That was an eye-opener of a sentence, as opposed to accurate.

No, it's quite accurate given the correct context, which is after Bomber
Command was driven out of most of Germany in the wake of the Battle of Berlin
and the 3/31/44 strike on Nuremburg.

It's a paraphrase of what Sir Charles Portal said after the invasion.

Specifically, Portal said:

"But for the favorable air situation created by the Americans, said Portal, '
it is possible that the night blitzing of German cities would by now have been
too costly to sustain upon a heavy scale'. Here was a remarkable admission
from the British Chief of Air Staff -- that it was only the success of the
American air policy which had spared that
of Britain from visible and humiliating defeat."

--"Bomber Command" p. 387, by Max Hastings

Do you
realize that during the BoB, Bomber Command lost more men attacking
continental targets, including Germany, than Fighter Command lost?

Not a very stirring testimony. The context of my note, which perhaps you just
skimmed, or maybe I wasn't clear enough, was in the period following the
invasion.

Walt

In the event, of course, the B-17s found it unsafe to bomb from 20,000
feet and moved up much higher.

And still, per the Germans, hurt them much worse than the RAF did.

Freeman relates in "Might Eighth War Diary" an anecdote where a B-17 box
climbed to almost 30,000 feet to get over the weather and still put 20% of its
bombs inside a circle of 1,000 foot radius.

Walt