Multymegaton ****storm :) Could the Germans win the war?

[Magpie_Oz]

And so far, national governments don't seem willing to sell the stuff to terrorists or weekend hobbyists.

I'm sure if you asked nicely they'd think about it, why don't you give them a call? I'd love to see how you get on when those jolly chaps from the Department of Home Land Security pop around for a chat.

[Michael Emrys]

So the allies didn't crack it in 1944-45 using computers they solved problems involved with a conventional explosive triggered implosion using experiment, brains and slide rules.

Richard Feynman, who was responsible for the calculations, has described in great detail how it was done. He had a dozen or so secretarial types (all female) do the calcs on ordinary business calculators...you know, the kind where you key in the numbers and pull the crank and it does the sums for you. The equations were broken down into thousands and thousands of such steps with one woman passing her sums off to the next until they were all done.

Talk about labor intensive!

Michael

[Erik Springelkamp]

Richard Feynman, who was responsible for the calculations, has described in great detail how it was done. He had a dozen or so secretarial types (all female) do the calcs on ordinary business calculators...you know, the kind where you key in the numbers and pull the crank and it does the sums for you. The equations were broken down into thousands and thousands of such steps with one woman passing her sums off to the next until they were all done.

That was not specific to the a-bomb program though.

For a long time every university or research institute had a 'computation chamber' with a lot of people doing computations as requested by professors.

Even before the invention of mechanical calculators. They used large table books with logarithms and other functions in great accuracy.

[Kanonier Reichmann]

Curtis LeMay thought so. From the end of WW II until the day he died he advocated bombing Russia "back to the stone age".

Michael

General LeMay was such a great humanitarian wasn't he. Bomber Harris and he would have got on like a house on fire (pun intended).

Regards

KR

[Vark]

General LeMay was such a great humanitarian wasn't he. Bomber Harris and he would have got on like a house on fire (pun intended)

I believe that Arthur Harris was only carrying out the War Cabinets policy of the area bombing of Germany, so why not have a pop at them, after all they were only fighting for their very survival! As Harris so eloquently puts it.

"The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind."

The only 'humanitarian' war is one that is prosecuted so that it ends as early as possible, Harris subscribed to this view, hence his annoyance at being asked to bomb the French rail system, in advance of D-Day and lend support to ground troops after it. He believed both were wasting a war-shortening asset, which is how he regarded his role.

[JonS]

He was wrong.

Or rather, he could have been more right, but only if he'd used his tool very differently, especially from about mid-43 onwards.

[Blackcat]

"he could have been more right, but only if he'd used his tool very differently, especially from about mid-43 onwards"

Ok, I'll ask. How do you think he should he have used his tool differently from about md-43 onwards?

[Michael Emrys]

I have long held the belief that the war might have ended six months earlier if even a few squadrons of heavy bombers had been diverted to anti-uboat patrolling in the mid North Atlantic in 1941-42. Harris fought that tooth and nail.

Michael

[Blackcat]

I have long held the belief that the war might have ended six months earlier if even a few squadrons of heavy bombers had been diverted to anti-uboat patrolling in the mid North Atlantic in 1941-42. Harris fought that tooth and nail.

Michael

The problem in 41-42 was the range of the aeroplanes then available was such that an area of the atlantic could not be covered (the air-gap). Secondly, without good enough radar the chance of a couple dozen heavy bombers patrolling the atlantic spotting anything would be exceedingly slim. Without the technology extra aeroplanes would have been unlikley to reduce the length of the war.

[Magpie_Oz]

The problem in 41-42 was the range of the aeroplanes then available was such that an area of the atlantic could not be covered (the air-gap). Secondly, without good enough radar the chance of a couple dozen heavy bombers patrolling the atlantic spotting anything would be exceedingly slim. Without the technology extra aeroplanes would have been unlikley to reduce the length of the war.

Thing is you don't have to patrol the whole of the Atlantic, just the bit where the convoys are. To my mind tho' their time was better spent bombing the buggery out of the U-boats' harbours and the resources used to build and operate them.

I think the main hurdle the strategic bomber commanders faced was Target Acquisition and Damage Assessment.

Working out which targets would give the best result must have been a nightmare what is more effective bombing the U-Boat pens accurately and hoping to penetrate 3m of concrete or flattening the village where the workers in the oil refinery live?

Later trying to determine if you penetrated the bunkers or did actually get the workers and if another strike was needed would have been a wild guess at best. As recent as Desert Storm BDA is still a huge conundrum.

[Blackcat]

Thing is you don't have to patrol the whole of the Atlantic, just the bit where the convoys are...

And where the convoy is going to be in a few hours, quite so. That still leaves hundreds of square miles that need to be patrolled with no more technology that the MKI eyeball. In addition there is still in 1941-42 that big bit in the middle which no aeroplane can reach (flying from the UK, Iceland or Newfoundland).

So Mr. OZ, whilst I agree with your other points, I must still challenge Mr. Emrys' claim that diverting bomber squadrons to sub-hunting in 1941-42 would have shortened the war.

[Magpie_Oz]

So Mr. OZ, whilst I agree with your other points, I must still challenge Mr. Emrys' claim that diverting bomber squadrons to sub-hunting in 1941-42 would have shortened the war.

Can't argue with that, they might have helped a bit but probably not all that much. Even then all the U boats would have to do is wait until night.

[Blackcat]

Strange weird stuff, Mr. Oz. My reply to your post seems to have arrived before your post.

[Michael Emrys]

You are both forgetting that the most important function that the bombers served was to drive the subs underwater. That way they didn't have the speed to track or catch the convoys, and they were also using up precious energy stored in the batteries. So whether or not they actually spot a sub, they may well fly close enough to force it to pull the plug. The second function they served was that if they actually do spot the sub, to report its location so that convoys can be rerouted around it if necessary.

Michael

[Michael Emrys]

That still leaves hundreds of square miles that need to be patrolled with no more technology that the MKI eyeball.

So? A plane even flying as low as 5,000' can eyeball thousands of square miles in an hour. And it really wasn't necessary to keep each one of those square miles under constant scrutiny in order to have a profound effect on the shipping war.

Michael

[JonS]

The problem in 41-42 was the range of the aeroplanes then available was such that an area of the atlantic could not be covered (the air-gap). Secondly, without good enough radar the chance of a couple dozen heavy bombers patrolling the atlantic spotting anything would be exceedingly slim. Without the technology extra aeroplanes would have been unlikley to reduce the length of the war.

The bombers don't have to actually sink - or even see - any U-boats to be effective. Just forcing them to dive, and keeping them back from the convoys is a big enough success. Sinking boats as well? Well, that's just the cherry on top of the gravy.

And it wasn't just Harris that was adamantly opposed to diverting heavy bombers to the Atlantic. The USAAF wasn't exactly forthcoming either, despite the Liberator having ample range, and the requirement in terms of the number of a/c being quite modest. Loss-rates and wastage, too, were very modest compared to bomber operations, so the sustained stream of a/c needed for the Atalantic would have been negligible.

Furthermore, the necessity to win the Battle fo the Atlantic was a pre-condition for the Combined Bomber Offensive. Bombers can fly across the Atlantic, and so are immune to the u-boats, but smaller a/c (ie, the fighters), plus fuel, bombs, ground crews, and the massive engineering effort, all had to come across in a never ending stream of ships.

Yet, that isn't even what I was talking about.

By mid-43 Bomber Command had the tools, techniques and experience to conduct precision raids on a massive scale. Not precision in the way we'd use it now, of course, but more precise than the USAAF was able to achieve in daylight. Yet Harris insulted his own crews by refusing to recognise what they were capable of, until forced to as a result of tests conducted at the start of the pre-OVERLORD Transportation Plan.* And even then he refused to wield his Command as a precision tool, preferring to think of it - and use it - as a blugeon.

Furthermore, even as a blugeon he could have used the tool far more efficiently. Harris refused to acknowledge the validity of the target sets and priorities that the Air Staff presented him with, and instead just carried on pummelling cities, almost at random. The net result was an almost negligible impact on the German economy and war making potential, compared to what a more focussed and targetted pummeling could have acheived.

I have no quibble with the way BC was used in the early years of the war, and I have no moral quibble with area bombing. My objection is to the sheer inefficiency of using BC in that way over the last two years of the war, when it was capable of so much more.

Jon

* it had also been shown six months earlier, during the Peenemünde raid.

[JonS]

Later trying to determine if you penetrated the bunkers or did actually get the workers and if another strike was needed would have been a wild guess at best. As recent as Desert Storm BDA is still a huge conundrum.

True, but they had their own experience to fall back on. The need to re-hit industrial targets was obvious as a result of the German air-raids on the UK. Almost regardless of how much damage a single raid causes*, unless the raid is repeated at regular intervals you may as well not bother in the first place.

Furthermore, they had the stark example of the abject failure of the GAF to impact civilian morale in the UK, despite an determined and sustained effort to do exactly that. Ignoring that example is simply perverse.

Jon

* there are a very few specific exceptions, such as the Huls(?) hydrogenation plant that really was destroyed as the result of a single raid in ~October 1944. And, I'm obviously talking about the the kind of damage capable with technology available over Western Europe at the time, rather than nuclear weapons

[Blackcat]

Jons,

Thanks for your contribution. If we could just leave the Battle of the Atlantic alone for a moment and return to the much more interesting point of the use of bomber command. You state,

"By mid-43 Bomber Command had the tools, techniques and experience to conduct precision raids on a massive scale. Not precision in the way we'd use it now, of course, but more precise than the USAAF was able to achieve in daylight."

I thought I was fairly well read on the subject but I have never come across a claim as bold as this before. Please would you let me have a list of your sources?

[JonS]

In addition there is still in 1941-42 that big bit in the middle which no aeroplane can reach (flying from the UK, Iceland or Newfoundland).

You seem to be saying that since planes couldn't cover the whole Atlantic, it was pointless having them cover any of it. That's a pretty shallow analysis.

Edit: just saw your most recent post about moving on from the Atlantic, which came in while I was writing this. Sorry.

[JonS]

I thought I was fairly well read on the subject but I have never come across a claim as bold as this before.

Bold claim? About BC being more precise than 8th A/F? I thought that was fairly well known :confused:

Please would you let me have a list of your sources?

For starters (you'll need to do some sifting).

[DavidFields]

Ok, not reading every page of this thread, and getting back to the OP.

I think the challenge is to determine the minimal number of changes that could have occured, and the Germans still win.

It is probably the obvious:

1. Launch the invasion of Russia one month earlier.

2. Push --less--far into Russia in 1941, +/- better winter gear, dig in for the winter.

3. Push everthing to the Northern Front in 1942 (sort of the original plan, but extended into the next year)

4. I am going to contend [and will enjoy the response] that most simulations would put taking Leningrad, and then attacking Moscow from the north (and west) in 1942 is the winning strategy. Yes, you need southern USSR or you tanks run dry. But best to take the USSR north to south, breaking that Leningrad strongpoint.

[Magpie_Oz]

Wow, amazing library their Jon, I want "Z Location : The Story of the 4th Durham Survey Regt" !

[Blackcat]

Mr. Sowden,

I am quite happy to do some digging but when I see Terry Pratchett and the Discworld books in a list of sources I am tempted to believe my interlocutor maybe attempting to extract the urine.

Fair go. You want to claim that bomber command had the ability to hit precise targets at night and more effectively than the yanks could do so by day. Furthermore, you seem to want to claim that Harris deliberately ignored this capability. So please do me the curtesy of pointing me at some sources that back your claim and not a reading list which includes fantasy novels.

[Magpie_Oz]

Reading on the Peenemude raids and while reasonably accurate they do seem an enormous investment for not much return?

Between 300 and 500 aircraft each raid and the installation is hindered for a few weeks?

Surely devastating large tracts of down town Cologne had more impact?

[JonS]

Surely devastating large tracts of down town Cologne had more impact?

Not on the V1/2 it didn't.