Re: RAF and dive-bombing.
 

Hello Tony
First of all, thanks for the answer to my accuracy question!

Here also Fw 190 fighter-bombers succeeded to destroy bridges.

Quote: ” It is my belief that fighter-bombers were not reliable bridge-busters.
But Skua dive-bombers brought down bridges in Norway in 1940 (as well as sinking the Koenigsberg) and Vengeances brought down bridges in Burma, so it is my belief that specialised dive-bombers were reliable bridge-busters.”

Now medium-bombers and fighter bombers were effective in destroying for ex Seine bridges below Paris during summer 44. And if Ju-87s were so effective destroying bridges, when did LW stopped a major Soviet offensive by simply destroying all bridges behind Soviet spearheads and by keeping them down from summer 43 onwards.
Here in Karelia Isthmus LW (both 87s and 190s) helped significantly Finnish defence in Tali-Ihantala by repeatedly knocking out bridges at Tali 23.-29. June 44, but because Soviet construction troops equally stubbornly repaired them every time, LW forgot the bridges and shifted to bomb Soviet troops north and west of Tali after that. Anyway, the periodical closure of the Tali bridges hampered movement of Soviet reinforcements and supply to north and west of Tali and so helped significantly the Finns. And of course the attacks against Soviet troop concentrations during the second week of the battle also helped. One extra reason for LW to shift from bridge-busting to direct support of Finnish troops might well have been that Soviet advance to west opened new bridging sites to Soviets. One disadvantage of Stukas was that they needed at least cloudbase at 2500m or higher to work effectively, so there were days when only fighter bombers could attack (and also Finnish level bombers).

Juha

Re: RAF and dive-bombing.
 

Hi Juha, I'm away for two days, but just had to thank you for that.
I know nothing about your battles in Finland.
But did not the Russian forces build bridges underwater to avoid Stukas?
I do need to re-look at your claim that mediums and fighter-bombers brought down the Seine bridges.
In the Netherlands it was always said buildings around the ends of bridges were always devastated for hundreds of yards, while the bridges survived. The Mediums were a by-word for inaccuracy.

Tony

Re: RAF and dive-bombing.
 

Hello Tony
Quote:” But did not the Russian forces build bridges underwater to avoid Stukas?”

IMHO they did so to avoid detection from air, IIRC they had practiced that even before the GPW ie before German attack on SU. And when Germans found out the trick, they were often able to find bridging sites, or at least what they thought to be bridging sites. It was fairly easy to make a decoy underwater bridge.

Quote:” I do need to re-look at your claim that mediums and fighter-bombers brought down the Seine bridges.”

If we can trust Jerry Scutts’ B-26 Marauder Units of the 8th and 9th AFs p. 35, according to him B-26s needed 92 sorties per a direct hit on a bridge on a series of missions to destroy 9 rail and 13 road bridges between Paris and the coast. Not a dive-bomber accuracy but one had to remember that the bridges were heavily defended by flak. Fighter bombers began the offensive against Seine and Meuse bridges on 7th May 44 and mediums joined in on 9th.

Juha

Re: RAF and dive-bombing.
 

I've read Raymond Baxter (Tales of My Time), Cabell & Thomas (Operation Big Ben), Shores & Thomas (2TAF Vol 4), Simpson (Spitfire Dive-Bombers Versus the V2) and Smith (The History of Dive Bombing), and conclude the following;

1. The claims of accuracy that I remember objecting to in Christopher Shores 1970 book “2nd TAF” have been radically, and correctly, revised. Shores & Thomas state; “The RP was not a precision weapon” and “dive-bombing ... accuracy was in the same order as that in the alternative – low-level bombing”. Neither, however, is quantified. But the implication that the RAF did not do accuracy is entirely correct as the RAF refused to operate specialised dive-bombers or aircraft equipped with anti-tank guns, and rejected even minimal fitment of armour.
2. Shores & Thomas do not always spell out the consequences of their conclusion that the RAF did not do accuracy. I'll give two examples; “All types of bridges could succomb to dive-bombing, but it required a high degree of accuracy”. If bridges were defended – such as those at Wesel during Op Veritable – 2TAF simply left them alone, and they were destroyed by the Germans after their withdrawal. Another example; “There was, however, little doubt about the effectiveness of RP in the British and Canadian Armies, as they relied upon, and much appreciated, the Typhoon rocket attacks that went in immediately before their assault on German positions”. It's true the soldiers enjoyed watching the RP fireworks, and many wrongly believed RP was accurate, but it would be a mistake to think all the infantry were deceived. Maj Harry Illing, a company commander in 2 Warwicks in 3rd British Infantry Division, said he would have swapped a Typhoon for a 25-pdr any day, because the gun-howitzer was accurate, reliable and always available. There is truth in the old saw that all the infantry actually did was accompany the Artillery FOO from La Breche to Bremen, with 2TAF an irrelevance.
3. The big claim made for 2TAF was effective interdiction. This claim, however, cannot be quantified, and often fails to withstand scrutiny. Shores & Thomas; “Interdiction .... was also effective ... against the V2 rockets ... difficult to locate ... only recourse was to curtail their supplies of fuel and replacement rockets by cutting the railway supply lines”. Cabell & Thomas examined this claim; “it is unlikely that .. rocket batteries were unaffected by these attacks, but those by 2TAF were not carried out specifically for that purpose.... their real strength, in and near the Hague, were not directly attacked ...... attacks on the railway bridge at Deventer, Zwolle and Zutphen which carried communications to the Hague. 2TAF was therefore considered to be making a contribution to defence against rockets”. Cabell & Thomas do not agree with Simpson about the effectiveness of the RAF's contribution to the campaign against the V2s. Cabell & Thomas; “it is not right to state that the horror of the V2s was only quashed when ground troops went in”, which was the claim made by Lord Alanbrooke (“typical bloody soldier”, being F/Lt Raymond Baxter's response). Simpson, however, agreed with Alanbrooke; “a very firm conclusion has to be that the attacks of both the 12 Group Spitfires and the aircraft of 2TAF did not (author's emphasis) bring the V2 campaign to an end – the reason they stopped was the advance of the Allied armies .... They did not come to an end because of the air attacks alone”.
4. It cannot, IMHO, be gainsaid that the RAF's refusal to operate a specialist and accurate dive-bomber was an unmitigated disaster for Britain. Any number of quotations and sources could be produced in evidence. Here is one from a practitioner, the CO of 84 Squadron, Arthur Gill, who operated both Blenheim bombers and Vengeance dive-bombers; “We had little hope of inflicting much damage! It seemed such a waste of effort. Dive-bombing with the Vengeance in Burma, however, taught us what it meant to be accurate! For example, to take out vital bridges, I could usually send just a couple of Vengeances in with the almost guaranteed certainty that the bridge would be demolished, whereas with the Blenheim I could take the squadron against the same target day after day and rarely, if ever, score a hit”. The RAF categorically refused to support the army with anything but Battles, Blenheims, updated Blenheims and fighter-bombers, consigning the accurate Hurricane IID and Vengeance to the operational scrapheap. As the Americans say, “Go figure”.

Tony

Re: RAF and dive-bombing.
 

Hello Tony
if not fighter-bombers, light and medium bombers knocked out the numerous Seine bridges, what did that? Freeman in his Over the Beaches p. 65 claimed that “On the eve of invasion, 74 bridges leading into the landing area were destroyed or made impassable…” I’m not sure what are the real figures but one can see from German unit histories that the interdiction campaign in Normandy was a success. IMHO LW with its Stukas didn’t do it better on Crete, it had less resources but Commonwealth troops had much less AA protection than Heer in Normandy. And if you believe that Seine bridges were not defended, why Allied AFs suffered losses over them? Fighter bombers did also great work against German radar stations before D-Day, even if ALSO those were well defended. And as you know, LW Ju-87s found radar stations very difficult to knock out during the BoB, even if they had some success.

And I’m sure that there were numerous company commanders in Heer that prefer 10,5cm field howitzer over Ju-87, because it “was accurate, reliable and always available”. After all dive-bomber was even more weather restricted than fighter-bomber because it needed much higher minimum cloud base height than the latter.

I agree that dive-bomber was an accurate weaponsystem, but IMHO not a wonder-weapon that would have solved all those difficult problems which hindered air support with WWII technology. Warfare was team work and in the end it was still the “bloody infantry” which had to occupy the contested territory.

On armour, Il-2 was interesting a/c, its armour made it almost totally invulnerable to rifle-calibre fire, even if Finns used their rifle-calibre AAmgs to kill the rear-gunners of departing Il-2s, so infantry was defenceless against it. 20mm AAA was also rather helpless at the beginning but by increasing the proportion of AP-shells that problem was mostly overcome, the price was less destructiveness when firing at other a/c types. The price of armour protection was of course its weight and so bomb-load of Il-2 was small. I know that there was a set of appliqué armour for Typhoon, but I have no idea how widely it was used.

Juha

Re: RAF and dive-bombing.
 

Hi Juha,

You are right, of course. Inaccurate fighter-bombers could knock out bridges, and so could Battles and Blenheims. The difference between accurate dive-bombers and these other inaccurate weapon-systems, was efficiency. Gill, quoted above, described how the Vengeance opened his eyes to the efficiency of an accurate weapon-system.

I believe 2TAF stopped even trying to bring down the Wesel bridges because of aircraft and aircrew losses to Flak. On March 2, 1945 2TAF savagely curtailed army support because of these 'unacceptable' losses. The same thing happened to the Fairey Battles in 1940, and in 1918. The difference in 1918 was the decision to fit armour to ground-attack aircraft. The Russians studied the reasons why the British Commonwealth Army beat the Germans in 1918, and applied it, including fitment of armour to ground-attack aircraft. The new RAF decided it didn't do army support and concentrated on Duhet and strategic bombing to the exclusion of ground support. All this is known, and we don't need to re-hash it.

Tony

Tony

Re: RAF and dive-bombing.
 

Hello Tony
Dive-bombing wasn’t the answer to flak losses. Here during summer 44 Stukas of I./SG 3 of the Gef.Vb Kuhlmey flew at least 1.199 sorties, dropped appr. 540 tons of bombs and lost 17 planes plus 11 badly dam, when Fw 190Fs of 1./SG 5 the Gef.Vb Kuhlmey flew at least 507 sorties, dropped 232,7 tons of bombs and lost 8 planes and 1 badly dam. Targets were similar, almost all losses to flak. In fact because pilots of 1./SG 5, having operated before in Arctic region, were unused of the massive AA protection of a Soviet main offensive had to learn from bitter experience that repeated low-level attacks on same target were suicidal, their losses per sortie were lower than those of Ju-87s after they had adjusted their tactics to the environment. Ju-87s were better bridge-busters but both were capable of that and there was days when only fighter-bombers could do that because of cloud base. But as I wrote in the end Germans gave up their efforts to keep Tali bridges down and concentrated to attacks against troop concentrations near front line.

Il-2s did drop bridges, but they were not best tools for that because of light bomb-load they could carry. The armour had its pros and cons. As a tank-killer it had at least some successes against Germans but none of appr. 40 tanks and StuGs Finns lost during summer 44 was lost to VVS. Of course Il-2 was effective against soft transport vehicles and open-topped SPWs and SP-guns, which Finns didn't have but a few AA-tanks, none lost, but same is true to fighter-bombers.

On Douhetism, I can understand why RAF adopted it, it needed something to justify its independence during the lean years after WWI, and before the invention of radar there was justification to the say “bomber will always get through”. So, I can accept the adoption of Douhetism as a selling slogan, but IMHO the top RAF leadership should have seen clearer the need of specialised army support beyond Lysander sqns. In this we agree.

What else without too much help from hindsight, IMHO to make possible to some Typhoon sqns to be armed with 40mm “S” gun when engaged to A/T work. Possibly to mdify some Vengeances back to dive-bombers and train a couple sqns to use them as dive-bombers when in spring 44 it began to look like that the capacity of LW to challenge Allied air-superiority over Normandy would have been less than feared. I cannot see that that would have been made a big difference, maybe in V-2 hunt but German AAA over Holland was inentirely different category than Japanese over Burma.

Juha

Re: RAF and dive-bombing.
 

HI, Juha,

There were other factors that explain the relative ineffectiveness of the AngloCanadianAmerican armed forces compared with that of their Russian allies.

With reference to the V2 campaign, the problems that ADGB/Fighter Command never solved were a) target spotting/identification b) accuracy and c) Flak resistance, which fed back to degrade item a). The Vengeance, however, scored on all counts; a) the forward-facing observer and pilot were more than twice as likely to see and identify a V2 than just the pilot b) the vertically-diving Vengeance was more accurate than the Spitfire XVI, and c) Spitfires never descended below 3,000ft (Cabell page 90) over the Hague because of risks from Flak to the exposed hydraulics and engine radiators, while the Vengeance, being 'built like a tank' and air-cooled, was more resistant to Flak - but could and should have carried more armour - and therefore logically could have descended further.

Cabell page 96 makes the revealing statement that the presence or absence of rockets could be determined by studying aerial photographs of the Haagsche Bosch and Duindigit areas, while Spitfire pilots by implication could not see or identify the rockets, and so could not attack them, even if they were there in plain view to the cameras of PR Spitfires. Spitfire XVIs were often continuously over the areas but the pilots never 'saw' the rockets until after they were launched, even though the rockets were visible.

This reflected the main problem which 2TAF never solved when supporting the army. The single-crewed Spitfires and Typhoons could usually find the area identified by the Army as containing a machine gun/tank/howitzer/88-mm, but they couldn't see the camouflaged target. Therefore 2TAF came to identify success in exactly the same way as Bomber Command, which openly admitted its task was to "cart bombs to Germany". 2TAF implicitly defined its task as 'carting' bombs or RPs to the approximate area specified by the army, and went home proclaiming success provided they had found the right map reference. (On this criterion the crews of the mediums that laid waste to Bezuidenhaut were 'fully successful' because they correctly dropped their ordnance on the wrong map reference, which was not their responsibility).

Such equivocation, or even prevarication, never washed with the Russian army which had the power to decide whether the VVS had succeeded in target destruction or not, which in the end is the only thing that counts. If the target continued to fire, the aircraft was told to go back until the target was destroyed. Hence the high losses from alerted Flak defences even though the IL-2 carried armour. The independent RAF rejected any such definition of success, which was in the end why it could shrug off the need for accuracy. Only the Butt Report on Bomber Command, and the 21 Army Group Operational Research sections, were ever in a position to prove that RAF claims were fictional in terms of effectiveness.

This has led, IMHO, to the RAF's emphasis on the unquantified and unquantifiable effect of 2TAF RPs, and of Bomber Command's area bombing, on 'morale', and the unquantified and unquantifiable claims of 2TAF on the effectiveness of interdiction.

Many pilots, such as Desmond Scott and Charles Demoulin (609 Squadron), were convinced of their pivotal role in the Allied victory, but the facts do not support them.
'It was the day of the eagle, yet it was General Montgomery who accepted the accolade. Back in 1942, the build-up of the Desert Air Force under Air Marshal Coningham had lifted General Montgomery above the level of his unfortunate predecessors and placed him on the pedestal of public popularity. Tedder or Coningham were seldom mentioned. In their (the soldiers') eyes he became a god of war who could do no wrong. But the view that aircraft and their pilots were expendable, mere weapons of convenience, rang a discordant note in the ears of all of those who flew. The Tactical Air Force rocket-firing Typhoons and fighter-bombers, maintained a successful interdiction of the Seine bridges and ensured victory in the land battles before they had even begun, crippling the enemy's armour as it lay waiting in the hedgerows. As an airman I must here speak up on behalf of every branch of the Allied Air force. Their role has consistently been understated'. Desmond Scott.
'the role played by 2 TAF in general and by the Typhoons in particular were the determining factor of Allied victory in Normandy'. Charles Demoulin.



I hold no brief for Montgomery, who was a disaster and should have been fired in July 1944. His failures - to open Antwerp and at Arnhem - were predictable since he had form, but by the autumn of 1944 there was general acceptance in the Anglo-American armies that only the Russians would finish the job.
Nor is Churchill blameless, since he had the responsibility and the power to sack Montgomery and to rein in the RAF, but failed to do so.

Tony