[tcolvin]

You may be right, Juha, about the accuracy of glider bombing, but from my knowledge of what actually happened on the battlefield in February-March 1945, 2TAF could not do it effectively. However, that may be explained by the politically correct attitude of the RAF brass in never getting close to the army (evidence the crap thrown at Broadhurst for doing so) and their poor equipment - never let it be said 2TAF pilots were the problem.

Previously I have suggested Mosquitos could have done the job of taking out the German electricity generating system - 2 engines, 2 crew.
But that was before I understood what the A-36 could achieve with 1 engine, 1 crew, at half (?) the unit cost of a Mosquito, whilst providing more accuracy and offering a smaller target to the defence.

Your suggestion, however, that a deep understanding of Germany's electrical grid was missing is not borne out by the facts. Please forgive me for copying part of something I wrote several years ago on this subject. Today I would substitute the A-36 for the Mosquito, and place less emphasis on electronic navigation since in clear skies pilots could easily find a generating station - and even in cloud since cooling towers produce a tell-tale bump, although you can't always dive-bomb through cloud;

The third priority after surviving Hitler’s invasion attempt - even easier to repel as a result of strengthening the Admiralty - would have been to endorse not area bombing but the objectives laid down in the US AWPD-1 of August 1941. These were disruption of the enemy’s electrical power system, their transportation and oil & petroleum production. The intermediate objective of AWPD-1, however, which was the establishment of air superiority over the Reich through destruction of the GAF, would have been rejected as unnecessary. Instead a thousand DH98 Mosquitos, which first flew in November 1940 with production starting in July 1941, should have been ordered. Until the arrival of jets, this ‘wooden wonder’ was unstoppable and carried four 500-lb bombs. These would have been placed accurately by the new navigation devices such as GEE, which began service trials in July 1941; H2S with first trial at end 1941; and Oboe, first tried in the summer of 1942 and very accurate up to 270 miles from Britain but able to control only one bomber at a time. Oboe was first used against a Dutch power station in December 1942. The first operational sortie by a Mosquito was made on May 31, 1942 on Cologne. The right target would have been the electrical generating and distribution system as laid down in AWPD-1 but never made a priority target. The Mosquito fleet would quickly have eliminated the RWE and 20% of total electrical generating capacity by the autumn of 1942. The large rotors in generating stations were vulnerable to bombs and their destruction would have prevented electricity transmission while destabilising the entire system. If repairs were made and transmission restarted, low-flying Mosquitos would have detected the electro-magnetic field and promptly shorted out the switchgear by dropping steel cables over the transmission lines before returning to bomb the generating stations. The Ruhr would have been shut down in exchange for the destruction of several hundred Mosquitos.

I even have evidence that the idea of taking out the RWE was alive in 1943 and being discussed by some aircrew, who couldn't understand the targeting of city centres. Butcher Harris, of course, dismissed with contempt everything except area bombing as "panacea targets".

Tony