[tcolvin]

Rod.
I agree the percentage of faulty ordnance will never be known.
But it's clear the problems existed throughout the war.
Harris knew the problem was serious, and called those responsible 'incompetent'.
According to Harris, the problem with the common No. 30 Pistol that was, he said, used in all medium calibre HE bombs throughout the war, were recognised only when BC started daylight bombing in the autumn of 1944. Crews now saw bombs exploding as they left neighbouring aircraft. No fix to this problem was found before the war ended. How many aircraft were in fact destroyed by premature bomb explosion rather than by the official explanation of Flak?

(And, by the way, why did BC never re-engineer the Lancaster to make it easy to bale out of compared with the Halifax? I found that statement by Fahey disturbing, and wonder how it could be true. I know the reason the crews called him "Butcher" Harris was because he butchered them).

That there was something very wrong with BC's bombs was clear from the first attack on September 4, 1939 when bombs were dropped by Blenheims on the Admiral Scheer in the Schillig Roads off Wilhelmshaven and failed to explode. Contrast that with the bombs dropped by two Russian SB-2s (an aircraft equivalent to the Blenheim) off Ibiza in May 29, 1937 that hit Scheer's sister ship Deutschland, killing 23 and wounding 83 members of crew.

Fahey suggests the ordnance problems in BC were endemic not just through poor design but also because;
- no one in BC coordinated the design and manufacture of the equipment needed to move and lift the bombs into the aircraft. So the stations created their own jury rigs that stressed and damaged the bombs
- HE Bombs were rolled along the ground, picking up mud
- the trolleys pulled by tractors also threw mud from the wheels onto the bombs and containers and into the fuses
- the AAEE, who were responsible for testing, were denied unrestricted range time by BC which monopolised the ranges for training
- there was no systematic evaluation of bomb types and therefore no way of identifying and correcting problems. I suppose this was because BC, like the whole RAF, was run by pilots who looked with scorn on civilian scientists. Manufacturing mistakes would have been picked up during this extensive testing that never happened.

By the way, the RAF was told by Zuckerman in his study of the total effects of air raids on Hull and Birmingham dated April 8, 1942, that heavy bombing did not break down civilian morale, and neither did it destroy productive capacity since; "The direct loss of production in Birmingham was about 5% and the loss of productive potential was very small."
The RAF dissed Zuckerman's report, and Lindemann misrepresented it to Churchill.

The evidence seems to be in that the strategic bombing campaign by BC was almost certainly worse than a crime, it was a futile mistake that ended up bankrupting Britain. The ultimate responsibility for that, of course, lay squarely with Churchill.

Fahey is, then, truly the first to quantify the total cost of BC's campaign.
That fact is significant given the great amount of work done on this subject.

Tony