[Juha]

John
hopefully You accept one more off topic message from me just for the background info.

Hello Glider1
while the divisional artillery of Soviet Rifle divisions was rather weak, Soviet Army, like the British Army but contrary to German Army, had vast High Command artillery resources, so from mid-43 onwards, when Soviets wanted a breakthrough, they allocated plenty of artillery assets for the attack and as a rule, achieved breakthrough.

Hello Tony
the cold fact is, that it is always costly and difficult to crush an enemy which had a army with good fighting spirit and sound tactical doctrine, was it well equipped as German Army was during WWI and WWII or even rather poorly equipped poor Army as the Finnish Army was during WWII. On British artillery, Germans had high regard on it, IIRC they thought it was the best arm of the British Army.

On 25pdr vs US 105mm, there wasn’t so big difference in the weight of the HE shells (25pdr vs 15kg) but it is true that in the US shell had almost 3 times more explosive (2.2 kg vs 0.82 kg) so fragmentation was different. But IIRC there wasn’t enough 105mm ammo even for the US Army in 1944, thanks for the Congress which had curtained the 105mm ammo production to prevent “overstocking”, so IIRC the British gave some 25pdrs and ammo for them to US Army in ETO during the autumn 44.

Now on BC, heavy bombers could deliver very heavy concentration of HE in a short timeframe either to a tactical or a strategic target, that means flexibility. When they used right kind of ordnance it was very effective as during the opening of Oper Goodwood. It wasn’t BC’s guilt that the British Army had not understood how deep the German defensive system was, as a good army should, Germans had understood the need of depth in a good defensive planning and were good in camouflaging, even if not nearly as good as the Soviets who were masters in that and in deception. So the British attack was stopped south of the BC’s target area.

I agree that the use of BC wasn’t always most effective and that Harris’ obstinacy took off much of the potential flexibility of the BC. In fact I also agreed that BC got a too big portion of British defence spending, with cleverer use of it it could have achieved better results with lesser losses, so there would have been need for smaller production of heavy bombers and for fewer crews. The first part isn’t hindsight, some in the uppermost hierarchy of RAF saw that but thanks for Harris and Portal that was not achieved, the latter is because many who wanted more intelligent use of BC were also heavy bomber men who wanted more powerful BC.

Juha