[Juha]

Hello Tony
IMHO Mossie was not nearly as good as a heavy bomber against marshalling yards, one key target type of transport plan, which needed to be saturated with bombs to make them inoperative. Also some sturdy bridges/viaducts were easier to knock down with superheavy bombs, of which only Lancs were able to carry in ETO.

Didn’t notice that earlier
Quote:” that first arose in 1947, and which I finally answered to my own satisfaction only in 1995.

In 1947 as an 8-year-old living in Germany, I was taken by my father to a battlefield where his unit, 2 Lincolns in 3rd British Infantry Division had succeeded at great loss in breaking through the German defences on March 2, 1945. We placed flowers on the graves of 24 soldiers who had died that day and whose remains were soon moved to the Reichswald War Cemetery - the CWGC's largest.

The question that arose then was later verbalised into this: why did the Allies, with control of the air and unlimited resources, lose so many men, and find it so difficult, to advance against the remnants of a beaten German Army within six weeks of the end of the war?”

At least the Soviet system didn’t produce a sure answer, look http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Ilomantsi, that battle ended 3 weeks before armistice between SU and Finland. Now Soviet losses might well have been only ½ of that mentioned in the article but still fairly high.

Juha