FalkeEins - thank you very much for that reference.
Nick - Impossible to disagree. If anything, I possibly went even further in one of the paragraphs of the original book proposal:
"Operation ‘Steinbock’ was a disaster for the Germans. The Luftwaffe’s under-trained and (in many cases) inexperienced bomber crews were out-thought and outfought by their opponents, who combined electronic warfare with powerful night fighter and anti-aircraft defences, and effective civil defence measures, to frustrate and hurt their enemy on almost every occasion they ventured in strength across the English Channel or North Sea. Although a few raids in February 1944 caused significant damage to small parts of London, some attacks missed their target completely and German airmen often struggled even to find the English coast, let alone drop their bombs accurately. Attempts to copy or adapt British methods of night-time target marking and other bombing procedures, and to utilise new navigational tools, proved largely unsuccessful. German losses were heavy, while British morale – though potentially vulnerable to effective bombing – remained mostly unaffected. With barely a whimper, Luftwaffe operations petered out at the end of May. By then, however, hundreds of aircraft and their crews had been lost, seriously weakening the Luftwaffe’s ability to launch offensive operations when the Allies stormed ashore across the beaches of Normandy only a few days later."
"... often struggled even to find the English coast" is possibly a little unfair, although given the difference between German figures for bombers despatched and British figures for aircraft crossing the coast, maybe not.
You have of course written at length on an example of the very worst of the Steinbock performances - the final raid on Bristol (
http://www.ghostbombers.com/kf4/West/bristol1.html)
And several other raids (notably the other raids on Bristol and those against Hull, but also the first four London raids) fall into the same general category.
But not all of them; as the (RAF) Director of Intelligence 6 April 1944 report (AIR 40/2019) states, after the first four raids "the standard of performance improved to a marked extent, the fifth and sixth raids being particularly successful... With the renewal of the attacks on night 14/15 March the standard again improved and was well maintained with the following two raids."
I guess that in developing this thread, I'm partly challenging my own assumptions (as expressed in the second sentence of the paragraph reproduced above). Maybe it's only me, and it reflects my naivety, but I was a bit surprised when I started going through the ADI(K) reports in detail and began to think that a not insignificant proportion of the captured airmen (and dead crew members about which information was recorded) actually seemed to be reasonably experienced. Of course, and as some replies to my queries indicate, I could be very wrong about this (in which case better to find that out now than in any reviews that the book might get). Still, it seemed to be an avenue worth exploring.
Anyway, I'll keep on hacking away at trying to explain (rather than just describe) the Luftwaffe's poor performance in Steinbock, and see where I end up.
Thanks as always for the feedback,
Simon