Christer Bergstrom BOB book

[John Beaman]

Originally Posted by John Vasco

Fanair:

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but it DOES feed in to objective critical thinking and re-evaluation of events. And I say this full in the knowledge that in 1940, the defenders of our Island could not 'see over the other side of the hill' as much as they wanted to, or needed to...

John, you are right. IIRC, Bletchly Park were just getting started, in any useful sense, with ULTRA, so any info on "the other side of the hill" was VERY sketchy.

[Nick Beale]

Originally Posted by John Beaman

John, you are right. IIRC, Bletchley Park were just getting started, in any useful sense, with ULTRA, so any info on "the other side of the hill" was VERY sketchy.

They had a major break into Enigma just before Dunkirk (and then some retrospective breaks into older material) and were getting quite a volume of Luftwaffe material throughout the BoB. BP seems to have been constrained by staff shortages and lack of Bombe machines, so they were only breaking into a few networks. They did however manage to put together a pretty good order of battle and locate a large number of the units on it, with detailed strengths for some. With a typical 24-hour delay in deciphering, there weren't too many dramatic warnings but a lot of individual items that accumulated into a bigger picture. And the ULTRA material shouldn't be taken in isolation — take the case of Knickebein and X-Gerät where it was the combination if decrypts, prisoner intelligence, wreck investigation and signals intelligence that enabled the RAF quickly to understand how the beams worked, on what frequencies and where they were being directed each day.

Another frequent subject of the messages, incidentally, is damage inflicted (or not) by RAF bombers on airfields in France.

[FalkeEins]

Originally Posted by John Vasco

Fanair:
I'll tell you next week after I've had a good look through it.
As for the other comments of posters, I'll give my simple views (Peter C. will disagree with some of them - Hi Peter!)

Hi John ..where's the 'Like' button when you need it..

..not going to contribute much except this pic of Christer and Morten (Jessen) at yesterday's book launch in Hawkinge at the Battle of Britain museum, where I picked up my copy. The book sure looks impressive and paper quality is reasonably good, artworks are very nice and there is a good selection of interesting pics, presentation is in a diary format, text very readable, not cluttered with details (WNr. etc..). Over 500 'notes' at the rear of the book. First time I'd met Christer - a very engaging and genial character!

[John Beaman]

Hmmmm......... a couple of rogues for sure! Would you buy a used car from them?

Just teasing. They are indeed a couple of great guys.

[PhilippeDM]

What an esteemed idea exchange here up and yes Neil, where is that like button

Actually I'm reading the Battle of Britain period of Ulf Balke's KG2 chronique. My german is good, but far from perfect and I am surely not able to pickup every single detail in the text, but I was astonished to read different times the Germans reached their target and were able to bomb it resulting in massive fires in the assigned bombing areas. Mr. Balkes describes the frequent use of radio beacon navigation methods when objectives are clouded over.
My point is that even in the later phase of the battle, results seems to be booked, even with lesser well formed or simply lesser pilots and admittedly not the most consistent objective choice.
The defense seemed to obtain lesser results than in the first period, probably due to the shift to night operations.
This is new to me as I always thought the Battle to decrease in quality from September 15th on.
OK I can imagine the horrible impact a bombing put on people, but, and it is easy to judge afterwards, knowing the facts that happened, I still esteem that the failure of the BoB for the Germans was misplanning and largely underestimation of the strenght of the ennemy and of the needed strength to archive an invasion (What preparations and how many tons of material and human resources were used for D-Day for instance)

[Nick Beale]

The defense seemed to obtain lesser results than in the first period, probably due to the shift to night operations.

On the other hand no air force has ever switched to night operations because its day missions were going well, has it?

Britain's night defences certainly had a long way to go in 1940 but in early 1941 the RAF's night fighters were dramatically improving their kill totals, month-by-month. What's surprising is that British night defence systems were developed rapidly in 1916–18 but received so little attention in the run-up to the Second World War.

[FalkeEins]

Originally Posted by PhilippeDM

I was astonished to read different times the Germans reached their target and were able to bomb it resulting in massive fires in the assigned bombing areas.

On only two occasions during the battle (7 and 15 September) did the Luftwaffe put more than 300 bombers in the air. No chance of hoping to subdue a metropolis the size of London - over 1,000 sq kilometres in area even in 1940. A couple of HE bombs per sq km is all the Luftwaffe could hope to manage. This is all pretty minor league stuff especially in comparison with the later air battles over the Reich.

Elsewhere, Christer makes the good point that Bomber Command made a big contribution to the RAF's success in the Battle of Britain - RAF bombers operated throughout the summer over Germany and the occupied countries, kept the pressure on psychologically, directly contributing to the 'indecision' in the Luftwaffe leadership ...(London vs. the airfields)

Also in the new book, an interesting appraisal of combat losses on both sides - the RAF's being much higher for the four months July to October, while the author also continues the re-evaluation of the performance of the Bf 110 units, which enjoyed better 'kill' ratios than the 109 units " the Bf 109's alleged superiority over the Bf 110 finds no support in these statistics.."

[Nick Beale]

"an interesting appraisal of combat losses on both sides - the RAF's being much higher for the four months July to October"

Which is interesting but in isolation doesn't tell us much. We need to factor in the respective abilities of each side to replace those losses (as well as weighing them: the resource cost of losing a medium bomber vs. a single-seat fighter, for example) and - more difficult but a real question - were the losses incurred "worth it"? I can see what Britain got in return for what it lost but what did Germany get for its?

The argument has been made here in the past that the Luftwaffe lost more aircraft in the Battle of France (to say nothing of army casualties) but France was knocked out of the war and Germany gained huge economic and strategic resources (imagine the Battle of the Atlantic without U-boat bases in France). Their "investment" in the Battle of Britain got them a big fat nothing.

[FalkeEins]

indeed! Re losses; there is a discussion along those lines in the book. Total BoB losses for the Luftwaffe exceed those of the Westfeldzug. I for one wouldn't dream of straying into the 'BoB was won by the French' territory, as suggested by the 'infamous' Michelet!

[mars]

Originally Posted by Nick Beale

"an interesting appraisal of combat losses on both sides - the RAF's being much higher for the four months July to October"

Nick, I believe these RAF losses included RAF bomber losses over Germany and Western Europe, of course whether this part of losses should be included into RAF losses in the battle of Britain is open to discussion. My opinion is that both RAF and Luftwaffe were capable of fighter two battles at the same time in 1940.