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To: Kaslin
Recent studies have revealed that senior USAAF commanders knew early on (1943)that daylight precision bombing was very ineffective..only some 5% of bombs dropped hit on or close to the target. The Brits gave up on it long before..they switched over to nighttime bombing.. cities...including population..with no pretense of hitting military targets..the cost to the 8th USAAF was catastrophic in terms of men and planes.

So why did they continue daylight bombing. The answer is simple. It was the only way they could draw German fighters into the air..so that they could be attacked and destroyed, to make sure that when the invasion came, the Allies would have total air superiority.

Chilling decision to make...but they felt it was the only way. They knew that Hitler could not let Germany be bombed unopposed....the bombers were the bait to lure the German fighters into the air.

3 posted on 07/02/2014 3:58:34 PM PDT by ken5050 ("One useless man is a shame, two are a law firm, three or more are a Congress".. John Adams)
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To: ken5050
Recent studies have revealed that senior USAAF commanders knew early on (1943)that daylight precision bombing was very ineffective..only some 5% of bombs dropped hit on or close to the target.

In 1955 I was assigned to what was then the Armament Laboratory at Wright Field. Most of our work was intended to solve the "accuracy" problem. This was before lasers and GPS, of course, so we had to deal with free-fall bombs. That meant correcting for wind drift, and getting velocity, range and azimuth correctly. Eventually we did pretty well. However, the stuff we did then is now obsolete.

To indicate what was possible with what we did then, bombardiers were trained at March Field in California. One of their "practice targets" was the American Can Company factory. They didn't actually drop bombs, of course, but everything was measured, and the point of impact calculated. If you did a good job of manipulating the radar bomb sight, you could hit the factory. The company gave little coin banks, with their logo, to bombardiers who hit (as I recall) the northwest corner of a thousand-foot-long building.

I was sent to take a one-week "familiarization" course there. It included only radar bombing, not any of the celestial navigation, etc., the people getting the full course took.

With only one week's training, I was able to "hit" the required corner of the building. Nearly 60 years later, my coin bank is still sitting on a shelf in my home office.

11 posted on 07/02/2014 5:24:37 PM PDT by JoeFromSidney (Book: Resistance to Tyranny. Buy from Amazon.)
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