re: "Masters of the Air" | WWII Miniseries | Apple+ Trailer

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From England to bomb some in Germany and then ending up in Algeria is well beyond the range of a B17 iirc.

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The B17 had a range of ~2000 miles with a 6000lb bomb load.

I just looked up distances. It’s only about 483 miles from London to Zurich and then about 785 miles from Zurich to Algiers, Algeria. So you can definitely hit Germany and land in Algeria.

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The map showing their next mission tells me they are being pretty loose with reality. From England to bomb some in Germany and then ending up in Algeria is well beyond the range of a B17 iirc.

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yeah they're going to show the schweinfurt and regensburg missions.

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nicholastiger: the British would do nightime runs and drop bombs blindly with no way of knowing if they actually hit anything

the usa pilots went during day to hit actual targets to help ground troops and making sure supplies were able to get to britain - I think that was the whole deal with the bar fight

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BuckyCheese: The map showing their next mission tells me they are being pretty loose with reality. From England to bomb some in Germany and then ending up in Algeria is well beyond the range of a B17 iirc.

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I haven't watched any episodes yet (I will catch up Sunday evening after the Lions beat the 49ers), but these descriptions remind me of a recent book I read called The Bomber Mafia by Malcom Gladwell. It covers the development (at Maxwell Field in Montgomery, AL) of the US strategy of precision daylight bombing (made possible by the Norden bombsight) to target infrastructure and production, vs the British strategy of nighttime area bombing to break the morale of the enemy, which was an incredibly dumb philosophy considering that the Nazis failed to break British morale using the same tactics earlier in the war. The book covers the failed Regensburg/Schweinfurt mission (the map Buckycheese mentions above). It's an easy read, recommended but I'm not sure how much of this material is covered in other books since these are well-covered topics.

As a side note, Albert Speer said the mistake the US made in the Regensburg/Schweinfurt mission was not striking again soon after. He believed that the US strategy was the correct one and repeated strikes on the ball bearing factories would have worked.

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The US plans had been conducted against the background of several ominous developments in German ground and fighter defensive organization. During 1943 the emphasis had shifted increasingly to concerted action against daylight raiders. Even though the British raids over Germany were still more numerous, the US precision raids were of much greater potential consequence for the German war industry. The first raid on Schweinfurt had come as a particular shock to the German high command, who regarded the ball-bearing industry as their Achilles’ heel. After this first raid, Albert Speer, the armaments minister, had predicted that if the raids continued at such levels the German armaments industry would come to a standstill in four months.

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From wiki: After the war, Minister of Armaments Albert Speer was asked by both British and American interrogators which air force had a superior bombing strategy. The exact wording of the question was "Which, at various periods of the war, caused more concern; British or American heavy bomber attacks, day or night attacks, and why?". In both cases, Speer replied: "The American attacks which followed a definite system assault on industrial targets, were by far the most dangerous. It was in fact those attacks which caused the breakdown of the German armaments industry." Speer went on to say that on three occasions, a relatively small number of bombing raids (on ball bearings and on the dams in 1943 and on oil and transport in 1944–1945) nearly collapsed the German war machine. That this didn't fully happen was largely thanks to Harris diverting planes from those tasks to his area bombing operations. Intercepted German intelligence from 1943 to 1945 made clear that the American destruction of oil and transportation facilities had a vastly greater impact on the fighting ability of the Wehrmacht than British area bombing operations.

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Gladwell also mentions the source of Britain's dumb bombing strategy, Winston Churchill's buddy and scientific advisor, Frederick Lindemann, who seemed to be a real a-hole.

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From wiki: Following the Air Ministry Area bombing directive on 12 February 1942, Lindemann presented in a paper on "Dehousing" to Churchill on 30 March 1942, which calculated the effects of area bombardment by a massive bomber force on German cities to break the spirit of the people. His proposal that "bombing must be directed to working class houses. Middle class houses have too much space round them, so are bound to waste bombs" changed accepted conventions of limiting civilian casualties in wartime". His dehousing paper was criticised by many other scientific minds in government service, who felt such a force would be a waste of resources. Lindemann's paper was based on the incorrect premise that strategic bombing could cause a breakdown in German morale. Despite this, his arguments were used in support of Bomber Command's claim for priority in allocation of resources.

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