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

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As escorts were lacking, were they supposed to just all sit in England and wait two more years for escort technology to improve.

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They spent the first year bouncing 500lb bombs off 30’ of concrete on the submarine pens.

Those missions and the crews who died making those runs could’ve been much better spent on many other missions or yes, saved until they had sufficient numbers to inflict meaningful damage on targets of substance rather than as sacrificial lambs to justify the daylight bombing campaign.

If you read the book they outline the real motivation for why they were used how they were and much of it has to do with bomber command attempting to save face for their prewar tactical assumptions.

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They sent the bombers up knowing they were trading men and aircraft against German pilots and aircraft,

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Which made sense later in the war when they had fighter escorts capable of inflicting positive loss rates against the Luftwaffe. Before the escorts got involved that was emphatically not the case. So why would you want to send bombers up against fighters with a negative loss rate? That’s a poor use of a limited resource and demonstrates poor generalship by incurring unnecessary casualties.

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the added benefit that bombing was reducing German ability to wage war and lower German moral. That was the quickest way to win the war.

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Post war analysis doesn’t support the conclusion that German morale was significantly impacted until very late with the mass casualty civilian target raids and more so it states unequivocally that because the German people had no ability to resist Nazi leadership that morale had no tangible correlation to decreases in German war production.

US bomber command was wrong about almost all of their prewar assumptions and tactics and it wasn’t until they had overwhelming numerical superiority and rushed development of fighters capable of escorting the bombers to their targets (which bomber command insisted weren't necessary as late as 1943) that they were able to grind the Luftwaffe into dust.