Air Force 100 Centenary - A tribute to bomber command.

[cyvideo]

Our Air Force, the RAAF (Royal Australian Air Force) was 100 years old 31st March. I've done a lot of doco work with the defense forces, and being a frustrated flyer though a little tribute was in order. The radio chatter is 100% genuine from a WWII Lancaster encounter. I had to add in the aircraft engine and the gunfire impacts etc but I think you'll get the idea.

Chris Young

 

[DLD]

The night German interceptors (Nachtjagd, usually Me-110/410 and Ju-88's) usually came in from below the bomber stream and fired their guns upwards in a vertical Schräge Musik installation. The Lancaster crews generally did not know what hit them.

 

[cyvideo]

Only until such time as the allies responded with "Windows". The much-vaunted Schräge Musik was the target of Windows.

"By July 1943, German night fighters had a success rate of 5%. While impressive in the sense that this was a very new way of fighting, it also meant that very many RAF bombers got through (95% of them). However, the element of ‘never knowing’ was a major worry for Bomber Command crews – would we be next? (Sounds like Covid odds) The experts in the RAF swiftly found a solution to the problems of German night fighters. Logically, night fighters were only as good as their radar. If Lichtenstein could be compromised, then RAF bombers would be in a much safer position. What was called ‘Windows’ undermined Lichtenstein by a remarkable degree. ‘Windows’ was very simple. Windows comprised of many thousands of strips of aluminum foil – 30 cms long and 1.5 cms wide – that was dropped in bundles of 2,000. German radar worked off of a system of being able to produce a bearing and an elevation for night fighters to home in on. ‘Windows’ made this impossible and each bomber dropped ‘Windows’ at one-minute intervals thus saturating radar on the ground with blips. This resulted in ‘Wurzburg’ not being able to give the night fighters the bearings they required."

Bomber Harris' strategy proved that there really was no defense against saturation bombing when you are fighting in your own air space.

NIGHT DEFENSE OF THE REICH

Nevertheless, despite problems in the fall, Harris embarked on what he regarded as a war-winning strategy. The lengthening nights provided his forces with the darkness needed for the long, deep penetrations to Berlin. Harris decided to destroy the German capital and in early November penned a note to Churchill in which he underlined his successes and future strategy. He listed 19 German cities, including Hamburg, Cologne, Essen, Dortmund, Düsseldorf, Hannover, Mannheim, Rostock, and Kassel, as virtually destroyed; 19 cities as seriously damaged; and a further 9 as damaged. "From the above," he minuted, "you will see that the Ruhr is largely 'out,' and that much progress has been made towards the elimination of the remaining essentials of German war power." He concluded:

"I feel certain that Germany must collapse before this program, which is more than half concluded already, has proceeded much further. We have not much further to go. But we must get the USAAF to wade in in greater force. If they will only get going according to plan and avoid such disastrous diversions as Ploesti . . ., we can get through with it very quickly. We can wreck Berlin from end to end if the USAAF will come in on it. It will cost us between 400-500 aircraft. It will cost Germany the war."

We all know what the eventual outcome was as any historian will attest to.

Chris Young

 

[DLD]

Yes, Bomber Harris embarked on a campaign that would have gotten him hanged for war crimes. But he should have been hanged by the Allies for embarking on a most criminally negligent and ineptly run military campaign that extended the war by several years.

And, btw, while most bombers did get through, their attrition rate was horrific and only a similar level of criminal ineptness from Der Führer in Berlin allowed further bombing.

PS. The Luftwaffe night fighters fired from the visual identification. They had the working infrared light even before the war but decided they did not need it as it only worked within 300 meters of the target and that was already within the eyesight of the pilots. They preferred to fly above the RAF formations and to see their silhouettes against the ground fires generated by the bombs.

PPS. A 5% loss mean that an average crew flew 20 missions before being shut down. The Luftwaffe bombers loss rate on the Eastern Front was .5% and that was for the combined day and night sorties.

 

[Phil Rhodes]

Our Air Force, the RAAF (Royal Australian Air Force) was 100 years old 31st March. I've done a lot of doco work with the defense forces, and being a frustrated flyer though a little tribute was in order. The radio chatter is 100% genuine from a WWII Lancaster encounter. I had to add in the aircraft engine and the gunfire impacts etc but I think you'll get the idea.

Chris Young

Is it bad that I actually recognise the shape of the muzzle flash in the poster frame... please, tell me I'm seeing things. Is that from where I think it's from?

 

[cyvideo]

Yes, Bomber Harris embarked on a campaign that would have gotten him hanged for war crimes. But he should have been hanged by the Allies for embarking on a most criminally negligent and ineptly run military campaign that extended the war by several years.

Having shot and edited numerous war documentaries the moral question regarding 'war crimes' is nearly always broached. Harris had one objective in mind. Winning the war. The question of morality in war had since long passed by this time. As you say Harris and his action could today be considered a war crime. If this is to be judged a war crime then the ultimate aerial war crime of WWII would have to be leveled at Curtis Lemay for his firebombing of Tokyo.

"On March 9, 1945, using a strategy pioneered by RAF Bomber Command, LeMay sent pathfinder aircraft ahead to mark the target area with napalm bombs. An armada of 334 B-29 bombers followed from bases in the Mariana Islands, with 279 of them dropping 1,665 tons of incendiaries, including a half-million cylinders of napalm and white phosphorus. Dry, windy conditions aided the spread of the conflagration, which turned into a firestorm, destroying almost 16 square miles of the densely populated city. An attack that incinerated "well over half a million Japanese civilians, perhaps nearly a million.""

The question is was Lemay's Toyko firebombing a war crime? Arguably no. It was war. Military leaders were trying to win a war. Military leaders are hard men. They kill; it is their job. Gen. LeMay had a heart of stone and a brilliant mind; he was very good at killing. All the great generals in history excelled at killing. Some 90% + of all the war dead in the history of man were noncombatants. That is war. If it takes this kind of action to preserve your country then from a victor's point of view no it is not a war crime. Victors write the rules.

Was America justified in using the 'A' Bomb at the war's end? Was that a "war crime"? It was either use the A-bomb or continue to persecute a war that would stretch into the future with untold US military casualties and untold Japanese civilian casualties.

Nowhere in the European theatre of war was white phosphorus used. The use of such new materials used in the pursuit of aerial bombardment underlines the issue that war is war. There is no morality in war. You give millions of people guns and weapons and pit them against one another there will be war crimes. Vietnam, Afghanistan. USA with the My 'Lai incident'. Australia with its current trial of SAS troops for atrocities committed in Afghanistan. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-55088230 Trying to define what is a war crime is a moral minefield as there are no clear ground rules to define a war crime. It has and always will be determined by the victors in any conflict. That's why the acts of Harris and Lemay have never been persecuted as "war crimes".

I was covering the Cambodian bombing in 1968/9 based out of Nong Kai on the Thai Laos border. This was when 'Operation Menu' was put into effect. That was carpet bombing of massive areas of civilians in a country that wasn't actually directly involved in that conflict. Anyone who saw what happened in that conflict knows that if anything was a war rime that was. That was a "crime" against humanity. But as military historians quite adamantly say and say quite often if you have the power to end a conflict then you must use it. One of America's leading military advisors and historians once said in an interview I was filming that "Not to use the A-Bomb to shorten WWII would have been a criminal act." That was Norman Friedman. My jaw nearly hit the camera. America won the war. America has written the current rule book on what is a "war crime".

https://www.usni.org/people/norman-friedman

Chris Young

 

[cyvideo]

Is it bad that I actually recognise the shape of the muzzle flash in the poster frame... please, tell me I'm seeing things. Is that from where I think it's from?

Where do you think it's from? I did the vision and sound edit. I have no idea where the muzzle flashes came from. All I know is that Autodesk 3ds Max was the main software used. There are a million various plugins for 3ds Max, it could be any one of those I guess?

Chris Young

 

[DLD]

Yes, Chris, it was a war crime. And, yes, everyone did it too. Which is why no air force officer - German, British, Soviet, Italian or American - was charged with any crimes (aside of Alexander Lohr, who was executed by the Yugoslavs but he was also the C-n-C of an Army Group). They had a perfect defense.

PS. As I had mentioned Harris and other air force officers on the Allied side were egregiously incompetent. Why, you might ask? Well, on the Eastern Front in June of 1943, the Luftwaffe VIII Flieger Korps flew 680 sorties against the largest concentration of the Soviet industry, the Red Sormovo district near the city of Gorky. Red Sormovo had 56 plants with the total floor footage of 14,000,000 square meters (each plant was 250,000m2, as designed and built by Albert Kahn). Flying over the course of two weeks and exclusively at night, the VIII FK (KG 27 and KG 55) succeeded in destroying 52 out of 56 buildings. When taking into account the reconnaissance aircraft, the average per plant was about 25 tons of the high explosive ordinance.

The combined US AC and RAF Bomber Command had about 1,500 four engine bombers in late summer of 1942, averaging roughly 3 metric tons of weapons per aircraft (the Lancasters could carry more, B-17's fewer). In addition, the Allies could have had nighttime escorts and pathfinders with Mosquitos and Beaufighters, if required. And they could have used twin engine bombers as decoys. And, where the Allies had a huge advantage over the Germans, the RAF had the centimentric downward looking radar that greatly aided the nighttime navigation.

Which means that the Allies could have wiped out the entire German armor (~ dozen plants in late summer 1942) and the aviation industry (a similar number) in one night, thereby bringing to a conclusion the entire conflict.

 

[cyvideo]

The British RAAF like many military services during the war suffered from bad mismanagement and internal infighting. The disagreements between Park, Dowding, and Harris and their respective approaches to air warfare greatly hampered the efficiency of the RAF. Notwithstanding they got it right in the end.

Re Gorky. In spite of the numerous raids carried out under the auspices of Operation Barbarossa to wipe out the Gorky Automobile Plant (GAZ), which had totally inadequate defenses, the Luftwaffe's success on the two major raids carried out by the He 111 aircraft of the Kampfgruppe 100 was very short-lived. The plant was totally rebuilt again within four months and started production again in October of '43.

Shooting and editing war history docos has been the mainstay of my production life for the last twenty odd years. Love it! Interestingly many war historians and academics I've interviewed, or rather shot while being interviewed, say a question that frequently comes up is "How come the airforce with some of the most experienced pilots in the world, many ex Spanish Civil War combat-experienced pilots, with the best equipment, failed to win the air war in Europe?" The general consensus seems to be that it was down mainly to the following factors. They were primarily a lack of fuel, lack of airplanes, and mismanagement.

Chris Young

Quote:

"The German aircraft industry was mismanaged from the start. Britain made plans from 1937 onwards (interesting, the often-maligned Neville Chamberlain started the ramp-up of the RAF in 1937 as Chancellor of the Exchequer) for greatly expanding the RAF, building an integrated air-defense system including the Chain Home radar stations, and setting up “shadow factories” for engine and airframe production to be managed by automotive manufacturing engineers with long experience in mass production techniques. That involved re-designing the Merlin engine with tighter component specifications to make components fully interchangeable.

As a result, Britain in 1940 produced more than twice as many single-engine fighters as Germany. During the Battle of Britain, the Luftwaffe was always swimming upstream in trying to destroy the RAF’s fighters faster than they could be produced and repaired (and the Hurricane, in particular, was especially easy to repair after minor damage, just patch the fabric, varnish it, and you’re good to go next day). And of course, Bf 109s shot down over England were gone for good, together with their pilots, whereas Spitfires and Hurricanes downed over England could often be salvaged and repaired, and RAF pilots who baled out were often back in action the next day.

So the Luftwaffe lost airplanes and pilots at a higher rate than they could replace them. A similar problem confronted the Japanese after the USA entered the war.

The second aspect of mismanagement was that the Luftwaffe kept its experienced pilots in combat continuously, rather than rotating them to training units where they could pass on their expertise to new pilots. Consequently, many expert pilots eventually ran out of luck and were shot down, All the while the new pilots coming online were not as good or nearly as experienced. The RAF had the same problem, but to a lesser extent because the expert pilots along with the newer fliers were less likely to be permanently lost even if they were shot down. The British rotated their most experienced fliers out of combat and used them in training improving the quality of their new pilots coming through.

Germany became short of oil and thus short of aviation fuel and lubricants. That influenced not just the number of combat hours that could be flown, but also the number of flight hours for training. So in general new pilots would not be particularly well trained - which in turn made them much more vulnerable to being shot down in their first few combat missions before gaining experience.

With all these factors together, and having been mauled in the Battle of Britain, the Luftwaffe never recovered its dominance. Then in the early months of 1944 huge numbers of American P-47s and P-51s absolutely devastated the Luftwaffe in the west, often destroying fifty percent of the sorties flown against them. Once the vast industrial capacity of the USA was brought to bear, the Luftwaffe was simply crushed.

Throughout the war, the Luftwaffe outclassed Poland and France in equipment and tactics but when it came to the Battle of Britain the Hurricane and Spitfire were roughly on par with the Bf 109, though the Luftwaffe employed more modern tactics. But then later on the Allies adopted better tactics and had better aircraft, and later a huge numerical superiority. So every advantage the Luftwaffe had up to mid-1940 was eroded and eventually reversed."

 

[Publimix]

And Not So Fun Fact: did you know that 15,000 U.S. Airmen were Killed in Training in WW II...

The German Luftwaffe started terror bombing. In the Netherlands they bombed Rotterdam and treathened to bomb more cities.

The remains of hundreds of Allied and German planes still to be found in lake IJsselmeer. I made this short clip:

 

[cyvideo]

And Not So Fun Fact: did you know that 15,000 U.S. Airmen were Killed in Training in WW II...

The German Luftwaffe started terror bombing. In the Netherlands they bombed Rotterdam and treathened to bomb more cities.

The remains of hundreds of Allied and German planes still to be found in lake IJsselmeer. I made this short clip:

That's absolutely great Peter. Love it. There are many recovery efforts underway in Netherland's waters because as you say they are veritable graveyards of allied aircraft that never made it home. In general, the Dutch sensitivity in handling the remains of these flyers is a testament to how much feeling they have for those who tried to lift the yoke of invasion from their lives. One recent effort was this one. And in some of the most breathtakingly beautiful country in Europe where my wife's family come from. She was born here in Aus but is passionately proud of her Dutch heritage.

Chris Young

 

[DLD]

The German Luftwaffe started terror bombing. In the Netherlands they bombed Rotterdam and treathened to bomb more cities...

Rotterdam was a failure to relay the agreed upon terms to the bomber crews who were already in the air. The Germans offered not to bomb if the Dutch surrendered the city. The Dutch, after some negotiations, agreed but it was too late for the raid.

If one wanted to go to the first terror bombing of the civilians by the Luftwaffe, it was the Condor Legion bombing of Guernica on April, 27, 1937. The commander was General (later Field Marshall) Wolfram von Richthofen, who died as an American POW in the summer of 1945 from cancer. Francisco Franco was, obviously, not going to press any charges anyway, as it was done at his behest.

As to Luftwaffe's problems, as with the rest of the German industry, the total output was only one of them. The administrative heads also completely missed out on the jet powered aircraft, which they could have had as early as 1937 when Hans von Ohain showcased a fully functioning version. Yet, Me-262 wasn't introduced into combat until October, 1944. They also completely missed out on mixed-propulsion aircraft - that had both jet and piston engines, that enjoyed some popularity after the war on the American B-32 Dominator - such as Ryan Fireball. Then they could have a motor jet and/or tandem engine fighters too.