OT Olympics The game

[Clive George]

That's news to me - pretty effective then. Impressed.

[Nightjar]

You only need to read a few of the documents from the time to know that was the job they were expected to do, with shooting down aircraft being seen as a happy bonus. In September 1940, it took around 20,000 shells to down one aircraft. Fighters were far more effective at bringing enemy aircraft down.

Colin Bignell

[Martin]

I started this thread with V1s. I never mentioned bombers.

[Martin]

Your impression was wrong.

[jgharston]

There's that missing scene from the end of Return of the Jedi where bits of burning deathstar plummet out of the sky and leave Endor a devasted wasteland.

JGH

[Nightjar]

Did I say you had? Threads develop and change, particularly on this group, and this one had moved onto aircraft falling on houses, which would mainly have been a problem in the early part of the war.

Colin Bignell

[Nightjar]

Even though air launched V1s were fired at Manchester, which was about

90 miles beyond the range of any ground launched V1?

Colin Bignell

[Nightjar]

On 18/05/2012 16:00, The Natural Philosopher wrote: ...

A remarkable and apparently quite fearless woman. She did a lot of testing of experimental aircraft and flew a helicopter inside the hall of the Berlin Motor Show in 1938. She also managed to fly into and out of Berlin, landing on a road in the Tiergarten, during the Russian assault on the city.

Colin Bignell

[The Natural Philosopher]

it had changed a bit by the wars end with proximity fusing and radar guiding.

Lets face it, if no one DID get shot down by flak it wasn't much of a deterrent?

Why not look at te numvers of UK bombers lost to flak and see just how effective German flak was. Yes, by day with radar guidance, fifhters were more effective.

But at night flak was what brought bombers down.

[Tim Lamb]

Speaking of thread development.... the firm I was apprenticed at had a number of ancient Herbert capstan lathes which were said to have been supplied for the manufacture of proximity fuses (used against V1's Martin). How did such fuses actually work?

regards

[Nightjar]

Indeed, but by then there were a lot fewer German bombers attacking Britain and the V1s flew low enough to be within range of the quick firing Bofors guns.

As I said, the view of the AA command was that their job was to disrupt the bomber's attack, with any kills being a happy side effect. Accurate bombing required a bomber to fly straight and level for quite a long time. It took a remarkably steady nerve to do that when flying into a flak storm and most didn't do it. Some didn't even fly into the target area if there was a lot of flak. The Allies faced the same problem, which is photographing the bombing radar when bombs were released was introduced later in the war.

Flying long distances over enemy held territory was not quite the same as just nipping across the channel and the Germans diverted a huge amount of their resources into AA defences. Indeed, some observers think making them do that was the major contribution of the bombing campaign.

In the very first months, nothing much brought bombers down by night. By late 1940, we were deploying night fighters with ground controlled interception and airborne radar, while the AA batteries were still badly under strength and partly equipped with obsolescent guns.

Colin Bignell

[Nightjar]

On 18/05/2012 19:33, Tim Lamb wrote: ...

The VT fuse was a British idea for a radar proximity fuse that was developed and manufactured by the Americans, under an agreed division of work on radar. Initially they were only used against Kamikaze attacks in the Pacific and for the anti V1 batteries, to ensure that none could fall into enemy hands.

Colin Bignell

[The Natural Philosopher]

Its hard to see how a round fired over britain against anything else is going to fall into enemy hands....

[Terry Fields]

ITYM "Many of the early V1s shot down by anti aircraft guns fell in built-up areas. The policy was then changed to a defence in depth: bombing and ground attack by aircraft on the launching sites, fighters over the Channel, guns at the coast, and another fighter belt inland. V1s that reached e.g. London, were allowed to fly on without being attacked. An intelligence-deception operation had persuaded the Germans that the V1s were falling short, and so they lengthened the range allowing a proportion of the surviving V1s to overshoot.

The coastal guns were particularly successful, due in part to the use of proximity-fuzed shells, which reduced the amount of rounds fired per downed aircraft from the 50,000 of the Blitz period to 50".

Terry Fields

[Andy Champ]

That's rather the point of using them in the anti-V1 batteries. And out over the Pacific Ocean...

For those who are interested there is an FI103 at

far from Calais. And it's in the café, so you don't have to go around the museum if time is short.

Andy

[John Rumm]

German AA was particularly effective at the start of the war because they had developed radar ranging capabilities for their guns. Eventually our bombers were fitted with electronic countermeasures which made the system ineffective. Fortunately the Germans apparently never realised this had happened!

[Alan]

In message , Nightjar wrote

To stop the public asking why despite sending up hundreds of thousands of shells few aircraft were shot down the Ministry or Propaganda will have suggested that it was to disrupt bombing.

As all bomber forces in WWII found, accurate bombing was virtually impossible hence the use of area bombing.

[Martin]

The Germans managed to take out major UK railway stations including York, without carpet bombing.

[Nightjar]

By the time they were available we were not shooting at much else in the skies over Britain, but the point is they were not allowed to be used on the Pacific islands nor after D-Day could they be used on mainland Europe before the Battle of the Bulge.

Colin Bignell

[Nightjar]

That does not explain why it was official doctrine in documents that were not released to the public at the time.

Area bombing was, by the end of the war, more a question of philosophy than need. Despite the evidence that bombing had only strengthened the resolve of the British, the official view, mostly promoted by Harris, was that bombing civilian targets would demoralise the population.

The German X-Gerat could place bombs within 100 yards of the guidance beam and with a spread of only a few hundred yards along it, which made it more accurate than daylight bombing. Gee would have been similarly accurate had we been bombing targets just across the Channel, but positional accuracy over Germany was to within about a mile. Gee-H improved that to around 120 yards, which was similar to Oboe without its limitations.

Colin Bignell