How long does Overlord av Avalanche keep going?

[mattep74]

How long will my airforces be hamstrung with the Overlord and Avalanchemissions on the 44 campaign? Its now 1st of july and i want the mighy 8th to start attacking Berlin and other friendly cities again.

Until i am free to bomb whatever i want i am bombing the crap out of the german panzers and sweeping the skys clear of the luftwaffe(averaging 90 lw planes shot down every day, they still field 2800 planes)

[Dobey455]

Until the breakout from Normandy by the army, or until you destroy enough of the mandatory targets.

[mgp104]

I've 'played ahead' in my game (ie. hitting end turn endlessly without sending any raids) until mid September '44 and found that Overlord ends on 1st September 1944 (by which time the Germans have retreated to the West Wall line. At this point 2nd Tactical and IXth have no mandatory targets.

I'm not sure about Bomber Command and 8th, in my game (where I have caused major damage in the Overlord area; about 44%) I find that on some days Bomber Command or 8th have no target restrictions, some days neither and some days both are restricted to Overlord. I suspect that it is based on overall Overlord damage although I'm not convinced, it could be damage to ground units or units in the Normandy front only.

With regards Avalanche I have not seen this end (and I assume that the Gothic line will not break until 1945), I think that Med Command and 12th are tactical airforces whose sole purpose is ground support. They will therefore only be able to attack Avalanche targets until 'Avalanche' is over (which, if you take Avalanche to mean invasion and total conquest of Italy historically took until almost the end of the war).

[Nicholas Bell]

You can of course manually work around this limitation by reassigning the primary target once the raid is established.  Some consider this cheating, but historically the Allies did a limited amount of bombing of strategic targets.  Somewhere there is a thread where I listed the non-Overlord bombing raids during the months of June through August (good luck finding it though with this crappy search engine).  The targets were primarily oil and railyards in the Reich.

[JeffroK]

8th Air Force hit industrial targets in the Munich area on 9 June, so any ban didnt last too long.

Bad weather slowed the return to Strat Bombing more than orders.