Unhistorical Air system - WAD but a poor design in my opinion

[Seminole]

The bombers are flying at over 20k feet

The ground is chewed up. Since the bombs are falling indiscriminately rubble, bridges, roads...they will all be pockmarked, shellholed. It did make an advance difficult.

On this subject I think combat delay, not interdiction, is worth considering at some threshold.
The Allies weren't ignorant of the side effects of their actions, and adjusted.

Several days later Patton flew over the battlefield in a light plane and saw where the Cobra bombs had landed. He was surprised, not at the extent of the damage but at the mildness of it. The craters were not "anywhere as great" as those in 1918.

All in all 60,000 hundred-pound bombs were to be dropped from an altitude of 8,000 feet.* Unfortunately, the might of the RAF Heavy Bomber Command had to be excluded. Their aircraft could carry only larger armaments whose giant craters would delay American tank forces pouring through the gap - a lesson learned only too well in Operation Goodwood.

* most sources I've read cite 11,500ft as the altitude the level bombers came through at.

[HMSWarspite]

Edit: Took so long to do I crossed with the posts above.

ORIGINAL: LiquidSky



Carpet bombing is not an exact science. It cannot be done 'on demand'. In order for it proceed it must be planned in advance.

The front line has to be shifted back. The minimal safe distance for friendly units is supposed to be one mile. So before bombing, you have to disengage from the enemy and back up. These units are also out in the open...waiting for an attack to be launched and not dug in...

Only if the attack is in 'close support' of a front line attack. If the aim, as here, is mostly to cause combat strength reduction and casualties, all you need is some recon. Most of a front line hex is more than the safety distamce away, and Pelton is not exactly holding the line with a thin crust.

The area being bombed has to be marked somehow. The bombers are flying at over 20k feet.

Not necessarily in either case. Heavies (especially BC) do not need to be, or cannot be this high, and 8AF dont usually mark. I dont think we have been told the bombing alt, but I would bomb from 15-18kft.

They are not dive bombers. They will not see units on the ground to bomb. The most common way of marking the are to be bombed is to follow geographical features...which means you may not even be able to bomb where the enemy really is. Other methods were tried...using coloured smoke from artillery for example, but they were not effective. (did I mention they bomb from over 20k feet?)

While being bombed, there is a huge psychological effect. The closest I can imagine is it would be like going to my in-laws for dinner. *shudder*. While there will be casualties, it will not be in proportion to the effort. Panzer Lehr which was supposedly 'wiped out' was still a viable division. The bombing covered a lot of their tanks with dirt, so they had to be dug out. That's not destroyed, that's disabled.

Only so many bombers can actually fly over the area.

Per time. A box of B17s is only a few hundred meters long (even when narrowed to bomb), that is a couple of seconds flying time. Box spacing is a few miles, so you can put entire 8AF over a target in well less than a day. BC was compressing 500 bombers across a city in the dark without coordination in less than an hour IIRC.

And after the bombs hit, there will be so much dirt, debris, smoke etc...concealing the battlefield. This will hinder other air operations.

The ground is chewed up. Since the bombs are falling indiscriminately rubble, bridges, roads...they will all be pockmarked, shellholed. It did make an advance difficult.

The B-17 was built with a purpose in mind. Nobody could wave a magic wand and turn it into a dive bomber. Or a tactical bomber. The use of fuel, crew, bombs...the time to prepare it for missions...the lack of any communication whatsoever with the army. (they only communicate general to general). Really...if they thought that it would be better to bomb random bits of ground in the hopes they can hit a German, they would have built a different airplane.

Not relevant to this discussion, which is given the bomber fleets existed as they did, could they be used to bomb units.

Sooooo...this leads me to the game. In game you can fly as many sorties as you want. With as many planes as you want. They drop their bombs like they are tactical aircraft that can see the target. You can fly at absurd altitudes (tree top bombing with b-17s) You can kill imaginary citizens of France. They never miss the target or hit friendly near by troops. The Strat bomber is just too effective at bombing units.

Need to ask for your in game evidence please. Controlled raids, repeated significant number of times, etc.

I am not against flying the mission...go crazy. The game already has a balance for that...you lose vps. Which should limit the number of times you fly the mission. What I am against is the amount of damage it causes. The kind of damage. The lack of any ground delay or effect on the allies.

The game just looks at the bombs. It says x number of bombs will do y amount of damage. And then multiply it by the number of bombs....it doesn't regulate the number of planes that should physically fly over the area. It assumes that no bombs ever hit an adjacent friendly unit. It pretends that the hex, despite any amount of bombing, would be as easy to walk through as a trip in a park.

In game you are bombing 7 days a week. When exactly do the troops have time to attack the hex? The battle would be like this: Overnight....friendly troops back away from front line to safe distance (about a mile) Carpet bombing hits early morning. After bombing finished, troops move up to front line. Launch attack at noon. Fight until night. Back up to safe distance maybe getting a couple hours sleep. Next morning...Bomb..move up...attack....retreat....maybe sleep.

If you say hey...I don't have to attack at all..well..whats to stop the Germans from hugging the front lines. A common tactic in places like Stalingrad when the enemy doesn't want to be shelled/bombed.

I think people are being naïve. Don't let Pelton's bad example justify what is a misuse of airpower. His argument is flawed in many ways, but deep down, there is a problem with how B-17's Lancasters etc...can be used exactly the same way as Mitchell's.


Earlier I had suggested that perhaps the strat bombers should leave enemy interdiction in the hex. Somebody countered with adding delay. Every day that a carpet bombing hits a hex, it should be somehow taking up time. Adding 3 delay per day could work, I liked the idea of enemy interdiction since that would cause the friendly fire associated with highly inaccurate bombing..but perhaps wouldn't add enough delay. Or maybe just have a house rule that you can only carpet bomb on one day of the week.

This appears to be different to the case here. The questions you raise here are valid, but a different case to the dicussion in this thread which doesnt have follow up attacks in the main.

I am not saying the game is correct on carpet bombing (I have pointed out months ago that BC was not trained for mass day bombing), but the case has not been made.

Until someone shows that using heavies against units actually helps them win, I am not sure this is worth worrying about. If I were fighting Pelton, I would be planning the follow up invasion to cut off his giant Kursk style front line. Where has he nicked all the troops from?

[KWG]

There is a whole lot of aircraft flying and tonnage being dropped.

I hope this exact "Air Engine" is moved to WiTE 2.0. It will be very interesting to see.

At the start for Barbarossa ...Only 300 Stukas(422) for the entire front. Only 700(1503) Shallow-dive/level bombers.


The number in (...) are total Luftwaffe numbers.

I can find so many different starting numbers, still all are low compared to Allies '44.

[KWG]

If I were fighting Pelton, I would be planning the follow up invasion to cut off his giant Kursk style front line. Where has he nicked all the troops from?

[;)] That may be why all the "activity" on the forum. And the careful slowness of completing his turn.
I landed in north Brittany this turn.

[HMSWarspite]

ORIGINAL: LiquidSky



Pacific theatre doesn't count for anything. Different war, different enemy, different air defences.

And again, I am not against using Strat bombers tactically. I am against their effect. The difference between 'other air attacks' and carpet bombing is the level of coordination. Other air attacks are either in contact with the ground through air liaison officers, or are nimble enough to find their own targets.

Carpet bombing is neither. They must fly high to avoid the flak infested German held areas. (Look up operation Tidal Wave for what happens to low flying strat bombers) They cannot see their targets. All 'innovations' for trying to guide them to a target were unreliable. Nobody on the ground could contact the strat bombers once they were in the air. And failure wanst an option. Bombing your own troops is a catastrophe to avoid.

Any tactical bombing they did in Italy was ineffective. They learned from those mistakes which is why they moved to carpet bombing. You have to saturate an area to get any effect at all, otherwise you are just throwing bombs away to make holes in the ground.

So to get any effect at all you need to be flying high, and in a large number. Without any communications once you start. Against a dug in, alerted enemy. With a huge time delay between the bombing and any attack that might take place. Without any real assurance that you are even bombing in the right place. With bombs that land somewhere within 2000 yards of where you think you are dropping them.

The game allows you to fly 16000 aircraft in 250,000 sorties over a couple of hexes. And then march an allied army into it like nothing was going on without any consequence whatsoever.

So again...not against using strat bombers tactically. All for it really. GO for it...yay team!

I am against the effect. They are not tactical bombers...just bigger! They are not a replacement for the B-25 or the A-20. Or even FB's. They are not better then them at the job of bombing the enemy.

I use my B-25s and other tactical bombers to bomb the Ruhr. If they did a better job then B-17s I would complain as well. Not that I wasn't allowed to use them in the first place.

You are assuming that the SB are performing tactical bombing. if hexes acquired a combat delay, would that ease your issue?

[HMSWarspite]

I have had a further thought. A Division, or any combat unit on the ground, is not uniformly distributed. A company position will be a few hundred meters across. Then there will be a gap of maybe a few hundred meters, and another one. However if you move back, there might then be 1000m or more without significant permanent presence, or at most a few AA, MPs, support troops installing field telephones, etc. Then there might be a second line. about 5km back you might get Artillery, more supplies and lots of support troops. If a significant load on bombs fall on a position, there will be heavy casualties, but equally you might get lots of craters in empty fields if the drop is only 500m away. Equally a single unit should not be able to hit every weapon type in a division...
The main difference between FB/TacB, Mediums and Heavies is their ability to detect and or respond to the presence of troops/positions. A heavy raid, as Liquidsky points out largely bombs geography - if there are troops in the wood or not, the wood gets attacked. They might miss the wood but the main variable is are there troops on the relevant geography? FB/TB can react quicker, can possibly see positions, can certainly aim at them if seen etc. Mediums are in the middle (small formations have some responsiveness, large ones have to act like heavies).
I realise this might be too large a code drop, but one extra parameter in the equation would address all this - a 'ground attack targetting factor'. This would be a function of hex recce score, number of troops in the hex, weather (presumably as normal combat), and attacking formation type and size. This reflects the above reactiveness factor, combined with conventional factors like how well the enemy positions are known/can be seen, and troop density. Each bombing unit (sqd/group etc) then rolls to see if it is bombing enemy positions. If 'yes' (check passed), then full damage but only to a restricted number of element types (not across all - ie either tanks or infantry or art, not all - but each unit is independently checked), if 'no' there should be a small random chance of a few elements being affected (strays, people 'out and about' etc). I have not thought this through, but then you could have a/c type factors like:
FB/TacB: 0.9
Mediums: 0.5
Heavies: 0.3

There could be an additional factor or check to limit the effectiveness of very large raids (a single division only has c9 infantry battalions, so 10 units should not keep a linear effectiveness relative to 5 bombing units (and 20 relative to 10 etc).

Add a 'ground cratering' delay as a function of total weight of bombs dropped, and there you have it?

[KWG]

ORIGINAL: HMSWarspite

I have had a further thought. A Division, or any combat unit on the ground, is not uniformly distributed. A company position will be a few hundred meters across. Then there will be a gap of maybe a few hundred meters, and another one. However if you move back, there might then be 1000m or more without significant permanent presence, or at most a few AA, MPs, support troops installing field telephones, etc. Then there might be a second line. about 5km back you might get Artillery, more supplies and lots of support troops. If a significant load on bombs fall on a position, there will be heavy casualties, but equally you might get lots of craters in empty fields if the drop is only 500m away. Equally a single unit should not be able to hit every weapon type in a division...
The main difference between FB/TacB, Mediums and Heavies is their ability to detect and or respond to the presence of troops/positions. A heavy raid, as Liquidsky points out largely bombs geography - if there are troops in the wood or not, the wood gets attacked. They might miss the wood but the main variable is are there troops on the relevant geography? FB/TB can react quicker, can possibly see positions, can certainly aim at them if seen etc. Mediums are in the middle (small formations have some responsiveness, large ones have to act like heavies).
I realise this might be too large a code drop, but one extra parameter in the equation would address all this - a 'ground attack targetting factor'. This would be a function of hex recce score, number of troops in the hex, weather (presumably as normal combat), and attacking formation type and size. This reflects the above reactiveness factor, combined with conventional factors like how well the enemy positions are known/can be seen, and troop density. Each bombing unit (sqd/group etc) then rolls to see if it is bombing enemy positions. If 'yes' (check passed), then full damage but only to a restricted number of element types (not across all - ie either tanks or infantry or art, not all - but each unit is independently checked), if 'no' there should be a small random chance of a few elements being affected (strays, people 'out and about' etc). I have not thought this through, but then you could have a/c type factors like:
FB/TacB: 0.9
Mediums: 0.5
Heavies: 0.3

There could be an additional factor or check to limit the effectiveness of very large raids (a single division only has c9 infantry battalions, so 10 units should not keep a linear effectiveness relative to 5 bombing units (and 20 relative to 10 etc).

Add a 'ground cratering' delay as a function of total weight of bombs dropped, and there you have it?

Bombing Mission Lab
tm.asp?m=3987360




Even morale boosts and hits.

"Canadian infantrymen reportedly found the the 'smoke and flame wonderful," and it was said to have "improved their morale 500 percent"
And for the Germans it was totally demoralizing.

I see the good and bad of this subject. I see what almost happen then fell apart do to petty,pompous people and selfish commands. Then picked back up for MarketGarden, Bulge, Germany

And the bigger bombings "COBRA" override the lesser tacticals that happen. As when the 8th AAF stopped the counterattack by 9th Panzer.


Cobra was only the kindling of the fire that could have blazed



I have vast amounts of info, papers, accounts on this subject.



British Chief of Air Staff Portal wrote to Tedder:

"the freguent intervention of the heavy bombers in the land battle was not essential and was only intended to save causalities."


Being British-American, I would have put a boot to his backside RATHER quickly and forcefully

[KWG]

SO.... What Allied player is using this tactic and getting a "I WIN" automatically result?

[HMSWarspite]

ORIGINAL: KWG

If I were fighting Pelton, I would be planning the follow up invasion to cut off his giant Kursk style front line. Where has he nicked all the troops from?

[;)] That may be why all the "activity" on the forum. And the careful slowness of completing his turn.
I landed in north Brittany this turn.

Good for you. [&o]


Edit: 'off colour' comment removed

[RedLancer]

Please don't make things too personal. Everyone is entitled to their views.

[Peltonx]

So I see no one refuting the in game data or the historical data for Normandy.

Looking to have a reasonable/logical argument, but I see no one refuting my data with a reasonable/logical argument.

If you can refute the in game of historical data do so with something other then I don't
like the data so I disagree based on nothing.

Here is in game data and historical data again. Just so stories agreeing with someone else just so story does not refute the
data or cherry picking a quote from internet land.
I have posted data supporting each point and sadly I see none from anyone else.

Agree or post some data

Turn 49
WA Loses: 256,000
GHC Loses: 268,000
Turn 58
WA Loses: 342,000
GHC Loses: 554,000
Total loses last 10 turns
WA Loses: 86,000
GHC Loses: 286,000
Ratio: 3.5 to 1 Historical lose ratio for Normandy 1:1 and most caused by artillery fire not bombing.

Also I see no one disagreeing based on data what the causes of loses were during Normandy other then me.
Sure allot of just because I don't like the in game and historical data I disagree.


panzer lehr
Bayerlein left a remarkable account of the effects of the COBRA bombing and ground assault on his already war-weary command.
In response to postwar interrogation he wrote:

We had the main losses by pattern bombing, less by artillery, still less by tanks and smaller arms.
The actual losses of dead and wounded were approximately:

by bombing 50%
by artillery 30%
by other weapons 20%
So Operation Cobra lasted a week and loses were only 50% by bombing.
and yet WitW gives 60-70% for 10 weeks.

Recent analysis of ground combat deaths in various wars has shown that, for WW2,
military wounds and deaths were caused primarily by four sources:


Small Arms fire: 5-10% of wounds, <1% of deaths
Mortars, Grenades, Mines, and other lightweight explosive devices: 40-50% of wounds, 20-40% deaths
Artillery (primarily blast and direct fragmentation): 30-50% of wounds, 50-60% of deaths
Bombs: 5-10% of wounds, < 5% of deaths

The amounts varied heavily by the particular battle, as locale terrain plays a huge roll in determining both what
weapons are prevalent, and the effectiveness of each.
For instance, artillery had a very low impact on deaths in the various Pacific island campaigns, where the
vast majority of casualties were from mortars, grenades, and mines, followed by small arms.

and yes as per Red Lances request lets not get into the personal silly

Happy New Year everyone [:D]

[RedLancer]

The data is correct but your use of the data in this argument is not. You cannot compare the game data and historic data unless the circumstances match. In this game they do not as neither side is playing historically.

If you want to use historical data we will need to build a scenario that replicates the bombing conducted for Cobra. I think T1 of Breakout and Pursuit could be modified to do this.

[Seminole]

Looking to have a reasonable/logical argument, but I see no one refuting my data with a reasonable/logical argument.

What is your reasonable/logical argument? Is it that if Cobra had been bigger and longer it would have produced exactly the same casualties?

You have pointed out that Panzer Lehr suffered 50% of its casualties from the sky in Cobra.
You have pointed out that KWG is conducting a MUCH larger Cobra, for much longer.

Given that situation, is less than 50% casualties from the air a reasonable/logical expectation? If so, why?

[Aurelian]

How is doing something that *costs* you VPs an exploit while leaving your troops entrained for months isn't?

[Kofiman]

It is an exploit because it means Pelton has to think.

[Seminole]

How is doing something that *costs* you VPs an exploit while leaving your troops entrained for months isn't?

Leaving troops on trains costs VP too, because they don't count toward garrisons.

[HMSWarspite]

ORIGINAL: Seminole

How is doing something that *costs* you VPs an exploit while leaving your troops entrained for months isn't?

Leaving troops on trains costs VP too, because they don't count toward garrisons.

If troops left on trains used up train/rail capacity and fatigued troops, as well as being unbelievably vulnerable to air and ground attack, I would allow it![8D]

[Aurelian]

ORIGINAL: Seminole

How is doing something that *costs* you VPs an exploit while leaving your troops entrained for months isn't?

Leaving troops on trains costs VP too, because they don't count toward garrisons.

Yeah, but I don't see how one can claim the former is an exploit while exploiting the latter.

[Seminole]

If troops left on trains used up train/rail capacity and fatigued troops, as well as being unbelievably vulnerable to air and ground attack, I would allow it!

I think they do use up rail capacity. I surmise this based on an observation when I was shuffling some Armies around as the Germans and I had a large concentration of troops on trains as I was moving assets. The next turn some of them were no longer on trains when I know I didn't disembark them (lacked the SMP in any event). A dev can confirm, but I assumed that in the case of each unit the necessary rail capacity was called upon, and due to the concentration (I was moving my mobile reserve army out of Italy, and sending other assets down there and lots of guys ran out of SMP around the Alps) there were not enough railyards in range and so at the start of the next turn not everyone could be put back on trains. Maybe it was just a bug, but I only play server games and haven't been in a situation to duplicate it or try to suss it out.
I don't know how the air game treats troops on trains, but agree they should be particularly vulnerable. There is already a consideration for ground combat (14.2: Combat units that are attacked while entrained will suffer a significant degradation in CV in the subsequent battle).

[Great_Ajax]

Estimates of German casualties due to the carpet bombing during Operation Cobra were estimated at about 700. Reported US casualties from the same bombardment were right around 600. There was a reason why carpet bombing was not continued regularly after Cobra. Namely that it just wasn't efficient and strategic bombers were not a good tool for close air support. You also had tremendous push back from the strategic bomber force for being employed inthis non standard application of combat power. It took Eisenhower getting involved to force the carpet bombing operation. Obviously the casualties inflicted to friendly forces compared to enemy forces was not acceptable and the result severely impacted the relationships between the air and ground commanders.

Trey