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Hi all,

I read many books about air combat (bombing) in Europe during WWII and in
almost all of those books there were several important issues mentioned...


The Douhet theories of "all mighty bomber air power that will crush
everything" / "bombers will always pass" / "there is no defense against
bombers other than other bombers" were all strongly present before WWII.

But in actual war all those theories were crushed.

The Battle of Britain in 1940 was one of the corner points where theories on
paper proved wrong in air.


The side effect of those early days in 1940/1942 on both sides (German and UK)
showed that bombers were in fact unbelievable weapons.

When I say "unreliable" I first of all mean their inability to find assigned
targets.

This was _HUGE_ problem that heavily plagued bombing campaign in Europe
(situation improved when airborne ground radar sets started to enter into
service for allies like H2S with "centimetre" radar - Germans relied on
navigation beams).

I remember reading (I will try to find exact quote) that only very very small
percent of aircrews found their targets at night at those days. Unless there
was good weather and full moon the odds that anything will be hit were almost
nonexistent.


BTW, I never read any books about bombing in Pacific and I only remember
seeing just one film dealing with that (Doolittle raid - "30 seconds above
Tokyo").

Anyone here having good reference for both sides bombing in Pacific?


Questions/issues:

#1
Weather in Europe and Pacific differed (of course) but I would suspect that
night bombing was almost non-existent in early conflict at least (i.e.
1942-1943).

This should especially be true (again similar as in Europe) when there was no
moonlight.

Is this assumption correct?


#2
How was navigation in Pacific regarding very long-range attacks?

I know that there were some amazing feats where, for example, the P-38's
killed admiral Yammamoto, Doolittle raid on Tokyo and Japanese sinking of
British warships Prince of Wales and Repulse.

But are those examples exceptions rather than rule or not?



So... how does this translate in our UV (and WitP)?


Is long-range bombing realistic in current UV?

Can we expect that our aircrews be so accurate in finding long-range targets
(both static and TFs) even on daylight?

Can we at all expect our aircrews to hit anything at night when on long-range
bombing?

Anyone ever saw in UV that our aircraft were unable to find static targets (I
think I saw it only for moving TFs at sea) due to bad navigation?


Leo "Apollo11"

I believe that you will find that prior to the formation of the "Pathfinder squadrons", less then 3% of Allied bombs actually landed on the targets in Europe. Without these navigation experts marking the targets prior to the main raids showing up, you can pretty much forget about taking out a target.

One of the problems I have with LBA abstracted in UV is the extreme effectiveness of it. The fact that you can pretty much pick a target and know it will get hit strikes me as a tad bit un-historical. LBA is strong enough to completely close bases in a matter of days currently, and looking at the history, it would seem that it was almost impossible for this to happen.

Perhaps we need a little bit of adjustment to make their use more costly and require a much larger logistics support effort to make this use more costly.

How about doubling the supply costs for LBA from their current levels?

This would have a few benefits, more use of the smaller aircraft, more requirements for forward basing of smaller bombers, higher ship traffic (supplies), less likeliness of carpet bombing the world (just plain silly now). Better ebb and flow of combat due to larger number of smaller bases required (due to range of the smaller aircraft). The added supply costs would add another element to the game, that of being able to isolate a base via naval blockade and keep the LBA forces grounded to a certain extent.

Perhaps there are other ways of messing with LBA that could be brought to bear on this overpowered resource, but if it goes into WitP with it's current strengths, WitP is going to be a really short lived game...

Originally posted by Mr.Frag

How about doubling the supply costs for LBA from their current levels?

Sounds good to me.

Yamamoto

I recommend Eric Bergerud's "Fire in the Sky" as a good start for learning about the air war in the South Pacific. There is a good chapter on the bombing campaign.

During daylight bombing in Europe was a lot harder than bombing in the Pacific.

See, any spot on the European coastline looks much the same from 30,000 feet. Once you're past that coastline - the whole countryside also looks very similar - which is a problem because somewhere in that sea of countryside, towns and cities was your target.

Being exactly on target would require excellent timing and trigonometry - not to mention talent, which was why pathfinders were so good - all the bombers were in the right "area" otherwise they would have been able to see/find the incendieries and flares the pathfinders dropped.

So the problem as I see it, was that although the average pilot/navigator was never that wrong, they were just wrong enough to no be able to localize an exact target. Even worse - half the time they didn't know they were wrong.

In the pacific, if you are going out to bomb a pacific island, although you have to actually find the island - until you find it you know you haven't etc. and once you had, the localising on the exact target area was much much easier - most islands weren't that big, you could see very distinctive coastline shapes from the air because the islands are smaller - you could fly around it to get your landmarks etc.

Which is why I'd say not counting weather, or cloudy nights, level bomber navigation in the pacific was probably easier than in Europe.

On the other hand, launching from a CV and finding your way home to a moving airfield would have been a real pain.

Which is why I'd say not counting weather, or cloudy nights, level bomber navigation in the pacific was probably easier than in Europe.

Gotta hand it to you, nailing the very two reasons that targets didn't get hit and not counting them

Wind was the number one problem with navigation during the early years of flight as there was no way to know exactly what course needed to be flown to arrive at the desired destination.

Someone want to dig up any articles that discuss navigation during the pacific timeframe? Seems to me that it was tough enough finding ones CV after flying 100 miles away forget about flying 1000 miles to bomb a target.

They didn't have any IRS or GPS or VOR or NDB to help them out back then. Couple to this obvious issue, radios were not reliable based on weather conditions.

We're not even going to discuss night flight (glad they put the fatigue fix in to deal with that one).

Just so you guys know, "night" is considered a weather condition all by itself, without even adding clouds to the discussion.

Fire in the Sky is a great read and I recommend it as well. I just finished it and based on it it does seem that bombers do a great deal more damage and are more accurate than in RL, especially IJN bombers.

Originally posted by Mr.Frag
Gotta hand it to you, nailing the very two reasons that targets didn't get hit and not counting them

Wind was the number one problem with navigation during the early years of flight as there was no way to know exactly what course needed to be flown to arrive at the desired destination.

Someone want to dig up any articles that discuss navigation during the pacific timeframe? Seems to me that it was tough enough finding ones CV after flying 100 miles away forget about flying 1000 miles to bomb a target.

They didn't have any IRS or GPS or VOR or NDB to help them out back then. Couple to this obvious issue, radios were not reliable based on weather conditions.

We're not even going to discuss night flight (glad they put the fatigue fix in to deal with that one).


Just so you guys know, "night" is considered a weather condition all by itself, without even adding clouds to the discussion.

Bergerud is probably the best read as others have mentioned as he took a rather unique approach by breaking the campaign down into three parts, geography (including base building and upkeep), the weapons and men involved, and lastly, an analysis of the campaign and the battle tactics used by both sides.

Actually navigating in the SoPac in terms of finding and "hitting" ground targets was extremely difficult as the interiorland and various clumps of islands all tended to look the same with little to no trappings of civilization or other forms of construction to use as landmarks.

Adding to the problem was the understandable reluctance of airmen to fly over jungle unless it could not be helped. The usual tactic was to skirt the coastline. The reason was that the thick canopy of the jungle made a forced landing all but impossible to survive and even if you parachuted out, your survival chances in such inhospitible country were all but nil.

Ground support was extremly difficult to coordinate with ground forces, the Aussies developing the best working system out of it but even then, often attacks would miss their targets leaving the enemy unscathed.

Airbases were not certainly not closed down in days with light to moderate forces. Depending on the size/sophisitication of the base and it's support forces (for base maintenance---runway repair was rather more basic) it might take thousands of continuous sorties by large #'s of aircraft to both put the base out of commission and more importanly to keep it down but it was almost never 100%. I really have a problem with the 100% loss of air ops over a base put over it's "threshold limit", more of one with the inability to evacuate aircraft at a base thats getting "too hot" to operate, or the ease in which even the larger bases are damaged. Part of the problem is that with any decent sized force there's really no way to "miss" This is especially critical for AA units which quickly get degraded.

This btw is the same problem that bedevels ship bombardment. Many cases were documented where an entire bombardment might have hit the wrong area leaving the critical systems and aircraft intact but UV's abtraction of bombardment does not currently take this into account. In more simple and direct terms, you cant miss when you bombard in the game

Is long range night bombing realistic in UV? With a little more variability in the results I think its adequate. Op loss factors account for the navigating issues. Night ops were a large part of the allied staple before the advent of longer ranged escorts for the bombers. While the bombers often got through (unescorted) i dont and never have felt that the reletive ease in which they do in the game is realistic. A factoid that might also increase realism would be tracking moon cycles and using it to modify sighting and to-hit chances, especially for attacks on ships in port or on night missions (fast transport/bombardment)

Shutting down an air base was hard. The Allies solved this problem by going after the aircraft on the ground (parafrags and strafers) thus shutting down the base because it had no aircraft to fly missions.

Since UV is a game and simulates a lot of things, perhaps the reason a base can be put out of action is due to a combination of aircraft, fuel, and repair facilities being destroyed. Not just the ruway being destroyed.

If you have a couple of enginees at your more important bases I have found that they can repair the base quickly enough to keep operating. Lack of heavy equipment does slow this process down, so the Japanese will be at a disadvantage, due the lack of this type of equipment. This is part of the reason they lost the war.

Probably the current best source for the activities of the B-17 operations in the Pacific is:

Gene Eric Saleckler ‘s Fortress Against the Sun, The B-17 Flying Fortress in the Pacific.

The book covers the entire Pacific war.

The most striking thing I found out when I read the book was the lack of massed air raids, The USSAC just did not have the aircraft. A raid in early 1942 of more than 10 B-17’s was almost unheard of. This got better in Nov- Dec 1942 with the arrival of B-24 units. Then gigantic raids of up to 25 to 30 B-17’s and B-24’s would rarely occur. By late 1943 raids involving B-17’s and B-24’s even reach the low sixties.

In September 5th, 1943 is when the last squadron starts to convert to B-24’s. The combat life the B-17 ends on September15th, 1943 with the last losses of a B-17 in a storm returning from Lae. N.G.

Those B-17’s that were not snapped up as personal transports for various general officers were either flow home to the USA by their crews rotating home, or transferred to the Troop Carrying Command, as armed transports.

The Eighth Airforce B-17’s groups were in the process of transitioning to the Pacific when the War ended,

Total B-17’s to serve in the Pacific:

B-17 C 11
B-17 D 42
B-17 E 176
B-17 F 47 The first four arrive on August 5th, 1942.
B-17 G One Replaces the personal transport of General Eichelberger in August 1945.

Therefore B-17 E’s should update to either B-17 F’s and then to B-24 D’s.
No B-17 G models should be in the game