I highly recommend reading "Why the Allies Won" by Dr Richard Overy.
Everybody just assumes that the Allies were bound to win, but if you look at the early period you can see that it was far from inevitable. Overy does a fantastic job of analysing WHY.
One of the issues he addresses is our bombing campaign which so many people nowadays love to denigrate. It was actually crucial to our winning.
The Nazis in charge had every reason to downplay the figures of just what it was costing, but even they admitted to something like 40% of industrial production lost or diverted to air defence. So much air defence required against bombers that they lacked air superiority in crucial battles like Kursk. So much ammunition converted to anti-aircraft production that they lacked supplies on the front line and even lacked fertiliser for producing food.
At the end of the day you can only fight if you have the weapons and ammunition to do it with, so it becomes a battle between respective economies. On the Axis side only Germany really ramped up production. Russia did an outstanding job, with her people caught between a vicious onslaught by National Socialist who called them sub-humans and their own International Socialist rulers who barely treated them much better.
And nobody could believe what the US economy proved capable of - the most accurate estimates were made by the British but even these were way off.
It might sound dry but it doesn't read that way - highly recommended.
"Many of the logistical problems faced in World War II may never need to be addressed by a future army, but problems of mobilizing, adjudicating competing demands, and fitting strategic ends to material means will inevitably plague future military leaders. They may have better organizations and tools at their disposal, but they can expect that policy guidance will be vague, expectations of field commanders excessive, and complex logistical systems almost impossible to keep in balance in the midst of war's vagaries."
> it becomes a battle between respective economies
I tend to think of WW2 as the Civilization video game. If you have more "production" than the other players, it's pretty easy to squash them like bugs.
> Russia did an outstanding job
There's an argument to make there, that if Russia was a democracy, it would have crumbled. It was Stalin's iron fist that moved resources where he needed them that reshaped the whole country into a lean mean fighting machine - at the cost of tremendous suffering, of course.
Yes, but it was also his "fist" which through a paranoid mind killed off much of his military brain trust --which left him with amateurish (unseasoned) upper ranks to run the military when war actually came.
I learned this playing Axis and Allies [1], where there is a rule for 'strategic bombing' [2]: rather than using your bomber to attack enemy troops, you attack enemy factories, where damage is done to the enemy's budget, rather than forces. I never used my bombers that way, preferring to attack armies and fleets, but my opponent, who understood the game much better than me, would doggedly go after my factories. Needless to say, he always won.
The Robert McNamara documentary "Fog of War" has some excellent insight into the WW2 bombing campaign (mostly in the pacific) and the sheer scale of what was done. It is startling to say the least.
I don't think people denigrating allied bombing campaigns are really concerned with their military effectiveness, but rather the millions upon millions of civilians we (Allies) killed.
On that note, I recommend reading on the spy that posed as an expert on tech for their oil/gas factories. They brought him to them. The Allies would then bomb them later. My memory loss prevents me from giving his name and more detail of operations. We had a number of people doing stuff like this. Not just bombing but spies were crucial to our work.
Anyone remember the name of that spy or got an online writeup on him? Like to add to my bookmarks.
In the 'See also' section: "Mary Babnik Brown, whose hair was used for the bombsight crosshairs."
The wikipedia articles on Mary Babnik Brown says: "In 1944 Brown was the first woman to have her hair used for military aircraft bombsights.[6] She saw an advertisement in a Pueblo newspaper in 1943 that said the government was looking for hair from women for the war effort, although no details were given as to how it would be used. The ad said only that they wanted blonde hair that was at least 22 inches long (56 cm), and which had not been treated with chemicals or hot irons. The women's hair collection for use as bombsight crosshairs was a clandestine operation even though they found the hair through a newspaper advertisement."
I wonder if only her hair was used? Or other peoples hair was used too.
>There have been some claims and counter-claims regarding what the human hair was used for. While its use in meteorological instruments such as radiosonde hygrometers is acknowledged, there are disputed claims regarding human hair use in bombsight crosshairs, particularly the Norden bombsight. While anecdotal accounts of human hair in bombsights exist, verifiable accounts only indicate it was used in precision weather instruments. Surviving Norden bombsights reveal that the cross hairs were etched in glass by diamond cutters.
Here's a Norden bombsight training film.[1] This one shows how difficult it was to operate. The human interface was primitive. There are indicators you have to monitor but can't see while looking through the eyepiece. The bombardier keeps lifting their head to read indicators, then looks back in the eyepiece. It's surprising that they didn't make those readouts visible in the eyepiece view.
This thing had to be operated while in an aircraft, while being shot at. The bomber had to fly straight and level during the bomb run. Not fun.
Last users of the Norden bombsight were probably US Navy Squadron VO-67, for interdiction on the Ho Chi Minh trail during the Vietnam War. They found suitable equipment in storage but had to track-down retired technicians to make it work.
It's too bad there's no Wikipedia article for Norden Systems. The company kept on doing business for another 65 years after the war, first as part of United Technologies in Connecticut and then Northrop Grumman, who appear to have closed it down in 2012.
If you're an amateur astronomer and you use a Telrad finder, that's a distant descendant (much simplified) of the Norden sight.
Sure there are better solutions nowadays, including finders that are actually mini-telescopes, but the low-tech Telrad is still popular for its air of nostalgia.
I visited BB-62 New Jersey this weekend, and they have an analog electromechanical rangekeeper computer. It's really cool to see the gears and shafts turn, as it continually updates its output (bearing, azimuth) in response to 14 input variables. It accounts for the target bearing, target speed, own speed, own bearing, even the latitude is an input to account for the Coriolis effect.
The Norden bombsight is a fascinating example of the way the promise of technology can run far ahead of the reality.
It's not an exaggeration to say that the U.S. military, when it entered World War 2, considered the Norden a war-winning weapon. The entire strategic bombing doctrine of the Army Air Forces was designed around it, emphasizing daylight raids on "pinpoint" targets to best capitalize on the Norden's accuracy.
The RAF advised against such a strategy, having tried the same type of raids themselves before American entry into the war; they found it impossible under combat conditions to achieve the degree of accuracy needed to knock such targets out. The British had switched to the doctrine of night area bombing, abandoning accuracy altogether to reduce their own casualties, and urged the Americans to do the same. But the AAF was confident that they would succeed where the British had failed, because American bombers were equipped with the Norden bombsight.
Which turned out to not make any difference whatsoever; in the stress of combat, buffeted by wind and flak and fighter attack, the bombardiers of the AAF ended up having just as hard a time hitting the target as the RAF's had. The Norden bombsight was a dud. And because it had led the AAF to organize its raids during the day, when its bombers were easy for German fighter pilots to find and shoot down, casualties in the bomber force during 1942 and 1943 were shockingly high; in one raid alone, the October 14, 1943 attack on the ball-bearing plants at Schweinfurt (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Raid_on_Schweinfurt), 26% of the attacking bombers were shot down. Even worse, the casualties were taken to no practical purpose; the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey (http://anesi.com/ussbs02.htm), a post-war review of the efficacy of the war's bombing campaigns, found that "there is no evidence that the attacks on the ball-bearing industry had any measurable effect on essential war production."
In the end the AAF's daylight raids did help win the war, but not in any way where the Norden bombsight contributed. As fighters were developed with the range to accompany the bombers all the way to the target, the AAF changed to a strategy of essentially using the bombers as bait, luring Luftwaffe fighters into the air where the AAF's could engage and destroy them. Here America's greater fighter production and better pilot training gave them the edge, with the result that by the time D-Day arrived in June 1944 the Allies had won uncontested command of the air, a dominant position they would never give up. But when the bombers were just bait, the accuracy of their bombing didn't matter at all; they could have gone up with any old bombsight, or no bombsight at all. Which is a sad verdict on the legendary Norden, which just three years before had been thought able to win the war all by itself.
In an interesting coincidence, I was just reading Kurt Vonnegut's Fates Worse Than Death. He fought in WW II and was taken as a POW to Dresden where he was promptly firebombed. He asks a close friend of his, Bernard O'Hare, what he learned (from the war). O'Hare (who eventually became a DA) replied "I will never again believe my Government."
> The future DA O'Hare replied, "I will never again believe my Government." This had to do with our Government's tall tales of delicate surgery performed by bombers equipped with Sperry and Norden bombsights. These instruments were so precise, we had been told, that a bombardier could drop his billets-doux down the chimney of a factory if ordered to. There were solemn charades performed for newsreels in which military policemen with drawn .45 automatics escorted bombardiers carrying bombsights to their planes. That was how desperate the Germans and the Japanese were (so went the message) to learn and make use of the secret of our bombings' diabolical accuracy themselves.
> Such a sop to civilian sensibilities nowadays would seem as unintentionally hilarious as a love scene between Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino
It's true that the supposed accuracy of the Norden bombsight was made much of in propaganda; the Carl L. Norden company itself, for instance, bought a block of time in a 1943 Barnum & Bailey circus performance at Madison Square Garden to show a routine involving a clown using the sight to drop a bomb into a barrel. (Here's Life magazine's article on the performance: https://books.google.com/books?id=EU4EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA27&ots=...)
But it wasn't all propaganda; the government really did believe the Norden was critical technology, and required a range of extreme security measures to protect it, including having bombardiers check their bombsights out of their planes and into a secured facility after each mission. But it was all more or less for naught, as the Germans had a man inside the Norden company itself who passed them a range of confidential materials related to the sight's design before being caught in the roundup of the infamous "Duquesne spy ring" in 1941. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duquesne_Spy_Ring for more on the latter.)
Strategic bombing did not work out anywhere near as well as its proponents had expected. I'm not certain that it can be described as a complete failure. I can't find a really good citation right now, but it is my understanding that the Allied attacks on Germany's synthetic fuel industry starting in September 1944 were extremely effective.
The closest quick citation I can find is the Wikipedia article "Oil campaign of World War II" [1]. In particular note the quotes from German leaders in the section "Opinions on outcome". (These quotes don't appear to be specific to the attacks against the synthetic fuel plants, though.)
The most effective Allied bombing attacks were definitely those on the German transportation network -- both fuel sources like oil, and other components like rail and road links. These played a significant role in disrupting German movement on the ground, which in turn contributed to their inability to turn back Allied offensives from D-Day forward. So it's correct to say that the strategic bombing forces made an important contribution to the final victory.
The problem is that strategic bombing theorists had been promising something much bigger than just contributing one part of a combined-arms victory; they had been promising that strategic bombing could win the war by itself. And, while it was eventually realized that these promises were over-sold, an enormous number of lives both among Allied aircrews and German civilians on the ground were thrown away in fruitless efforts to prove them.
The book talks about the change in tactics. At the beginning of the war targeting civilian areas was clearly a war crime; by the end of the war we had things like Dresden.
> And because it had led the AAF to organize its raids during the day, when its bombers were easy for German fighter pilots to find and shoot down, casualties in the bomber force during 1942 and 1943 were shockingly high; in one raid alone, the October 14, 1943 attack on the ball-bearing plants at Schweinfurt (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Raid_on_Schweinfurt), 26% of the attacking bombers were shot down.
Most people don't understand just how high the casuality rates were. The RAF bomber command lost about 55,000 men of 125,000 total.
Most people don't know how high the casualty rates were in general in WWII. The German U-Boat force lost 28,000 men out of 40,900 total crew. By the last year of the war, thanks to airborne radar and Allied ULTRA decrypts, the survival rate of U-Boats in the Atlantic was less than one patrol.
> Most people don't understand just how high the casuality rates were.
Indeed. There is actually an old board game that teaches this lesson more effectively than any history book I've ever come across: Avalon Hill's B-17: Queen of the Skies (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1032/b-17-queen-skies), first published in 1981.
It's a deceptively simple game: you play as the crew of a single B-17, and follow them over Western Europe in 1942-43. The goal is to make it through 25 missions, the number real-life bomber crews were expected to carry out before being rotated back to the States for non-combat duty.
What makes it so effective is that, after a few games, it quickly becomes obvious that keeping the entire crew alive through 25 missions more or less requires a miracle. A really lucky player will be able to keep the bomber itself going to the end, taking occasional casualties and rotating in new faces to fill their seats, with the result that at the end you look over the crew roster and find half the people you started out with are gone. And that's the lucky player! The less fortunate hit one of the many, many catastrophic failure modes that can bring the entire bomber down in flames long before mission 25 is anywhere near in sight.
In real life it was so rare for a crew to make it through 25 missions that when one finally did -- the crew of the Memphis Belle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memphis_Belle_%28aircraft%29), who flew their last mission in May 1943 -- they instantly became national celebrities. So the grim odds the game lays out are depressingly accurate.
(Given its age, it's hard to find pristine copies of B-17: Queen of the Skies today, but there are modern remakes like Target for Today (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/160903/target-today) that are more accessible. Or, if you're willing to wait a little while and live with a used copy of the original game, it's not too hard to get one via eBay. I recommend it if you're interested in the subject; it's a fast play, and since it's a solitaire game it doesn't require assembling a group to play.)
One of the problems in assessing the performance of various technologies in WWII is that for decades after much of what was done was kept secret. So in some cases we are still discussing what were really cover stories, either for the use of airborne radar or code breaking.
Something I suspect not widely known, and covered in that book is that many night time british bombing raids later in the war were successful because they used GPS.
The BBC made a documentary loosely based on it in 1977. It is on YouTube [1]. Well worth watching, they don't make documentaries like that anymore. The episode on Enigma has been banned, but the rest are still available.
Something that never fails to amaze me about the Norden is the CEP (which is a radius, I know...) is numerically about equal to the length of my grandfather's B-24, which is pretty impressive performance for a box of gears a couple miles up in the air.
AFAIK no one has ever built a Norden or a Norden inspired sight out of lego or meccano, which would be interesting to see. I'm not interested in something visually similar as much as I'm interested in something that operates identically.
Everybody just assumes that the Allies were bound to win, but if you look at the early period you can see that it was far from inevitable. Overy does a fantastic job of analysing WHY.
One of the issues he addresses is our bombing campaign which so many people nowadays love to denigrate. It was actually crucial to our winning.
The Nazis in charge had every reason to downplay the figures of just what it was costing, but even they admitted to something like 40% of industrial production lost or diverted to air defence. So much air defence required against bombers that they lacked air superiority in crucial battles like Kursk. So much ammunition converted to anti-aircraft production that they lacked supplies on the front line and even lacked fertiliser for producing food.
At the end of the day you can only fight if you have the weapons and ammunition to do it with, so it becomes a battle between respective economies. On the Axis side only Germany really ramped up production. Russia did an outstanding job, with her people caught between a vicious onslaught by National Socialist who called them sub-humans and their own International Socialist rulers who barely treated them much better.
And nobody could believe what the US economy proved capable of - the most accurate estimates were made by the British but even these were way off.
It might sound dry but it doesn't read that way - highly recommended.