Telemecus
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Zorch
Precision bombing at night was simply not possible at that time. Even daylight bombing of small targets was hard, as the USAAF found. This question has probably been answered already, but did the Germans (i.e., Foreign Armies East under Gehlen) know where the strategic factories were?
Actually yes was asked by you earlier in the AARs for this game! 
The answer at the start of the war was certainly yes they did. I once saw a book that was available from a public lending library in East London in the 1930s that actually had a map showing where they were at the time. If anyone could pick them up at a public library in East London then certainly the Germans knew. In addition a lot of American companies were contracted for special technical work in the Soviet factory construction in the 1920s and 1930s. I actually spoke to the son of one American who had to go and help set up the big factory at Magnitogorsk in the 1930s. Big American companies had to list the locations of those big projects as part of their listing requirements for the New York Stock exchange - so you could also get a lot of very specific details publicly available in New York for instance.
The more difficult question I have wanted the answer to is did they follow where the factories went to after they were evacuated. You can see German intelligence records of the time during the war sketching out where they thought the big factories were - although I do not know how accurate it was. There is an interesting moment in the documentary "Los Ninos de Rusia" which you can see here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLlde6xDTbI. These were the kids in the Basque country who were evacuated at the start of the Spanish civil war to Leningrad but who were then not allowed to return by Stalin. When the Axis approached Leningrad they were evacuated to what they thought was a safer place - Stalingrad. Their teachers got to work in the factories. Some of the kids only returned as adults in the 1950s by UN action. But some did return to Nationalist Spain in 1942 and gave a full listing of the factories their teachers were working at in Stalingrad. I asked an elderly family friend who worked in army intelligence how credible would it be that the Germans knew where these factories were. His answer was he would be amazed if they did not. These factories employed tens of thousands of people which added to their families meant hundreds of thousands would know where they were. Many would be PoWs or HiWis willing to talk to the Axis, and there would be so many independently confirmed reports of where a big factory was that it would be beyond doubt. So the Spanish refugee kids were only a very small proportion of the possible sources.
It should be rememberd nowadays when we talk about a factory we think of a large shed that gets a lorry to deliver supplies, puts things together and then sends the product away by lorry to the next factory. Soviet factories at the time were themselves the size of cities. Indeed cities like Magnitogorsk could even be more properly called factories themselves. They were built to be fully integrated. So a tank factory not only built the guns, they also built the paper clips that the tank navigator used. They also provided schools and hospitals for the workers and families on site. Factories the size of cities can be picked up and identified by aerial intelligence and were.
Did the Germans bomb factories during the war? Yes they did. A link given earlier by another user on this site pointed to the German bombing of Gorky Automobile Plant, Sokol, Krasnoe Sormovo and the Dvigatel Revolyutsii factories see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Gorky_in_World_War_II . You will see for example it describes one precision bombing raid in 1942 where German agents on the ground near Gorky shot signal flares to guide one bomber in to the precise building to target. You can find similar records for all the big Soviet industrial cities.
Finally the Führer Directive 21 which launched Barbarossa explicitly said the 1941 operaion would conclude with industrial bombing - "In order that maximum forces may be available for operations against the enemy air force and for direct support of the army, the munitions industry will not be attacked while the major operation is in progress. Only after the conclusion of the mobile operations will such attacks, and in particular attacks against the industrial area of the Urals, be considered." see https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/F%C3%BChrer_Directive_21
This final bombing of the Urals did not happen as Barbarossa did not achieve its ground goals - if it had then it would be ahistorical to disallow the very thing the Germans were planning.
In my view the ahistorical thing in most games is to see the Soviet air force used exclusively near the front lines. The Red Air force historically did defend its rear area factories - you can see the references above talking about the LaGG-3 air groups sent to defend Gorky. The complaint used to be that the Soviet air force was overpowered. As a result it was nerfed in a recent patch. I think the correct answer was that the threat of industrial bombing should mean Soviet players do distribute their air force to defend rear area industry. That way the Soviet air force would be less over powering at the front and Axis industrial bombing would be less successful - as indeed is historical.
There is a good argument though about the mechanics of how bombing damage effects what industry. I can see it is fairly easy at the time to bomb a factory the size of a city - but you could not know if you were hitting the final assembly area or some more generic upstream production like ball bearings. So I found the idea of saying you could bomb a city but which factory in the city you actually hit would be random to be attractive. Other things to look at are repair rates and what impact damage actually has on production or expansion.
< Message edited by Telemecus -- 12/11/2018 1:57:00 PM >
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RE: 8MP T48 - 
It is clear by that map that you all were maturing a strategy and put a great deal of time into it ...
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