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aspqrz02 -> RE: UK out of Merchant Marine by U Boat campaign (1/9/2020 6:27:17 AM)
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The thing is, the Bomber lobby in both the UK and the US WAY oversold the capabilities of their aircraft ... shades of Douhetism!
The accuracy of the Bombers in typical northern European weather (bad) was as bad as night-time bombing (or very close to it) ... only on those days where there was good weather (a minority) was the accuracy OK, but still nowhere near as good as it was claimed it was going to be.
The problem was that the loss rate was really unsustainable for the RAF and close to it for the USAAF (the number of required missions before rotation home kept rising, and some crews were sent back for a second tour before the end of the war) ... the RAF went over to night bombing and the USAAF tried all sorts of dodges, but never managed to get their accuracy up.
"An example of the difficulties of precision bombing was a raid in the Northern Hemisphere summer of 1944 by 47 B-29's on Japan's Yawata Steel Works from bases in China. Only one plane actually hit the target area, and only with one of its bombs. This single 500 lb (230 kg) general-purpose bomb represented one quarter of one percent of the 376 bombs dropped over Yawata on that mission. It took 108 B-17 bombers, crewed by 1,080 airmen, dropping 648 bombs to guarantee a 96 percent chance of getting just two hits inside a 400 x 500 ft (150 m) German power-generation plant."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_bombing#World_War_II
That's why the Power Plant/Switching Plant plan didn't go anywhere.
The thing was, a lot of the damage was actually CUMULATIVE. The oil plants could be repaired quickly when seals and valves were ruptured, but the repairs could only be slap and patch and, eventually, there were repairs on repairs and the repairs became more and more vulnerable to more and more distant 'near misses' ... likewise, a lot of the pipe in such plants which, early in the war, was unaffected by near misses became more and more stressed and, eventually, would rupture from less and less distant near misses.
The thing that killed the Germans was the Transportation Campaign of 1944-45 ... the allied Strategic AND Tactical Air Forces targeted not only bridges, but tracks, repair and maintenance facilities and, counterintuitively, switching yards.
Switching Yards were large open areas full of nothing much but a network of tracks and switches that allowed train consists to be broken down or made up with minimum effort, often by the use of gravity ... but they were LARGE areas ... so even piss poor accuracy could KO more and more of the tracks and, more importantly, the switching and signalling gear.
By early 1945 the Germans were actually reduced to pushing currently un-needed RR rolling stock OFF THE TRACKS (effectively rendering them useless without extensive repairs) to make up new train consists ... they were THAT desperate.
According to Strategic Bombing Survey by early 1945 trains in Germany could only 'safely' run at night and could travel only an average of 12 miles (~20 klicks) before running into an obstacle (downed bridge, bombed track, destroyed train etc.) that prevented further movement.
The TAFs were set to basically strafing any train they saw, even Fighters got in the act ... and MG bullets will happily blow a boiler on a steam train (and probably won't do the diesel or electrics on diesel or diesel electric any good either) ... and they even began strafing and bombing the River Barges that moved a HUGE percentage of German industrial goods.
IF they'd done some or all of that earlier, then the Germans would have had a hard time of it.
Of course, you don't seem to be able to bomb RR capacity in WarPlan.
Phil McGregor
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