Comments on: Me on Orac on Dawkins on Harris

By: Airminded · Orac on me on Orac etc

Airminded · Orac on me on Orac etc — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 10:19:14 +0000

[...] Orac responds to me … sort of: Orac paused, his lights blinking, patterns ever changing. It was almost as though he were thinking, if such a thing were possible by a computer. Then he went on, “Of course, as much as I’ve defended Dawkins before against similarly spurious uses of the Hitler analogy, now that I think of it, I have caught him before making arguments based on a dubious understanding of history.” [...]

By: Carnival of Bad History No 11 - Philobiblon

Carnival of Bad History No 11 - Philobiblon — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 23:07:07 +0000

[...] Some of the controversies here are just going to run and run, and that’s certainly true of the debate about the aims and actions of Arthur “Bomber” Harris in Dresden and other places. Brett Holman on Airminded takes issue with “Oracâ€™s post critiquing Richard Dawkinsâ€™ comments”. (Yes I did cut and paste that to make sure I got it right.) [...]

By: Christine Keeler

Christine Keeler — Sun, 19 Nov 2006 06:16:30 +0000

As for Dresden eclipsing Hiroshima in the hot-air stakes, I suspect thatâ€™s not the case in Japan and the United States (though the forgetting of Tokyo is more interesting).

Indeed, and it remains a source of abiding fascination why not only Bomber Command but, to an even greater extent, the USAAF 20th air force has been completely written out of popular representations of the war.

Don’t want to get off topic, but Le May was pursuing the same tactic as Harris, with even greater success (regardless of the A-bomb).

By: Chris Williams

Chris Williams — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 22:04:49 +0000

Joubert didn’t want Lancasters to ‘go on the offensive against submarines’, AKA cruising over the trackless ocean. He wanted them to patrol over and ahead of convoys to force the wolf-packs down. That, after all, is how he used the few Liberators that he had. He also pointed out that sticking H2S into Bomber Command Lancasters meant that sooner or later (in the event, sooner) it would be a present for the Germans, whereas ASV3 sets were unlikely to fall into enemy hands.

By: Pontius

Pontius — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 12:24:18 +0000

Cruising around over vast featureless tracts of ocean looking for subs was like looking for a needle in a haystack - and about as productive. On that basis, having even more resources doing the same would have been pretty ineffective. Even when, much later, the better equipment became available, it was only the availability of Ultra giving them a basic idea of where to look that tipped the scales in terms of effectiveness. The number and increased effectiveness of the convoys escorts made a big difference (They after all did most of the sinking of U-Boats), as they could be with the convoy day and night, whatever the weather. They didn’t really have to look for U-Boats, - the U-Boats came to them! CC’s harassment of the subs leaving and returning to the Brest area was however materially and psychologically damaging.

Regarding the Normandy breakout; A lot of the criticism of the British (Mainly by the Americans) was aimed at Monty for being very over-cautious. Monty was well-known to be cautious with the lives of his men, probably as a result of his experiences in the 1914-18 War. That delay in breaking out inevitably led to the delayed response from the Germans having time to catch up, so his caution might be viewed with hindsight as a little self-defeating. In fairness to Monty, - he was a very experienced professional soldier and General with recent and current experience. The Americans had the resources but lacked his experience. In the event, the Americans more gung-ho approach worked well, but arguably, again, only because of the cumulative effects of the bombing campaign. (I never did understand why Caen was flattened however, - why didn’t they just go round it!? That worked OK with islands.)

I’m more than a little puzzled however by all this speculation about where a few thousand bods were channeled to. They would probably have just become more cannon-fodder with depleted air superiority. Thgey would have been fighting against tanks that they could have prevented being produced in the first place….. The fundamental issue here is that the Allies overall superiority was based on it superior air-power on both a tactical and strategic level, - yes it took resources, planning and time. It was a huge investment that paid huge dividends. On the other hand, the inexorable rolling-back of the German front-line was fundamentally about lack of air-power, in the same basic way that it was during the German advances in the west were at the start of the war. As events like Caen and Montecasino showed, trying to winkle out a few well-dug in troops was very costly indeed. No matter how well dug-in they were however, or how tenaciously they fought, air power would tip the scales. Allied air superiority was the engine that drove the Allied success in all theatres, and was the jewel in it’s crown. Had the Germans realised this and made the correct investments earlier - the war would at the very least, have dragged on much longer. That ability to reach out across Europe, like it was a giant chess board, was crucial, and an option that the Germans never really had to remotely the same extent, - especially as the war progressed. Every move they made was discovered, monitored, analysed and responded to via air power.

By: Chris Williams

Chris Williams — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 10:21:35 +0000

There’s a lot about the Bomber vs Coastal Command struggle in Terraine’s _Business in Great Waters_. Given what Pontius’s mate (120 Squadron, I assume) and his comrades achieved with 20 or so Liberators, a couple of hundred heavies a year earlier might have led to victory in 1942. Certainly Joubert (C-in-C Coastal Command) was crying out for Lancasters, much to Harris’s annoyance. Ultra was important, but it wasn’t cracked on a permanent basis: There was a significant gap between Feb 1942 and December 1942.

I was under the impression that in the spring of 1944, the heavies (over Harris’s emphatic protests) mainly hit ‘marshalling yards’ in France and Belgium: it was the mediums wot carrried out Zukerman’s plan and knocked down the bridges. But I could be wrong about this.

My point about D-Day largely rests on Keegan’s _Six Armies in Normandy_ which flags up the lack of initiative shown by the British infantry in the summer of 1944. I’m not suggesting that demobilising Bomber Command in 1943 would have made a difference, rather that not building it up so much in the first place, and channeling more of the best recruits, technical production, and political support towards the infantry might have made a difference, in Italy as well as France.

By: Pontius

Pontius — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 22:11:16 +0000

Yes, thats why SS Panzer regiments had to DRIVE north to join the battle…..
Vis a vis Coastal Command; I’ve never heard that one before….. Of course, we had prety-much cracked Enigma. Problem was, we still didn’t really have the gear in the early war in the a/c to mke the best of Ultra. Only later did it all really come together, with sonar-bouys in the day and when we had the Airborne Radar and Leigh-Lights, so that the subs couldn’t even safely surface at night did it all come together and the ‘mid Atlantic gap’ was plugged.
A little ditty; - A friend of mine flew Lib’s based at Reckyavic, Iceland. They managed to kill a few Whales with their depth-charges…and on one occasion hit another Lib’ - head on… (!) - that they were relieving over a convoy in mid Atlantic. Both machines went into a spin and lost engines, but, amazingly, both recovered and limped back. My friends machine was declared a write-off where it stool at dispersal at Tain. I have the photos of the wreck. I think that they all needed a clean pair of underpants after that one..lol.
At the end of the day, we are back to Harris’s ‘Panaceas’ I suppose. Under the circumstances, I think they probably got it about right.

By: Gavin Robinson

Gavin Robinson — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 19:46:36 +0000

That’s a good point. Bomber Command wasn’t just carrying out strategic bombing of Germany in 1944. They were also supporting the invasion at an operational level. Heavy bombers attacking the transport network in France made it much more difficult for the Germans to move reinforcements to Normandy. This also had mutual benefits, because the success of the invasion meant that fighter bases and Oboe transmitters could be established in France, increasing the effectiveness of strategic bombing.

The most respectable argument I’ve heard about the resources taken up by Bomber Command is that they might better have been allocated to Coastal Command, because more long range anti-submarine patrols might have made the battle of the Atlantic less of a close run thing. If anything Coastal Command is even more forgotten than Bomber Command. My list of veterans excluded from the metanarrative could have been much longer…

By: Pontius

Pontius — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 14:47:33 +0000

But; Without Bomber Commands efforts, many of these ‘extra’ land forces might have ended up lying dead on the beaches……….

By: Alan Allport

Alan Allport — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 13:42:46 +0000

It’s hard to imagine that, given the huge resources deposited into Normandy, that a few thousand ex-aircrew would have made that much of a difference.

Not just a question of aircrew. There were tens of thousands of skilled ground-crew working for Bomber Command, and hundreds of thousands of skilled industrial workers building aircraft. Britain’s commitment to the strategic bombing campaign was vast, and its implications for manpower, non-trivial.