As many WWII aviation enthusiasts know, the bombing campaign against the Germans took on two distinct characteristics. The Americans believed in daylight precision bombing while the British went to carpet bombing by night. The reason the British went this way was due to several reasons. One is that daylight raids were rather ruinous in terms of aircraft lost. This itself was because of several factors. One was the lack of proper fighter escort and the other is that the bombers being used were all pre-war designs and did not have the sort of speed, carrying capabilities, and defensive armament required. So the British switched to night bombing, which was not very accurate as most bomber crews had not trained for night work.

Introduce into this a new commander of Bomber Command, 'Bomber Harris' and things changed. First of all Harris was a devotee of the theory that you could bomb the enemy into submission, not just by bombing factories but the populace. He had available to him by mid war, heavy bombers that could carry a decent load. In this I mean the later Halifax and the new Lancaster bomber. It was the Lancaster on which he put his hopes and a goodly percentage of Britain's war industry was focused on building Lancasters. One reason they could do this was the British were supplied with quite a bit of their warfighting equipment by the US, so they did not need to build a lot of tanks, trucks, jeeps, etc.

The Lanc eventually became the main plane in which night bombing was carried out. However, things were not perfect.

The Germans were a bit slow to develop a night fighting arm, but once they got underway, they made up for lost time. It was discovered that the Bf-110, which was pretty much a failure as a heavy fighter was a great platform for night fighting. It was able to carry the equipment later needed and it was a stable gun platform. It eventually became the best night fighter in terms of numbers and kills that the Germans had and operated in this role until the end of the war. While better night fighters were developed (and I mean the He-219), it was not built in the numbers needed to make much of a difference.

German developments in airborne radar and especially in the Schrage Musik gun system gave the Germans quite an edge. Though the British worked on ways to jam many of these electronic devices, they were not very quick on the uptake and it often was many, many months before they realized what was going on. For instance, when the Germans switched from the FuG 220 to the SN-2 radar, it was 8 or 9 months before the British realized this had happened and their earlier defenses were no working. Similar results were with the Schrage Musik and the realization that the Germans were homing in on the Lancaster's bombing radar.

The end result is that bomber losses by the RAF were quite heavy. Frequently the Germans managed to shoot down almost as many Lancasters as were being built. Yet Bomber Harris continued to feel that this mass bombing would work, despite the facts that showed it did not. One often reads stats and interprets them to fit one's theories. The Lancaster was large and relatively slow so easy to find and destroy. However, it carried a lot of bombs and Harris was fixated on tonnage and continued until the end of the war.

Oddly, he had the perfect night bomber, the Mosquito, which was fast and able to elude the 110, but did not carry a lot of bombs, so it was only used on precision raids. Even when the Allies had daytime air superiority, Harris resisted switching to day raids and the Germans kept shooting down 5-7% or more of every mission.

So while the Allies did win the war, it was the Germans who really won the night battles shooting down 15-20 times the number of bombers than were lost in terms of night fighters.

All of this and more is covered in one of the more interesting editions in Osprey's long running Duel series. It is a book that I most highly recommend to you and one that I am positive you will enjoy, even if you don't agree with its conclusions.

July 2013

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