The Allies never get air superiority

Then you read wrong. The Eighth Air Force bombing accuracy went from 20% in 1943 to 50% in 1944. The problem is the criteria and the conditions. That was for daylight visual aiming. The real problem was the common 500-lb GP was too light to damage machine tools and other critical items in factories. Combine that with the inability to bomb visually on a regular basis, the inability to hit targets sequentially early on, and other issues and you have the real world effectiveness of strategic bombing...it was not as great as its proponents claimed but nor was it as ineffective as its detractors claimed.

You read wrong again. That is closest to the results described by the Butt Report in August 1941, which resulted in the operational changes that made BC so deadly later in the war.

If you think strategic air bombardment was so ineffective, please explain why the Germans and Japanese put so much effort in defending against it.

The USAAF never attacked Romanian oilfields, they attacked Romanian oil refineries.

Huh? Aside from that being a meaningless figure, loss per mission is very different depending on the size of the mission - 150 out of 1,500 is a rather different figure from 150 out of 150 - it is simply incorrect.

There is no 8th USAAF "official war diary". There is the USAAF Statistical Diary and there are the Eighth AF mission reports and various OR reports relating to bombing effectiveness and so on, but no "official war diary",

 

It depends on what you mean by "total losses" and when. I think he was referring to aircraft losses by the Luftwaffe, of which 80 to 85 percent were lost in the "West", i.e., Western Europe and the Mediterranean.

 

OK a huge statement saying that is why they failed. I have NEVER heard the above. How did they become Aces if they weren't allowed to shoot anyone?
I think you will find the "non-aces" were two things...Underqualified, many pilots were expected to learn on the job and unlike the Allies did not turn up to squadrons fully qualified. And second were given the understandable job of wing-man. - Meaning they watch the lead's six and try to help boxing the target for yes, the leader's shot. This is NORMAL.
German fighters would/could return without fireing a shot because A. Their job was escort - or B. They didn't find a target before having to return due to fuel concerns. But 90%?? I'll need the source for that.
Put simply i don't agree with anything in the above statement.

 

But a documentarian said so...

Seriously, there is a kernel of truth here. The problem with the German system was that there were never enough qualified pilots in the pipeline to supplement the existing experienced "Adlern". That led to the experienced pilots conducting sortie after sortie, getting good experience, but rarely passing it on. Worse, eventually they got the twitches and either augered in or lost the picture and had some 19-year old USAAF jock that had 600+ hours in training before he went on a mission, who followed the TTPs for his aircraft and got the Jerrie behind the Eight-ball.

Most of the German "Knights" died before the end of the war.

 

I'll stick to my numbers, that the 8th USAAF only achieved 5% accuracy and that RAF nighttime bombing achieve only 2% to 3% accuracy.
Oh by the way I had the OFFICIAL WAR DIARY of the 8th USAAF. You know Rich constantly calling folks on here liars does not look good.

 

Nope, you likely have Roger Freeman's Mighty Eighth War Diary, which is not "official". I don't call people liars liars unless they lie. You're simply wrong.

If you'd like to read the actual Eighth Air Force bombing accuracy studies I can refer you to them.

 

One effect of no Allied air superiority is that all those AA vehicles they developed for use in NW Europe actually get used. Historically of course they were mostly withdrawn from use after D-Day when the Luftwaffe failed to show up in numbers.

The effects of this? Well, for the British at least it actually compounds their manpower problem. Crews needed for tanks are now in tanks and AA tanks. And of course advancing without guaranteed air support - and in the teeth of enemy air attack - is much harder and gathers more losses. Mind you, tank-mounted 20mm and 40mm cannon would be useful in suppressing enemy infantry (historically they were used this way before being withdrawn)

 

Not exactly. Most were not withdrawn, but they began to draw down existing AAA strength in the second half of 1944, after slowing the tempo of fielding AAA units in 1943. In July and August 1944, the British began disbanding the AAA platoons assigned to Infantry Brigades and Armoured and Tank Regiments. Both the British and Americans made extensive use of vehicles from AAA units that were temporarily "grounded" during the pursuit in September 1944, but it was December 1944 before disbanding of units was begun.

Probably...but first you have to figure out a viable way for the Allies to lose air superiority when, at best, Germany could only generate air parity and local air superiority through strenuous efforts in specific theaters of war after about mid 1942. Germany's production of pilots and aircraft was simply too low for them to have a serious chance to do so.

 

I am always prepared to look at new information, also I must apologise for the liar comment.

Also now that you mention it, you are correct on the book I had "Mighty Eighth WAR Diary".

Also I forgot that the Allies did photograph sites after missions that confirm the accuracy.

Please accept my apologies..

 

Let's look at it this way, this not perfect but a suggestion. By mid 1944 say May, German aircraft factories after retooling switch to full-time production of fighters, this includes all aircraft factories.

Then the Luftwaffe can have massed numbers of fighters in the sky over Germany to intercept the American bombers hopefully to inflict huge losses say up to 150 bombers shot down per mission and then up to 400 economic write offs.

Meaning that German fighters are destroying more four engined bombers than the Americans can build.

 

I was deliberately avoiding doing so, because I can't

 

By that stage, fuel and pilots were beginning to run low while Allied escorts were getting more common. Even without the fuel/pilot problem I can't see America losing aircraft faster than they could be produced. Partly because it would be enormously difficult for the Germans to damage and destroy the numbers you are suggesting and partly because the Americans built so darn many aircraft

 

Um, they did. By mid 1944, starting in July, they began disbanding bomber units and transferred personnel - the pilots at least - to fighter units and the rest to the Heer and Waffen-SS.

They also already had retooled progressively from 1939 in order to build more fighter aircraft. The ratio of fighter to bomber production was:

1939 - 1:1.6
1940 - 1:1.7
1941 - 1:1.4
1942 - 1:1
1943 - 1:0.53
1944 - 1:0.19

The problem is, aircraft require pilots and fuel. It was easier to build aircraft than it was to train the pilots and fuel them. Despite this effort, the German fighter fleet simply refused to grow at the rate they needed it to...until it was too late. From the start of the war, the annual average strength serviceable (working aircraft with an operational pilot) was:

1939/1940 - 830.2
1940/1941 - 750.0
1941/1942 - 798.6
1942/1943 - 1021.5
1943/1944 - 1140.6
1944/1945 - 2051.3

Not going to happen.

 

Yes fuel is a problem, that I get in fact I wrote a short story of Heinkel Salamander squadron in the last days of the war, half of the squadron was lost on their last mission to their jet engines flaming out and the rest were lost due to running out of fuel.
Did Hitler's interference in the Me-262 have any effect, I did read somewhere that Hitler insistence was that out of every 20 Me-262's built 1 was a fighter and 19 were fighter-bombers. Also I read that during the wars the largest formation of Me-262's was 56.

 

Rich thanks for the information.

 

The Me 262 was self-defeating. There are a number of reasons, starting with the poor engine reliability, that make it so. With respect to fuel, while the 262 used more available J2 jet fuel, a single sortie required roughly 3 times the fuel a single sortie by an Me 109 did. That made the 262 untenable on a large scale. It would have been difficult to impossible for Germany to keep more than maybe 100, at most, flying on a daily basis. There wouldn't have been enough replacement engines and fuel to do it.

The He 162 used less fuel per flight, but had much shorter range. The BMW 003 was more reliable, but the plane's airframe was fragile and accidents due to failure would have been high. It definitely was not a plane to be flown by a novice pilot.

 

The allies could not afford to stop bombing missions.