Originally Posted by
Buster Hyman
Just watched the first 2 episodes & there was an emphasis on the night time RAF area bombing vs USAAF precision daylight bombing. The take away being that the USAAF were more careful... 🤔 Now, I'm clearly no expert & happy to learn something new, but I always thought that it was a skill issue more than anything. I have no basis or evidence of that, merely hearsay but could someone with a better grasp of the different tactics be able to 'educate me' here please?
As a TV show, it was okay. A bit slow, a bit surreal when compared to BoB & TP but I'll continue watching.
USAAF ‘precision bombing’ was a myth. The Norden bomb sight was not all it was cracked up to be, especially in cloudy Northern Europe where, no matter how good the sight, you still needed to see the target. So, only the lead bombers were given the sight and the rest dropped when they dropped. Given that a formation of a few hundred bombers could be strung out over a sizeable chunk of airspace, then bombs were not dropped in the pickle barrel as they claimed. Because they could not do pinpoint bombing, the USAAF followed our lead and introduced pathfinders to mark the target. They also bombed through cloud using H2S/H2X which was a very rudimentary radar, therefore again bombs went far and wide. USAAF crews were banned from calling it ‘blind bombing’, which is exactly what it was. The USAAF carried out area bombing just as the RAF did - the only difference is that we admitted it.
I watched both episodes last night. Cheesy and cliched, with the usual Spielberg/Hanks mocking of the British. The RAF personnel in the pub were classic stereotypes.