WW 2 Bombing Accuracy (or not)
 

Just watching an episode of Blitz Cities and fell to wondering about the comparative accuracy of British and German bombing raids. The Butt report demonstrated the inaccuracy of Bomber Command in the early part of the War. Were the Germans any more accurate?

Hahahaha - think you should have a look at the 'accracy' (or not) of your speling :D

Wander00,
I tend to think that, in the early stages, the 'shock and awe' aspect of it was more important.
Yes, we did waste quite a bit of 'cast iron and gunpowder' and I'll be interested to hear if there are any figures for comparison.

Well, good word to type wrongly. Cannot change it, but maybe Mods can, please.
Now , back to the topic..................



Done
Senior Pilot

Many of the towns involved were not too far from the sea or major water features, which meant they were easier to find. The Luftwaffe also used pathfinder units (KG100) and had some electronic aids. They did an effective job, but only had a modest bombload.

They were accurate enough at Coventry.

Wander, I'll check with the PFF museum at Wyton and get back to you. From memory the error was at times in the high tens of miles.

They even got the wrong country on at least one occasion: The town of Schaffhausen in Switzerland was mistakenly bombed by either the USAAF or RAF.

German accuracy was much higher, due to the use of beam guidance systems and pathfinder units. Google "Battle of the Beams" for an intro to a plethora of information (other search engines are available).

This programme explains the story of the early German successes with radio navaids such as Knickebein, X Gerat and Y Gerat:
"Gee" - the RAF's first radio navaid - entered service in 1942. More here on the history of navigation in the RAF.

For anyone interested in this subject, "Most Secret War", RV Jones' autobiography, is a must read.

Depends on what is meant by accuracy. If talking about hitting a particular area then the accuracy was greater than hitting a given specific building or group of buildings etc. The German guidance systems were initially in advance of anything Britain had. By 1942 British methods were in the ascendency due mainly to the decision to take the bombing campaign to the German industrial heartland and the determination of "Bomber" Harris at a time when German raids on Britain had passed their peak.

Both sides had times where targets were missed, sometimes with a large margin of error. The Luftwaffe bombing of Dublin when Liverpool was the target springs to mind and both sides had methods of misleading raiders into dropping bombs on empty countryside.

To effectively hit a small, defined, target took a great deal of training and not a small amount of luck. That is why area bombing was carried out by both sides. The British raids on the dams, Amiens prison, the Tirpitz and the u-boat pens at St Nazaire, where tightly defined targets and aim points were specified, took far more specialised training than that given to crews on the regular bombing sorties over towns and cities.

Later in the war the Allies found that smaller aircraft in small numbers, such as fighter bombers, were effective in destroying specific items such as trains, bridges and less well defended buildings without the need to area bomb with large numbers of heavy bombers and this use became an important tool in the run up to and after D-day.

There are many reports of both sides 'ditching' their bombs. Only last month I read a first hand report of an 'attack' on a Fleet Air Arm base in Scotland where the the bomber ditched the bombs in the sea. Since it was a clear night and the observers could see the aircraft and the target was very close to the coast - the crew decided not to attack, for whatever reason.

Later in the war, the RAF crews had to take a photograph to show that they were over the target in order to qualify for the trip against their Tour. Whilst many failed to find the target, for many understandabale reasons, some crews deliberately chose not to bomb the target.

I unfortunately can't remember where I read it,but many many years ago I read that the RAF had done research into bombing accuracy during WW2 and concluded that only 1 bomb in 16 had fallen within 1 mile of its target.

Am interested to see if anyone can elaborate on the subject.

Emeritus.

WW2 navaids....
 

.....were not all that great. John Cruickshank VC once told me that he had been tasked into a "box" SE of Iceland for a very long surveillance mission in his Catalina. The cloud base was was low and very thick. No sun, no stars when it got dark, all done on DR when the forecasts were a tad "variable". At off task time they set heading for Sullom Voe in Shetland and after a long transit made landfall on the island of Benbecula. Buggah!! It was now another 4 hrs coast crawling to back to SV. And errors of that magnitude were not uncommon.

This tale was triggered after his first trip in a Nimrod where, back in dispersal the baby nav was claiming that the nav system was a tad out - the error being inside the wingspan of the aircraft after 6 hours.

The Ancient Mariner

Emeritus

You're thinking of the Butt Report https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butt_Report mentioned in the original post. There's a transcript at https://etherwave.files.wordpress.co...ir-14-1218.pdf

Emeritus - as I understand it, that was the Butt Report that started the attempts to improve bombing accuracy

Are we talking about accuracy or effectiveness? Accuracy is irrelevant if you can't find the aiming point and the woeful results early in WW2 are surely down to the inability to find the target town, never mind the aiming point. Someone out there should be able to quote the sort of CEPs being achieved on the range at the time, but in 1946 IX(B) with its new Lincolns was proud to record an average error (not CEP) of 32 yards for 8 bombs from 20000 feet - step forward F/O Myatt and crew! I suspect 300 yards was nearer the mark in real life.

Navigation without radio aids is/was not easy and AFAIR in the 50s a requirement for classification as a Select Canberra crew was to keep within 50nm of track on astro.

Butt Report
 

The Butt Report, 1941, found that on average only one in three RAF bombers claimed to have reached the target and, of these, only one in five bombed within 5 miles of it, a figure that fell to one in 15 on a moonless night.
So only 1 bomb in 45 got within 5 miles of its target under those conditions.

The Operations Research Group were given the task of identifying the problems, and providing solutions.

ORG calculated, from ‘real world’ photographic data, that the Dead Reckoning 50% Band of Error would have been 24 miles radius after the 3 hour flight to Berlin.

DR Errors on a UK to Berlin flight:

A 1o error in heading gives an across track error of 10 nautical miles.
A 10 knot error in the across-track component of wind gives an across track error of 10 nautical miles.
A 10 knot error in the along-track component of wind gives an along- track error of 30 nautical miles.
A 1 minute error in bomb release gives a 3 nautical mile along- track error.
A pencil line is ¼ mile wide on a 1:500,000 plotting chart.

There was also problems with bomb aiming and even the bomb bar doors of early war aircraft were held shut with bungee cords - so there was a delay whilst the falling bombs actually opened the doors.