Night bombers interception in Western Europe in 1944

In article ,
"Emmanuel Gustin" writes:
"OXMORON1" wrote in message
...

I suggest that the bombing radar system in a B-52 was more
reliable/efficient
than the navigation methods and Norden bombsight that Art had available
to him during WWII.

There is an interesting thing about post-war bombing
and that is that, on the whole, it was based on British
WWII tactics more than anything else. The debate about
which force used the better tactics during WWII, the
RAF or the USAAF, is fairly pointless. At the time, both
did the best they could, and in the end they were both
reasonably successful.

Just so. And the two efforst were complimentary. The Germans werent'
able to get away with building one Air Defence System - they had to
build two. (Well, actually, they could have built one, if they'd
organized it right)

But soon after the war was over, the USAAF tactics
became a historical curiosity. With the exception of
some B-29 operations in Korea, no post-war bomber
force tried to fight its way into enemy territory in
daylight and close formation. The preferred tactics
were an extension of those preferred and developed
by the RAF in wartime years -- a fairly diffuse approach,
based on suppressing or misleading enemy air defenses
and moving in bombers, if possible, unseen; defensive
armament largely disappeared from bombers. Of course
this trend was stimulated by the appearance of nuclear
weapons, guided missiles, and, in recent years, stealth.

I think the big sea-change here wasn't that the RAF tactics were
superior, but the incresdible jump in the lethality of an individual
bomber. When the goal changed from getting an X-ton bomb pattern on a
particular target to getting a single airplane over that target, the
large close foramations of bombers became redundant.
It's worth noting that in Korea, when the B-29s were bombing targets
using conventional bombs, they used large, mutually supporting
formations. Until they ran out of targets, that is. (It also makes
the job of escorting the bombers a lot easier, if you have then all in
one place, rather than spread out all over the sky. If the bombers
can't protect themselves, at least the interceptors will be
concentrating on one target, so that the escorts can gat at them.)

Until the advent of SAGE, the big limitation of bomber defence was the
limited ability of the GCI networks to handle interceptions. A
Canadian study on the tactical use of the CF-105 Arrow specifies that
interceptors can be vectored at targets at a rate of 1/minute. If the
interceptors don't have a significant speed advantage over the
bombers, and sufficient radius to be able to intercept a target that
isn't obligingly flying directly at the interceptor's airfield, (Not a
trivial issue, by any means), then it's fairly easy to saturate the
system by flying in singletons at spacings of 30-40 seconds through
the same GCI sector. In some respects, that's what teh British were
doing with the Bomber Streams - concentrating teh airplanes through
specific points to saturate the very, very brittle German GCI system.
The bomber streams also helped by reducing the volume of sky that a
bomber would be found in - Even with AI radar, the field of
view/search of a night fighter was very limited. In order to find
the targets, they had to get themselves pointed at teh target within a
fairly short distance. The long wavelengths of German AI radars meant
that angular discrimination was fairly poor, and the minumum range of
teh radars was large, so they couldn't be used for the attack. (This
also was a problem with the early Allied radars) This meant that at
some point in the interception, the fighter would have to acquire the
blacked-out bomber visually.
Of course, once the fighters got into the bomber stream, they had an
easier time of it, since the targets were fairly concentrated.
Keeping the fighters out of teh bomber stream was aided by chaff,
decoy and spoof raids, and buggering with the GCI net.

For all its failings, Bomber Command pioneered modern
air warfare, with its high emphasis on "blinding" enemy
air defense systems. It is an interesting question whether
eventually the nature of the problem will shift back, with
increasingly sophistication creating tight air defenses that
again can only be countered by a frontal assault with
overwhelming strength. I expect not.


I agree. Back then, an attacking airplane had only one option - fly
over the target and place itself at teh proper point with enough
precision to drop a load of dumb bombs. Nowadays, the attackers have
much more flexibility - the systems on board the airplanes allow than
to attack from any direction, speed, or height, and to acquire targets
on the fly with very high accuracy. With PGM's and todays' standoff
weapons, there's no need ot get close to the target. That increases
the volume of space teh defence needs to be able to monitor and be
able to intercept in tremendously. As the attackers become more
stealthy, it also becomes necessary to increase the number of sensors
(Radar/IR/Ground Obcervers/Ouija Boards) by an even more astronomical
amount.

--
Pete Stickney
A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many
bad measures. -- Daniel Webster