Was the S.B.C. a waste?

[Tony Evans]

Excellent, Bill. Nobody could refuse the Germans primus inter pares when it came to fiendishness, except the later 20th C Japanese.

 

Sand Creek, Wounded Knee, the Belgian administration of the Congo, the British indiscriminantly bombing cities -- with the actual capability to do substnatial harm. There's enough ignominy to go around, Ken.

[BillB]

I cant speak for the Gotha Raids, but Zeppelin raids at least early on dont seem to have much in the way of sophisticated targeting. One Timewatch documentary relates one that somehow managed to find Oxford Street in London, and proceeded down it dropping bombs in its wake. The only apparently targeted raid I can remember off the top of my head was a raid against the Royal estate at Sandringham, which repelled by a mixture of setting up searchlights in the wrong locations (the first Q site?) and a unit of the Royal Navy mobile anti aircraft unit. Of course the main difference here, Zeppelin raids seem mainly to be by night, Gotha by day.

 

There was a very good book by the commander of the Royal Navy Mobile section (which used among other things French mobile AA guns) available on Archive.org. Well worth a read.

http://archive.org/details/defenceoflondon100rawluoft

 

I suppose it depends what you mean by sophisticated targeting, Stuart; sending nine Zeppelins after Liverpool docks flying across the width of England seems pretty sophisticated, even if it didn't go according to plan. Here's something I put together for a relative who lived not far from where some of the bombs landed in Loughborough.

 

 

Zeppelin Bombing Attack on Loughborough, Leics. on the

Night of 31 January/1 February 1916

 

 

The attack on Loughborough was part of a planned raid on Liverpool by nine Reichkriegsmarine (Imperial German Navy) L20-type Zeppelins commanded by Korvettenkäpitan Peter Strasser.[1] The craft belonged to Marine Luftschiff Abteilung (Naval Airship Unit),[2] and were based at some or all of the following bases on the German North Sea coast: Friedrichshaven, Fuhlsbüttel, Lowenthal and Nordholz.[3] The Zeppelins included L13 (Käpitanleutnant Heinrich Mathey), L14 (Käpitanleutnant Alois Böcker), L19 (Käpitanleutnant Löwe), L20 (Käpitanleutnant Stabbert) and L21 (Käpitanleutnant Max Dietrich).[4] The airships all appear to have been of the L20-Class, the most advanced fielded to date and still the largest combat aircraft to see action at between 536 and 585 feet in length and around 60 feet in diameter. All had two crew gondolas and four engines driving a single propeller each, giving top speeds between 55 and 60 miles per hour with operational ranges between 2,670 and 3,000 miles. Operational ceilings varied between 9,136 and 11,500 feet, with payloads between 33,000 and 39,250 lbs.[5]

 

The attackers left their bases at approximately midday on Monday 31 January 1916 but only the latter five of the nine Zeppelins appear to have carried out their attacks, making individual landfalls in the area of Norfolk and the Wash. Matters went awry for the attackers at this point as the British East Coast was blanketed in fog; a combination of this and navigational errors misled them into mistaking rivers, canals and industrial sites in the suburbs of Birmingham and the East Midlands for the River Mersey, Birkenhead and Liverpool. Böcker’s L14 appears to have penetrated furthest west, passing south of Nottingham and Derby and reaching Shrewsbury before turning back east toward Tamworth at 22:05. L13, L20 and L21 appear to have been spotted near Derby between 18:45 and 20:35. It is unclear precisely which airships carried out which attacks, but overall the raiders dropped 220 bombs across six counties. L13 appears to have been responsible for bombing the Leicester Railway Junction at Burton-on-Trent and the nearby Ind Coope bottling store at between 20:12 and 20:50, possibly preceded or followed by the L19 and L20. Although a blackout was supposed to be in force, the subsequent enquiry criticised its implementation at Burton, and there was also an exemption for railways due to their importance to the war effort. Whichever, the Zeppelins appear to have been attracted to the unguarded lights and the Burton attacks hit a Midlands Railway Goods shed, a stationary train at Leicester Junction, houses, and the brightly lit Black Cat Billiards Saloon suffered a near miss that killed a passing sixteen year old boy. In all fifteen were killed and seventy-two injured.

 

Poor light discipline also played a part in attacks by Käpitanleutnant Böcker’s L14, which scattered bombs in passing at pipe furnaces at Ashby Wolds near Tamworth and later at Overseal and Swadlincote without much effect before turning north-west toward Derby. In this instance Böcker was probably attracted by tram and other lights coming back on in south Derby after an earlier blackout, and dropped his total remaining load of twenty high explosive and four incendiary bombs. These hit the Rolls-Royce Works, the Midland Railway Locomotive Works, the Midland Railway’s Carriage & Wagon Works, the local gasworks, the Metallite Lamp Works, Fletcher’s Lace Factory, the Rolls-Royce Foreman’s Club bowling green and nearby streets. Three railwaymen were killed and two injured, one of whom died later. L19 and L21 appear to have been attracted to foundry furnace fires on the outskirts of Birmingham, the former succeeding the latter and possibly drawn to the explosions and fires caused by her predecessor. Both airships scattered bombs along a course running over Tipton (fourteen dead), Lower Bradley (two dead), Wednesbury (fourteen dead) and Walsall (three dead). Apart from setting the Crown Tube Works in Wednesbury ablaze, all these bombs landed on residential areas, hitting houses and a church; the Walsall casualties included the Lady Mayoress of Walsall, Mary Julia Slater. All the dead appear to have been killed by bombs from the L21.

 

The attack on Loughborough appears to have carried out by two airships, Käpitanleutnant Stabbert’s L20 and one other; the latter might have been Käpitanleutnant Mathey’s L13 which had attacked Burton and does not appear to figure in attacks on Derby or points further west. L14 first bombed the Stanton Ironworks near Ilkeston before trying for the Brush Works and Herbert Morris Works in Loughborough, missing the first but hitting the latter and a number of buildings in the town centre and the Empress Road and the Rushes area. The attack lasted for approximately twenty minutes between 20:10 and 20:30 and killed ten and injured between eight and twelve.

 

All the Zeppelins bar one returned safely to their north German bases. L21, for example, crossed the coast near Lowestoft at 23:35 on 31 January and docked at Nordholz at c.10:45 on 1 February 1916, after a round trip of 1,056 miles in just under twenty-four hours. The exception was L19 which appears to have been suffering problems with three of its four engines and thus did not clear the British coast until 05:25 on 1 February. Unable to maintain altitude or steer the Zeppelin strayed into Dutch airspace near Ameland in Holland, was fired on by Dutch troops and ditched in the North Sea shortly afterward.

 

The still floating wreck was happened upon by the trawler King Stephen from Grimsby, captained by a William Martin. Martin declined to take the sixteen-strong crew of the Zeppelin aboard after a shouted conversation during which he was allegedly offered money by Käpitanleutnant Löwe and sailed away leaving the German airmen to their fate, none of whom were seen again. Contemporary newspaper reports claimed Martin’s action was in retaliation for the German Zeppelin attacks, but the fact that the Germans were outnumbered the trawler’s crew by almost two to one and may have been armed, and the fact that the King Stephen was fishing illegally in Dutch waters might also have had some bearing on the matter.

 

Be that as it may, the British Press Bureau took the unusual step of releasing an official communiqué about the Great Zeppelin Raid on Saturday 5 February, to counter lurid German claims of the damage they had inflicted. The communiqué detailed the precise damage inflicted by the bombing, and cited an overall casualty count of sixty one dead and 101 injured; the former figure may have risen subsequently as some of those injured in the raid succumbed to their injuries; at least one victim in Walsall died shortly afterward of blood poisoning and one of the injured railwaymen at Burton passed away later, for example.

 

Further Reading

Cole, Christopher & E F Cheesman The Air Defence of Great Britain 1914-1918 (ISBN 0 370 30538 80).

Fegan, Thomas The Baby-Killers

Morris, Joseph German Air Raids on Britain 1914-1918 (ISBN 1 897632 16 9);

Rimmel, Ray Zeppelin! (ISBN 0 85177 239 0)

Robinson, Dr Douglas The Zeppelin in Combat (ISBN 0 85429 130 X);

 

 

[1] Reichkriegsmarine: literally Imperial War Navy

 

[2] Marine Luftschiff Abteilung: Naval Airship Unit

 

[3] All four locations feature in accounts of the raid, but it is unclear which Zeppelins were based at each or if all four bases were involved in the 31 January raid

 

[4] Korvettenkäpitan is equivalent to Royal Navy Commander rank : Käpitanleutnant equivalent to Lieutenant-Commander

 

[5] All technical details refer to L19, L20 & L21, as no information on L13 available at time of writing

 

Edited July 22, 2013 by BillB

[Ivanhoe]

 

I stand by my point the Germans were not doing strategic analysis or intelligence gathering for strategic bombing remotely accurately, either for the USSR or the UK. Maybe this is just another indication of the compartmentalization of Reich authority and empire building.

 

Can you really blame them, though, on the Russian end of things? Even if their spies correctly identified the movement of whole factories eastward, at the higher levels of command who would believe those reports? Relative to western Europe, Russia was still a backwards agrarian nation with a poorly educated populace. Comparing the theory that they did move their factories against the theory that they were just doing some decoy work, the latter surely seemed more likely.

[Ken Estes]

Sophisticated be blowed, they just followed the Great Central Railway.

 

Seriously though, a great find and clearly points to the fact they were more than just targeting London and the South-east. Ive also got a feeling Strasser was the man who dropped the bombs on Oxford Street.

 

BTW I urge you to take a look at that book. They also have some scanned copies of the war illustrated on there which are also well worth downloading.

Hah. Even to the present day I have found USMC helo pilots navigating in the US by civilian roadmaps, just as Guderian inter alia used Baedeker guides in the low countries and France.

 

Nice to be reminded of Peter Strasser's contribution to German naval aviation that made him the presumed name of the second KM CV after G. Zeppelin.

[D Simcock]

 

 

 

1. The Luftwaffe could range French and Polish targets from airfields close to the borders of Germany. It could range Great Britain from airfields in France. The British could range Berlin from Southern England. The USAAF could range Central Romania from North Africa and the Danzig area (now Gdansk, in Poland) from Southern England. Both the British and the Americans could mount heavy, effective attacks with hundreds of aircraft at those renages. That's precisely what "range" means in the strategic airpower sense -- the ability to go where you can't send your armies. The capability to hit targets a couple hundred miles past where your armies have occupied is not strategic range, in air power terms. It's just a technical capability of the aircraft in question.

 

 

 

 

The Luftwaffe bombers could, already in 1939, reach targets over Britain from its bases in Germany. It's not that far. That doesn't mean that it is a good idea to do it if you have airfields in France. In fact, operations in 1944 against London and other targets were launched, for some units, from airfields in Holland and Germany.

 

2 - 4. You apparently think that a snapshot of 1939 doctrines and capabilities defined the air forces for the entire war.

 

 

I could say the same about you with the above quote: "effective", "heavy", "hundreds of aircraft", well, certainly not before 1942, with the only possible exception of "hundreds" for the RAF.

 

Well, it's true that in 1939 the Americans and British had a fantastic view of strategic bombing, and hadn't paid much attention to any other capabilities, except for fighter defense. But the war wasn't fought in 1939. It was fought in 1940, 1941, 1942, 1943, 1944, and 1945. Over those years, the Luftwaffe never really grew out of its initial form, either in doctrine or equipment. The Americans and British evolved both their doctrine and technological capabilities to the point where they did have strategic reach and effectiveness. That's the difference that counts in the discussion of whether an air force was tactical or strategic -- could that air force actually do strategic attack, at ranges independent of army front lines, for as long as it took to get the job accomplished. The British and Americans could, in the end. The Germans never managed to

 

Exactly, let's look at the entire war. I would postulate that, taking in account doctrine, technical capability of the aircraft and equipment, training, and number of bombers the Luftwaffe was the number one AF in terms of capacity of conducting a strategic bombing campaign, for the period 1939-some point of 1942.

An AF that was in top for a good part of the war, cannot be said that it could not do strategic attack, unless that the true strategic attack was only "invented" in 1943/4.

 

I think you are arguing the case that the Luftwaffe 'could have been' an effective strategic bombing force. Maybe it could have been in the absence of commitment to tactical tasks, but based on the actual results achieved it never was an effective strategic force and this includes the times when its primary commitment was strategic one, in the Battle of Britain. It was however, a very effective tactical air support force.

 

I disagree with the statement there was no such thing as Blitzkrieg. There was but it didn't occur exactitude of precision or coordination that occurred in the definition. Fusing air targets to tactical ground objective in a timely fashion was in effect Blitzkrieg.

Edited July 28, 2013 by D Simcock

[D Simcock]

I never said not doing. I said possibly not doing it so often.

 

I recall an interview to Albert Speer in 'the World at War' which I think contradicts this. He said in that interview that it was their belief in the ministry after the Hamburg raids that if what had been done to Hamburg could have been done to another five cities, [relatively quickly] the war would have been over. They just didn't know it wasn't possible to do that to another five cities in 1943. Similarly there was a gag placed on the reporting of the Cologne raid by the Nazis as they feared the effect this would have on morale, and their control of the populace. Speer also states that the campaign did produce a second front and tied up resources which he believed would have been decisive in other theatres. So the Nazis seem to have believed strategic bombing was effective. If anything, from an Allied perspective, there needed to be more of it. Speer was also one of the first to point out to the Allies that strategic bombing hadn't destroyed their production capacity, so it was I think his view on the effectiveness of strategic bombing seems to be more related to effects on morale and resource allocation issue than issues with effects on production.

 

My conclusion is that while strategic bombing didn't achieve its primary stated objective of knocking out German production capacity, it did through its intensity achieve some of its secondary objectives, namely opening a second front, raising morale of the allies and lowering morale of the Germans, disruption if not elimination of the German war industry (which also increased costs), and diversion of resources from other fronts which probably ultimately let to a reduction in the duration of the war.

 

I would also argue that the enhancement of Volksgemeinschaft from 1943 -45 was as much a result of the unconditional surrender clause as it was to the 'air terror.' Volsgemeinschaft may have taken on a whole new meaning if there were a little more manoeuvre room for the Germans politically (note the Germans, not the Nazis).

Edited July 28, 2013 by D Simcock

[DougRichards]

 

Sophisticated be blowed, they just followed the Great Central Railway.

 

Seriously though, a great find and clearly points to the fact they were more than just targeting London and the South-east. Ive also got a feeling Strasser was the man who dropped the bombs on Oxford Street.

 

BTW I urge you to take a look at that book. They also have some scanned copies of the war illustrated on there which are also well worth downloading.

Hah. Even to the present day I have found USMC helo pilots navigating in the US by civilian roadmaps, just as Guderian inter alia used Baedeker guides in the low countries and France.

 

Nice to be reminded of Peter Strasser's contribution to German naval aviation that made him the presumed name of the second KM CV after G. Zeppelin.

 

 

Civil airliners in the 1920s in Britain and Europe followed civilian railway tracks between cities as the most convenient navagation tool, particularly in poor visibility.

 

The downside was when two aircraft were navigating using the same railway line, both pilots mainly looking down at the line and to check altitude, but the two aircraft were each going in the opposite direction, towards each other.....

 

hence

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_mid-air_collision_of_airliners

[Tony Evans]

 

I disagree with the statement there was no such thing as Blitzkrieg. There was but it didn't occur exactitude of precision or coordination that occurred in the definition. Fusing air targets to tactical ground objective in a timely fashion was in effect Blitzkrieg.

 

 

The air component of blitzkrieg is way overdone in some ways. Close air support was important in keeping tactical things moving on the ground, but it was no more important than mobile divisions, or the basic operational concept of encirclement and anihilation, which goes back to Moltke the Elder. Blitzkrieg could be done without CAS -- though of course at substantially greater expense -- but without the mobile troops on the ground, and a plan to use them in a certain way, no amount of CAS would creat blitzkrieg. And, CAS or no CAS, blitzkrieg always demanded air superiority, so that logistics and reinforcements could be moved about freely.

 

WRT the term "blitzkrieg" itself, it of course has legitmacy through sheer regularity of use in describing a certain kind of operational approach, combined with a certain technological tool set. But it's important to remember that it is -- and always has been -- a descriptive term, not a prescriptive one. What has been termed the "Soviet Blitzkrieg" by at least one author, for example, has nothing to do with the German blitzkrieg approach to winning whole wars quickly and decisively. The Soviet operational art -- mostly post-Kharkov 1943, but with early success in Operation Uranus -- wa about chopping up territory to be taken into operationally realistic chunkc, and systematically taking them, with no thought towards winning the war in any immediate sense. (Though obviously you do win when the enemy gives in or you run him out of chunks.)

[Junior FO]

...

Edited September 22, 2024 by Junior FO

[Angrybk]

Now that this is back from Zombie Status I want to reiterate that banning Tony Evans was a really bad call. Yes I know it was ten years ago

[R011]

58 minutes ago, Angrybk said:

Now that this is back from Zombie Status I want to reiterate that banning Tony Evans was a really bad call. Yes I know it was ten years ago

Perhaps he could be unbanned.  It would just be a symbolic gesture, though, as Tony has since passed away.

[Angrybk]

1 hour ago, R011 said:

Perhaps he could be unbanned.  It would just be a symbolic gesture, though, as Tony has since passed away.

I had no idea. Shit 

[Stuart Galbraith]

Im genuinely sorry to hear that. I was always arguing with him, but I rather liked him and respected his intelligence. That sucks.

 

[RETAC21]

12 hours ago, R011 said:

Perhaps he could be unbanned.  It would just be a symbolic gesture, though, as Tony has since passed away.

When? thought he wasn't that old, damn sorry to hear.

[JWB]

14 hours ago, R011 said:

Perhaps he could be unbanned.  It would just be a symbolic gesture, though, as Tony has since passed away.

When, how?

[shep854]

IIRC, he would be mid-late '50s.  ISTR reading something about cancer, but it's been a while.

[Markus Becker]

🤓 For a moment i was worried this was about naval dive bombers.  

[sunday]

You too?

[shep854]

15 hours ago, Markus Becker said:

🤓 For a moment i was worried this was about naval dive bombers.  

While an interwar biplane, the SBC was a good training and development platform for the US Navy.

[Markus Becker]

It's a shame Hornet's CAG didn't reject the SBDs on the grounds of no time to train with them. Then we'd have had biplanes at Midway. 

Aside from the coolness Hornet would have to launch from a shorter range. That would at the very least have mitigated the navigation CF wrt the Wildcats. 

[R011]

On 3/25/2023 at 11:36 AM, JWB said:

When, how?

A couple of years ago.  Complications from diabetes, I believe.  It seemed rather sudden to those of us following him on NavWeaps forums.

[Stuart Galbraith]

He should be put on the wall of the missing, even if he was banned.

[rmgill]

On 3/24/2023 at 9:29 PM, R011 said:

Perhaps he could be unbanned.  It would just be a symbolic gesture, though, as Tony has since passed away.

https://www.thespectrum.com/obituaries/sgs026005
 

Anthony Owen Evans

Dammeron Valley - Anthony Owen Evans, 57, passed away on March 9, 2022, in St. George, Utah. He was born November 9, 1964, to Stan and Johnna Evans, in San Gabriel, California.

After graduating from Don Bosco Technical Institute in Rosemead, California, he joined the Marine Corps in November 1983 and honorary discharged in May 1993. While in service, he participated in Operation Desert Storm. After working in California as a technical assistant for a few years, he moved to Dammeron Valley and attended Dixie State College, graduating in 2003, summa cum laude with a degree of Associate of Science. After graduating college, he worked as a professional computer programmer in St. George, Utah.

He is survived by his parents, Stanley and Johnna Evans.

Memorial Services will be held Saturday, March 19, 2022, at 1:00 pm at Metcalf Mortuary, 288 West St. George, Utah.