hehe, i was gonna mention the precision thing. I've got a book here about it that has about 10 pages of references after each chapter and talks extensively about this bombing 'accuracy'. As I said, remember the 16km 'dot' and the 8km area around it - hitting something within it was considered 'accurate'!... So imagine you bombing a factory producing tanks. You end up bombing a cow field 20km away. That would be considered a 'success'.
So that's that.
but US was in fact going for precision bombing, but they had some key weaknesses too: they believe in huge superiority of their equipment for example (specificaly, 2 best examples are their bombing aim and tank aim that allowed to shoot on move - neither actually worked). So here's the story. US bombed factories that produced friction bearings, used in like 80% of all german equipment. And best part was it was produced in one town in Germany. IN theory, had US bombed that place to the end, it would have halted the whole bloody army! But it didn't happen.. Why? The germans later said 'had they been able to continue bombing those bearing factories...' and the key word is 'had they been able'. Because they weren't so successful. They lost THOUSANDS of airplanes! Germans air defence was damn good. So it did few raids on the city making friction bearings, and that was the end of it. It's a fact - bombers of WW2 were grossly inaccurate, even the later versions. It's also a fact that so much more people died in WW2 from conventional bombing rather than Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombs.
Here's a few notes on how inefficient the bombing was made by allies (that germans were equally ineffective when it comes to GB is a common wisdom and that needs no alterations
)
I will first reiterate the point. 2 events conincided. In 2nd half of 1944 was the time when German economic indicators went into decline. That's when the bombing intecified and its credited heavily for it. But that's not really true, in fact it's completely different fact was responsible for decline. In September 1944 Germany lost its key source for Iron ore in France and Oil in Romania. This would obviously have an impact on production of anything related to oil and iron ore! And remember, while it was demoralizing, a demoralized german worker is not necessarily a less productive german worker! In US war report they estimated that in cities without bombing about half of population (57%) wanted to surrender. In those that were bombed, it was about 64%. Hardly a huge differnence. That's a US source.
Also don' forget - more than 4/5 of bombs dropped on germany in WW2 were dropped past January 1944 (yes, allies too late realized they needed much more bombs to make impact!). Also it was a failure because about 2/3s of bombs were dropped on civilians, and only 1/3 on military targets.
Another reason the whole bombing till 1944 was a disaster in terms of achieved goals was because only in December 1943 the P51 became available for the brits as an escort fighter for the Lancasters. And it took them so bloody long because they figured out too late that the unreliable engine that came with Mustang needed to be replace by if I remember correctly, a very good Merlin.
So bombing took place for 3 years and was complete waste. Only in 1944 it seemed to make an impact but by that time Germany was losing the war anyway, and the bombings became so intensive and concentrated that of course it finally started to show results. But it was not in any way a key to winning the war. On contrary, people on the ground, slugging it out in bloody fights were the ones deciding it.
BTW, the Normandy landing plans begun in 1942 (COSSAC plan) and were subsequintly changed many times (from the very flawed to something that could have potential of working).
OOOOPS. SORRY for the Long and Boring post guys.
