Hi Pearly Button; Air forces are important to win wars, and so are ground forces. But the lesson that was not learned in WW2, or was learned too late, is that air and ground are force multipliers. That is, an attack by air is vastly improved in effect by having a coordinated ground attack. And an attack on the ground is vastly improved by having a coordinated air attack. They did learn this in the application of their tactics, but they didn't learn it in the application of their strategic plan. Or at least their strategic plan didn't take into account the "combined arms" advantages that they could have taken.
The two forces are complementary. They make up for each other's weaknesses. To get the same result you can use either a huge amount of air power, a huge amount of ground pounders, or a very moderate amount of combined forces.
War, like engineering, is about efficiency. Air and ground forces are much more effective in company to each other. Air superiority provides recon, attacks targets difficult from the ground, interdicts enemy supplies, and breaks up communication.
What the allies ended up with is a situation where they had the advantage on the ground in the Eastern front, while they had the advantage in the air over Berlin. The problem is that this is not an efficient way of distributing forces. It would have been far more effective to combine the forces into one that had the combination of an advantage on the ground and an advantage in the air. That combination, command over the air and command over the ground, is what gave the famous German blitzkrieg its advantage. Without air superiority, the German blitzkrieg petered out.
In terms of winning the war quickly, and in terms of minimizing Russian losses, the Allies should have converted their wasteful heavy bomber production into fighter production, and shipped a good portion of those fighters to the Eastern front. From the production figures I gave earlier, it is clear that they could easily have increased their fighter production by a factor of 10. That many fighters would have given them complete air superiority both in the Eastern front and the West.
That kind of fighter production would likely have allowed them to invade France much earlier. (Maybe they wouldn't have chosen Normandy, but instead would have picked an area that was better from the point of view of combined operations between air and ground forces...)
Instead what happened is that they pissed away the majority of their production effort on inefficient heavy bomber production. This left them with insufficient amounts of fighters to give the Russians local air superiority on the Eastern Front.
Without air superiority over the Russian front the Germans would have collapsed quickly. The Germans fought the Allies to a standoff in Italy until the Allies used their air superiority to prevent supply of front line German troops. When cut off from supplies, the Germans quickly fell apart. The Russians would have done the same thing if they'd had local air superiority but they didn't because we didn't make enough fighters to give them enough. The reason we didn't make enough fighters is because 70% or more of our production went into heavy bomber aircraft.
Germany's big problem was that they didn't have production capability of more than about 1/10th of the allies in aircraft. We had at least 5x as much production capability (look at the aircraft production figures for 1940-45 I posted to the thread recently. Correcting for aircraft types increases the ratio higher, maybe 10x), but we pissed away most of our production capability into bomber aircraft. If we had put most of our production into fighters our total aircraft count would have exploded to 10x the German production. That would have given us massive, undeniable air superiority over the Germans, (do you deny this obvious fact?) and very effective assistance to our land forces. But we didn't do that. Instead we wasted time bombing German cities with heavy bombers.
That Germany didn't manufacture lots of heavy bombers was not because of a mistake they made, but instead due to their inability to keep up with our aircraft production. If they'd built a lot of heavy bombers, our superior numbers of fighters (superior despite the fact that we put so little of our resources into it) would have shot them down. Building significant amounts of heavy bombers was never an option for Germany because they were starved for production. Heavy bombers are "targets" only without local air superiority, and (as has been widely noted), they were ineffective even with local air superiority except against special targets (things that burn well).
If Germany had decided to put 70% of their production effort into heavy bombers (like we did), the effect would have been to reduce their fighter production by 70%. Where would that have left their air superiority? At the beginning of the war Germany had made the same mistake England had made regarding the importance of strategic bombing. It is well known that Germany lost the Battle for Britain when they quit worrying about air superiority and started concentrating on strategic bombing. Why is it that what was a fatal error for the German air force was a brilliant decision for our own? The fact is that it was a mistake for both sides, but our much superior production capacity saved us:
"made a fatal tactical error, perhaps at Hitler's urging, when he switched from direct attacks upon the RAF to bombing London in early September 1940 just when British fighter defences were crucially stretched from losses in the air and on the ground. RAF Fighter Command thus gained precious time to recover."
1freespace.com
Re: "What else could they do? [To assist the Russians.] The strategic bombing campaign was the only "other front" available unless they were willing to accept casualty rates of a similar magnitude to the Russians."
The point that most of Germany's army was deployed to the Eastern Front is exactly true. But that avoids the question of what the most effective way of assisting the Russians was. It's clear now that the best way of helping them would have been to supply them with sufficient fighter aircraft that they would achieve local air superiority. That, after all, is what the Germans used to such effect in their blitzkrieg, and what the Allies had to delay the invasions at Normandy for.
Providing air superiority would have been the most useful way of helping the Russians. While the Germans had 145 divisions on the Eastern front, they were outnumbered by the Russians. Russia is famous for its artillery. Local air superiority would have made that artillery much more effective (by spotting rounds and targets). Local air superiority would have made the German problem of resupply much more difficult. If Russia had had air superiority in 1940, Germany probably wouldn't have invaded them. Instead, they had a weak airforce and Germany hurt them badly.
So instead of building up local air superiority in both the Western and Eastern fronts (through the massive construction of fighter aircraft) we instead put the majority of our efforts into heavy bombers of questionable effectiveness.
We sent the Russians plenty of trucks &c., but what we needed to send them was fighter aircraft. In fact we sent them some fighters, but not enough for them to achieve air superiority.
"During World War II, all sides learned that air superiority was necessary to conduct ground operations successfully. From the beaches of North Africa and Normandy to the amphibious landing at Inchon, from the valiant defense of Khe Sanh to the famous 'left hook' during the Gulf War-American air superiority proved vital."
af.mil
"General Frido von Senger und Etterlin, commander of the XIV Panzer Corps during the battle, said that enemy air control created difficulties for the German defenders to move troops laterally as was required. He was only able to move at night. He noted that the commander who could only move during darkness was like a chess player allowed only one move for each three made by his opponent.
...
The concept of combining an interdiction [i.e. air] campaign with an offensive on the ground is of such importance as to merit another example. The Allied invasion of Normandy was planned in the full knowledge that German forces in northern France would greatly outnumber the invaders. The only way the invasion could succeed was by preventing the movement of reinforcements to the Normandy area. The planners depended on an interdiction campaign to accomplish that end.
...
The difference was in air power. The Allies had conducted a two-month interdiction campaign before the invasion. On D-day, the Allies flew 14,000 sorties, opposed to 100 the Germans managed to put in the air. (Allied air losses from all causes were 127 aircraft, while German losses were 39.)"
au.af.mil
Modern military theory emphasizes the importance of combined operations. They have all kinds of phrases for it, but it all amounts to the same thing. Make your air and land forces work together. What the Allies did in WW2 was inefficient.
On the other hand, it could have been done for political reasons. If we had shipped 10x as many fighters to the Russian front perhaps the French would be using a different alphabet by now. But from the point of view of military efficiency, there is no question that we overbuilt heavy bombers and underbuilt fighters and attack aircraft.
-- Carl |
