Originally posted by sean9898
Yes, as you've pointed out the Kamakaze oops Stuka pilots had some trouble in staying aloft. Any ideas why the Germans didn't use their other airframes as a tank killer. Didn't they possess a decent 2 engined fighter which might have been more suitable?
Monty was nothing if not thorough, he assembled a ridiculous ratio of aircraft, somthing approaching 10:1 at the battle.
I don't think that in 1942 the allied bombing campaign was designed to destroy the Luftwaffe. There may have been a vague justification that attacks on factories and workers may have slowed airframe production, but it certainly was not intended to be a battle of attrition against the Luftwaffe. Sending unescorted daylight bombers may have sounded like a good idea at the time, but the idea was that formation bombing would protect the platforms, not attack the Luftwaffe. Likewise, sending fighters achieved a by-product of Luftwaffe destruction, again not the intended goal of bombing.
And I thought the Russians were the good guys 
Transportation and liquidation of undesirables is different to ignoring a number of Soviet cities ceasing to exist. I'm not sure the allied pilots would be the only group hated if raids continued, some of that anger might turn against the Kremlin.
Stalin did divert resources to the relief of Leningrad, including civilian rations. Using your logic, wouldn't he have just let the civilian non-workers starve? There was also a limited evacuation of women and children from the city when the ice over Ladoga thawed. Wouldn't an uncaring dictator simply have left them there?
I thought there were no industrial centers. From the outset of any Eastern war the Urals would be out of range, European Russia, the Baltic and Ploesti would be the target areas. There's also a possibility of striking at the Caucus oil fields, though I'm not sure there existed sufficient bases within range.
It's hard, if not impossible to build a wall against bombers. Otherwise the Germans would have simply built a chain of airfields around the border. As well as border interception, some method of tying airbases to cities would have to be implemented.
I'm sure the Russians had radar, not sure they had aircraft mounted radar. One of the night witch regiments flew bi-plane bombers, they used to glide over German positions and bomb them. The fighter regiments flew Yak-1s not the best plane for high altitude interception.
The only mention of strategic bombing I could find in the charges pertains to Leningrad. I scanned the counts a couple of times, so I could have missed something:
"In the Leningrad region there were shot and tortured over 172,000 persons, including over 20,000 persons who were killed in the city of Leningrad by the barbarous artillery barrage and the bombings"
Nothing about London, Warsaw or Rotterdam. Doenitz was charged with waging unrestricted sea warfare, but Goering had no mention of any specific charges of strategic bombing. The embarrasment of convicting Doenitz of "crimes" the US navy copied in their submarine war against Japan led to him receiving a relatively light sentence of only ten years.
OT but.....this judgment is quite ironic:
Ribbentrop participated in a meeting of 6th June, 1944, at which it was agreed to start a programme under which Allied aviators carrying out machine gun attacks on the civilian population should be lynched
Unsurprisingly, no mention was made of the "merits" of strafing civilians
There is no binding precedent that air warfare is covered by Hague ground rule. While it may be theoreticaly possible there is certainly justification for treating air war as covered by naval bombardment, or being totally outside the Hague jurisdiction.
Sorry, I'm not an aircraft engineer
But I still got a guess: first of all, the Germans had no other divebomber design AFAIK- the stress of a dive attack simply demands a stronger airframe. A close air support platform also needs to be especially protected from ground fire, so it requires a special design. My guess is, that the Germans simply had no other available design that could be compared to the cheap and unsophisticated Stuka.
At El Alamein Monty had a 3:1 superiority if we are generous: 220,000 men vs. 108,000. 900+ planes vs. 345 etc. Until then there had been air parity. Now the Allies had air superiority, but they still had not air supremacy.
You're right. The strategic bombing campaign was not initially planned as a means to destroy the Luftwaffe. But later on it was one of its aims to drag the Luftwaffe out to fight and to destroy it. IMHO it was the only substantial contribution of the air campaign, but let's not go there
Most evidence we have of Russians in war shows us, that they can withstand considerable sufferings, and that they adversity makes them rally around the flag. The only episode in history, were that wasn't the case, was during the later stages of WWI. But consider that the Czar system was tremendously more hated (and had been so for centuries) than the Communist system, that had just shown that it could fight and win against the worst enemy Russia had ever faced. I think city bombings would make the population hate the enemy - not the government. BTW: has city bombing ever worked the other way around?
Stalin diverted resources to Leningrad to keep Leningrad in the war. Not because he cared for the fate of individuals.
You're right, there are no industrial centers. As I said: it was a quickie. What I meant was that Stalin might protect important centers like those of politic, but that he probably wouldn't care whether Kharkov was razed to the ground for the 5th time 5 years.
We simply do not agree about the diversion strategy. A better approach would be to deploy fighters along avenues of approach. If you tied fighters to a city, you effectively tie them to an environment were they cannot fight (due to AA) and were it is to late to fight since the bombers probably would have dropped their bombs already.
As for the Nuremberg Tribunal look at these two quotes:
"The Tribunal distinguished between the Allied aerial assaults on Berlin, Dresden, Hamburg, Cologne and other German cities and the Nazi's killing of civilians. These bombings were in reprisal for the German attacks on London, Coventry, Rotterdam, and other Allied cities. Even if the bombings had not been acts of reprisal, "there still is no parallelism between an act of legitimate warfare, namely the bombing of a city, with a concomitant loss of civilian life, and the premeditated killing of all members of certain categories of the civilian population in occupied territory." Fn265
"The Court also rejected the contention that the defendants were being prosecuted for the type of conduct which had been engaged in by the Allies. The judges failed to find a single instance in which the Allied forces had executed a reprisal prisoner. Nor did the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the aerial raids against Dresden modify the rules of modern warfare and legitimize the Nazi's reprisal policies. These bombings were in response to the Reich's illegal aerial attacks on Rotterdam, Warsaw, Belgrade, Coventry, and Pearl Harbor. The Court observed that the Germans may not violate the law of war, invite retaliation, and then credibly claim that the standards governing the conduct of war were altered." Fn388
So the German air attacks were "illegal aerial attacks on Rotterdam, Warsaw, Belgrade, Coventry, and Pearl Harbor(sic!", while the Allied attacks were in response to those attacks (reprisals), but even if they had not been it was an "act of legitimate warfare, namely the bombing of a city". Illegal or legitimate - even the court seems to have had a hard time finding a common ground. No wonder, we can't.
The only reason why I am stating that air warfare was regulated by the Hague Convention is, that a source I have read on the US bombing campaign an legal issues before, during and after the war, states quite clearly that it was the common perception the US airforce that the Hague Convention indeed laid of air warfare rules as well.
Regards,
EoE
