Just a little something I cooked up in response to post #6692 here https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=140356&page=349
Enjoy (I hope)
One of the enduring debates regarding the Combined Bomber Offensive swirls around Operation Navajo. Almost as large a debate rages over the timing of the raid as its outcome. Of all the many arguments regarding the way that the Allies conducted the air war, Navajo remain perhaps the second most often debated (the other being the never conducted Operation Zeus). It is, therefore, worth examining the operation in some detail.
One of, perhaps the, greatest point of contention among the air planning staffs of Allied Supreme Command was in target selection.
The USAAF was devoted to “precision daylight bombing” (modern readers need to keep in mind that this involved, not the weapons of today, which can almost literally be directed through a specific window of a structure, but free falling bombs dropped from five miles altitude, often through broken cloud cover) and systematic destruction of the Reich’s war making potential, generally convincing themselves that any civilian losses were incidental and unavoidable regardless of precision (an understandable self-deception that ignored the fact that bombs sometimes missed the aim pout by as much as 12,000 yards) and was certain that all it would take was time to knock the Reich out of the war. USAAF planners continuously sought the agreement of Bomber Command to join into the targets of the Nazi rail and oil supply networks, as well as production facilities, convinced that the combined weight of the two air forces would crush the Reich’s means of fighting a modern war.
RAF’s Bomber Command, personified by Air Marshal Sir Arthur Travers Harris, 1st Baronet. was equally dedicated to the concept of “area bombing” that specifically targeted civilian housing areas based on the belief that the key to defeating the Nazis was to break the will of the population to resist and that the best way to destroy German production was through destruction or demoralization of the workers. Bomber Command was equally convinced that, if the USAAF would change over to “de-housing” attacks, the Reich would collapse in short order. (Ironically, when sufficiently pressed, Harris’ Bomber Command crews proved themselves to be capable of remarkably precise attacks, often against nearly impossible targets, the famed raids against the Ruhr dams being just the most well-known example).
The difference in strategic thought extended to the various aircraft used by the two nations. The Americans relied primarily on the B-17 and B-24 heavy bomber. There aircraft were both heavily armored and equipped with a massive number of defensive weapons (as many as 13 .50 caliber Browning machine guns, depending on the specific model), and designed to operate at very high altitudes of up to 30,000 feet (unpressurized), to the point that early in the war the USAAF 8th Air Force commanders believed that their bomber formations could fight their way through any defenses without fighter escort (a belief that was quite literally beaten out of them by Luftwaffe fighter squadrons). In what became a common theme for the U.S. military during the War the USAAF, rather than abandon its beloved precision bombing, developed high performance single seat fighter with ranges that, prior to the war, would have been considered to be absurd. The most famous of these was the P-51 Mustang, a somewhat Frankenstein combination of the underwhelming A-36 ground attack aircraft’s basic airframe and a Packard built variant of the famed Rolls-Royce Merlin engine (how two of the highest end luxury car makers pre-war combined to produce the engines that were instrumental in winning the war is outside the scope of this work, but is a remarkable tale of cooperation between former rivals) with the range to escort bombers to Berlin from bases in the United Kingdom, and the P-47N (actually designed with the vastness of the Pacific in mind, it had a range that exceeded even the Mustang’s by more than 20%). The down side of the heavy defenses of the U.S. bombers was a much reduced bombload and somewhat less range than their closest RAF counterpart, the Lancaster.
The Arvo Lancaster, compared to the U.S. bombers carried a very light defensive armament of 8 rifle caliber (.303) machine guns with each gun also supplied with less ammunition (American air crew were infamous for sneaking extra boxes of heavy .50 caliber rounds onto aircraft prior to missions, often nearly doubling the ammunition carried, at obvious detriment to aircraft performance), making it far more vulnerable to enemy fighters, something the RAF solved by operating almost exclusively at night. The relative paucity of defensive firepower carried by the Lancaster was, however, more than compensated for by its offensive punch. Each Lancaster could, and frequently did, carry double the bomb load of a B-17 deep into Germany providing each aircraft a tremendous destructive potential. Combined with a series of what, in hindsight, proved to be brilliant tactical decisions despite being quite controversial at the time of implementation, the Lancaster came to be a true night terror across the Reich.
In the end the two sides never came to an agreement on the “proper” strategy, this, quite unintentionally, created massive problems for the Luftwaffe since it faced enemies around the clock, using radically different tactics and equipment, forcing Goring’s operational planners to dedicate dwindling resources to very different tasks (the defense of the Reich’s airspace against heavily armed and stoutly escorted USAAF bomber “boxes” during the day required entirely different tactics and pilot training than those needed to counter Bomber Command’s individual aircraft bomber streams that would sometimes extend linearly for hundreds of miles and across thousands of feet vertically). It was a strategic challenge that the Luftwaffe never solved, although in fairness it is quite possible that this dilemma was actually insoluble, at least during that era.
The end result of the RAF/USAAF divergent strategies was less of a “combined” and more of a “cooperative” campaign, one that was unquestionably more successful that either strategy could have been on its own.
One of the greatest controversies surrounding Operation Navajo is the timing. The existence of the Nazi death camp complex of known as Auschwitz II-Birkenau was known to the Allied senior leadership as early as 1942. Arguments had raged, nearly from the time its existence had been confirmed regarding the possibility of disrupting its lethal efforts. There were strong argument both for and against devoting resources to the destruction of the camps, both for and against. The “for” argument was and is fairly self-evident, the “against” somewhat less so, but generally came down to range, accuracy, and resources. The camp was located deep into Central Europe, deeper than fighter escort from England could manage and at the very edge of escort range for bombers operating out of Southern Italy. Discussions with the Soviets regarding shuttle bombing were exceptionally difficult, and rarely produced positive results due to Stalin’s paranoia regarding “Western contamination” of the Soviet Union. The chances of killing thousands of prisoners was also a very real one (keeping in mind that even the most careful of bombing was, in the era, a very blunt instrument) and there would be little that could be done to prevent the Nazis from simply rebuilding and continuing their depravity. Lastly, the argument went, the best way to save the most potential victims of the Reich was to win the war, diverting aircraft from that mission would benefit no one.
These arguments changed in late 1944 with the Rundstedt-Offensive (aka Unternehmen Wacht am Oder) along the Dneiper River front and its stunning impact on the Soviet advance toward the Reich after the successes that the Red Army had compiled following its near destruction along the Volga and the loss of Stalingrad (had Stalin followed through on his plans to effectively liquidate the entire STAVKA following that disaster it is almost unimaginable that the Soviet military would have ever recovered, as was the combination of the Stalingrad disaster and the failure of Mars and Uranus left the USSR on the defensive well into 1943). Even before the Heer struck the Red Army with a three ARMY strategic reserve that no one had ever imagined existed the Dneiper had become the single bloodiest engagement of the entire War, with well over 500,000 KIA when the two sides’ losses were combined (and a total casualty list exceeding 2.25 million). Rundstedt’s Offensive, which was only done as a compromise, Hitler had, idiotically, wanted to strike against the WAllied forces in northern France and Belgium in the bizarre belief that the WAllies would, at that late date, be shocked into surrender, while the Heer General Staff had wanted to use the forces in a defensive role, hoping to wear the Allies down to the point that some sort of negotiated peace could be arranged that preserved at least a trace of German independence, stunned the Red Army, inflicting losses not seen since the dark days following the failed Volga offensive in late 1942. The Offensive drove the Red Army back almost 50 miles in places, the Heer forces only stopping when supplies ran low. Suddenly the Allies were faced with a very different situation.
The Soviet reversal forced the United States, which had already begun to refocus its massive strength on the Pacific into a number of changes. Possibly the most significant of these was the diversion of the 313th Bomb Wing (less the 509th Composite Group) with its B-29s and the dispatch of three fighter groups equipped with virtually every P-47N then in existence to the United Kingdom instead of the Pacific.
The arrival of the B-29s altered the air war dramatically. It was almost 100mph faster than the other 8th Air Force bombers and could carry five times their bomb load more than twice as far. Fully pressurized, its crews could handle long missions at extreme altitudes without be exhausted by the sheer effort of staying warm that sapped the B-17 & B-24 crews. The ultimate expression of the WW II piston engine bomber it arrived in the ETO with a set of very specific missions, all of them devoted to disrupting the Wehrmacht’s ability to wage war against the Red Army. With its P-47N escorts operating out of the UK, supplemented by P-51 squadrons operating out of northern France, there was nowhere in Europe that was out of reach, including a little island of hell on Earth in Nazi Occupied Poland.
Operation Navajo commenced before sunrise on February 22nd, 1945. Crews were given only the vaguest possible understanding of the target, it was referred to as a prison camp in pre-mission briefings and bombardiers were directly ordered not to drop unless they had clear visual observation of the target area. Targets were designated as SS barracks and “industrial Structures” with the prisoners housing marked off limits. It was the 6th mission for the 313th since arriving in England on January 10th, the previous five all had been dedicated to various railway hubs, including the marshalling yards near Dresden, which had been utterly obliterated four days earlier. The Wing, in 10 box formations, and escorted by five P-47N squadrons (an additional seven P-51 Squadrons from 8th AF joined for at least part of the mission) experienced only five mechanical aborts, leaving 130 bombers to conduct the mission. P-51 formations preceded the bomber stream by roughly 40 miles, breaking up attacking formations as they appeared (Captain Charles Yeager was credited with shooting down a remarkable 8 Me-110 heavy fighters on the mission as it crossed Denmark in a feat that earned him a Medal of Honor; Yeager, who retired as a Major General is reputed to have had only three .50 caliber rounds remaining from his ammunition supply when he returned to England), allowing the longer ranged P-47Ns to retain their drop tanks until all fuel in them had been expended.
Only three B-29s were lost, two of them to flak, en route to the target.
The target was exactly as briefed, the recon photos being, for once, remarkably accurate. Bombing weather was evaluated as ideal, with light crosswinds. Nevertheless, 30,000 feet is a very long way to fall, regardless of how carefully the bomb was aimed. Post-strike photos showed that, in addition to the complete destruction of the “industrial structures” (the death chamber and crematoria) and the destruction of 70% of the guard barracks at least five prisoner housing structures were destroyed. It was, by any reasonable measure, a remarkable achievement. Unfortunately, in addition to around 300 SS casualties some 1,800 prisoners were also killed and many other wounded (and, of course, left untreated by the surviving SS contingent). Some 158 prisoners are confirmed to have escaped and been saved by the Polish underground. Tragically at least 250 more made it into Underground hands but died despite the best efforts of the serious strapped Poles to save them.
There is evidence that the destruction of the machinery used to murder prisoners, coupled with a heavy attack on railway equipment in the region five days later, altered the Reich’s planning. It is certain that they evacuated all remaining prisoners, save a few who were simply too far gone to be worth the effort. Many of these prisoners died during the forced march to other detention facilities Overall, based on captured SS records it is estimated that the destruction of Auschwitz saved the lives of roughly 40,000 possible victims. It is a huge number until it is compared to the 1.1 million who perished there. Hence the decades of debate surrounding Operation Navajo.
USAAF losses totaled 7 B-29s (including two that received so much battle damage as to be deemed unrecoverable) 11 P-47Ns and 14 P-51s. Of the 55 men shot down over Germany, some 38 survived to be captured and were released at wars end.
Enjoy (I hope)
One of the enduring debates regarding the Combined Bomber Offensive swirls around Operation Navajo. Almost as large a debate rages over the timing of the raid as its outcome. Of all the many arguments regarding the way that the Allies conducted the air war, Navajo remain perhaps the second most often debated (the other being the never conducted Operation Zeus). It is, therefore, worth examining the operation in some detail.
One of, perhaps the, greatest point of contention among the air planning staffs of Allied Supreme Command was in target selection.
The USAAF was devoted to “precision daylight bombing” (modern readers need to keep in mind that this involved, not the weapons of today, which can almost literally be directed through a specific window of a structure, but free falling bombs dropped from five miles altitude, often through broken cloud cover) and systematic destruction of the Reich’s war making potential, generally convincing themselves that any civilian losses were incidental and unavoidable regardless of precision (an understandable self-deception that ignored the fact that bombs sometimes missed the aim pout by as much as 12,000 yards) and was certain that all it would take was time to knock the Reich out of the war. USAAF planners continuously sought the agreement of Bomber Command to join into the targets of the Nazi rail and oil supply networks, as well as production facilities, convinced that the combined weight of the two air forces would crush the Reich’s means of fighting a modern war.
RAF’s Bomber Command, personified by Air Marshal Sir Arthur Travers Harris, 1st Baronet. was equally dedicated to the concept of “area bombing” that specifically targeted civilian housing areas based on the belief that the key to defeating the Nazis was to break the will of the population to resist and that the best way to destroy German production was through destruction or demoralization of the workers. Bomber Command was equally convinced that, if the USAAF would change over to “de-housing” attacks, the Reich would collapse in short order. (Ironically, when sufficiently pressed, Harris’ Bomber Command crews proved themselves to be capable of remarkably precise attacks, often against nearly impossible targets, the famed raids against the Ruhr dams being just the most well-known example).
The difference in strategic thought extended to the various aircraft used by the two nations. The Americans relied primarily on the B-17 and B-24 heavy bomber. There aircraft were both heavily armored and equipped with a massive number of defensive weapons (as many as 13 .50 caliber Browning machine guns, depending on the specific model), and designed to operate at very high altitudes of up to 30,000 feet (unpressurized), to the point that early in the war the USAAF 8th Air Force commanders believed that their bomber formations could fight their way through any defenses without fighter escort (a belief that was quite literally beaten out of them by Luftwaffe fighter squadrons). In what became a common theme for the U.S. military during the War the USAAF, rather than abandon its beloved precision bombing, developed high performance single seat fighter with ranges that, prior to the war, would have been considered to be absurd. The most famous of these was the P-51 Mustang, a somewhat Frankenstein combination of the underwhelming A-36 ground attack aircraft’s basic airframe and a Packard built variant of the famed Rolls-Royce Merlin engine (how two of the highest end luxury car makers pre-war combined to produce the engines that were instrumental in winning the war is outside the scope of this work, but is a remarkable tale of cooperation between former rivals) with the range to escort bombers to Berlin from bases in the United Kingdom, and the P-47N (actually designed with the vastness of the Pacific in mind, it had a range that exceeded even the Mustang’s by more than 20%). The down side of the heavy defenses of the U.S. bombers was a much reduced bombload and somewhat less range than their closest RAF counterpart, the Lancaster.
The Arvo Lancaster, compared to the U.S. bombers carried a very light defensive armament of 8 rifle caliber (.303) machine guns with each gun also supplied with less ammunition (American air crew were infamous for sneaking extra boxes of heavy .50 caliber rounds onto aircraft prior to missions, often nearly doubling the ammunition carried, at obvious detriment to aircraft performance), making it far more vulnerable to enemy fighters, something the RAF solved by operating almost exclusively at night. The relative paucity of defensive firepower carried by the Lancaster was, however, more than compensated for by its offensive punch. Each Lancaster could, and frequently did, carry double the bomb load of a B-17 deep into Germany providing each aircraft a tremendous destructive potential. Combined with a series of what, in hindsight, proved to be brilliant tactical decisions despite being quite controversial at the time of implementation, the Lancaster came to be a true night terror across the Reich.
In the end the two sides never came to an agreement on the “proper” strategy, this, quite unintentionally, created massive problems for the Luftwaffe since it faced enemies around the clock, using radically different tactics and equipment, forcing Goring’s operational planners to dedicate dwindling resources to very different tasks (the defense of the Reich’s airspace against heavily armed and stoutly escorted USAAF bomber “boxes” during the day required entirely different tactics and pilot training than those needed to counter Bomber Command’s individual aircraft bomber streams that would sometimes extend linearly for hundreds of miles and across thousands of feet vertically). It was a strategic challenge that the Luftwaffe never solved, although in fairness it is quite possible that this dilemma was actually insoluble, at least during that era.
The end result of the RAF/USAAF divergent strategies was less of a “combined” and more of a “cooperative” campaign, one that was unquestionably more successful that either strategy could have been on its own.
One of the greatest controversies surrounding Operation Navajo is the timing. The existence of the Nazi death camp complex of known as Auschwitz II-Birkenau was known to the Allied senior leadership as early as 1942. Arguments had raged, nearly from the time its existence had been confirmed regarding the possibility of disrupting its lethal efforts. There were strong argument both for and against devoting resources to the destruction of the camps, both for and against. The “for” argument was and is fairly self-evident, the “against” somewhat less so, but generally came down to range, accuracy, and resources. The camp was located deep into Central Europe, deeper than fighter escort from England could manage and at the very edge of escort range for bombers operating out of Southern Italy. Discussions with the Soviets regarding shuttle bombing were exceptionally difficult, and rarely produced positive results due to Stalin’s paranoia regarding “Western contamination” of the Soviet Union. The chances of killing thousands of prisoners was also a very real one (keeping in mind that even the most careful of bombing was, in the era, a very blunt instrument) and there would be little that could be done to prevent the Nazis from simply rebuilding and continuing their depravity. Lastly, the argument went, the best way to save the most potential victims of the Reich was to win the war, diverting aircraft from that mission would benefit no one.
These arguments changed in late 1944 with the Rundstedt-Offensive (aka Unternehmen Wacht am Oder) along the Dneiper River front and its stunning impact on the Soviet advance toward the Reich after the successes that the Red Army had compiled following its near destruction along the Volga and the loss of Stalingrad (had Stalin followed through on his plans to effectively liquidate the entire STAVKA following that disaster it is almost unimaginable that the Soviet military would have ever recovered, as was the combination of the Stalingrad disaster and the failure of Mars and Uranus left the USSR on the defensive well into 1943). Even before the Heer struck the Red Army with a three ARMY strategic reserve that no one had ever imagined existed the Dneiper had become the single bloodiest engagement of the entire War, with well over 500,000 KIA when the two sides’ losses were combined (and a total casualty list exceeding 2.25 million). Rundstedt’s Offensive, which was only done as a compromise, Hitler had, idiotically, wanted to strike against the WAllied forces in northern France and Belgium in the bizarre belief that the WAllies would, at that late date, be shocked into surrender, while the Heer General Staff had wanted to use the forces in a defensive role, hoping to wear the Allies down to the point that some sort of negotiated peace could be arranged that preserved at least a trace of German independence, stunned the Red Army, inflicting losses not seen since the dark days following the failed Volga offensive in late 1942. The Offensive drove the Red Army back almost 50 miles in places, the Heer forces only stopping when supplies ran low. Suddenly the Allies were faced with a very different situation.
The Soviet reversal forced the United States, which had already begun to refocus its massive strength on the Pacific into a number of changes. Possibly the most significant of these was the diversion of the 313th Bomb Wing (less the 509th Composite Group) with its B-29s and the dispatch of three fighter groups equipped with virtually every P-47N then in existence to the United Kingdom instead of the Pacific.
The arrival of the B-29s altered the air war dramatically. It was almost 100mph faster than the other 8th Air Force bombers and could carry five times their bomb load more than twice as far. Fully pressurized, its crews could handle long missions at extreme altitudes without be exhausted by the sheer effort of staying warm that sapped the B-17 & B-24 crews. The ultimate expression of the WW II piston engine bomber it arrived in the ETO with a set of very specific missions, all of them devoted to disrupting the Wehrmacht’s ability to wage war against the Red Army. With its P-47N escorts operating out of the UK, supplemented by P-51 squadrons operating out of northern France, there was nowhere in Europe that was out of reach, including a little island of hell on Earth in Nazi Occupied Poland.
Operation Navajo commenced before sunrise on February 22nd, 1945. Crews were given only the vaguest possible understanding of the target, it was referred to as a prison camp in pre-mission briefings and bombardiers were directly ordered not to drop unless they had clear visual observation of the target area. Targets were designated as SS barracks and “industrial Structures” with the prisoners housing marked off limits. It was the 6th mission for the 313th since arriving in England on January 10th, the previous five all had been dedicated to various railway hubs, including the marshalling yards near Dresden, which had been utterly obliterated four days earlier. The Wing, in 10 box formations, and escorted by five P-47N squadrons (an additional seven P-51 Squadrons from 8th AF joined for at least part of the mission) experienced only five mechanical aborts, leaving 130 bombers to conduct the mission. P-51 formations preceded the bomber stream by roughly 40 miles, breaking up attacking formations as they appeared (Captain Charles Yeager was credited with shooting down a remarkable 8 Me-110 heavy fighters on the mission as it crossed Denmark in a feat that earned him a Medal of Honor; Yeager, who retired as a Major General is reputed to have had only three .50 caliber rounds remaining from his ammunition supply when he returned to England), allowing the longer ranged P-47Ns to retain their drop tanks until all fuel in them had been expended.
Only three B-29s were lost, two of them to flak, en route to the target.
The target was exactly as briefed, the recon photos being, for once, remarkably accurate. Bombing weather was evaluated as ideal, with light crosswinds. Nevertheless, 30,000 feet is a very long way to fall, regardless of how carefully the bomb was aimed. Post-strike photos showed that, in addition to the complete destruction of the “industrial structures” (the death chamber and crematoria) and the destruction of 70% of the guard barracks at least five prisoner housing structures were destroyed. It was, by any reasonable measure, a remarkable achievement. Unfortunately, in addition to around 300 SS casualties some 1,800 prisoners were also killed and many other wounded (and, of course, left untreated by the surviving SS contingent). Some 158 prisoners are confirmed to have escaped and been saved by the Polish underground. Tragically at least 250 more made it into Underground hands but died despite the best efforts of the serious strapped Poles to save them.
There is evidence that the destruction of the machinery used to murder prisoners, coupled with a heavy attack on railway equipment in the region five days later, altered the Reich’s planning. It is certain that they evacuated all remaining prisoners, save a few who were simply too far gone to be worth the effort. Many of these prisoners died during the forced march to other detention facilities Overall, based on captured SS records it is estimated that the destruction of Auschwitz saved the lives of roughly 40,000 possible victims. It is a huge number until it is compared to the 1.1 million who perished there. Hence the decades of debate surrounding Operation Navajo.
USAAF losses totaled 7 B-29s (including two that received so much battle damage as to be deemed unrecoverable) 11 P-47Ns and 14 P-51s. Of the 55 men shot down over Germany, some 38 survived to be captured and were released at wars end.
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