European Aviation History

  617 Squadron was by no means the only RAF unit engaged in precision bombing. The Mosquito bombers likewise proved to be extremely accurate when in capable hands -- far ahead of anything the USAAF ever delivered. Two examples of their outstanding accuracy will serve to prove the case.    As the war progressed, the French Resistance grew increasingly strong and effective. In anticipation of the Allied landing on the Continent, the French Resistance played an increasingly vital role in both providing intelligence and sabotaging German installations. By late 1943, however, many French Resistance cells had been infiltrated by German spies and in the winter of '43/'44 the Germans struck with mass arrests. On 14 Februrary 1944, a Resistance leader who literally "knew too much" about the Allied invasion plans was arrested by the Gestapo and put in Amiens Gestapo prison. He was not alone. Four American spies, three British agents, a Belgian spy, and over 800 othe...

Hitler's Wonder or Vengeance Weapons ( Wunderwaffen or Vergeltungswaffen ) killed roughly 9,000 civilians in the UK and damaged half the housing in the British capital. The V1 was the first "cruise missile" and the V2 was the first rocket-delivered explosives in history. While few believe they alone could have altered the outcome of the war, the damage they inflicted called for a vigorous response. Yet the RAF's options against these new weapons were limited.   Just one week after D-Day, the first of Hitler's Vengeance weapons struck British soil. They instantly killed 6, injured 30 and made 200 people homeless in a single unopposed attack that risked not a single German life. Three days later, V1s had taken 499 lives and injured 2,000 while 137,000 buildings had been damaged. The V1 was a drone, or a flying bomb as it was called at the time, roughly the same size as contemporary fighters, but unmanned. They were also very crudely controlled. Essentially, they wer...

  No one is more closely associated with 617 Squadron then Wing Commander Guy Gibson. He formed the squadron, hand-picking many of the pilots. He led it to fame on the Dams Raid. Yet he literally only flew on one operation with the squadron, and his command ended after less than three months. No other wartime CO was on the squadron for a shorter period. The CO who commanded the squadron longest -- albeit, even then, only eight months -- was also the man who gave it a mission. Thus even if his name is not so immediately associated with 617, he was in fact more influential than any of the five men who led the squadron in WWII.    Cheshire, who by September 1943 already had a distinguished war record and was the youngest Group Captain in the RAF recruited to command 617 Squadron in order to help solve a pressing problem. With their backs increasingly to the wall, the Germans had unleashed their creativity to develop four devilishly advanced and potentially game-changing ...

Despite routinely being accused of doing only "area bombing" one of the most precise -- and arguably the most effective RAF raid of WWII -- was the RAF attack of 16/17 May 1943 on the Ruhr Dams. The raid was immortalized in the post-war film "The Dam Busters."   It all started with Barnes Wallis, an innovative engineer. At the outbreak of the war, Wallis was already 52 and recognized as one of the leading aircraft designers of his generation, but he found himself wondering what he -- as an engineer -- could do to shorten a war that he knew would be horrible. Freed from work on any specific project, he started to experiment with a variety of ideas. No longer tied to government specifications, his imagination took flight, and while many of his ideas were dismissed by contemporaries as impractical if not ridiculous, Wallis' philosophy was to see criticism as a stimulus to keep perfecting an idea. (Below Barnes Wallis) He also spent time studying the industrial ...

It has become a cliche to claim that the RAF conducted "area bombing" at night and the USAF conducted "precision bombing" by daylight. As with most cliches, there is a kernel of truth in it, but it is also a gross oversimplification. It is certainly true that after taking over as C-in-C of Bomber Command, Air Marshal "Bomber" Harris embraced the idea of whole-scale destruction and scorned most efforts to attack specific targets as pointless. However, it is wrong to claim that the RAF as a whole never attempted or achieved precision.  For a start, the RAF began the war with a doctrine of strategic bombing that was not materially different from that of the USAAF. Furthermore the crews -- and the public -- were religiously assured that all targets were "legitimate military targets" and that the objective in all bombing was to obtain the greatest possible accuracy and minimize collateral civilian damage. Indeed, the RAF's failure to achieve the a...

 Air Marshal Harris had warned during the Blitz in 1940 that Germany had sowed the wind and would reap the whirlwind. Later he astutely noted that the Germans had started the war under the "childish" assumption that they could bomb everybody else but no one was ever going to bomb them. They were wrong.    City of Cologne, 1945 Although the Allied air counter-offensive took a long time to get off the ground, by the start of 1942, Bomber Command had enough of heavy bombers (of all three types) and enough trained crews to launch its first large raids. The Luftwaffe had sent nearly 1,000 aircraft, of which roughly 350 were bombers, against London on 7 September 1940. It was not until the night of May 30 1942 that the RAF reciprocated with its first "thousand" aircraft raid. But it came. The target was Cologne, and significantly, all those aircraft were heavy bombers. The payload of the Luftwaffe's twin engine bombers during the Blitz averaged around 4400 lb...

  Based on aerial reconnaissance following 617's first assault, British intelligence wrongly concluded that the German Battleship Tirpitz was still serviceable. Only after the war did the British learn that 617's first raid had in fact rendered the great battleship incapable of conducting operations. On the misconception that the Tirpitz might yet sally forth to wreck havoc on the convoys bound for Russia, 617 was again ordered to "sink the Tirpitz ."   Meanwhile, under cover of low cloud, the Germans towed the Tirpitz down to Altenfjord, where the Germans moored it as a floating gun-battery to deter allied landings. Discovered there by British reconnaissance aircraft shortly after Oct 15, the move seemed to support the thesis that the ship was still seaworthy, i.e. that it had not been seriously damaged in the earlier raid. The move, however, put the German battleship with in range of Lancasters operating from the tip of Scotland --provided they had new, more powerf...