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And even then, they often hit the wrong city
No way. Are you joking or did this really happen?
God yes, all the time. Navigation was more of an art than a science back then. And you have to imagine you’re flying quite high to avoid flak, while looking out for targets that might be obscured by cloud cover and where the lights were turned off so as not to present a clear target for said bombers.
Basically, the crew dropping the bombs might be ‘reasonably certain’ they’re hitting the right target, but a few miles here or there can make a lot of difference. You think you’re looking at A, while you’re really flying over B.
I live in the Netherlands, right on the German border. A local village here was bombed by accident on february 15th 1945, because the bomber crew mistook it for a German industrial complex just over the border. They dropped 35 bombs. They luckily ‘only’ killed 2 and injured 7. There’s a yearly memorial.
It’s terrible that it happened, but honestly… you really can’t blame the crew for it.
Yes, Nijmegen got hit almost as bad as Rotterdam (the worst bombing by the germans) and that was also because of allied forces thinking they were flying over germany. It was the 80 year memorial a few weeks ago. Unfortunately, more than a few people died in Nijmegen.
Especially with night bombing campaigns.
They used to "move" towns by a few km by stringing up lights that matched the pattern of the town's streetlamps in empty fields a few km away, and then having the actual city blacked out. From 30k feet up, they'd see matching light patterns and assume they were over the target.
The daylight bombing raids were a bit more accurate. You may think that being able to match a map to terrain features sounds relatively easy in a plane that's flying relatively slowly along a predictable route. But if it's at all overcast it's much harder. Then add in flak or enemy fighters distracting you and pulling you away from your maps, and suddenly it's a lot harder.
But, under ideal conditions, with the Norden bomb sight, the bombers could be surprisingly accurate. The bomb sight adjusted for ground speed, changing winds, and included a primitive auto-pilot and actually steered the plane, and AFAIK it auto-released the bombs at the right time. Hitting the right cluster of buildings from a height of 30k feet with a gravity bomb is fairly impressive. But, under combat conditions that was pretty rare.
Navigating at night using nothing but maps, compass, altitude and speed indicator is pretty difficult. Especially when the hostile territory you are flying over is forcing everyone to keep their curtains closed and minimize light leaks.
Why didn't they just use the GPS?
time travel hadn't been invented yet.
Poor signal.
Because the Earth is flat, they would've had to have used FPS
I've done some night flying by dead reckoning. I had the benefit of meteorologists in the territory I was flying over, so I had pretty good winds aloft data. That makes a DIFFERENCE.
Some cities would go dark and then a mile away have lanterns set up in the night over a large distance so planes would drop their bombs in a field instead of over the actual city, if I recall correctly.
In ww2, sometimes the wrong COUNTRY was hit
Or landed in. See giant stone marking spelling out EIRE, i.e., NOT ENGLAND YOU STUPID YANKEE.
To wit: the initial “development” process of the Tu-4
Edit: ok to be fair those were more of a “don’t have enough fuel” situation, but it is funny how they just copied the thing
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-65344370
Russia is just honoring the Great Patriotic War!
Bezuidenhout comes to mind. The Allies bombed The Hague instead of a rocket installation outside of town because somebody got their target coordinates mixed up.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_the_Bezuidenhout
Several Swiss cities were bombed during World War II because they were mistaken for Germany. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerial_incidents_in_Switzerland_in_World_War_II?wprov=sfti1#Bombing_incidents
I was going to make a joke about how it was really because they were hiding Nazi gold but...
The German city of Constanze would deliberately leave all their lights on at night so that allied pilots would think they were part of Switzerland
This actually worked pretty well
An easy mistake at any altitude.