As a suggestion from my question about not knowing about the small village roads and how they affected the traffic coming off the beaches, I’m adding this question as it’s own thread.
So why was Caen bombed so much that it destroyed so many buildings? While there’s the obvious human question, I want to focus this on the military benefit for the goal of taking Caen. It’s 1944, and the war has been going on since 1939. The effects of destroying cities and what that means to ground troops trying to take that city should be reasonably well known by now. Bombing Caen that much makes it really hard to get across, especially with mechanized things- so just attacking and getting through Caen was made really, really hard. And the added rubble seems to make it easier to defend, too- as the randomness of places to defend from was really increased.
To me, it makes no sense at all to bomb Caen that much if it were really a goal to take even within a month of the landing.
Ignorance of the reality of heavy bombing. The heavy bomber was a new weapon and it was not well understood. The pre war thinking massively overestimated the effectiveness of the bomber and the empirical evidence hadn’t yet replaced the dogma of theory. The senior officers making the decisions had, to the best of my knowledge, no prior experience of using heavy bombers in a tactical situation and had a fantasy of it’s effectiveness. Once they started they may have kept doing it in the human foible of trying to force reality to conform to their beliefs rather than accept they were wrong. Or it might just be that they didn’t have time to access the results and learn from them.
Looking at it post facto we can see it was senseless; but the people who did it made their decisions behind a veil of ignorance.
New weapon? The war is 5 years in, and there have been thousands of sorties of heavy bombing done by the allies, as well as thousands of sorties on British cities over those years.
If the planners don’t know that bombings take down buildings, blocking the roads, to me that’s willful ignorance, as they can’t even look outside and see the fire brigade struggle to get around to fight the fires.
As for the defensive side, the fighting in Italy made it pretty clear to the Allies first hand that fighting around destroyed buildings is really tough, too.
And that’s the real point of my question- if after so many bombings of cities they don’t know what the effect is, then they were pretty clueless.
Heavy bombers only started operational use in late 1940 and only became dominant in allied hands in 1943, so still relatively new. British cities had not been subject to saturation bombing by heavy bombers, so the allies experience of being the target was not indicative of effect.
The allied assesment of the effects based on their limited knowledge of the German experience was wildly inaccurate.
Remember also that in the bombing of British and German cities the transport systems hadn’t collapsed.
There was no practical experience of heavy bombers as a tactical weapon. Nobody before had tried to advance through a city that had been subject to saturation bombing in front line conditions. Perhaps the only thing that could have given them a clue was a close analysis of Stalingrad; but was that available to them?
So of course they were clueless. But given the defective knowledge they had their choice wasn’t irrational.
To me, just hindering transportation makes it harder to take a city. And that part was clearly known. All saturation bombing does is make that worse. Again, the bombing of the Germans on English cities showed that non saturation bombings make things bad, so how does one expect saturation bombing makes it better? You expect more destruction, right? That’s kind of the point of bombing like that.
So all they were doing was making a worse situation than the troops needed.
The experience of British cities was that bombing didn’t hinder transport that much.
Of course they expected destruction, after all the point was to destroy the enemy.
They thought that the balance between weakening the enemy and hindering transport would be in the allies favour.
Post facto it is obvious that their expectations were erroneous.
So yes, their actions made the situation worse; but given their knowledge, that was not a probable outcome.
But it did hinder transport- as has been pointed out a few times in the struggle for the fire brigade. And bombing a lot more would make that a lot worse.
So I guess I’m curious that the expectation of more damage didn’t get extrapolated to the roads as much. Let alone making it easier to defend with the more randomness of places to hide.
This isn’t the first time I questioned strategic bombing strategies given the info that they all learned as the war progressed.
How much hinderance of transport do you think was tolerable? The fire brigades issue was during the bombing and didn’t persist. Security and morale concerns meant tending to suppress such detail during the war.
The widespread knowledge of such issues only occurred post war. Was it know to the ground forces commanders who ordered the bombing?
You may be optimistic in your assessment of the amount learned as the war progressed. Most of what was learned was learned from post war analysis.
What seems like an obvious extrapolation to you is framed in your knowledge of bombing which is far better than that of anyone at the time.
Probably my biggest flaw is that I think they learned lessons reasonably quickly.
Then again, I also find it to be a flaw in the system that the lessons could only be learned post war. It’s not as if the destruction of cities were not monitored. And then using those observations to extrapolate the detailed damage within England. Yes, that seems pretty obvious in using that data to plan and assess bombing.
Again, for this question, it’s about Caen, and morale issues would be local, and can be kind of dealt with by bringing in troops from the south.
As for who ordered the bombing, that is a great question.
I don’t think the time it took to learn the lessons was a flaw, more a limitation of technology. We are so used to swimming in a sea of information that it is difficult to appreciate the limited information bandwidth they had.
Consider a detailed bomb damage assessment of a single raid on a town in England. It would involve a team of people going walking about visually assessing the physical damage and interviewing people about their experiences. Face to face interviews because hardly anyone had a private phone. All the information recorded on pencil and paper.
This data would then have to be collated by hand and then analysed, on paper.
The initial analysis would have to be written out and then typed up, hard copied and distributed for review.
Once reviewed it would have to be retyped including review changes.
It would then have to be typeset and made ready for printing.
Paper was rationed, so that limits the number of copies you can print. And you then have to decide who is on the distribution list and mail it to them.
When you step back and take this into account it’s not surprising that senior army officers were not familiar with detailed analysis of the effects of different types of bombing.
At Caen the intention was to disrupt and restrict the flow of supplies and reinforcements to the German forces fighting North of Caen. What they hadn’t understood was the consequences to their subsequent advance of choosing to do that by using saturation bombing.
Good points, to me their biggest fear was being from back into the sea like in 1940/1942 or Gallipoli/Greece etc . After all they only had a very small stretch of land and a lot of land the Germans were on had higher elevation. In hindsight it is easy to say that the Allies would win BUT the weather was very uncertain and the Allies had to go through a learning curve.
I think Arthur Harris was put under de command of Eisenhower ESPECIALLY to hit the Germans with EVERYTHING they had. People who have been to Normandy probably realize quickly how close Caen is to the beaches and the Germans potentially throw a lot at them and really bad weather COULD HAVE destroyed a lot of Allied supplies.
I can see why as D-Day was a daunting operation and what other here said their info was limited and obviously you never know which German General is in the right place at the right time (maybe Rommel) ;-).
One more counter point- they didn’t touch Bayeux. I know it was smaller, but it was also important to link foot holds. And it was easily taken.
As for impeding the flow of supplies- taking the roads and railways would be considerably easier and lost costly and have a similar effect of choking flow for Germans along the coast.
Why wasn’t Bayeaux bombed?
The rail and main road link to Bayeaux run through Caen, so there was no need to block them at Bayeaux.
The main German counterattack on d-day was to the North of Caen.
Bayeaux was liberated on June 7th.
If you look at the map Caen was the major transport nexus berween Normandy and the rest of France. Blocking that nexus impeded the German ability to move reinforcements and supplies to the west of Caen in the immediate aftermath of the invasion.
The plan on d-day was to take the roads and railways; it wasn’t easier, it failed.
Once it became apparent that the allies woukd not take the roads and railways around Caen on the 6th the optimum solution was to block at the nexus.
Both were day 1 goals (neither achieved), taking either would seriously make it harder to supply the Cotentin. Bayeux actually links footholds- making really important.
As for transport to the rest of France- once it was hard to get supplies to the Cotentin by other means, that part really didn’t matter much WRT supplying the remaining Germans. But destroying Caen did make it much harder for the Allies to supply France, since they had to rebuild all of that. So by the transport to France Hub reasoning- that hurts the Allies worse than the Germans based on the rest of the action.
The map I see shows that interrupting Germans supplies is easier if they take the roads and rail lines than the hubs. Has the same effect. Any cut in the supply line has an effect. Bayeux was really important in the scheme of things for the Allies- linking the beaches and preventing movement through it. It wasn’t bombed at all. If everything you said was that important, they would have surely bombed Bayeux for the same reasons at least once.
And noting how relatively easy it was to take an undamaged Bayeux… Back to my original question.
What would bombing Bayeaux on June 6th achieve that wasn’t achieved by bombing Caen?
The battle for Caen was the most intense action of the Normandy campaign.
There was no battle for Bayeaux.
Taking those roads you describe as easier took over three weeks of intense fighting.
Taking the urban area of Caen took less than two weeks.
Your easier assessment isn’t supported by the facts.
While the bomb damage did impede transport during the combat, they were quickly cleared and repaired after liberation.
Unlike the allies, the Germans were not able to keep smashing the repairs.
Your assessment as to the transport problems the allies experienced from bombing Caen isn’t well supported by the facts.
Back to my original answer.
Two weeks? Caen fell in July. How does 6 weeks after the intended date become two weeks?
But clearly, my question about the damage impeding the fight for Caen is not that important. Six weeks and multiple attempts to take it with lots of casualties. The damage from the bombing didn’t apparently affect that. Even if it did.
Since the topic is the effects of bombing of Caen, i refered to the elapsed time from the start to finish of fighting for the urban area of Caen (Operation Charnwood and Operation Atlantic).
In contrast to the time it took to capture the roads leading West outside of Caen.
What have you based your assessment of the problems the bombing caused to the allies based on?
The only significant issues i am aware of was vehicles keeping up with the infantry during the liberation battle, but not beyond that.