Pearl Harbour / 23 august '43 ploiesti, Comparison

During the Tidal Wave operation
US lost 59 planes from 178 and 440 from 1726 crews (108 were POW). only 33 planes were fully opeartional next day
romaniam lost 2 fighters and other 2 damage
germans lost 3 fighters and 9 were damage

at soil (military and civilian) were only 200 dies and 335 wonded.


dates are from "Bine ati venit in infern" by Ioan Grigorescu

Even if they weren't ordered to bomb civilian targets, it would have happened anyway. The USAAF NEVER achieved the bombing accuracy needed to justify the losses we sustained during the daylight "Strategic" bombing campaign over Europe, especially the meat grinder over Romania.

Even official USAF studies done in the 70s and 80s conceded that when you compare the sustained loss rate from June 1943 through December 1944, the loss percentage (somewhere between 15% and 20%) across the board doesn't justify the horrendous losses suffered by the 8th and 15thAAFs. Statistically speaking, a US Marine in the Pacific stood a better chance of making it home alive than an 8thAAF bomber crewman.

Post-mission recon often showed that a target reported as "destroyed" by the bomber crews was only lightly damaged, if hit at all, while the surrounding town was heavily damaged. There are even repeated reports of towns more than 50 miles away from the target area being heavily hit and the crews claiming a successful attack, or of a heavy concentration of bombs being dropped in open fileds and on mountainsides in the middle of nowhere.

Incidentally, post war analysis showed that the only targets which had a sufficient enough impact on the German war effort to even come close to justifying the sacrifice of men to hit them was the Oil refineries of Romania, railroad lines throughout ocupied Europe, and the synthetic oil plants in Germany. More damage was done to the German war effort and economy by the sustained attacks on these targets starting in the spring and early summer of 1944 than was accomplished by the sustained efforts to destroy the munitions and aircraft factories begun a year earlier and running to the end of the war did. And the Americans knew as early as 1943 that the bombing of civilian targets (the way the RAF Bomber Command advocated) would not have any effect on the war other than to embitter the civilian population to fight harder to keep them out and to cause problems with resentment when the war eventually ended. All you had to do was look at the population of cities like London and Coventry to see that "terror bombing" had the exact opposite effect as its intention. For every city that was destroyed (think Hamburg and Cologne) the Germans fought harder to drive off the bombers, inflicting heavier losses on our crews. It was not a feasable way to wage a sustained bombing campiagn. We knew it over Germany, so I have a hard time believing that they would order it over Romania (though they didn't seem to understand it over Japan, so anything is possible).

So basically, despite the poor survivability and results, we really had no choice militarily but to attack the Ploesti oil refineries and the rail junctions in Bucharest. Civilian losses are to be avoided, but when you are attcking a target surrounded by (or closely adjoined by) a major civilian center, it is inevitable, even in the 21st century, that civilian losses will occur no matter how accurately you bomb.

Incidentally, I grew up next door to a man who had been a B-24 crewman in the 15thAAF. I asked him once, after I started to become interested in the ARR in WWII, if he had ever flown over Romania and was it reall as bad as they said?

He said he would rather have made a run to Berlin every day for his tour than to attack Ploesti or Bucharest the 7 times he did. It was THAT bad.

Achive the objective at all cost was also the atitude of USA army, just becouse they don't whant to sacrifice their LIFE for their country makes them superior??? I don't think so.
Is just a matter of publicity, in the movies we see american bomber crew circleing aroung in the flak trying to pinpoint the nazi ammo depot, caryng for the hospital across the street, whyle in reality it was in contrast. Also we see the german army as a bunch of crazy people driven by evil.

I'm afraid I don't see the point of this thread, or maybe I just don't understand the question. Is the question which air raid had a greater impact on the war? Or which was a greater moral outrage? If it's the first one, it's certainly Pearl Harbor because it brought the US in to the war.

If it's the second, why are we looking at these raids as examples of moral outrages? Pearl Harbor was unquestionably a valid target. The civilian casualties were incidental (not that Japan had shown any hesitation in targeting civilians in China). The moral outrage of Pearl Harbor came from the fact that the US and Japan were not at legally at war. As for Ploesti, if one finds attacks on economic targets immoral, or attacks on targets that might cause civilian death immoral, there are many worse examples.

I stated my position on this in the thread on the Dresden bombing and I'm not going to restate it at length here. Germany had made its position crystal clear on the first day of the war in Europe by using terror bombing and bombing of economic targets in Warsaw (such as the gas works). It had made it clear this was doctrine and not accident many times: Rotterdam, London, Coventry, Stalingrad and the list goes on. Now the tables had turned and Germany and its allies were feeling the effects.

Some will say "Well, Romania did not bomb the US (or Britain)". This is true. However, Poland, Holland, Belgium, Norway, and so on never attacked Germany either. Romania's position forced painful choices on them, but they had more choice than most of the countries of Europe were given. Marshal Antonescu chose to enter an ongoing war on the German side. Could Romania have stayed out? We'll never know. I would say the best example of how they could have stayed out is Sweden... another medium-size power surrounded by combatants, that supplied Germany with critical war material (iron from Kiruna), and which succesfully stayed out of the war. But considering the effort the German put in to defending Ploesti, they might have just invaded, too.

AFAIK, the latest research, made by Marius Emmerling, shows that the Luftwaffe did not deliberately hit Polish civilian targets in Sept. 1939, despite what has been written throughout the years.

Gen. Dénes

Hi Denes,

It may or may not have been policy to bomb Polish civilian targets, but it nevertheless occurred and this helped set the tone for what followed. It should be noted that the British and French did not respond by bombing German cities themselves over the winter of 1939-40. It was the attack on Rotterdam that really began to change things. The Dutch had been determinedly neutral only days before and the raid seems to have been a deliberate attempt to bomb an urban area in order to break Dutch will to resist. (The fact that it was unsuccessfully aborted after the Dutch agreed to surrender doesn't alter either the apparent intent or actual result).

It should be noted that the Luftwaffe had already staked out its position a year before WWII began at Guernica in the Spanish Civil War. The Guernica raid was technically legal and has a number of similar justifications to Dresden (although it was not, of course, on the same scale). After it and the Italian bombing of Barcleona, Britain and France tried to introduce legislation before the League of Nations in 1938 restricting the bombing of urban areas. However, Germany, Italy and Japan (which had been bombing Chinese cities for several years) had by then ceased to pay any attention to the League of Nations and so no new international regulations were enacted.

As it happens, no Germans were apparently punished for any bombing raids during the war, except for that on Belgrade. This had been declared an Open City, which should have made it immune to attack.

The sad fact is that over 1939-45 the international laws on bombing dated back to the pre-heavier-than-air machine era, and were designed to deal with balloons! This meant that there was little legal restraint on bombing in WWII.

Cheers,

Sid

I know that you mean it brought the US into a "shooting" war, but for the record, the US was at war with the Axis the moment it passed the Lend Lease act in March 1941. It even included USSR into the LL 2 months before the Pearl Harbor attack.

take care

This post has been edited by Imperialist on May 20, 2006 10:29 am

Edited for failure to notice second page

This post has been edited by 120mm on July 11, 2006 11:04 am

I know that you mean it brought the US into a "shooting" war, but for the record, the US was at war with the Axis the moment it passed the Lend Lease act in March 1941. It even included USSR into the LL 2 months before the Pearl Harbor attack.

take care

I just noticed this reply Imperialist. What are you basing this on?

I would agree my phrasing was sloppy, and that Lend-Lease certainly brought the US "in to the war" in a sense. The US was taking some actions outside its borders that had something to do with the war. But I would disagree that the US was "at war". Certainly the US did not consider itself to be in a state of war with the Axis. The US had not declared war on any other country, and no country had declared war on the US. The US was not taking anything that could be called sustained offensive action (yes, the destroyers of the neutrality patrol dropped depth charges, but seldom and without result). The US was not the victim of any sustained offensive action either... personally I would say the sinking of the USS Reuben James on 31 October 1941 would qualify if it had been followed by a declaration of war or more actions, but it was not.

For what it's worth, the Americans alive at the time (my parents and grandparents for example) felt that they were at peace on 6 December 1941. There was a war going on in Europe, but the US was neutral. On 8 December they considered themselves at war.

I would not deny that it was obvious that the US favored Britain and her allies. But saying the US was in the war because of Lend Lease is like saying Sweden was in the war because she sold iron to Germany.

Did you notice this thread:

http://www.worldwar2.ro/forum/index.php?showtopic=3320

Some aspects were discussed there. I think they would be off topic here, I'm not sure.