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by joshontheweb
4246 days ago
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That was really interesting. I never knew there was this kind of strategy behind flak evasion. Man, must have taken some stones to do a bomber mission. I knew an old timer that flew bombers in WW2 and he said towards the end of the war the germans were running out of metal and all sorts of things were used as flak. He said nuts and bolts were pretty common. He'd find them embedded inside the cabin after close flak fire. Pretty scary to think that your end might come from a washer. |
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http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAF_Bomber_Command
The wiki article gives good explanation of how bombing developed during WWII - starting as a weapon to terrible to be used (based on poor quality data); with general agreements not to kill civilians; realising that bombers were hopelessly inaccurate; changing tactics to allow bombing of civillian populations, including the (to my mind) war crimes of fire bombing.
> Bomber Command crews also suffered an extremely high casualty rate: 55,573 killed out of a total of 125,000 aircrew (a 44.4% death rate), a further 8,403 were wounded in action and 9,838 became prisoners of war.
That's pretty much "toss a coin".