The plane that saved Britain
- Thread starter crosslandkelly
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Oh along with the Bristol Beaufighter the similar looking de Havilland Mosquito are two of my all time favourite planes. I was a bit disappointed as to the technical depth of the program, but then I'm a bit of a geek when it comes to this plane. Aviation History magazine (I think it was that one anyway) did a great piece on the rebuilding of the Mosquito in last nights program about a year ago and the level of restoration and time and money spent was amazing.
I think that although the glory planes like the Spitfire and the workhorse like the Hurricane were fantastic the Mosquito was better in that it's construction materials and skills to build it didn't eat up already short resources (Göring complained about the high speed of the aircraft and its wooden structure, built by a nation he considered to have large metal reserves, while Germany had shortages of such materials and could not produce such a design) and the number of roles it excelled at put the others in the shade. Also it's just so pretty and purposeful.
Good program and the presenter was so obviously interested and overwhelmed with emotion when he went up that it made an interesting watch. Would dearly love a flight in one myself.
Did you know that?
The other plane we were discussing elsewhere on the boards the ME 262 first operational kill was a Mosquito, happened on 26 July 1944.
Post war, the RAF found that when finally applied to bombing, in terms of useful damage done, the Mosquito had proved 4.95 times cheaper than the Lancaster.
The film 633 Squadron (fictitional film about the Mosquito) inspired the "trench run" sequence in Star Wars.
I think that although the glory planes like the Spitfire and the workhorse like the Hurricane were fantastic the Mosquito was better in that it's construction materials and skills to build it didn't eat up already short resources (Göring complained about the high speed of the aircraft and its wooden structure, built by a nation he considered to have large metal reserves, while Germany had shortages of such materials and could not produce such a design) and the number of roles it excelled at put the others in the shade. Also it's just so pretty and purposeful.
Good program and the presenter was so obviously interested and overwhelmed with emotion when he went up that it made an interesting watch. Would dearly love a flight in one myself.
Did you know that?
The other plane we were discussing elsewhere on the boards the ME 262 first operational kill was a Mosquito, happened on 26 July 1944.
Post war, the RAF found that when finally applied to bombing, in terms of useful damage done, the Mosquito had proved 4.95 times cheaper than the Lancaster.
The film 633 Squadron (fictitional film about the Mosquito) inspired the "trench run" sequence in Star Wars.
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I remember making the Airfix kit, it was the first model where I actually painted most of the parts before assembly, it was an impressive looking plane.
The other Airfix kit that sticks in my mind was the Boulton Paul Defiant, which for a fighter looked quite mean with its gun turret.
We must have a thing for nightfighters as the Boulton Paul Defiant was the plane replaced by the Bristol Beaufighter and de Havilland Mosquito. Looked like a Hurricane. I had the model kit too.
Oh there's an idea I haven't made a model in years...
While doing his Nation Service in the RAF my father burned a Mosquito to ashes....
It had made a crash landing on the airfield and it was a cold winter in Nissen huts... wooden planes got to love em!
It had made a crash landing on the airfield and it was a cold winter in Nissen huts... wooden planes got to love em!
Another beautiful aircraft from WW2 has got to be the Westland Whirlwind. Makes you wonder where the designers of the Me262 got their ideas from
It's a real shame there aren't any examples left
It's a real shame there aren't any examples left
Good story Mr Fenna, I can imagine someone sneaking around in the dark pinching wood from the wreck to keep his home fire burning.My Dad managed to kill one of the family pigs when a German bomber came down near the farm during the war. He'd got there first and pinched a load of machine gun ammo which he later put on a fire in the yard. BANG one very dead pig, one scared kid and an explosively angry set of parents. (Still pork for tea for a while.)
Another beautiful aircraft from WW2 has got to be the Westland Whirlwind. Makes you wonder where the designers of the Me262 got their ideas from
It's a real shame there aren't any examples left
Nice plane Mesquite, must admit I didn't know a heck of a lot about it 'till you popped up the WIKI link there.
Cheers,
GB.
NO, i have not been to auschwitz, but to some smaller concentration camps which was upsetting enough for me... .about dresden ""somewhat hammered"": you might want to discuss this (if they'd be still around...) with my ancestors who saw the fires from 60km away and with my friends mother- she was hiding in the basement of their house and the building next door got a full hit... .
to avoid all misunderstandings: i just could not understand how any bomber plane can save any country...
Strategic bombing.
When your country is under threat of invasion or at the very least a severe clobbering that will knock it back into the third world, if you enemy has restructured its economy and infrastructure with that aim in mind, then it insufficient to simply face the enemy on the battlefield, one must take the fight to the enemies homeland and destroy his industry, his internal and external economy, his very will to wage war in the first place.
It is argued that the bombing of Dresden was part of a plan to destroy the fighting spirit of the German people, that rings false, the writing was already on the wall for Germany and most already knew it.
There was no direct equivalent to Dresden in Britain, it would be as if all of England's galleries, The British Museum and British Library were moved to Bath, any anti-aircraft defences removed, most of the fighter cover removed, half of the surrounding countryside population (especially all the children under ten) moved within the city boundaries, a large percentage of all allied and recuperating servicemen moved into the hospitals, schools and great houses within the city and all this done because, y'know its Bath and there are no arms factories, no major railway yards and who would want to blow up The British Museum and Library?
If we'd wanted to smash the spirit of the Italian people the equivalent would have been to flatten Florence or Venice.
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Churchill was originally against the bombing of Dresden in such large quantities. His original orders to bomber command did not include them. He was persuaded against his better judgment to amend these orders and earned himself one of his few black marks in an otherwise well commanded war. He should have stuck to his guns. his instincts were very often more in tune with history than his subordinates.
A truly beautiful plane, but still an instrument of war.
[video=youtube;H_-AsgYvF2o]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_-AsgYvF2o[/video]
And you gotta love these guys.
http://www.eaa.org/news/2010/2010-12-02_mosquito.asp
[video]http://www.worldwarbirdnews.com/2011/04/26/video-mosquito-34-scale-replica-maiden-flight/[/video]
The first flight is at 8.55 into the vid.
[video=youtube;H_-AsgYvF2o]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_-AsgYvF2o[/video]
And you gotta love these guys.
http://www.eaa.org/news/2010/2010-12-02_mosquito.asp
[video]http://www.worldwarbirdnews.com/2011/04/26/video-mosquito-34-scale-replica-maiden-flight/[/video]
The first flight is at 8.55 into the vid.
Whilst I'm no supporter for the bombing of Dresden, I have to challenge this statement:
The generally accepted death toll in Dresden is 25 000, vs 90 000 for Hiroshima. Many more died in Hiroshima later on from fallout.
The generally accepted death toll in Dresden is 25 000, vs 90 000 for Hiroshima. Many more died in Hiroshima later on from fallout.
Actually Churchill had got his hands dirty before - gassing the Kurds out in what is now Iraq before WWII. However It's very easy to impose a moral viewpoint on the situation from a distance. I'm not really equipped to judge.
Surprisingly few survivors of Hiroshima died from exposure to fallout, reading the figures one would have expected there to be many more. However deaths related to burns, infections and inability to provide for oneself were very high.
The death toll I have read for the first day in Hiroshima was between 90,000 and 160,000.
I am aware that certain right wing nut jobs like to bandy a figure of half a million casualties about and that the 'recognised' figure is 25,000 however that figure was arrived at after the events when there was pressure to play down what many thought was the true figure. There were few people to count the bodies that had to be quickly disposed off, the city had been flooded with refugees from the countryside and no definite count was made of their number and with the Red Army on its way there was no way afterwards to judge how many may have died in the bombing, how many killed or imprisoned by the advancing Russians or how many simply scattered to the wind.
At the time the Germans talked of two to three hundred thousand deaths, is that accurate, probably not, was it only 25,000 maybe. I'd be inclined to pick a figure somewhere in the middle.
History says 25,000
And in the words of Sir Winston Churchill
"History will be kind to me for I intend to write it."
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Back on topic.
A lot of the British bombers shot down over here were Liberators, which was a surprise to me as I didn't know the RAF used them.
A faster heavy bomber than the Flying Fortress, not as good looking though.
A lot of the British bombers shot down over here were Liberators, which was a surprise to me as I didn't know the RAF used them.
A faster heavy bomber than the Flying Fortress, not as good looking though.
The Mossies used to fly over our school's playing fields during the filming of 633 Squadron. Lovely plane, and it claimed a casualty when one of the lads was watching the Mossies instead of the discus, which hit him on the head and knocked him out! The Germans also produced a similar wooden plane - various versions of TA 154/254, but it wasn't very successful.
Re Dresden, this extract ties in with my own research into this area years ago. Ty reading it, remember the situation as it was then, and then decide...
The logic for the argument claiming it was a war crime is that
1 the war is already(almost) over
2 they did it for revenge
5 years ago
Short answer.
It was bombed by the Royal Air Force and the 8th Air Force of the USAAF.
Yes it was justified.
Nobody was tried for a "War Crime" as it was not, at the time, a war crime to bomb an enemy's industrialised towns.
Long answer. Please read it.
The biggest problem with dealing with the matter of the bombing of Germany is that it is judged against modern morals and standards of behaviour.
Civilians have suffered during war from the beginning of time. When the barbarians sacked Rome they slaughtered men women and children. When the French stormed Spanish towns during the peninsular war the citizens inside were killed and the towns raped and pillaged. The powers during the 19th century and the early 20th laid down ever more stringent rules about conduct during war trying to prevent these excesses but until the Geneva Convention came along there were no hard and fast “rules of war”.
In 1945 the Geneva Convention did not prohibit the general bombing of a town to destroy its industrial capacity.
We have to look at Dresden in the light of the morality of the time.
Some people in Dresden and elsewhere claim that the Bombing of Dresden by the RAF AND the USAAF is a war crime. In my opinion it was not
I am not in any way denying the fact that what happened in Dresden was horrific and appalling. I do deny that the men who undertook the mission have any crime to answer for.
The bombing of Dresden has been used since 1945 as a tool to beat the RAF about its conduct of "terror bombing" during WW2.
The bombing of an industrialized town from the air in an attempt to destroy its industry or cause such loss of morale amongst its inhabitants that they ceased to work was NOT a crime by the Rules of War in 1945. The bombing of Coventry, London and other British Cities in 1940 and 1941 was also NOT a War Crime.
Within Europe we did not have the “industrial areas” afforded to towns in the New World. The factories were in and around the areas where the workforce lived. One side of the street would be the factory wall; the other side of the street would be the workers houses. Unfortunately this lead to what, nowadays, is called “collateral damage”
Dresden burned so heavily for several reasons.
It was a medieval city with many wooden buildings.
There had been a dry winter in the region which meant many buildings were tinderboxes.
The population were not used to air raids and did not therefore have the knowledge that you need to put incendiaries out quickly
The raid had little opposition because its Anti aircraft defence had been taken away by the Germans for use on the Eastern front. Therefore the bombers were able to put their loads in a concentrated space with little or no opposition.
Dresden was not "chosen for destruction". This was a raid on an industrial centre which went exactly right with horrifying consequences due to many circumstances some of which I have listed above.
Why did so many people die?
The 35000 people that died (absolute top number using all available, reliable sources) did so because of the reasons above and the fact that Dresden’s Air Raid Precautions were appallingly bad. There were few, if any, properly constructed public shelters despite money having been allocated for them which was spent by the local burghers on Air Raid shelters for their homes in the suburbs.
People therefore sheltered in basements of houses which, due to the firestorm above filled with noxious fumes and killed the occupants before the houses collapsed onto them and burned their corpses.
Many people have claimed in the last 62 years that Dresden was a quiet peaceable town going about its business and waiting for the war to end. Read the paragraphs below which are taken from research by myself and many others for the truth about "quiet, peaceable, nothing to do with the war" Dresden.
In early 1945 the war was far from over. The Allies were still camped outside the borders of Germany, V2 rockets were still falling. The Allies had just fought the battle of the Bulge where the supposedly defeated Germans suddenly punched a huge hole in the Allied lines, German Rocket and Jet aircraft were coming off the production lines and proceeding to rip the hell out of the allied air fleets.
It was an operation undertaken due to many reasons.
1. A request from the Russians at the Yalta conference in February
1945. General Antonov "We want the Dresden railway junction bombed"
Meeting between the Chiefs of staff as reported by an interpreter.
2. It was a German base of operations against Marshall Koniev`s left flank as he advanced into Germany. (See above)
Captured German High Command documents from Berlin in 1945 state that "Dresden is to be fortified as a military strongpoint, to be held at all costs." These statements are also backed up by decrypts from Ultra at Bletchley Park.
3. Munitions storage in the old Dresden Arsenal.
4. Troop reinforcement and transport centre
Re Dresden, this extract ties in with my own research into this area years ago. Ty reading it, remember the situation as it was then, and then decide...
The logic for the argument claiming it was a war crime is that
1 the war is already(almost) over
2 they did it for revenge
5 years ago
Short answer.
It was bombed by the Royal Air Force and the 8th Air Force of the USAAF.
Yes it was justified.
Nobody was tried for a "War Crime" as it was not, at the time, a war crime to bomb an enemy's industrialised towns.
Long answer. Please read it.
The biggest problem with dealing with the matter of the bombing of Germany is that it is judged against modern morals and standards of behaviour.
Civilians have suffered during war from the beginning of time. When the barbarians sacked Rome they slaughtered men women and children. When the French stormed Spanish towns during the peninsular war the citizens inside were killed and the towns raped and pillaged. The powers during the 19th century and the early 20th laid down ever more stringent rules about conduct during war trying to prevent these excesses but until the Geneva Convention came along there were no hard and fast “rules of war”.
In 1945 the Geneva Convention did not prohibit the general bombing of a town to destroy its industrial capacity.
We have to look at Dresden in the light of the morality of the time.
Some people in Dresden and elsewhere claim that the Bombing of Dresden by the RAF AND the USAAF is a war crime. In my opinion it was not
I am not in any way denying the fact that what happened in Dresden was horrific and appalling. I do deny that the men who undertook the mission have any crime to answer for.
The bombing of Dresden has been used since 1945 as a tool to beat the RAF about its conduct of "terror bombing" during WW2.
The bombing of an industrialized town from the air in an attempt to destroy its industry or cause such loss of morale amongst its inhabitants that they ceased to work was NOT a crime by the Rules of War in 1945. The bombing of Coventry, London and other British Cities in 1940 and 1941 was also NOT a War Crime.
Within Europe we did not have the “industrial areas” afforded to towns in the New World. The factories were in and around the areas where the workforce lived. One side of the street would be the factory wall; the other side of the street would be the workers houses. Unfortunately this lead to what, nowadays, is called “collateral damage”
Dresden burned so heavily for several reasons.
It was a medieval city with many wooden buildings.
There had been a dry winter in the region which meant many buildings were tinderboxes.
The population were not used to air raids and did not therefore have the knowledge that you need to put incendiaries out quickly
The raid had little opposition because its Anti aircraft defence had been taken away by the Germans for use on the Eastern front. Therefore the bombers were able to put their loads in a concentrated space with little or no opposition.
Dresden was not "chosen for destruction". This was a raid on an industrial centre which went exactly right with horrifying consequences due to many circumstances some of which I have listed above.
Why did so many people die?
The 35000 people that died (absolute top number using all available, reliable sources) did so because of the reasons above and the fact that Dresden’s Air Raid Precautions were appallingly bad. There were few, if any, properly constructed public shelters despite money having been allocated for them which was spent by the local burghers on Air Raid shelters for their homes in the suburbs.
People therefore sheltered in basements of houses which, due to the firestorm above filled with noxious fumes and killed the occupants before the houses collapsed onto them and burned their corpses.
Many people have claimed in the last 62 years that Dresden was a quiet peaceable town going about its business and waiting for the war to end. Read the paragraphs below which are taken from research by myself and many others for the truth about "quiet, peaceable, nothing to do with the war" Dresden.
In early 1945 the war was far from over. The Allies were still camped outside the borders of Germany, V2 rockets were still falling. The Allies had just fought the battle of the Bulge where the supposedly defeated Germans suddenly punched a huge hole in the Allied lines, German Rocket and Jet aircraft were coming off the production lines and proceeding to rip the hell out of the allied air fleets.
It was an operation undertaken due to many reasons.
1. A request from the Russians at the Yalta conference in February
1945. General Antonov "We want the Dresden railway junction bombed"
Meeting between the Chiefs of staff as reported by an interpreter.
2. It was a German base of operations against Marshall Koniev`s left flank as he advanced into Germany. (See above)
Captured German High Command documents from Berlin in 1945 state that "Dresden is to be fortified as a military strongpoint, to be held at all costs." These statements are also backed up by decrypts from Ultra at Bletchley Park.
3. Munitions storage in the old Dresden Arsenal.
4. Troop reinforcement and transport centre
This thread is veering sharply into the political.
This forum is not the place to discuss the rights and wrongs of a war that ended over 65 years ago (or any other war for that matter)
Please keep to the topic.
Thanks.
Graham_s
BCUK Mod Team.
This forum is not the place to discuss the rights and wrongs of a war that ended over 65 years ago (or any other war for that matter)
Please keep to the topic.
Thanks.
Graham_s
BCUK Mod Team.
Dorniers and Heinkels must therefore have been the most successful planes of World War 2. Accounting as they did for 22,000 Londoners in the first 4 Months of the Blitz. (A factual non political statement)
Anybody heard of the term "Coventrated"?
Two wrongs don't make a right but in War pardonable decisions are made. Difficult to know in a tit for tat situation which tit started it.
I happily drink with the German Team and discuss the relative merits of our period service rifles in the full knowledge that twice in the last century we would have been shooting them at each other.
Wars over guys we forgive if not forget the actions of our ancestors.
Anybody heard of the term "Coventrated"?
Two wrongs don't make a right but in War pardonable decisions are made. Difficult to know in a tit for tat situation which tit started it.
I happily drink with the German Team and discuss the relative merits of our period service rifles in the full knowledge that twice in the last century we would have been shooting them at each other.
Wars over guys we forgive if not forget the actions of our ancestors.
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i was not intending to cause such a stir-up with my comment- i just wanted to point out that i consider most bombers a weapon of mass destruction- no matter who builds or flies them... .
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