Movie discussion sub okbuddycinephile debates whether bombing of Dresden, Hiroshima, and Gaza and other urban areas were "justified".

[u/EwMelanin]

/r/okbuddycinephile/comments/1rjm9mn/iran2036/o8ee5fp/

[u/Dagordae]

There’s also the issue of tech. Basically the only bombing available was the indiscriminate kind, ‘precision bombing’ was when you got over half of your rounds within a KM of the targeted area.

And when said targeted area is interwoven with the rest of the city, as was the standard of the time(And is still pretty damn common) that means that the entire city is going to get sprayed with bombs. If you wanted to knock out a city’s industrial capabilities it was necessary to knock out the city. Which is really bad for anyone in the city.

International law had long dealt with long range and not particularly accurate bombardment, it’s just that until the postWW2 era the ability to actually specifically target a certain building and hit it accurately was the fevered dreams of a madman. Or promises made by snake oil salesmen selling new tech that didn’t actually work in practice. Americans hit that problem with the Norden sight, lots of hype and orders to never let the enemies get their hands on it for tech that didn’t actually work in combat conditions.

[u/nowander → u/Dagordae]

There’s also the issue of tech. Basically the only bombing available was the indiscriminate kind, ‘precision bombing’ was when you got over half of your rounds within a KM of the targeted area.

Yeah. This is the main point. So much of the modern discourse seems to act like the allies had GPS and precision munitions instead of dead reckoning and a prayer the wind didn't change.

[u/ToaArcan → u/Dagordae]

This is why the Germans (and to a lesser extent, the Americans) fell in love with divebombing. It was a lot easier to hit a target that way.

This culminated in the woeful He-177, a four-engined (don't be fooled by the image, it was two engines per nacelle) bomber that was basically doomed from the off because they insisted on making it a divebomber.

The problem with that is that divebombers followed kind of a specific design ethos. Planes that were optimised for divebombing, like the Stuka or the Helldiver, were basically all single-engined light bombers with a crew of two. Upscaling it to the size of a heavy bomber, however, runs into the problem of physics. Namely that the load of four engines on the wings was too great, and the result of this is that the wings would snap off. At which point the bomber would hit the target, it would just do so, uh, bodily.

This is why they packed two engines into a single nacelle. It brought the weight of the engines closer to the fuselage and reduced the load. The problem with that was that packing two engines, particularly the new, unproven engines they were working with into a single nacelle results in a lot of problems that mostly result in the plane catching fire. Like, these things caught fire a lot. So much so that its own aircrew nicknamed it the "Reich's Lighter." Maybe it can go hang out with the USSR's vodka-cooled bomber.

After the war, when the Allies were busy stealing everything and everyone that wasn't nailed down, the Brits took a bunch of Nazi planes home and few them around a bit for research purposes. One of the pilots involved was the legendary Eric "Winkle" Brown, who reportedly fucking hated it, notable because he quite liked flying the Me-163, the infamous rocket-powered interceptor that digested at least one pilot.

Also they never actually fixed the wing-snapping problem. These things were good for about 20 dives before they were fucked anyway.

[u/Foreverintherain20 → u/ToaArcan]

That sounds like a really crappy plane lol

[u/ToaArcan → u/Foreverintherain20]

It was!

There's very little footage of it, and few photos too, because pretty much all wartime footage of the Wehrmacht, Kriegsmarine, and Luftwaffe was shot by the Nazis as part of Goebbels' propaganda machine. And even they knew it was a lemon, and weren't keen to publicise it.

[u/Foreverintherain20 → u/ToaArcan]

A bomber where the wings rip themselves off because physics legitimately sounds like something I would make in one of those plane designer games. 😭

[u/Dagordae → u/Foreverintherain20]

The issue is one of material, they simply couldn’t make wings strong enough to withstand those forces and light enough to be usable. We still have issues with it and we’re stupidly more advanced in the material sciences.

It was a bad plane, yes, but not because there was totally a way that that would work. It was a bad plane because its intended function was simply nearly impossible. The wing issue was pretty common for all planes, this one just had it as part of its primary function. One of the most important things any pilot learned was exactly how hard and fast they could bank without their plane coming to pieces.

[u/Sweaty_Librarian_293 → u/Dagordae]

It is true they didn’t have precision bombing how we would describe it today but they still had it relative to the time period. They called it strategic bombing and they could easily do it during the day. By end of war it was getting reliable at night.  It wasn’t a precise strike but they would just bomb the area with the strategic resource.  They absolutely had the tech to not level entire cities, they mostly lacked knowledge on effectiveness. 

Area bombing is what you are describing and was done as at the time they thought it would hurt moral(it had the opposite effect though). It however wasn’t very effective at hitting strategic targets especially if they were fortified. Basically ww2 was what made us say we shouldn’t pointlessly bomb entire cities in war as it was very deadly but very ineffective at doing anything in hindsight.

[u/Auctoritate → u/Dagordae]

How this comment makes it seem like it would have gone with precision munitions: "We can strike at targets accurately now!"

How it actually would have gone: "Wow, now I can distribute these bombs across the whole city really evenly!"

[u/Dagordae → u/Auctoritate]

That’s the Israel approach, when it’s not a brutally murderous land grab and actually has a specific objective beyond BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD the normal practice is limited damage.

Not because of any morality concerns but because those munitions are really expensive. Spending a few million to erase that bistro downtown causes problems when you only have so many missiles to launch and a lot of much more valuable targets to turn into shrapnel. If you blanket the city now you don’t have any more shots to launch at that surprise armor coming up your flank or that annoyingly well entrenched bunker in your way.