Woe Unto Those Who Seek 'Truth'

Hello hello

I thought I'd quickly drop a note out to you lovely people to say that the second Dresden video is about to go into production, with the aim of having it to you ASAP, ideally by the 13th Feb for no reason.

Secondly I thought you might appreciate a brief insight into some of the challenges of trying to get things right, and a book recommendation.

If you are a total nerd, especially if you geek out like I do on the USAAF in Europe, then I highly recommend Richard G. Davis’ “Carl Spaatz and the Air War in Europe”. It’s sadly out of print now, but copies circulate on the internet for not insane money, and it has everything- all the missions, plans, strategies, graphs and stats you could possibly hope for. Davis spent a decade and more writing and researching it. I have leant on it regularly, and it has never let me down. But. As ever sometimes what is not said, is at least as intresting as what is said. For example, he describes how 1,377 aircraft took off to hit Germany on 14th Feb (guess why I was looking at that date), and he gives amazing detail on the plans, A to C, in the event of weather etc. He mentions that 340 B-24s of 2nd Air Division opted for plan C and struck at Magdeburg’s rail yards using H2X, dropping 811 tonnes of bombs of which 215 tonnes were fire bombs – this is the sort of superb detail he gives and you can see why I nerd out on it right. Anyway, he further notes 294 B-17s went to Chemnitz, notes their loads, and then 311 bombed Dresden. At first blush that all sounds perfectly detailed, sensible and clear. Except. Add up 340+294+311. Where did the rest go? No mention of them. Where are they Mr Davis? Presumably some horrific aircrash, or mass shoot down might be worthy of discussion, especially this late in the war especially seeing as Dresden had no flak defences at all....so I went a huntin’ and Lo! Wouldn’t you know it, due to a ‘technical malfunction’ of the lead aircraft’s H2X radar nav system, they over shot 150km and hit Prauge instead. Richard mentions this not at all. A bomber force in broad daylight, in 1945, misses the entire country they were aiming at. And then might reasonably go, ok, well good job someone else did note that down in a different book, and indeed the Air Div history does note it, excellent, now we know. Except then you have to ask yourself, wait, 423 aircraft, that’s more than on part of one air div, so probably there’s more than one lead aircraft, and elements of a number of different units, so clearly there’s been some god almighty fuck up here due to bad weather, but someone’s H2X has to be working right, I mean statistically lets assume on in 10 aircraft have a unit fitted (which, by the way, I’m guessing at so I need to scratch at that later) so let’s say there’s 40 units, they can’t all have packed up. Procedure should have been if the lead plane couldn’t navigate, it should hand lead to another aircraft and so on, so what happened? It feels like a 30+ minute window of confusion and panic and frustration and that might, you know, be quite informative about how late war aircrew were behaving, how the culture had developed, what they were thinking, what procedures had been created that failed and thus the limitations of learning in the USAAF and whether that was different in Bomber Command or how much of that might have gone forward into the early Cold War etc etc etc. All from a set of numbers which, unless you did the maths, you might well just glance over and move on.

The moral of the story here? Never trust a single source, check everything at least once, and always as the second question. Also buy Mr Davis’ book it is truly superb.