why didnt evil Hitler send long range bombers over the USSRs crop fields and just bomb them with incendiaries to set fire to their food supply and starve them?
>>18637187Whoa... You should join the academy... You'll be a general in no time...
>>18637187probably because they wanted to control said crop fields, that and its not like Germany didn't bomb the USSR
>>18637190Trump should put me in charge >>18637193anon, they can regrow the crops next year after all commies are dead within a week
the effects of any crop bombing wouldn't have been felt for a year after minimum and the war would've been over by then according to plan.
>>18637187The fire could spread back to Germany.
I don't know if this is me being a Hearts of Iron brained retard, but how would strategic bombers be defended from fighters?It is my understanding that fighters are generally short range, and thus if Germany sent a strategic bomber to, for example, Kazan, they could not be defended and would be at the complete mercy of any fighters the USSR had there.For a non-hypothetical example, how did the US bomb Japan so extensively? Did they just develop long-range fighters? Were they covered by fighters from Aircraft Carriers? I know nothing of technical military history.
>>18637416B-25 flew at an altitude that Jap fighters couldn't reach.
>>18637428Damn. Why were Jap fighters so shit?
>>18637433they were glass cannons that relied on firepower and superior speed to defeat the enemy and sacrificed literally everything else to get it. They were so focused on speed that they didn't even have self-sealing fuel tanks to save weight. They were highly effective in the opening stages of the war but once America developed fighters that could match them in speed they were death traps
>>18637443>they were glass cannons that relied on firepower and superior speed to defeat the enemyJap fighters did not have superior speed. They could turn and climb better, but they were incapable of chasing even F4F in a dive.
>>18637428>B-25 flew at an altitude that Jap fighters couldn't reach.B-29. And your talking total shit. The entire point of taking Iwo Jima was because the airforce pushed hard for an emergency landing area precisly because they were losing enough bombers in the drink on the return flight because of damage sustained from japanese interceptors that it became a top priority.
>>18637187Because Germany couldn't maintain strategic bombing efforts after 1940 as far- as I know. They could barely spare the resources. America's bombing campaign was revolutionary only we could pull it off.
>>18637187meme answer, nazis were le silly.real answer, America would have sustained the USSR with even more food.
>>18637580>Ki-84A very late-war model that was slower than early war American fighters.
>why didn't the notoriously resource poor germans waste valuable resources on bombing distant low-value targetsThe military genius of /his/ is on full display
>>18637626one wildfire can burn down many thousands square kilometers worth of crops in days, especially if the fires were donw about now close to harvest time theres no chance of re-planting anything youd have to wait for spring, or try planting winter crops but then you are without food for a long time anyways
>>18637699Cool, assuming that works your enemy will have significantly less food a year from now (assuming they aren't being supported by an agricultural juggernaut on the other side of the world.) Meanwhile your ground troops are begging for air support right now, your enemy's factories are churning out weapons that will reach the front in a few weeks, and you barely have enough fuel to sustain your current military operations and industry. Would you choose a high value target or a low value target?
>>18637187Heavy bombers are extremely expensive to produce. Literally only the western powers could afford it. The Axis and Soviets couldnt even try.The Germans tried to build an aircraft carrier during ww2 but they literally ran out of funds halfway through.Every raid is extremely costly as well because a bomber fleet also needs fighter protection. There is a very high fuel consumption in that, plus ordnance costs, plus attrition from each raid. The British nearly bankrupted themselves early in the war because the bombing raids costed more than they achieved.
how do you burn a turnip
>>18637784It wouldnt take that much to do, russia is big and only the important places are protected, flying on a path with the least dense villages/towns would be really easy and coincidentally the most concentration of grains, plenty of planes could fly around the world even then, 1-4 planes with fuel and a few incendiaries could do it i reckon, flying and dropping them at night over forests and crops or even grasslands would be devastating, with no firefighting abilities it it should've been easy to spread. plenty of armies have burned crops as a tactic
>>18637187What long range bombers?
>>18637836You realise it's incredibly hard to bomb something specific. The whole reason allies switched to indiscriminate city-wide bombing was because trying to target industrial areas was nearly impossible (the butt-report).
>>18637416>Fighter protection for bombers created many problems which had to be solved in action. Bomber pilots preferred close screening in which their formation was surrounded by pairs of fighters pursuing a zigzag course. Obviously, the visible presence of the protective fighters gave the bomber pilots a greater sense of security. However, this was a faulty conclusion, because a fighter can only carry out this purely defensive task by taking the initiative in the offensive. He must never wait until attacked because he then loses the chance of acting. >t. adolf galland I can't tell you anything about the specifics of tactics etc but yeah in general, there were two schools of thought: close escort or free hunt. Stick near to the bombers and attack anything approaching or go forward and proactively hunt for anything that might be dangerous. When restricted, fighters get really weird and edgy. The Allies near the end realised that unchaining them to just cause chaos in Germany is a good idea and it led to the situation that Luftwaffe fighters would get swarmed by P51s as soon as they took off. Galland's account of the last months of WWII in his autobiography is pretty apocalyptic with basically everything that moves being a target that could be destroyed at any moment.
>>18637416>Did they just develop long-range fightersUnironically yes they did.P51 Mustang was revolutionary because they could provide long range escort.P51 mustang was the reason USA started to do day-light raids over Germany instead of the traditional night-time raids. The P51 allowed the Americans to draw out and destroy the luftwaffe completely in its own airspace.
>>18637886>What long range bombers?Of course they only had a handful and they were optimized as maritime patrol bombers, but then so was the original B-17.
>>18638554
>>18638557
>>18637898>something specifica big field is not that specific, its a pretty large target, if a cigarette can set all of california on fire then a small incendiary bomb can absolutely do the same
>>18637187A single standard World War II 500-pound general-purpose bomb causes severe structural damage within a radius of about 150 feet, covering an impact and blast zone of roughly 70,000 square feetRussia has approximately 13.1 trillion square feet of arable and crop land
actually i found my own answer that probably explains why wildfires wouldnt spread as easily as today, all the underbrush wouldve been collected by peasants to use as firewood and for basket and fence weaving materials so a fire wouldn't have had enough fuel to burn through several fields
>>18638619>dry California is 100% exactly the same as cold tundraRetard
>>18639142Siberian pines are all pyrophytes. dont you look stupid now
>>18639324And tell me what great farmland is in Siberia?
>soviet union>having food in the first placeThey were communists anon
Hitler didn't even use chemical weapons despite having the technological advantage because he was a WW1 veteran and didn't want the enemy soldiers to suffer.
>>18640608>and didn't want the enemy soldiers to suffer.It's because he needed to save his chemical weapons to carry out the Holocaust with
>>18640608and yet he gassed jews, make that make sense
>>18637416The last real test of strategic bombing theory was done with the conventional fire bombing campaigns in Japan after LeMay overhauled everything. Strip as much defenses as possible to add more bombs, use incendiary bombs, tight formations, fly low and fly fast.Faffin about with escorts, defense guns, and trying to fly above interceptors was at best ineffective, at worst disastrous.
>>18640615>everyone puts on their gas-masks>hits the UK with sarin>UK suffers 95% casualties>Germany suffers 2% casualtieswell played chillfat well played
