My Dad was pretty happy with the results of the bombing campaign, even though (as part of the the 3rd Canadian Division) he was accidentally bombed by the USAF in Normandy. It was the only way for the allies to strike back against Germany prior to 1944/45:
After the war, General Omar Bradley ( U.S. Army ) remarked, "We went into France almost totally untrained in air-ground cooperation."
My uncle was on the Caen raid. The bombing of Caen was at the request of General Montgomery. Air Marshall Harris was willing to co-operate, But, as he repeatedly explained, his men had been trained to fly at night and each aircraft operated "individually, navigating by prescribed routes to the neighbourhood of their objective under conditions in which no details of the ground can generally be seen." Each aircraft bombed on pyrotechnical markers placed on or near the objectives by Pathfinder aircraft and if necessary corrections were made by the master bomber. It involved grave risks for the army to ask aircrew trained for such missions to locate and identify ground targets in close proximity to our own troops.
Harris wanted the army to understand that the pilot in a Lancaster had a very limited view of the ground as did the navigator, "a machine minder and plotter who spends most of his time in a cabin." The navigators job was to determine the position of the aircraft using electronic aids as well as dead reckoning. The only crew member who could actually see the ground was the air bomber who had little training and experience in the difficult art of map reading with reference to the ground rushing beneath him. If heavy bombers were to provide close support the chances of short bombing and misplaced concentrations would have to be expected.
With reference to Terry Copp, Canadian military historian.
