Talk:Thunderclap plan

Proposed move

I propose to move this article to Thunderclap plan, this is the title that Patric Bishop uses in "Bomber Boys" in his index page 428, and as he (p. 344) like Taylor (214) makes clear it never became an operation. "Such opperations would serve a dual puropse of speeding the Russian's progress westwards as well as perhaps fulfilling the objective mooted in Thunderclapof creating sufficient ... further resistance was futile."

The direct lining of the Bombing of Dresden to Thunderclap, seems to have been yet more disinformation put out by the discredited David Irving in his book in the early 60s. If anyone has a modern source that can show that Thunderclap did indeed take place then we can discuss it further. --PBS (talk) 20:00, 2 April 2009 (UTC)

Edit on 21 April

Nowhere on the page given does it say that an RAF directive called Operation Thunderclap was issued. The campaign diary entry on the RAF web page is not correct on describing the operation as Thunderclap, two more recent sources (Frederick Taylor and Patric Bishop) both state that Operation Thunderclap was not implemented. This mistake seems to have originated with David Irving's book APOCALYPSE 1945: The Destruction of Dresden (See the chapter called Thunderclap in the online 1995 edition pp. 110-127) and as such is not from a reliable source. --PBS (talk) 13:32, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

Was Thunderclap was shelved?

I just got done watching the PBS, American Experience, and they said that even though Thunderclap was shelved due to the moral questions of bombing civilians, the operation was finally carried out during the winter of 1944-45, killing 3,000 and 100,000 homeless. We really need more sources for this page. Was Thunderclap really shelved? Dinkytown talk 08:07, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

See above two modern sources say it was. It seems that the usage of the term "Operation Thunderclap" was initiated by David Irving a known unreliable sources. -- PBS (talk) 15:04, 13 August 2011 (UTC)

Frederick Taylor's endnotes, p.530, source the cancelled operation's codename Thunderclap to "Bombing of Berlin, note by the Secretary, January 22, 1945, PRO, London, CAB 81/127." This presumably refers to Sir Archibald Sinclair, Secretary of State for Air in 1945. The PRO (Public Record Office at Kew) is now known as TNA (The National Archives). CAB means Cabinet files.

The original plan, in August 1944, was for the whole of US Eighth Air Force and RAF Bomber Command, over 2,000 heavies, to attack Berlin in daylight, the intention being that the psychological blow would capitalise on the German collapse in Normandy and perhaps hasten surrender. Taylor, p.207, says that on 17 August "the joint planners reported that they did not think such an operation 'likely to achieve any worthwhile degree of success'." Taylor does not source this in his notes. It is probably true that even such a demonstration of Allied strength would not have made the enemy stop fighting. However, Sir Arthur Harris, in Bomber Offensive, Cassell 1947, pbk Pen & Sword, Barnsley, 2005, ISBN 1-84415-210-3, pp.245-6, gives a rather different account. He says that the operation was in fact laid on and that he personally cancelled it the day before it was due because it turned out that the Americans did not have enough long-range escort fighters to protect Bomber Command as well as the Eighth. "...there was a plan to carry out a vast Anglo-American air attack on Berlin in daylight; the idea was that this might cause the German Government to panic at a critical moment. General Doolittle [commander Eighth Air Force] came up to Bomber Command on the afternoon before the projected attack and he and I and our staffs examined the final plan together in the Operations Room. The routes were decided and the whole operation pretty well cut and dried when I discovered that the Americans, whose long-range fighters were required to protect Bomber Command's striking force as well as their own Fortresses, were unable to raise enough fighters to give what I considered adequate cover for our aircraft during such a deep penetration of Germany... There had been some misunderstanding about this in the earlier stages of planning the operation, since it was only on the day before the operation was to take place that I discovered that an American long-range fighter force sufficient to cover both our own and the American bombers all the way to Berlin was not available. Although Jimmy Doolittle did his utmost, as always, to meet our requirements I had to refuse to subject my force to a risk far greater than usual... The whole operation was therefore cancelled."

The RAF only had seven squadrons of Mustang IIIs (P-51Bs) at that time as production priority was given to Eighth Air Force. British-based Spitfires with 90-gallon drop tanks could cover the bombers out to 300 miles (halfway to Berlin), but seven squadrons of RAF Mustangs weren't enough to cover 1,000 Lancasters and Halifaxes over the other half of the route there and back, the more dangerous half, and the Americans couldn't make up the necessary numbers, so the whole thing was a no-go.

Bear in mind that, on 27 August 1944, when RAF Bomber Command made its first daylight raid on Germany for three years, dispatching 216 Halifaxes, 13 Pathfinder Lancasters and 14 Oboe Mosquitos to the Rheinprussen synthetic oil plant at Meerbeck near Homberg, about 300 miles from base, Harris detailed nine Spitfire squadrons to cover the outbound flight and seven to cover the withdrawal. As usual when a strong Spitfire escort was present, the Germans chose not to engage: only one scouting Bf110 appeared and it was promptly seen off. The Germans would fight Mustang escorts, but not Spitfires, for well-known psychological reasons.

The Eighth Air Force did raid Berlin as part of the dusted-off plan for attacks on 'Berlin and other East German cities' in February 1945, to support the Soviet offensive. None of these attacks was quite on the scale envisaged in the August 1944 proposal. Khamba Tendal (talk) 17:46, 1 May 2019 (UTC)