Strategic Bombing - can it stop Germany taking out France

[Premu]

For my next game I want to use strategic bombing more prominently - until now I never really bothered to concentrate on it. A good country for that purpose seems to be the UK.

My plan - build up a decent airforce with fighters and strat bombers, and station them in France. Once the war starts, hit the airfields in western Germany first, followed by strikes against the infrastructure. This could achieve the following effects:

1. It limits the number of planes Germany can use in the Benelux - in SP as Germany I already had problems to compete for air superiority before taking airfields there simply because I couldn't station enough fighters nearby. If those airfields nearby are damaged, it will be even worse for Germany.

2. After the Luftwaffe is grounded, hit the roads and railways, and let their units starve - it should be far harder to break through into the Benelux with units out of supply and give the allies time to react.

So my questions here is: Is this a viable strategy, or do I overestimate the effect of early strategic bombing?

 

[Secret Master]

Getting enough concentration of force in time for Danzig will be the hard part.

Strategic bombers aren't cheap. Trying this with TACs and not having any other humans around is also probably impossible. I'm not sure you can build enough bombers and fighters to press the bombing campaign hard enough to crush German industry/Luftwaffe before French lines collapse.

The problem you are going to face isn't that you aren't good enough. It's that France is going to collapse rather quickly once Poland falls. Your window of opportunity is small.

However, there is a chance that you could wipe out the requisite German airfields within a week or so of Danzig. That would reduce German air power over Benelux (as you rightfully point out), but I'm not entirely sure you can knock the required airfields and the infrastructure leading to Benelux and put enough hurt on Germany's industry to swing the war to your favor before the Germans reach Dunkirk.

Keep in mind that the more STRs you build, the fewer CAS you will have to bomb German units as they attack. Thus, even if you have air superiority, and that's important, you won't be able to damage the Germans via ground attack. But there might be a way...

...Have you considered TACs to bomb the airfields, but once the airfields are dead, swapping them to ground attack in Benelux, periodically going back to bomb airfields as they become operational again? I'm not sure what ratio of fighters to TACs you need in this scenario.

 

[Premu]

So, I just tried it - and it kind of worked, just not the way I planned originally.

I built fighters, tactical bombers and strategic bomber - as the war started I had around 2000 fighters, 400 Tacs and 300 Strats.

After Germany invaded Poland, I immedieatly sent all my bombers to bomb western Germany, covered by my fighters. Germany reacted by sending all its fighters there, too. Unfortunately France decided to keep out of the air war completely. So while the German and British fighters slaughtered each other in a war of attrition, my bombers didn't really get through and did not cause much damage. But it was not completely for nought - I just have pinned the whole Luftwaffe on their own ground, and once they started to invade the Netherlands and Belgium, I could achieve air superiority with a single air wing as no German plane showed up. This slowed them down enough. French troops and my expeditionary forces managed to man a strong defensive line in Belgium and the Netherlands in the hills and behind the Rhine, and the front there turned totally static. My tactical bombers were now bombing German troops in the Benelux while my strat bombers still "pinned" the Luftwaffe - or so I thought at least.

A little bit later I decided to annoy the AI by switching the target of my bombers to other German air zones. I expected some of the German fighters will redeploy to tackle the bombers there - but they simply remained in western Germany, duking it out with the fighters of the RAF. My strategic bombers could now hit targets in northern and eastern Germany competely unmolested. Apparently the AI believes the air superiority over western Germany is far more dangerous than 100s of bombers dropping bombs on Hamburg and Berlin.

On top of that I found another serious flaw in the AI. At the start of the war, I just had Hurricanes facing mostly Bf 109s, but of course I've switched to produce Spitfires. Germany in the mean time seemed also to have developed the 1940 fighter - but as its fighter were in a serious attritional battle, the production was kept to newer and newer variants of Bf 109s. While for a short time Germany was making gains in the airwar as only few Spitfires arrived, it quickly turned against them as my factories became effective again.

So - to really mess up Germany, it's enough to build a lot of fighters and send them to fight for air superiority over western Germany. In the mean time you can actually send your bombers to the real strategic areas you're targeting.