Talk:Butt Report

Precursors to the dehousing paper

From the history of the article:

• 20:58, 10 July 2008 Mugs2109 (→Contemporary debate, Dehousing and Singleton Report: The dehousing report was in response to the Area bombing directive vagueness, not the Butt report)
• 21:11, 10 July 2008 Philip Baird Shearer (reverted. The reference is at the end of the paragraph see Longmate-126.)
• 21:19, 10 July 2008 10 July 2008 Mugs2109 (Changed Longmate opinion/POV to a historical fact)

Mugs2109, you have shown your personal opinion "The dehousing report was in response to the Area bombing directive vagueness, not the Butt report" do you have a source for that? In my opinion the 21:11, 10 July edit by you was an attempt to reinsert that POV in a slightly different format. We are allowed to use reliable secondary sources include such points of view, such as Longmate's that you dismiss with the statment "Changed Longmate opinion/POV" (See WP:V). While it is an historic fact that "After the Butt report and Area bombing directive had been issued" the sentence implies that the dehousing paper was issued because of the But report and the area bombing directive -- after all if you did not wish to imply a link between the issuing of the directive, and the dehousing memo why specifically mention it? If we take your statement "a historical fact" at face value, we could change the wording to "After Portsmouth F. C. won the FA Cup in 1939,[1] Cherwell produced his ..." which is also an historical fact, but Portsmouth winning the F.A. Cup was not in the chain of events that caused Cherwell to write his dehousing paper. Do you have a source that say that the area bombing directive was a precursor to the dehousing paper? if not we should go with Longmate. --Philip Baird Shearer (talk) 10:47, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

'A new directive was sent to Baldwin as acting commander-in-chief on 14 February 1942, modifying the directive of 14 July 1941 by removing communications as a primary target and focusing the force entirely on "the morale of the enemy civil population and in particular of the industrial workers." ...This was the background to the famous minute sent to Churchill by Lord Cherwell on 30 March 1942, in which he calculated that 10,000 RAF bombers would by mid-1943 be able to drop enough bombs to de-house one-third of Germany's urban population... it has attracted much discussion from historians, but in effect it simply advertised a shift in bombing priorities that had already been agreed and was now in place.' (Richard Overy, The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945, Allen Lane 2013, pbk Penguin 2014, pp.288-9, ISBN 978-0-141-00321-4.) Incidentally, since this is Wikipedia where people don't know stuff, '10,000 RAF bombers' referred to total expected deliveries of aircraft over the years, not the number that would ever be in service at one time.

The article is also wrong to say that the photographs used by Bensusan-Butt were taken by automatic bombing cameras of the kind used later in the war. 'This was a project that had only become possible since the early summer. When the war broke out the RAF had day cameras but none suitable for night photography. Trials were carried out using the standard F24 camera with a shutter mechanism and a large flash unit released manually through the bomber's flare shute [sic]. When the flare was at maximum intensity, one of the bomber crew had to close the shutter. The result was a complex operation designed to be undertaken at the most dangerous point over the target. Research began on an automatic night camera but it was not ready until 1942.' (Overy, op. cit., p.267.) The RAF would eventually adopt a system where a photoflash bomb was released with the load and bomb release triggered a timer fitted to the automatic motor-drive of the revised F24, which took a series of exposures when the photoflash was predicted to go off. This wasn't available in 1941. After the Butt Report, 'The RAF response was, not surprisingly, defensive. Portal pointed out that weather over Germany had been very poor in June and July [when all of Bensusan-Butt's impact photos were taken]; that the Butt Report covered only one-tenth of Bomber Command sorties; that inexperienced navigators took images too long after the release of the bombs (almost certainly the case, given the difficulty of operating the camera and seeing the bomb burst below [author's parenthesis, not this poster's]); and, above all, that German raids tracked over Britain showed only 24 per cent of German bombers reaching the target area. Even Lindemann admitted that conditions had not been ideal for photographic analysis in the summer months. Portal was no doubt correct to argue that the Butt Report was subject to substantial methodological flaws, but the RAF's own operational evidence gathered since 1940 had consistently shown a very wide margin of error between what the crews reported and what had actually been bombed.' (Overy, op. cit., pp.267-8.)

The article's illustration is weird, and wrong, since it shows a Lancaster in 1944 armed with 14 HE 1,000-pounders, a 'tactical' load used against enemy troops, not the mixed HE-incendiary load used on German cities. On the upside, it does show the F24 camera, but the Lancaster did not even enter service until some months after the Butt Report. Khamba Tendal (talk) 18:10, 18 July 2017 (UTC)

where does the article state that the photos were "taken by automatic bombing cameras"? As to images, the images available to editors are limited (copyright is a real problem), if you can find a better one on Wikicommons then replace it (see commons:Category:British WW2 general purpose bombs). -- PBS (talk) 11:11, 21 July 2017 (UTC)

The article says the cameras were 'triggered by the bomb release'. That is, that they were automatic, a system that was only brought in a year later, as I already explained. In 1941 the photoflash was manually shoved down the flare chute and the second pilot or observer (referred to by Overy as the 'navigator', a slight anachronism) had to watch for the flash and decide when it was at maximum and then trigger the camera manually. Hence Portal's argument about observers taking the picture too late. The camera was not 'triggered by the bomb release' (on an automatic timer, set for altitude, with a motor drive taking multiple exposures as the flash went off) until a year later.

Given the security situation regarding photography on wartime airfields, relevant photographs are likely to be official and therefore Crown Copyright and IWM or RAF Museum. There don't seem to be huge problems with such pictures. But a 1944 Lancaster doesn't have anything to do with the Butt Report. Bomber Command's main weapon in 1941 was the Wellington. Khamba Tendal (talk) 19:24, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

I see nothing's been done. It is not my job to clear up other people's mess, but the article is still extremely poor. It still fails to note the issue of the area bombing directive in February 1942, before Cherwell's 'de-housing' paper, it still falsely claims that the cameras on RAF aircraft in summer 1941 were 'triggered by the bomb release' (they weren't, and few aircraft even had cameras) and it still has an irrelevant photograph of a 1944 Lancaster armed for tactical operations against troops. This is why people despise Wikipedia. Khamba Tendal (talk) 17:46, 23 July 2020 (UTC)

Loss of production

'The loss of production is the worst month of the Blitz as only equal to that of due to the Easter holidays ...' Can anyone tell me what this line from the article means as it appears to have become totally mangled from the original quotation. Bedwasboy (talk) 08:29, 17 May 2009 (UTC)

My transcription errors now all fixed (I hope). --PBS (talk) 11:24, 17 May 2009 (UTC)

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