WW-2 drones and a rabbit hole

We all know about the V1's. Youtube's algorithm threw a peice about WW-2 pilotless planes at me: mostly the TDR-1. It was slow and guided by a "mother ship" flying out of sight behind it. The mother plane monitored where the drone went using a TV camera in the drone's nose.

It wasn't on anybody's short list--cranking out lots of ordinary planes came first, and when we had enough spare capacity it wasn't so vital anymore. And the things were pretty slow and vulnerable to flak. But in their final mission, 31 of 50 drones hit their targets--often by being crashed into them.

The rest of the air force wasn't that accurate, was it? 60% is pretty good! UPDATEOr 46 and 21=45%?

The United States Strategic Bombing Surveys say no, they weren't that good.

Conventionally the air forces designated as "the target area" a circle having a radius of 1000 feet around the aiming point of attack . While accuracy improved during the war, Survey studies show that, in the over-all, only about 20% of the bombs aimed at precision targets fell within this target area. A peak accuracy of 70% was reached for the month of February 1945.

That's hitting within 1000 feet. I don't know if the "hit their targets" metric for the drones was that loose, but the video suggests it was at least sometimes much better

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I should not indulge this sort of research when I have to get up early. A few quotes from the report:

Germany was scoured for its war records, which were found sometimes, but rarely, in places where they ought to have been ; sometimes in safe-deposit vaults, often in private houses, in barns, in caves ; on one occasion, in a hen house and, on two occasions, in coffins.

and a note about industrial capacity

Because the German economy through most of the war was substantially undermobilized, it was resilient under air attack.

wrt steel: Germany didn't have to build up as much as fast as the US did, so steel shouldn't have been a bottleneck, but

Although steel was considered a bottleneck by the Germans, a detailed examination of the control machinery together with interrogation of officials in the Speer ministry and its predecessor organizations, reveals that the trouble was partly an inefficient allocation system and partly, in the early years of the war especially, an unwillingness to cut out nonessential construction and civilian consumption . German industrialists were also found to have had a marked propensity to hoard steel.

and

German steel producers were required by the government to keep records of production losses and their causes. These records show that air raid alerts in 1943 were a more serious cause of the lost production than the actual damage from the raids.

Another oddity: Japan lost 50,000 planes, 60% of them to "training, ferrying, and other noncombat losses". The USA lost 27,000, of which we lost 70% to non-combat losses.

Kamikaze missions had an 18.6% hit rate--we got better at stopping them. Probably the Japanese would have gotten better at stopping drones too.

10.1 millon tons of Japanese shipping was reduced by 8.9 million tons by our actions; about 55% due to subs, 30% to planes, 9% to mines and less than 1% to surface gunfire--the rest to accidents.

And I had not heard before that thanks to disruption of the nitrogen fixing plants, Germany was so low on explosives that they were adding rock salt to shells.