A Comparison of Life Expectancy

[Beau Geste]

Many of you will have read the articles in todays newspapers regarding the WW2 Bomber Command Memorial. In the Daily Mail it was claimed that the life expectancy of a member the RAF's bomber crews was less than that of an infantry officer in the trenches during The Great War.

The only details provided to support this view were as follows:

a. 125,000 bomber command air crew served during WW2

b. 55, 573 of these were KIA, a death rate of 44%

c. There was a 4% average chance of being shot down per mission.

I'd be interested to know what members think.

Harry

[tipperary]

Harry dont know where but i think somewhere on forum is a post working out life expectancy or lack of it compounded by each additional op.john

[ss002d6252]

Without any firm figures to hand it is said that a junior officer would last an average of 6 weeks .

The average number of missions flown by a Lancaster and crew was 21 missions, unless 21 missions were flown in under 6 weeks then the average life of the crew would have had to exceed 6 weeks.

[mconrad]

"For the bomber offensive as a whole, Eighth Air Force lost 4,182 aircraft from a total of 273,841 attacking, a rate of 1.5 percent. RAF’s Bomber Command aircraft loss rate for the same period was 2.5 percent." ("Daylight Precision Bombing," by John T. Correll, Air Force Magazine October 2008)

----- So I suppose there are various numbers floating around about this (RAF loss rate of 2.5 % vs 4 % cited by the Daily Mail). US Eighth Air Force had 250,000 aircrew sustain 18,000 KIA (compare Daily Mail RAF Bomber Command's 125,000 - 55,573 KIA)

[bill24chev]

Without any firm figures to hand it is said that a junior officer would last an average of 6 weeks .

The average number of missions flown by a Lancaster and crew was 21 missions, unless 21 missions were flown in under 6 weeks then the average life of the crew would have had to exceed 6 weeks.

What about the crews of Halifax, Stirling, Wellington Etc.

[MikB]

As I understood it, the average didn't really make much sense as a measure. Many or most of the casualties fell in their first few missions, whilst those who learned quickly might survive to finish their tour. Though it's clear that even the most experienced could still be vulnerable to bad luck or equally experienced defenders.

Regards,

MikB

[Stoppage Drill]

Is there any point to such comparisons ? I'm no stranger to bad taste, but I'm not comfortable with apparently casual curiosity about things lie this.

[Beau Geste]

Harry dont know where but i think somewhere on forum is a post working out life expectancy or lack of it compounded by each additional op.john

Thank you Munster. I'll see if I can find it.

Is there any point to such comparisons ? I'm no stranger to bad taste, but I'm not comfortable with apparently casual curiosity about things lie this.

I agree in the sense that I find it difficult to identify a really useful purpose to comparisons of this type except that it might help us to measure (however unscientifically) the claims made by some. For example, the statement that the life expectancy of a junior officer in the trenches was a mere six weeks.

Harry

[corisande]

As one might expect there is a book about life expectancy of junior officers

Six Weeks - The Short & Gallant Life of the British Officer in the First World War by John Lewis-Stempel

Review of book - click

And a forum thread on the subject - click

[phil andrade]

A significant portion of those Bomber Command fatalites - perhaps one sixth - occurred not in "combat" but in training.

I suspect a degree of exaggeration in the claims being made about the death rate ; although God knows the reality was appalling.

Phil (PJA)

[phil andrade]

From John Terraine's The Smoke and the Fire, page 208 :

"The total number of British officers killed during the First World War....was 38,834. The total of aircrew of Bomber Command, exactly the same type of men, killed during the Second World War was 55,573."

What do you make of his take on them being " exactly the same type of men" ?

There has been a kind of historiographical spin on the fatality satistics, in which the intention has been to downplay the Great War by emphasising the extreme loss of some sectors in the Second World War. There have been claims that the German submariners suffered a uniquely high mortality 1939-45 ; this has been countered by similar claims made on behalf of their victims, the British merchant seamen. Then there is, of course, RAF Bomber Command. And, to make the cup run over, Gordon Corrigan has argued that the experience of the British Infantry in Normandy in 1944 was more deadly than that of their counterparts on the Somme in 1916. Now, I am sure that it was every bit as dangerous to carry a rifle and bayonet into battle and close with the enemy in 1944 as it had been in 1916. But I do take exception to flawed statistics being deployed in order to make exaggerated claims, especially if they result in a rather complacent view of the slaughter of 1914-18.

Phil (PJA)

[bill24chev]

From John Terraine's The Smoke and the Fire, page 208 :

"The total number of British officers killed during the First World War....was 38,834. The total of aircrew of Bomber Command, exactly the same type of men, killed during the Second World War was 55,573."

What do you

I beleive that if not the majority a significant minority of the RAF aircrew casualties in WW2 were SNCO/WO's

and some of the commissioned casualties would have been commissioned Ex NCO's'

If my uncle was typical he was what you would probably categorise as respectable working class, he worked in a cotton mill and his father (My GF, WW1 CSM) was skilled worker in the cotton industry.

My uncle was killled im 1943 on his third tour of ops, he had been over Berlin in 1940. He was not actually in Bomber Command when he died, he was serving with 138 Special Duties Sqn and was caught up in the "Englanderspiel" of the Abwher in Holland' one of their despatch points was over a recently deployed AAA unit, the theory being that it had been moved there to meet the agent Drop.

I dont beleive that my GF or Uncle would have regarded themselves as being from the same stock as the ssubalterns who volunteered in 1914/14

[phil andrade]

Thanks for that, bill24.

My uncle, too, served in Bomber Command, as a navigator.

He was very lucky.

Here's another example of the historiographical spin that has been put on the statistics. This is from the same book by John Terraine.

From page 59 :

The great clashes of armour supported by air power, the Blitzkrieg in its most powerful form, produced casualty bills which put the "blood baths" of the First World War quite in the shade. In 1916, for example, in ten months of agonizing attrition at Verdun, the French and Germans between them suffered about 750,000 casualties; Germany alone sustained that number in the first six months of Operation BARBAROSSA in 1941.....

John Terraine is one of my heroes : he rescued me from the clutches of Alan Clarke, Liddle Hart and Joan Littlewood. But I find that passage a bit of a travesty. He's comparing casualties from a single battle in 1916, fought along a 15 mile front, with German casualties suffered in 1941 along an entire front of more than a thousand miles. The record actually shows that German casualties on the Western Front in the first six months of the Great War were 847,465, a significantly higher total than that for the Russian Front in 1941. So much for the Great War being " quite in the shade." We might also cite the 630,192 casualties that the Germans sustained on the Western Front in the last six months of 1916, and the 688,341 casualties that they recorded in the four months between March and June 1918, to demonstrate how German casualty rates rivalled or surpassed those of Operation Barbarossa.

I realise, of course, that Soviet losses for 1941-45 were vastly heavier, and certainly did exceed - by far - those suffered anywhere in the Great War. But even here Terraine transgressed. He writes on page 37 :

We need now to take into consideration, when contemplating the thirteen million dead of the First World War, the Soviet Union's 13,600,000 military dead of 1941-45.....

13,600,000 military dead ? I don't think so. The revelations of the Soviet archives have provided us with the authoratitive figure of nearly 8.7 million : an outrageously huge number, by any reckoning. The 13.6 million alludes to the increase in the male deficit, indicating the extent of massacre and hardship that was inflicted on the civilian population, particularly on men.

Sometimes the mythbusters go too far.

Phil (PJA)