A damaging air attack naturally generates reports, photographs, and narrative detail, while repeated attacks driven off by fighters or AA may receive only a sentence. Readers can therefore mistake the visible successes for the normal outcome and underrate defenses that stopped many earlier attempts. Battle of the Atlantic writing shows the same distortion, with attacked convoys dominating accounts while uneventful crossings attract little attention. Some quiet crossings resulted from Bletchley Park intelligence, signals-traffic analysis, and aerial reconnaissance routing convoys away from U-boat concentrations. Evaluating a weapon or campaign requires counting the failures imposed on the enemy, not only the occasions when defense broke down.
Notable Point · 1:02:19-1:05:59
Failed attacks vanish from air-defense histories
Dramatic successful attacks receive pages of coverage, while numerous raids and submarine approaches that achieved nothing are compressed or omitted.