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Bombers, speed over defensive armament, why were lessons ignored ?

Discussion in 'Aircraft' started by Justin Smith, Oct 24, 2011.

  1. phylo_roadking

    phylo_roadking Member

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    Yes - because we can't tell from this remove if the relative lack of losses is due to their speed advantage OR the mission profile....

    Nightfighter/interdiction over Berlin wouldn't require speed all of the time, for instance...NF Mossies would spend a certain amount of time just lingering/orbiting over Berlin....while Pathfinder/target marking would involve fast lowlevel approaches to targets.
     
  2. Erich

    Erich Alte Hase

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    Mossie NF's yes the bombers no over Berlin they would get out of the area as quickly as possible as 109G-6/AS's were making their presence felt along and later the single seat Me 262 of K. Welter.

    Mosquito NF interdiction can be arguably defined as sinister or by many LW crews not a threat at all as they were never engaged one way or another.
     
  3. Volga Boatman

    Volga Boatman Dishonorably Discharged

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    speaking of 'acceptable' loss rates, I always found the following more than a tad ironic.

    During the Great War, the losses that caused the most heartache for British people as a whole were said to be the approx. 51,000 junior officers that failed to make it home. These men were said to be the best and brightest, the future 'brains' of the country, all never to reach their potential as the academic forefront of the country.

    Faith in Airpower was the result of this. Airpower was supposed to be a better, cleaner, more effective , and most importantly, least costly in terms of human lives. The irony is that it required those same educated junior officers to make it all function, with the level of training required expotentially greater still. The resources of the country were principally devoted to this end. The four engined bomber, along with it's counterparts, got top priority for wartime allocations of resources. As much as one third of British wartime money/personnel/resources were pumped into the the air offensive.....and it cost over 54,000 aircrew, including a fair proportion of those same, valuable, junior officers that this style of warfare was supposedly preserving.

    Given the results, and the controversy engendered, it seems the outcome of all this was the exact opposite of what it was intended for.
     
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  4. Colonel FOG

    Colonel FOG Member

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    Haven't time to read the whole thread (sorry), but in the speed over defensive armament debate, speed would surely win. However, the limiting factor was RANGE. No fast and light bomber could carry enough of a bomb load while likewise maintaining the extended range necessary to hit deep into Germany. Perhaps pursuing lighter, stronger, high-altitude a/c would have been worth further investigation. Alas, materials and engineering limitations did not offer a "piston-engined B-57" (or similar type) option at the time. The B-29 was the best they could produce along these lines.
     
  5. Justin Smith

    Justin Smith Member

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    According to Hastings book Bomber Command (p209) the Bomber Command loss rates did not include aircraft crashing in Britain [even if as a result of damage suffered on an op], yet to quote Hastings those crashes" added at least 15% for most of the war".
     
  6. Justin Smith

    Justin Smith Member

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    Most Japanese Kamikaze squadrons suffered a 100% loss rate.
    A rather better loss rate was suffered by the little known Italian Kamikaze squadron. Its loss rate was approximately 0%.
     
  7. Justin Smith

    Justin Smith Member

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    According to Hastings a Mosquito "could take a 4000lb bomb to Berlin, and with only the slimmest chance of Germans shooting it down".
     
  8. Justin Smith

    Justin Smith Member

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    Adolf Galland certainly thought the Mosquitos were highly impressive, and extremely difficult to shoot down, and, one would think, he should know if anyone did !
     
  9. phylo_roadking

    phylo_roadking Member

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    Actually - it WAS done! But perhaps the Air Staff were too focused on growing the size of the heavy Bomber Force by then to fit the Area Bombing doctrine for it ever to be uptaken...or to want to return to low-numbers "precision" bombing by the Heavy Force....

    And it was our old friend Barnes Wallis who was at the forefront! Not only with the Victory Bomber concept...

    Victory Bomber - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

    ....but also the pressurized Type 407 and Type 421 Wellington Mark V and the Wellington Mark VI prototype.

    The above from an absolutely wonderful but sadly now defunct site that used to list specs for EVERY RAF aircraft used in WWII, even uptaken civilian items.


    [​IMG]
     
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  10. mcoffee

    mcoffee Son-of-a-Gun(ner)

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    No, it wasn’t done. The B-29 had a maximum speed of 365 mph, but a cruising speed of 220 mph, and it was faster than either of the two aircraft you mentioned.

    The fallacy that most people fall into is that they look at maximum speed, maximum range and maximum load capacity and think that the aircraft can do all of those things simultaneously. The Mustang could go over 400 mph and it could make a combat radius of over 800 miles, but it couldn’t go that far going that fast. The Mustang cruised at about 260 mph until time for combat.

    Fuel flow increases dramatically with airspeed, and it is not a linear relationship – it more approaches exponential. Fuel load is a direct subtraction from available ordnance load. If you want to go fast, you have to carry a LOT of fuel. It must also be noted that external fuel (or ordnance) stores are speed limited, both from the drag penalty they impose on the aircraft and for structural reasons.

    The often repeated mantra that the Mosquito should have replaced the heavies, that it could carry a 4000lb bomb load to Berlin while outrunning fighters, is fantasy. Yes, it could carry the load to Berlin, but it could not run from fighters until it shed its load. The reason it wasn’t done was that the people in charge looked at reality.


    I would suggest that the war be postponed for a decade or so until - as Col. Fog put it - the B-57 was available. But, dang, then you would have those MiGs to worry about.


    The USAAF heavy bomber loss rate in Europe was about 1.6% over the course of the war.
     
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  11. Justin Smith

    Justin Smith Member

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    Over France maybe.
    In 1945 maybe.
    When flying with a heavy top cover of Mustangs maybe.
    And maybe the odd mission where the fighters didn`t find them.
    But when flying unescorted over Germany in 1943/1944 it was far far higher than 1.6%.
     
  12. Justin Smith

    Justin Smith Member

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    But I`m not suggesting the use of any technology which wasn`t available in the early part of WW2, so I don`t understand your point.
    I`m suggesting sacrificing defensive armament, and if necessary some of the bomb load, in order to save crews and planes.
    Apart from the fact nobody should expect aircrew to fly a tour when they`re statistically unlikely to live, if the planes only get shot down 30% as often then they only need to take half the bombload, or less, to be in front.
     
  13. Carronade

    Carronade Ace

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    The point on Mosquito production is an interesting one. Being made of wood, much of the production was contracted to furniture companies and the like so that it did not directly compete with construction of metal aircraft. It allowed new capacity to be brought into aircraft production rather than competing for existing resources. On the other hand, most of the conventional industry could not easily be switched over to building Mosquitos. If a significantly higher proportion of high-speed bombers were desired, it would require either new types or, more likely, existing designs modified as we've been discussing here, armament reduced, etc.
     
  14. mcoffee

    mcoffee Son-of-a-Gun(ner)

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    For the European Theater of Operations, for the entire war. If you don't like those numbers, how about for the last six months of 1943, which includes both of the Schweinfurt missions? That loss rate was 3.69%.

    Oh, yes you are, and that's the point. You can go fast, or you can go a long way carrying a load, but you can't do both simultaneously with WWII technology. Do you really believe that none of the engineering minds of the era even considered building a very fast bomber with a large load capacity before giving up the idea as unobtainable? What is it that you know that the aircraft designers of the era did not?
     
  15. Justin Smith

    Justin Smith Member

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    Does that 3.7% include crash damage in Britain ?

    On the second point we`re talking about Bomber Command here, didn`t I read somewhere that they removed armour plate from the Lancasters to increase bomb load.......
    I`m not suggesting it was possible to build a plane which would carry the same load as a Lancaster but at 350mph, though it`d be interesting to see what bomb load a plane with 4 Merlins and no defensive armament capable of 350mph would carry. Whatever the answer to that is I`m actually suggesting sacrificing some of the bomb load in order to decrease the losses by greatly increasing the speed. From a purely statistical POV it`d make sense, Lancasters were bleedin` expensive and took a hell of a lot of manufacturing capacity to produce. But what`s even more important than that, fewer aircrew would have been killed.

    Incidentally, with reference to the idea to remove the Lancasters defensive armament to increase its speed (I`ll put the guys name on when I get that particular book back from my mate) does anyone have any idea how much it would have increased its speed ?
     
  16. leccy1

    leccy1 Member

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    5% as you say was the acceptable loss, that means that is what Bomber Command were prepared to lose not what was actually lost. The only group that had a higher than 4% loss for the whole war period was the HCU losing 13 aircraft on 167 sorties (7.8%), next was No2 group, all the rest were under 3%.

    How many aircraft were in each Mossie sortie, how many aircraft in each Heavy sortie. What was the tonnage dropped and where in Berlin where the targets? were all raids in the centre or outskirts.
    The mossies flew less than a quarter of the sorties the rest flew (approx ratio of 1:4.5) so you have to divide the losses up in a ratio. So you just need to know tonnage dropped and compare it to number of aircraft on each sortie and the loss to get a proper comparison, thats without getting into the particular target, its not easy getting a proper comparison to many variables.
     
  17. Carronade

    Carronade Ace

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    When used with regard to air operations, 'sortie' means one flight by one aircraft. A raid by 100 a/c is 100 sorties, as are five 20s or 100 solo attacks.
     
  18. leccy1

    leccy1 Member

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  19. Justin Smith

    Justin Smith Member

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    Do you have the statistics to break down what the loss rate was for ops over Germany for that period ?
     
  20. phylo_roadking

    phylo_roadking Member

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    Not being facetious - but you didn't mention speed LOL

    Aircraft design IS as you've noted a fine balance between a number of competing factors - fuel capacity vs bombload being one of them. The Hi-Alt Wellingtons were intended as a wayof exploiting the Victory Bomber concept with existing production lines and technology quite early in the war; but given that Bomber Command couldn't drop bombs on targets from "normal" high and medium altitudes at night in 1940-41...what point was there building a hi-alt, pressurized and expensive aircraft to do the same....

    Regarding ramping up Mosquito production - perhaps the availability of companies capable of the woodworking required wasn't as important as the production rate of Merlins ;) There were already a LOT of calls on the RR Merlin...
     

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