The best of the best and Worst of the worst

If it's German, it has 4,693 variants -- more or less.

 

I'll raise you the Blackburn Roc. Same principle as the Defiant but with worse performance. So bad they were used as ground-based AA!

 

Picking out a few points -

Bomber classifications are always tricky, because as noted it is a moving goalpost. The Blenhiem could carry 1,000lb of bombs, the Typhoon could carry a 1,000lb bomb under each wing

Calling a Mossie a light bomber is dangerous, being as they routinely carried 4,000lb to Berlin, same as the B-17...


My nod for best fighter goes to the Spit, purely because it started the war as a top-level fighter and finished the war as a top-level fighter. Nothing else can make that claim, not even the 109. For a 1930s design to still be a top-level fighter in 1945 is very impressive. Sure it had blips when new aircraft or new versions (or new tactics) arrived, but it always rose to the occasion.

 

I do have suggestions for the worst bomber:

The Polish LWS-6 Zubr - a bomber so bad it couldn't take off with a bomb load, and tended to fall apart mid-air
LWS-6 Żubr - Wikipedia

The Italian Breda Ba-88 Lince - its performance was so poor that brand new aircraft were simply used as static decoys on airfields
Breda Ba.88 Lince - Wikipedia

 

I would put the B-29 in a different class of bomber than other 4 engine heavies of the war. The B-29 was the only heavy bomber to have a pressurized crew compartment that worked. It was the only heavy bomber with a computer fire control system and remotely controlled turrets that actually worked. It could carry a far larger payload than any other contemporary heavy bomber, the British Lancaster included.


That's double the load a Lancaster could manage of that bomb...

Its combat mission profile has it flying higher and faster than other contemporary heavy bombers. If you count in the D model (became the B-50 for political funding purposes), it isn't even a contest. There was nothing to match it. For WW 2, it was really the only super-heavy bomber to reach production.

Near contemporaries would be the Convair B-32 Devastator built in small numbers but lacking pressurization and the sophisticated gun system, prototypes like Messerschmitt's Me 264 which lacked the same things as the B-32 and had a smaller payload, or Junker's barely in the contest, Ju 390.

 

The B-29/B-50 were not classified as medium bombers - that distinction was disappearing after World War II. Instead, the units they flew with were redesignated as Bombardment, Medium instead of the wartime Bombardment, Very Heavy. The difference began around 1949, when the B-36 was slotted to take over the role of the heaviest strategic bomber in the USAF. Those squadrons became Bombardment,Heavy, while the B-29 and B-50 became Bombardment, Medium and the B-47 became Bombardment, Medium Jet, the B-26 Bombardment, Light, and the B-45 Bombardment, Light Jet. When the B-52 came in it was initially assigned to Bombardment, Heavy Jet squadrons. And then it all changed again...

Aircraft were further classified as "strategic" or "tactical" and by 1st or 2nd Line.

 

This strikes me as a distinction without a difference.

 

I'd like to put in a bid for the best armoured car (for scouting, not fighting) of WW2 - the Daimler Dingo

I could wax lyrical about its advanced design, its popularity, etc etc, but IMO the best recommendation is that as far as I know it is the only AFV that entered series production by both sides

 

From memory the altitude change was due to the weather (cloud and high winds) over Japan throwing off the aim, rather than any fault of the bomber (cue long argument about bomb aiming capabilites in the 1940s )
Low altitude incendiary raids were far more effective anyway, given the highly flammable construction of Japanese cities. I recently read an article about how Air Force planners used data from the 1923 Tokyo earthquake when planning the use of incendiary (the earthquake was bad, but charcoal fires, ruptured gas mains and extensive wood & paper construction produced a firestorm that was worse)

 

That was part of the problem. Japanese industry, unlike European, was generally not concentrated in large factories but, instead, dispersed among lots of small shops usually co-located in residential areas of a city. That is, you often had shops where one or a few people worked with a few machines to produce a part for a factory that assembled the final product. Very large factories were a rarity in Japan at the time.

The weather problem was compounded by the jet stream often being over Japan and for the first time, bombers (the B-29) were flying at an altitude where they ran into it.

The idea to incinerate cities in Japan came about as much because of the recognition of how industry there was situated as for weather and wind conditions.

 

1) The inaccuracy wasn't inherent in the bomber. It was due to the discovery of the jet stream. Any bomber flying that mission profile would have suffered exactly the same inaccuracy.

2) The engine-fires were due to a new engine design still having the bugs worked out. It's true that it was pretty bad at first. The shift to lower altitudes also eased the engine strain and rate of engine failure. I'm trying to hunt up solid sourcing for this post typed from memory.

 

On the engine issue...

The B-29A was being redesigned for the B-29D model with a new and more powerful engine that didn't have the engine fire issue. But this variant didn't get into production before the war ended. Postwar, it became the B-50 due to politics at the time. New aircraft designs got funding, existing ones didn't. So the USAF redesignated the B-29D as the B-50 to get it funded...

 

Yes, it would still be. The B-29 represented the first in a new generation of heavy bomber. The speed and altitude of the B-29, operationally, was the forebearer of the demise of heavy AA guns. It operated at an altitude and speed at which all but the heaviest AA guns--those in the 120mm + size--couldn't effectively counter. For the typical 85 to 90mm AA gun, firing times on a B-29 fell to just a few minutes at most making them all but ineffective because they simply could not put enough rounds up to get a decent kill probability.

With jet bombers, this problem would become even greater. No AA gun of reasonable cost and size could be produced that could defend against such aircraft. The Germans recognized this towards the end of 1942, the US and Britain by mid 1944 having not faced the sort of bomber offensive the Germans had. The conclusion everyone reached was to develop a guided missile instead of a bigger AA gun.

The later was tested in guns like the Green Mace 127mm, or the German 15 cm Flak 50.



As you can see, these guns were insane in size, complexity, weight, and cost.

When you add the threat of stand-off and guided munitions, a missile became the only viable option. Thus, why everybody started developing surface-to-air missiles.

Oh, I'll add here that the German ones were not the archetypes for any postwar SAM's that were successful and put into operational service.

 

Impressive! Looks like they're loading some sort of automatic loading device. As you say, imagine the cost to put useful numbers of these around every potential target.....

 

Without the B-29, a serious bombing campaign against Japan couldn't have gotten underway until we captured Okinawa, and even then many targets would be at extreme range (Tokyo about 900 miles). Iwo Jima was too small to support a major effort, if we even had it; most of the reasons for taking it related to the B-29 campaign from the Marianas. B-24s might be able to reach some Japanese targets from Luzon, with reduced bombloads.

p.s. This would be a bit of a geographical oddity; our forces would have to advance past Japan in order to attack it. Thinking in terms of a great circle route, bombers flying from Okinawa to Japan would be heading towards the United States

 

Not in the ETO, where the jet-stream runs further north. How many TA-152s did Germany produce, and was was the effective ceiling of the 88mm FlAK? I think you'll find that the answers imply that the -29 will be far superior to anything in that theater; and conversely, any ETO bombing over Japan (that's if they could reach it, which they couldn't until Okinawa was secured, and then only barely) would have had exactly the same issues with the jet stream.

I disagree. A single B-29 generally carried the equivalent weight of ordnace (14,000 lbs) as 7 Avengers or Helldivers -- which, by the way, will have to make low-level runs too -- at a much longer range, from islands that do not expose aircraft carriers to kamikazes or submarine attacks. Each Essex-class CV by this time typically carried one VT and one VB squadron -- perhaps 36 a/c max, 72,000 lb of bombs. That's about five B-29s. With the VBs/VTs carrying three men per ship, you're risking 108 men in the air, as opposed to the 50-55 men aboard the B-29s.

There's a lot to these decisions, but after Franklin, Bunker Hill, and many other kamikaze attacks damaging our CVs that spring, I doubt Nimitz or King would have approved a three-month deployment off Honshu to obliterate the 45 or so cities that the -29s did before they stood down.

Only two of those cities were destroyed by A-bombs, of course.