Bear in mind the Fairey Battle was considered an extremely promising aircraft during the pre-war era. And the largest Battle disaster - when 63 were launched in a desperate bid to stop the advancing German Army in the Battle of France, with only 23 returning - wouldn't have been done if Gamelin hadn't been useless. After that they switched it to night attacks, and then training.
The Luftwaffe had the same problem with the Stuka when it met the Hurricanes and Spitfires, remember.
Schild und Schwert der ParteiAbout the turrets and guns on bomber aircraft? We did the same thing with the Lanc, the Halifax and the Stirling. Only we had .303 M3 Browning machine guns as opposed to the .50 M2 Brownings on the Fortress and Liberator, making them even more useless. Plus our main type, the Lancaster, didn't have what was vital for a bomber making solo night runs over Germany - a ventral turret. Making them meat and drink for the German night fighter arm, who were more and more equipped with Jazz Music installations in their aircraft, flew underneath the Lancasters and scythed them from the sky in droves. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%A4ge_Musik
for how nasty THAT shit was.
Our casualty rates were as much as 55 airmen dead out of 100 in combat or as a result of wounds. You had a one in six chance of surviving a thirty ops tour. If you did a second tour, your odds of survival were one in forty. See here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAF_Bomber_Command#Casualties
Yup, but when Stukas actually did what they were designed for, i.e operations where they were adequately protected by fighter escorts over territory that didn't involve flying into the most heavily defended airspace in Europe at the time, with definitely the best integrated systems, they actually did really rather well. Just ask Rudel for details. And he wasn't the only prominent Stuka pilot of the war.
edited 19th Dec '13 11:56:53 PM by TamH70
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Didn't some of the Lancaster IInote have the ventral turret?
Although, it appears the turret
was fairly useless anyhow:
edited 20th Dec '13 12:29:02 AM by Greenmantle
Keep Rolling OnSome provision against Schräge Musik was much better than NO provision against Schräge Musik. We lost far too many crews due to that. And we kept on losing Lancasters on night raids to it right up until the end of the war.
"Even in the last year of the war, 18 months after the Peenemunde Raid, Schräge Musik night fighters were still taking a fearful toll, for example on the Mitteland-Ems Canal Raid, 21 February 1945: On this particular night the night fighters were to score heavily. The ground radar stations responsible for initial guidance to the vicinity of the bombers did their job well, as did the airborne radar operators to whom fell the task of final location of individual targets. The path of the returning bomber stream was clearly marked by the pyres of numerous downed victims. NJG-4 was operating from Gutersloh (later an RAF base) and in the space of 20 minutes, between 20.43 and 21.03, Schnaufer and his crew, using their upward firing cannons [from a Bf 110G night fighter], shot down seven Lancasters. As it was, on that black night, four night fighter crews accounted for 28 of the 62 bombers lost out of the 800 despatched.[26]"
One night fighter crew killed seven Lancasters. Making the pilot an ace in one operation. Well, even more of an ace. See here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinz-Wolfgang_Schnaufer
He arguably killed more RAF crew than any other fighter pilot. Most of them in Lancasters, given his claim tally.
Nope, not totally on the way back. Schnaufer and his colleagues scored kills on the incoming part of the raid as well. Pyres burn brighter if there is a cargo of incendiaries inside the downed aircraft, after all.
edited 20th Dec '13 3:52:36 AM by TamH70
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Not that it would have been easy to find a location for another ventral turret, due to the Lanc's long and un-obstructed bomb bay, the largest of the War.
The Halifax
also had a rather unsuccessful ventral turret. Mind you, there was a hand-operated mounting
for a single 0.5 in Browning in some examples, which were later removed due to increased H2S radar production.
The lightning was capable as a fighter craft as well as a ground attack craft. The Germans called it "The Fork Tailed Devil". It did reasonably well in Europe but seemed better suited to pacific.
Have som Gun Cam footage. If you watch closely you will see one chasing an Me-163 at one point.
edited 20th Dec '13 3:55:25 AM by TuefelHundenIV
Who watches the watchmen?The Luftwaffe were really good at blatting the shit out of our bombers before they got to the bomb zone. Sometimes too good - a fair few Luftwaffe pilots got taken out by the explosion of the payload of their targets. And killing lots of crews comprised of trained pilots, navigator, gunner, engineers and radio operators is a fair trade for the odd bomb hitting a civilian building. Or even a city block getting taken out. Besides, bombing civilian houses and killing their occupants only hardens the morale of the remainder, which is why area bombing, like what the British got up to, was a total failure.
The episodes of the classic documentary on World War 2, "The World At War" that dealt with the bombing campaign and civilian life in Germany, pretty much showed that.
To be fair aerial bombing was hardly precise by any means. You were lucky if half your bombs landed within a few hundred meters of aim point. It often took multiple sorties to just smash one target and many many bombs. Bombs don't start getting really accurate until we get laser guidance kits.
edited 20th Dec '13 3:58:06 AM by TuefelHundenIV
Who watches the watchmen?It was quite a lot worse than that, I am afraid. Some reports indicated less than five percent of bombers dropped their payloads within 5 miles of their targets towards the start of the war. It didn't improve much until quite late when technical means like radar guidance and the Pathfinder Force were available.
Later on in the war, Harris still pursued bombing of civilian targets when the bombing accuracy had improved to an extent that factories and military installations could reliably be smashed. He saw attacks on areas other than civilian housing as hitting panacea targets. Albeit he was kept out of the loop on "Ultra" - the intel gained by the combined Polish, French and British smashing of the Enigma codes, and thus wasn't aware of why his bosses were giving him targets to hit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Arthur_Harris,_1st_Baronet
has some of the details on him.
His own men called him "Butcher". Not because of what he did to Germany's (and the rest of Western Europe's) civilian populations, but because of his attitude towards his crews and to the losses they endured.
One of the reasons that area bombing came about was due to the fact that bombs were so inaccurate...
That even included preparations for D-Day
, if I recall.
edited 20th Dec '13 4:28:27 AM by Greenmantle
Keep Rolling OnReally, it seems like the cock-ups of the RAF are only about the same as those of the US Bomber Command. Though did the RAF bomber command ever actively deny escorts to their own bombers?
The Lightning wasn't really any better suited to the Pacific, it was just that the Pacific command simply wasn't pants on head retarded and actually maintained the thing properly and issued the drop tanks that were key to long range missions.
Speaking of, the Pacific forces also did better at the whole precision bombing because they actually listened to the statistics and often stripped guns from bombers for speed and then made very low-altitude, high-speed bombing runs. On that note, the bombing of Japan was far more industrially crippling than the bombing of Germany. Of course, they also threw in some terror bombing, but when you're throning the might of the USAAF at a small country like Japan, you have an awful lot of forces to work with, sometimes even compared to the amount of productive things you have to do with them, and every single Japanese "civilian" was seen as a potential (and likely) enemy combatant.
edited 20th Dec '13 5:42:02 AM by Balmung
I don't think Bomber Command even used escorts for night raids during World War II. RAF Mustangs were used for recce and ground-attack work, and towards the end of the war (with Spitfires) for bomber escort during daylight raids.
edited 20th Dec '13 6:06:00 AM by Greenmantle
Keep Rolling OnThough I suppose it's not as big of a deal when doing night bombing.
And the 8th Chair Force denied fighter escort until someone made a fighter that could go the whole way on internal fuel alone, despite the existence of drop tanks that would have allowed the P-47 and P-38 to escort the bombers all the way over a year before the the Mustang arrived. And why? Because they were afraid that if fighters could carry drop tanks, they could carry bombs, and that would infringe one the Bomber Mafia's precious bombing monopoly.
They continued to do fighter bomber missions through out the war eventually moving to more forward bases. Reportedly the lead of the group skipped a 500lb bomb through the front door of the HQ of Field Marshal Günther von Klugein 1944.
P-38's also were used as escort craft as requested by the 8th Airforce in 1943 as well as Escorting B-17's in the African campaigns before that.
Jimmy Doolittle himself chose to fly a P-38 to observe the Normandy operation and said it was a sweet aircraft.
The lightning was dropped from escort duty because it was notably slower then the BF 109 and FW 190 it was supposed to be fighting. The evaluation of the P 38 was given by British who pointed out its weak points. The P51 was faster by comparison.
The P-38 was better suited to the Pacific and saw more success and wide spread use. There was no issue with freezing cockpits and the Allison engines performed better in the climates there. The P-38's suffered engine issues when flying bomber cover in Europe at the higher altitudes.
The P38 also suffered from dive compression and unlike the German aircraft lacked dive flaps.
These problems wouldn't be fixed until the P-38J came out and by then the P51 Mustang was in use instead and did not have the same issues. The Japanese had more lightly protected craft and the P-38's guns made for good long range shots.
Oh and many accounts of the P-38 in Europe on escort missions mention the drop tanks.
Your out in the weeds there mate.
Who watches the watchmen?Yeah, I'd need to see a cite on the with-holding drop tanks. Worth noting, I've read that drop tanks were considered a hazard in air combat since it's basically a drum of gasoline hanging off of your plane, meaning that it both slows you down and bursts into flames if an enemy manages to hit it. They were only useful at getting you as far as the outermost layer of enemy fighters. If the Luftwaffe attacked while you were still over coastal France, the drop tanks didn't benefit you a great deal (which is why German fighters were unable to provide substantial escort during the Battle of Britain despite carrying drop tanks themselves).
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There's risk of collision and friendly fire on the one side of things, alternatively fighters might lose contact with their bombers and get lost.
Drop tanks are a hindrance in a dogfight, that's for sure. Both in terms of drag and reduced roll rate due to inertia.
Continuing on this line of thought, one problem the Mustang faced early in its deployment in the war was that the Germans would send out an early wave just to force the fighters to abandon their drop tanks, then wait a while before sending more fighters to attack while the escorts were now low on fuel. The solution was simply to cram another fuel tank into the Mustang where there was some extra space behind the cockpit. This had the result of giving the Mustang a CG farther aft than its designers intended (and moreso than many of the pilots were accustomed to), leading to a plane that had very wonky handling in certain situations (such as takeoff, due to the plane's CG situation getting worse once you pulled back on the stick).
Carrying full fuel tanks, the Mustang had a nasty habit of going into spins, so most pilots would fly the first part of the trip from England burning off fuel in the aft tank to bring the CG a bit farther forward before switching to the drop tanks.
I found this on Amazon yesterday, it deals with the German night fighter/Bomber Command war over Europe and looks quite interesting. It isn't on kindle, which sucks.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Other-Battle-Luftwaffe-Bomber-Command/dp/0760302650/
Yep. The FW-190 didn't achieve its apotheosis until Kurt Tank got fed up with pissing around with BMW 801 radial engines and went for massive inline ones with liquid cooling (the Jumo 213.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FW-190
Then again, the TA-152 was on the horizon, and that was arguably the best performing single seat fighter of the war in terms of potential. Service ceiling of nearly fifty thousand feet and top speed of 472 miles per hour is scary shit for a piston engined aircraft.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focke-Wulf_Ta_152
Imagine thousands of those fuckers instead of Gustav model Bf-109s. Where's your bomber fleets now?

Really, though, they withdrew the Stirling as soon as they had enough Lancasters and Halifaxes. And having two made sense, in case of supply chain problems.
A brighter future for a darker age.