If you don't use the best engines you have got you are already screwed.
Bomber with best engines vs smaller fighter with 2nd best engine????
Bomber with 2nd best engine vs fighter with best engine?????
You misunderstood my point - I don't think you can lobby to get some bleeding edge engine that the front line fighters don't have. I think you'll have what they have, basically. Not the newer experimental types. No early Griffin for example, I don't think you could count on that.
The A-36 was great airplane, but it does point to a few problems.
1, it arguably one of the most streamlined planes around and maybe the most streamline. A bomber with enclosed bomb stowage has little chance of being as good.
2, the A-36 used a 1325hp engine for take-off which it puts 20-30% more powerful than any V-12 engine in 1939-40, let alone before. It is 15% more powerful than the Allisons used in the P-40D & E or even the Mustang Is.
Arguable. V-1710-73 was producing 1325hp for takeoff, the only difference from the -39 on the P-40D&E was the boost rating used, and in fact many P-40Es were refitted with -73s in certain Theaters.
More importantly, P-40K, F, L, M, N which were more widely used than the D or E and were contemporaneous with the A-36 had the same available horsepower.
3, and that brings us to one of my hobby horses, Field Length. The A-36 with its 1325hp engine needed 3150ft at 10,000lbs (full internal fuel and two 500lb bombs) to clear 50ft .
And that is at 0 degrees C or 32 degrees F Add 20% more length for 20 degrees C or 72 degrees F. This is on a hard runway.
You can operate a Halifax or Lancaster out of the same size airstrip.
4. now figure out the operational radius. with 180 US gallons. And any other plane you can make without a trunk load of NA drawings/documents won't have the same range.
How close you come is subject to question.
I agree field length - and field surface, as well as training, are all potential issues in deploying a relatively high wing-loading, small winged fast bomber. Maybe ask the American Seabees to make some airfields for you.
Ok, lets start doing the math. If we want 120,000lb of bombs on target (area) we need 20 big bombers and so we are going to loose 1 bomber for every mission.
If we use the 1000lb load bomber we need 120 planes and we are going to loose 2.4 bombers per mission. Adjust for imagined crew size.
Yes on a pure accounting level, this makes sense. This is the accountant's logic. The devil is in the details though.
When we look at the operational history, it doesn't seem to be so cut and dry. In Theaters where they had bombers with much heavier loads available, after hard won lessons, they relied on fast two-engined bombers and fighter bombers. A-20s and Baltimore's, Hurricanes and P-40s were the favored bombers in the Western Desert and Med for the British, even though they had Wellingtons which carried a much larger bomb load. Problem being that the Wellingtons were way too slow to evade flak and fighters, and couldn't effectively bomb Tactical targets at low altitude.
In the Pacific, the USAAF had B-17s and B-24s, (and the British / Commonwealth had some Wellingtons), but except in the rare cases where they did some (risky) low level bombing, B-17s and B-24s almost never hit their targets, and did far less damage and were far less useful than the smaller, faster A-20s, Beaufighters, P-40s, and later on, Corsairs. Heavy bombers were useful for armed recon, ASW, and harassment, but all those extra tons of bombs they carried tended to land harmlessly in the sea or the jungle.
The only advantage is the increase accuracy of the small bomber. How much of that is training?
I don't think that is the only advantage. Many heavy bomber crews were
extremely well trained, and still didn't hit their targets. A huge number (almost 50% for Bomber Command) lost their lives. It turns out poor accuracy is an artifact of bombing at high altitude (or medium altitude, but at night) and it by no means guarantees survival. This does of course depend on the target. You can drop bombs on a city. Maybe a real large rail yard. If you are trying to hit a bridge, or a supply convoy, or a ship, or a dock, or a particular factory, or a column of tanks, it turns out bombing from 25,000 is pretty pointless no matter how much training you have.
Meanwhile I think the Mosquito had a much lower loss rate than the Lancaster, right? Wiki says 0.7% compared to 2.2% for heavy bombers.
Fairly untrained (at least for bombing) fighter pilots learned
in the field how to hit bridges and barges and artillery positions and supply convoys and did so effectively enough to impact the outcome of battles. The difference here is potential. The huge delivery van of a bomber can only fly so fast, or with so much agility. The fighter bomber or relatively agile light bomber
could swoop down and release bombs close to the target, and then fly away at very high speed and / or with the potential to maneuver and (in the case of fighter bombers) fight off interceptors if necessary. The heavies just lumber in and lumber out, counting on their luck to see them through.
This speaks to the other big advantage of a small, fast bomber (or fighter bomber) -
increased survival rate. If you sent 50 x Wellingtons with max bomb load to strike tactical or operational targets during El Alamein, say, you would start with a very impressive 225,000 bomb load. You could send 50 x A20s and the load is a comparatively dismal 55,000 lbs. Send 50 x P-40s can carry the same. But all the Wellingtons will be shot down, missing, or too damaged to fly after 3 missions. Most of the A-20s and P-40s will still be available, and even the badly damaged ones often come back with pilots and crew. So you dropped 675,000 lbs with your Wellingtons in the 3 missions before they were all gone along with their crews. Meanwhile you got 20 missions out of your A20s and P-40s, so A-20s drop closer to 1,000,000 lbs. In both cases more accurately than the Wellingtons were likely to do. Which type is better? The heavy bomb truck or the small, fast bomber?
Now you may be able (with increased losses and smaller bomb load) attack targets further away with the big bomber.
You can't attack targets much further away with the small bomber at all.
I definitely don't think you get increased losses with smaller planes.
A lot depends on the theater of operations.
That's true, and the target type.