1941: Top 3 Allied Bombers

Ad: This forum contains affiliate links to products on Amazon and eBay. More information in Terms and rules

There wasn't an overnight changeover from Halifax to Lancaster, the squadrons changed over a period of time, but there is a marked difference in the losses they experienced flying Halifaxes and those flying Lancasters.

As an example No. 35 squadron flew 717 Halifax sorties as part of 4 Group with a loss rate of 4.9%. They transferred to 8 Group and flew another 1,776 Halifax sorties with a loss rate of 3.7%. In March 1944 it converted to Lancasters and flew a further 2,216 sorties with a loss rate of 1.2%.

No. 405 squadron RCAF converted to Lancasters almost exactly a year earlier. It's Halifax losses at 4 Group had been 6.6%, at 6 Group 7.3% and 8 Group 3.6%. After conversion in March 1943 the loss rate on Lancasters for the rest of the war (2,549 sorties) was just 2.0%.

There are many factors influencing the loss rate, not just the type flown, but the pattern repeats itself across several squadrons, converting at different times.

Cheers

Steve
 
There wouldn't have been an overnight change over from one type of Halifax to another.

I don't doubt the loss rate was lower for the Lancaster but the loss rate for the early Halifax's was higher than the later ones. Point was that, much as Harris disliked Handley-Page, and I am not getting into the argument as to if he was justified or not, 4 of the Factories that built Halifax's were tooled up and producing by the Spring of 1942. At which point BC is sort of stuck with them. Handley Page started in Oct 1940, EE started producing in Sept 1941, LAPG started in Jan 1942, Rootes started in April 1942. Fairey joined at a low level in Aug, 1942.

Now perhaps they could have stopped Fairey pretty easily (it took Fairey about a year to build around 140 Halifaxes) but trying to switch the other factories over in 1942 would have resulted in hundreds fewer 4 engine bombers available in 1942 and early 1943. Now It shouldn't have taken as long as it did to solve the Rudder problem ( and a few others) but again, somebody was putting production ahead of the better solution by looking for quick fixes that would keep the most production tooling.

Harris could demand all he wanted, he was stuck with the Halifax unless he wanted to retool 4-5 factories and delay the bombing campaign ( or a large part of the 4 engine bomber component of it ) by months if not close to a year. This may be part of his frustration. The first 3-4 Factories/production groups had been tooled up and started production before more than a couple of squadrons had flown the Halifax on operations.
 
According to Bruce Robertson, Bomber Command losses (including Coastal, special duties, and gardening) were :- 1941 - 27; 1942 - 199; 1943 - 713; 1944 - 740; 1945 - 154.
As well as looking at the aircraft factories, don't ignore those producing engines, since they were also capable of gumming up the works; the Spitfire III foundered because the Hurricane II needed all the Merlin XXs, and the 100 Spitfire XIIs were built because there was a shortage of the necessary mark of Merlin, so Griffons had to be used.
 
Maybe more relevant to look at figures for sorties flown against Germany as the Halifax was eventually spared the more arduous operations.

According to my ancient, yellowing and well thumbed 'Bomber Squadrons of the RAF and Their Aircraft' by Philip Moyes (with a foreword by Arthur.T. "Butch" Harris no less) these for the two types were as follows.

By Night:

Halifax: 36,995 sorties, 1,410 missing (3.8%)

Lancaster: 83,881 sorties, 2,508 missing (3.0%)

That is statistically significant. For every 100 Lancasters lost, 127 Halifaxes were lost.

The Halifax (10,074, 57, 0.6%) did better than the Lancaster by day (23,204, 179, 0.8%) which is probably a reflection of both the type of mission flown and when (late in the war with a rather improved Halifax).

Cheers

Steve
 
Last edited:
I've just found a January 1943 report which is an indictment of the MAP's decision to persevere with the Halifax and some justification for Harris' desire to get rid of it and convert production to the Lancaster. In 1942, when Harris took over command of Bomber Command, there were only two squadrons of each type operational and the opportunity was missed. There would have been an overall loss of heavy bomber production, but this would have been compensated for by the superiority of the Lancaster had the change been made in the early part of 1942. Harris knew this and was prepared to accept it.

The Bomber Command report comments on this superiority of the Lancaster over other types:

"A few figures will show the extent of the gap. For every Lancaster lost on operations 68.5 tons of bombs are dropped. Corresponding figures for other types are 30.1 tons for the Halifax and 21.6 tons for the Wellington. Again, for every 100 tons of bombs dropped by the Lancaster, nine aircrew personnel are killed or missing. For other types the figures are Halifax 19, Wellington 23."

What would you want to fly in?

Cheers

Steve
 
Last edited:
Edgar Brooks said:
According to Bruce Robertson, Bomber Command losses (including Coastal, special duties, and gardening) were :- 1941 - 27; 1942 - 199; 1943 - 713; 1944 - 740; 1945 - 154.
Click to expand...

A rather poor return for the huge German investment in the Flak arm of the Luftwaffe? By 1941 some 3500+ of heavy (88mm and bigger guns) were deployed in Germany proper and in occupied Western countries, and further thousands of light Flak (20-37mm).
Granted, much more bombers were damaged by Flak, but still a poor return.


The Hurricane surely needed the Merlin XX to cut the performance advantage the Bf 109 held. Unfortunately, the Bf 109 received not only the more engine power in late 1940-42, but also the aerodynamic refinements, so the performance gap was wider in 1941 than it was in 1940.
It is maybe unfortunate that aerodynamic refinements of the Spitfire III were not incorporated in the serial produced Spitfires?
The Merlin 20 series were also slated for Beaufighter, and later for the Halifax, Lancaster and Mosquito - there were doubts that Bristol will be unable to churn out as many Hercules engines as foreseen to be needed by the AM/RAF planers?
 
Well, if I was flying in a Wellington squadron I might want to transfer to Halifaxes.

granted the Halifax is dropping more bombs per sortie so that losses per 100 missions/sorties might be even or actually in the Wellingtons favor.

I have no idea what the bombs dropped per Whitley or Hampden were (let alone Blenheims) per plane lost or air crew lost per 100 tons dropped (needs 200 sorties by Blenheim but only 3 men per plane).

And for 1941 and good part of 1942 that is the question. Fewer bombs dropped in total and a larger percentage of the lower total dropped by the old twin engine bombers.
By the end of 1942 there had been only 698 Lancasters built and of the 109 built in Dec how many would have gone from the factory door and into combat before the end of the year?

LancasterMonlty Production

And the saga of the Manchester:

"Of the 200 airframes completed as true Manchester's and issued to front line RAF squadron's. A total 77 aircraft were lost on operations and an additional 20 were also lost in various accidents with those squadron's. A further 24 were lost during training flights with non-operational units, such as Conversion Flights. Combined losses therefore, were 121 or 60.50 percent of the original 200 aircraft. From those losses, 33 were directly due to engine failures - 12 on the squadron's, 21 on the training units. A further 28 aircraft lost during operations, were also thought to have been caused due to engine failure. But since the airframes and engines could not be examined there are classified as "Probably Lost Due To Enemy Action""

from Lancaster History
 
Harris started to campaign in earnest to switch production from the Halifax to Lancaster in late 1942. He met immediate resistance from the MAP. On 11th September '42 John Llewellin (the then Minister) wrote:

"If we gave the order to change over now, English Electric would produce the first Lancaster about November 1943 [more than a year later!] and would not reach peak production until December 1944. Between August 1943 and December 1944 you would lose some 220 bombers. This would probably be the firm that would give the best result. In my view, the changeover is not the remedy. The remedy is to modify the Halifax so as to bring its performance more like the Lancaster's"

Harris didn't believe him and nor incidentally did the more dynamic Stafford Cripps who would take over his job shortly. Llewellin's remedy took nearly as long to implement as the changeover, and in the meantime men continued to die in an inferior aeroplane.
Llewellin had the support of Sinclair, but Freeman was more sympathetic to Harris and Bomber Command. His compromise solution was that English Electric should, over the next twelve months, erect additional capacity with jigs and tools to build the Lancaster at its Preston plant. He would write:

"In this way the time lag should be cut down and the Halifax can go at almost peak rate until the Lancaster is in reasonable production. The shops that are now producing the Halifax would eventually turn on to the Lancaster and we should get the combined output of both."

This was rejected by the MAP for no good reason. Handley Page were an old client and whereas the suggestion that Avro, the new kids on the block, should produce the Halifax (made in 1940) was acceptable, the idea that Handley Page produce the Lancaster was not. I believe this was a political decision which has a whiff of the sort of cronyism that so bedevilled German aircraft production about it.

Rootes and LPTB production is irrelevant at this time. Between them they manufactured just 20 Halifax BIIs. Fairey hadn't even started (LK747 a BIII was the first to come from Fairey Aviation).

Cherwell liked his statistics and was also a supporter of the changeover on grounds of efficiency. His department calculated that due to the ease of construction of the Lancaster, and its heavy bomb load, 3.6lbs of bombs were dropped for every factory man hour compared with just 0.95lbs for the Halifax.

Ease of construction is reflected in production figures for 1942 of 516 from Avro with a further 172 from Metropolitan Vickers and Armstrong Whitworth.

Edgar raised a very valid point about engines. The Lancaster II was forced to use Hercules engines whilst the inferior Halifax got the limited allocation of Merlins. As you can imagine this got Harris going again. He wrote to Portal:

"The Lancaster II has a marked falling off of performance which is not acceptable now and will be still less acceptable in 1943. It has over 200 miles less range in theory and in practice we are already finding that it has some seven hours endurance compared with the ten hours of the Lancaster I. It is slightly slower. It's maximum speed is achieved at 15,000 feet [which Harris considered lethal] as compared with the 19,500 of the Lancaster I. The Hercules engine is notoriously unreliable, though this may be got over. The raison d'etre of the Lancaster II is that insufficient Merlin engines are now available to put Merlins in the total production of Lancaster fuselages. But Merlin engines are being used in large quantities in the deplorable Halifax. Therefore in order to overproduce one deplorable type we are virtually wrecking a large proportion of the output of a first class type, the Lancaster I."

Cheers

Steve
 
Last edited:
Hmmmm.

"It's maximum speed is achieved at 15,000 feet [which Harris considered lethal] as compared with the 19,500 of the Lancaster I. The Hercules engine is notoriously unreliable, though this may be got over. The raison d'etre of the Lancaster II is that insufficient Merlin engines are now available to put Merlins in the total production of Lancaster fuselages. But Merlin engines are being used in large quantities in the deplorable Halifax. Therefore in order to overproduce one deplorable type we are virtually wrecking a large proportion of the output of a first class type, the Lancaster I."

Granted the Short Stirling and Wellington were being phased out in 1943 but how many crewmen were lost flying those planes with the notoriously unreliable Hercules engines? And a what altitudes were they cruising at? Max speed bears a relation to cruising speed but this comparison seems a bit contrived. On shorter missions the crews of ALL types of bombers could have used a faster cruising speed that they were instructed to use with a lower causality rate.

The large proportion of wrecked Lancasters amounted to 300 or so , all built by Armstrong Whitworth at the rate of around 20-25 month when production of Merlin powered Lancasters was running around 156-183 a month. IF the first 300 Lancasters built by AW were all MK IIs then at the end of 1943 you had 300 Hercules powered planes out of a total of 2679, 11.1%

It sounds like not enough testing was done and/or not enough information was given to crew and raid planners if a large number of MK II Lancasters ran out of fuel on operations.

The Lancaster was a better plane but neither really amount to much in 1941 and I am not sure I buy all Harries excuses (unless he was trying to overstate things to shake things up).
 
Last edited:
The point Harris is making is that the Lancaster II should not have been built at all. The available Merlins should have gone to Lancaster production, even at the cost of Halifax production. The Lancaster II performed badly compared with its predecessor, taking backward steps in aircraft development is difficult to justify in any circumstances, even more so as a strategic bombing campaign began to gather real momentum.
To Harris and Bomber Command building Merlin engine Halifaxes and Hercules engine Lancasters was a double negative. He got poorer performing Lancasters and more of the same old 'deplorable' Halifax

Harris would sooner have had fewer, better, bombers, something which superficially seems uncharacteristic of him but which is supported by copious evidence. He wanted to maximise the tonnage of bombs dropped whilst minimising his losses and in 1942-43 Merlin engine Lancasters were the way to do it.

Men like Cherwell and Freeman wanted to maximise the tonnage of bombs dropped with the minimum cost in labour and materiel (in the context of the heavy bomber programme) and came to the same conclusion as Harris.

The Halifax should have been dropped in 1942. There was a chance to do it but the opportunity was missed.

Hindsight is something we have the benefit of. Foresight is something that Harris, Freeman and others were able to use but which others like Llewellin and Sinclair lacked in this particular case.

Cheers

Steve
 
Halifax could have been used as long range patrol a/c, which CC wanted very badly.
 
I do get the feeling that there are some political points being scored in these old papers. I have never heard the Hercules being considered an unreliable engine.
Would I want to convert my airforce from Halifax I and Ii to the Lancaster, definitely. Would I want to go to the trouble of converting the Halifax III to the Lancaster, no definitely no. The difference in performance is too small. Indeed a number of units that converted from the Lancaster to the Halifax did a lot better with the Halifax III
 

Definitely a lot of politicking, and Harris was one of the worst offenders. I don't believe the Hercules engine was as unreliable as he was making out either. Even he conceded that it might be fixed. He had a genuine points about the reduction in range its thirst incurred and the lower altitude at which it operated best. 15,000 feet was a lethal height and time after time you can read of crews striving for altitude. Experienced crews ignored the ordered altitude for the stream and flew as high as possible.

I wouldn't swop a Halifax III for a Lancaster either. The problem lies in how long it took to sort the Halifax out. If it had been discontinued in 1942 then the Halifax III would never have been realised and nobody would have noticed or cared.

Cheers

Steve
 
Could Lancaster production be increased to compensate for the lost numbers of Halis built if the Hali had been terminated?
 
Milosh said:
Could Lancaster production be increased to compensate for the lost numbers of Halis built if the Hali had been terminated?
Click to expand...

It could have been minimised following Freeman's plan, whereby English Electric set up parallel Lancaster production lines whilst continuing Halifax production. There would always be some loss of production of Halifaxes at English Electric as resources were stretched.

The plants building Lancasters would not have been able to compensate for this. The lost production can only be estimated, but neither Harris nor Freeman believed it would have been anywhere near as high as LLewellin's estimate which was, crucially, supported by Sinclair who was the political master of all of them.

It is unfortunate that Freeman was moved to take up a job as Vice-Chief of the Air Staff in late 1940, only returning to what became the MAP in late 1942 (I'd need to check the date). Had he remained as the Air Member for Research and Development and continued at the MAP I'm virtually certain that the Halifax would have been axed.

Cheers

Steve
 
Lancaster production could certainly have been increased, the argument is over how fast and/or how many bombers would NOT have been built during the change over.

Both planes were built by a large group of factories/assembly shops with lots of subcontracting. At the end of 1942 there were almost as twice as many Halifaxes built as Lancasters, by the end of 1943 the numbers were about equal for total production so the Lancaster was being built in larger numbers for most of 1943. Halifax production did increase again in 1944 with the MK III.
Every factory or manufacturing group needs it own set/s of jigs/fixtures and tooling for a specific aircraft so even if you have the buildings, overhead cranes, floor tracks, scaffolding/ladders, rivet tools etc it can still take months to convert from one type to another. Some of the smaller factories/groups were only building 15-30 4 engine planes per month so while the lost production doesn't amount to a whole lot neither does the gain.
as an example for the Lancaster 7 'factories' built Lancasters but the 'home' factory built 49.7% of them, Vickers Armstrong/Chester built 235 in 1944/45 or about 3.2%. Of the 7 "factories" only 3 built Lancasters before Sept of 1943.

English Electric built about 2000 of the 6104 Halifaxes built and could very well have been the most logical factory to convert but it took EE just about 4 years to build those 2000 planes for an average of 41.6 planes per month. The average would be even lower because the 4 years (Sept of 1941 to Sept of 1945) doesn't count the the time it took to tool up to build the first 1-2 planes.

If someone has production numbers for the Halifax by month it might help.
 
All good and salient points. English Electric was the logical choice for conversion to Lancaster production in late 1942 because the others( Rootes, Speke and LPTB, Leavesden) were virtually hand building very few aircraft.
It would have been possible to erect Lancaster production line(s) whilst maintaining Halifax production at E.E, Salmesbury. Converting production at Handley Page's parent plant at Cricklewood/Radlett had far more serious political repercussions, and I agree it would have taken longer and entailed more significant loss of Halifax production, but it could have been done.

I will attempt to find Halifax production by month. It's probably secreted in some table in a book somewhere in this house

It is worth getting numbers in perspective. It is easy to imagine that by late 1942 hundreds of Halifaxes were undertaking missions for bomber command. In fact, throughout 1942, the number sent on any one raid rarely exceeded 40, with the exception of the 'thousand' raids. In the first half of 1943 this rose to 100+ and by mid 1943 it was regularly over 200. Many of these could have been replaced with Lancasters.

Cheers

Steve
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Users who are viewing this thread

Total: 1 (members: 0, guests: 1)

Similar threads

Axis Strategic Heavy Bombers?
2
Replies
26
Views
3K
Shortround6
S
German heavy bombers
2 3
Replies
50
Views
5K
Geoffrey Sinclair
G
D
"Self-inflicted" heavy bombers damages in 8th Air Force
Replies
2
Views
1K
Daniel BASTIEN
D
S
ww2 propeller crash biggin hill 1941
Replies
3
Views
488
stuart
S
high altitude bomber
2
Replies
30
Views
4K
Shortround6
S
Menu
Log in
Register