Bombers defensive armament: a misconceived idea?

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the lancaster kicks ass said:
and speed means nothing in a Bomber-fighter encounter............
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Incorrect. Has everyone forgotten about the Mosquito? The RAF's very own wooden wonder? It is by all right a bomber and re-proved beyond a doubt that speed was the most potent weapon in air combat.

However, you can't attack with purely super-light, super-fast aircraft because the enemy will make an even faster aircraft (see Me-262) to shoot yours out of the sky.

Also keep in mind that the ENTIRE point of the USAAF bomber offensive was to cripple the Luftwaffe to make invasion a possibility. Time and time again, post-mission recce flights over bombed targets showed that the facilities hit by USAAF heavies were back to nearly 100% operating capacity within a week.

The job of the combat box was to destroy German fighters and kill the highly experienced pilots inside them. It took a long time, and a lot of folks got killed but the job was done. Thats the nature of war.
 

actually even the germans didn't expect it, that's why hitler stopped his tanks short of Dunquirke, if he'd had let them go on insted of stopping them for a few days it wouldn't have been the miracle it was...........
 
Incorrect. Has everyone forgotten about the Mosquito? The RAF's very own wooden wonder? It is by all right a bomber and re-proved beyond a doubt that speed was the most potent weapon in air combat.
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sorry i wasn't thinking about the mossie but i was refering to an encounter between a 4 engined heavy and a twin engined night figter...........
 
actually there was another defensive move used by Bomber command that did involve speed. If an attacking fighter was coming in for a pass the tial gunner could call "drop" if he did the flight engineer would drop the throttles (the pilot didn't controll the throttles) and the bomber, ,let's assume it's a lanc, would rapidly loose speed, this caused the gap between fighter and bomber to drop allot quicker than the fighter pilot would have planned, as such he wouldn't be able to get any shots in and the tail gunner would have a few shots, upon hearing the command "easy" from the tail gunner, the flight engineer would increse the throttles, this whole process would be over in a matter of seconds..............
 
yes but i've never heard of an instance where that happened on a lanc, proberly because the merlin was such an amazing engine.............
 
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