Did the RAF have designs for a long range escort fighter?

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Zipper730 said:
S Shortround6

Your thoughts on this?
Escort Spitfire - a missed opportunity for longer reach? - Royal Aeronautical Society
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I believe there is another thread (at least one) on this article. Basically they make some poor assumptions and/or the Spitfire is going to need more modifications than they think.

Just like the P-51 was only an 8 G rated fighter at 8,000lbs and a 7.1 G fighter at 9000lbs. A Spitfire carrying an extra 100 gallons internal is going to be 10% over weight (or have it's G load rating reduced by 10%) unless the structure is beefed up. ANd that assumes you can get the 100 gallons in the plane without screwing up the center of gravity, which the rear fuselage tanks did.

Cruising at 240mph over Europe makes you a target, there is are reasons the US fighters planned cruise at 210mph IAS (305-310mph true) at 25,000ft. It was the same reason the British learned with the MK V Spit back in the "Lean forward into France" days of 1941. It could take a Spit V about two minutes to accelerate from a cruise speed in the low two hundreds to full speed and by that time the Spit was either full of holes or the German fighters had come, shot up the bombers and gone. You need to be "cruising" much faster so as to not give up the initiative from the start.

it doesn't matter how much fuel you can strap under a fighter, what matters is how much fuel you have over Berlin or Munich AFTER you drop the external tanks, fight for 15-20 minutes (and that may include several minutes just climbing back up to altitude after a fight, not every minute being full combat) and then get home.

Photo Recon Spits did carry large fuel loads, they also ditched the guns, had sometimes squirrely handling and were restricted in flight maneuvers until a lot of the fuel was burned off, not exactly what you want in your escort fighters.

More could have been done with the Spitfire but that article is using some rose tinted glasses. Very rose tinted.
 
Clayton Magnet said:
What about (revisionist history in 3, 2, 1...) the Spitfire Mk.III? With its improved drag characteristics, could it have been saddled effectively with extra fuel, with a corresponding increase in combat radius?
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SPitfire III always gets high marks by me thus I agree with idea. It already had 100 imp gals aboard vs. 84 the Mk.I/II/V carried.
 
The need for escort fighters only became apparent after the beginning of the war. All these discussions are using hindsight.

In 1936 the DDOps (then Richard Peirse) wrote of events in Spain that "While I still feel it would be a confession of weakness and a waste of effort on our part to even consider the use of fighters in this way [to escort bombers] , I cannot help feeling that we ought to be prepared for such an eventuality."

On 30th November the Director of Staff Duties (then Sholto Douglas) commented that "My own feeling on the matter is that the bombers should be able to look after themselves without the addition of an escort of fighters; although certain of the bombers might be more heavily armed than the remainder at the expense of their bomb load."

The Americans would try that later, and it didn't work.

In response the DCAS (then Christopher Courtney) listed a set of concerns about escorts that reflected pre-war RAF thinking. Specialised escorts would demand resources which might otherwise be put into bombers. ; they would be tied to their formation; they would not necessarily be better armed than the aircraft they were escorting. He concluded that "The whole concept of fighter escorts is defective."

In June 1937 the Air Fighting Committee decide that it was not the right time for requirements for special escort fighters to be drawn up.

In the summer of 1938 Ludlow-Hewitt, then Chief of Bomber Command, confronted with the prospect of a real war, suddenly got cold feet about the certainty of the 'bomber will always get through' concept, and argued that the Air Staff's policy on escorts should be reconsidered. His appeal fell on deaf ears.

In an April 1939 meeting on Bomber Command readiness the Director of Operations reported that further discussions on the issue of escorts had resulted in the opinion that the defence of bombers would be better undertaken "by bomber aircraft carrying fewer bombs, but more ammunition and guns."

Did I mention that the Americans would later try that? Fortunately the British never did. What was envisaged was more an escort bomber than an escort fighter. Air planners were handicapped (unlike us) by their inability to come to a consensus on how to predict the increasingly complex and uncertain future of aerial warfare.

That's why the RAF did not have designs for a long range fighter. Everything else is hindsight.

Cheers

Steve
 
I have written before that with the state of the art in Britain the single engine escort fighter wasn't technically feasible in the mid/late 30s. Not to come down to harshly on the British it wasn't technically feasible in most (all?) countries. The Merlin was the best single engine for fighters in 1938. The DB 601A shows up at the end of 1938. The Allison is almost 2 years from mass production. The Hispano needs a discreet vail pulled over it.
The P-36A with the P&W R-1830-13/17 has 900hp at 12,000ft running on 92 octane fuel. 100 octane will increase performance below that height, not above it.

Yes, better engines are being offered/promised. for the British we know how the Centaurus, Sabre, vulture saga turned out.
for the Americans we know how the Lycoming O-1230, Continental ???-1430, and Wright Tornado turned out too. (much less successful than the British three, they powered zero production aircraft)

Easy to pick winners now

For the Japanese the Ki-43 was a bit late getting started (into production) and showed up in the fall of 1941 with a single speed supercharger and a two blade, two position prop.
Yes it held more fuel than a Spitfire but it's great range was only achieved at around 200-220mph at altitudes that would have been impractical in Europe. A pair of 7.7mm machine guns might not have the been best choice either.

The state of the aeronautical art changed in 1940-42.

Which leads us back to 1936-38. What could reasonably have been expected to be the result of an escort fighter specification from those years using "safe" technology(betting on the Sabre gets you zero aircraft in service in 1941-42). Improvements to the Merin are an unexpected bonus.

It is no wonder that the men in charge thought that the only solution (and a poor one) was some extra bombers toting extra guns and ammo.

Lets also remember that the Japanese army requested that Kawasaki start work on a twin engine fighter in 1937 that lead to the Ki-45, first prototype flew in 1939 and after much (much, much) revision finally made it into production in late 1941/early 1942. it was used as a bomber escort early in it's career but was no match for the single engine, single seat interceptors it faced. Point is that even the Japanese, while working on the Ki-43, didn't believe the single engine, single seat fighter was the answer to the long range escort problem.
 
stona said:
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Thank you for posting the excerpts. From them we can concude that a): escort fighter was not being equaly discarded by all members of brass, and b): that people in charge never actually tested whether escort fighter works or not. That leads us to c): decision to not to proceed with escort fighter project was based on 'I feel' rather on 'it is fact, borne out from tests'.
Seems like we also don't have d): results of tests of RAF fighters and whole FC (including GCI) ability to intercept RAF bombers in second part of 1930s.
 
That's ultimate load?
A Spitfire carrying an extra 100 gallons internal is going to be 10% over weight (or have it's G load rating reduced by 10%)
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From what I remember it's max load was around 9-10.5g right?

As for the issues with the center-of-gravity, that was an issue that affected the P-51's as well, but they were willing to put up with it anyway -- the problem went away once the tanks were drained. That said, the speed seems to be the biggest issue -- and I had a hunch about that, but wanted to make sure of it -- I figured the 240 mph cruise speed would mean it'd face off against an enemy that would start off with superior speed, could out accelerate it (the Fw190 was good in that regard) in level flight, and in a dive.

How much did the Spitfire VII/VIII/IX range increase with the Merlin 60's?
Photo Recon Spits did carry large fuel loads, they also ditched the guns, had sometimes squirrely handling and were restricted in flight maneuvers until a lot of the fuel was burned off, not exactly what you want in your escort fighters.
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Were they escorted by other fighters due to this limit? Also, how fast did they cruise?
 
buffnut453 said:
No idea about the cruising speed for PR Spitfires but they were never escorted by fighters. They were "alone, unarmed and unafraid"...ok, perhaps not the latter.
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Approx 50% of Spitfire Mk XIVs carried a camera. They weren't supposed to fight just equipped to get out of a place the enemy didnt want them to see.
 
PR cruise speeds:

Spitfire X & XI (at 30,000 ft)
most econ: 260 mph​
max weak mix: 388 mph​

Spitfire XIII (at 5,000 ft)
most econ: 175 mph​
max weak mix: 280 mph​

Spitfire XIV (at 35,000 ft)
most econ: 290 mph​
max weak mix: 393 mph​

Spitfire XIX (at 35,000 ft)
most econ: 360 mph​
max weak mix: 405 mph​
 
Zipper730 said:
That's ultimate load?
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No, that is the service load. The Ultimate load was supposed to be 12 Gs. The extra 50% is the safety margin!

From what I remember it's max load was around 9-10.5g right?
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That kind of depends. One list has a MK IX at 7240lbs having an ultimate load of 10.0 G's. Different countries had different rules. But cut that to about 6.7 Gs for a service load?
How much beefing up was done I don't know but some of the older/lighter Spitfires may have had a bit higher G rating.



As for the issues with the center-of-gravity, that was an issue that affected the P-51's as well, but they were willing to put up with it anyway -- the problem went away once the tanks were drained.
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Actually on the P-51Ds they preferred to keep 25-35 gallons in the rear tank. The Americans still used the rear tanks post war and into the 50s. The British wired the fuel fillers shut in peace time and you needed written orders from the squadron commander to unseal the tank/s and fill them. Again, different rules or perhaps the two planes didn't really respond the same to large amounts of fuel behind the pilot.

How much did the Spitfire VII/VIII/IX range increase with the Merlin 60's?
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In general the range went down. That assumes the planes had the same size fuel tanks. The VIIIs got the wing tanks.
If you are making extra power you are burning extra fuel. You might eek out a bit more range due to the lower drag at higher altitude but you are using more power/fuel to drive the two stage supercharger. A lot depends on speed and altitude.

Were they escorted by other fighters due to this limit? Also, how fast did they cruise?
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AS answered above these were solitary missions.
Photo recon was done at both high and low altitude. In general they used the highest speed they could that would give the desired range to make interception as difficult as possible.
There were a number of long tail chases that ended with the Spitfire getting away (and few that didn't?), dodging into any handy cloud also helped.
 

There was an assumption that ADGB's zone fighters would intercept bombers at night, it is why they were specified with a day/night capability. The reality was that they could not, yet another abyss between the reality and rhetoric.

The RAF was doctrinally committed to the aerial offensive, but never stopped thinking about fighters and other methods of home defence. Dowding did not invent the concept of integrated air defence. General E B Ashmore, who had directed Britain's air defence in WWI, argued after the war for the development of an information network to aid the interception of bombers. This took advantage of observers and dedicated telephone lines to support fighters and anti aircraft artillery. Eventually improvements in radio telephony would be incorporated and, eventually, radio direction finding.
It was the inability of British fighters to intercept British bombers in the 1934 exercises that gave impetus to the development of radio direction finding/radar. It seemed that the future Prime Minister's fears, expressed in 1932, might be justified.

As late as March 1938 Slessor (then Deputy Director of Plans) requested an overview of the effectiveness of fighter defence from the Air Staff. He needed information for a meeting of the Joint Planning Committee (the British LOVE a committee) and asked about the likelihood of bomber interception, the value of defensive armament on bombers, and the margin of speed between fighters and bombers (which was closing alarmingly). The Air Staff reply was upbeat, supposing that 60% of day and 40% of night raids could be intercepted. This was palpably nonsense. The Air Staff was at pains to point out that an increase in the number of fighters was tied to the development of a German bomber force and that British offensive strategy had not changed. "It is not enough to avoid losing a war...a boxer cannot fight if he does no more than parry an opponent's blows, he must have an equivalent punch, he must be able to deliver it at the right time and place; and he must be able to keep on punching until his opponent is out." There was a concession that the case that the bomber will always get through might have been overstated.

In November 1938 the Air Staff circulated a memorandum stating that the counteroffensive had not been abandoned or replaced by a defensive orientation.

There is a clear contradiction in RAF policy and doctrine. On the one hand it argued that its bombers would get through and deliver a devastating counteroffensive in the case that Britain was attacked. This was nothing less than wishful thinking, events from 1939-1942 would prove it so. On the other hand it imagined that it might prevent the enemy bombers from getting through. In daylight at least this proved almost accidentally correct. It is Overy (with whom I seldom entirely agree) who wrote "To admit that there was a defence against the bomber was to question the whole basis on which an independent air force had been built." In this case he is absolutely right. The RAF had a tendency, as do many organisations, military or otherwise, to preserve its fundamental assumptions whenever possible. This prevented a proper examination of the evident tension that is inherent in simultaneously believing that it could fend off a Luftwaffe attack and also prosecute a successful offensive against Germany.

Cheers

Steve
 
I think you're being a tad harsh there, Stona, because you're assuming that all bombers are created equal. In 1938 the RAF was (AFAIK) the only air force that was equipping its bombers with power-operated turrets, and the Wellington carried a far greater weight of bombs than any other German bomber. If RAF senior leadership believed that power turrets enabled their bombers to better survive attacks by defensive fighters, and if RAF bombers could deliver a more powerful punch per-aircraft, then it's perhaps not surprising that this contradiction in RAF strategy might occur.

That said, I do agree that there was a lack of truly objective critical thinking...but the RAF wasn't alone in that. The Luftwaffe and the USAAF equally suffered their fair share of mis-steps from 1935 thru 1945.

Arguably, the true shortfall was in accurately understanding the limits of air power. The "shock and awe" of Guernica seemed to point the way to a future where entire cities could be cowed by aerial attack. The reality is that, until the advent of the atomic bomb, air power alone could not subdue a city entirely. It could disrupt factories but it never resulted in the mass breakdown of morale that Guernica seemed to presage.
 

Wellington IA and IC carried 4500 lbs max, same as Heinkel 111 with Jumo 211 engines of 1939-40. Number of bombers also counts, not just punch-per-aircraft.

That said, I do agree that there was a lack of truly objective critical thinking...but the RAF wasn't alone in that. The Luftwaffe and the USAAF equally suffered their fair share of mis-steps from 1935 thru 1945.
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Agree all the way. We can toss air forces or air services of France, Italy, Soviet Union and Japan here.


Very true.
 
Shortround6 said:
Point is that even the Japanese, while working on the Ki-43, didn't believe the single engine, single seat fighter was the answer to the long range escort problem.
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You could say that planes like the Typhoon and P-47 were twin engine fighters but with one propeller. They were the cost weight and complexity of earlier twins. Both the Vulture and Sabre engines were two engines joined together in some way.
 
buffnut453 said:
I think you're being a tad harsh there, Stona,
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Not really. The whole concept of an offensive bomber force was predicated on its ability to launch a devastating counter offensive in the event of, in fact to deter, any aggression.

The gulf between this declared objective and reality was demonstrated in the first eighteen months of the war. In September 1939 the RAF had nearly 1,500 first line aircraft including 536 bombers. What did they do? They carried out mainly maritime operations and supported the Army in France. Maritime operations might be justified, supporting the Army was something the RAF had consistently resisted and argued against since the day of its foundation. The operations that Bomber Command did carry out met with extremely limited success. The demoralising outcomes of operations in the first three months of the war began to cast doubt on the theory that the bombers will always get through. Anthony Verrier summed it up well, writing, "Few aspects of this phase of the strategic air offensive are more striking in retrospect...than the claims made for and the hopes entertained about mass bombing before 1939 and the virtual absence of all reference to it at the highest policy making levels for many months thereafter."
In fact the RAF pulled back from prospective plans for even a limited offensive against Germany. In January 1940 Ludlow-Hewitt expressed severe doubts about plans to mount attacks against power plants in the Ruhr, arguing that the loss of 50% or more of the attacking forces would not only demoralise the bomber crews, but also kill the men who might later fly more capable bombers.

The mythologizing of WWII by the British tends to obscure just how incapable Bomber Command was. In September 1939 the Air Staff authorised the dropping of leaflets, hoping to persuade the German population that the war was a jolly bad idea and they would be better off not pursuing it. Equipped with maps, astro-sextants and directional radio crews were expected to find their way by night. So many bombers crews accidentally over flew or crashed in neutral Dutch, Belgian and Danish territory that even the leaflet raids were suspended.

Tami Davis Bidell has written of British attitudes in 1940, "Britain was in a desperate situation: the bombers provided the only means of offensive action against Germany. Looking stoically ahead, the British kept themselves from despair by cultivating a selective blind spot." That is an American assessment with which it is hard to disagree. Sebastien Cox wrote more succinctly that, "The Air Staff, and indeed the government, were sustained by a faith wholly at variance with the known facts of the situation."

Cheers

Steve
 
Steve,

You're applying the retrospectroscope again by discussing what actually happened after the outbreak of war. My observation is that the apparent contradiction in RAF thinking that RAF fighters would succeed in defending against enemy bombers while our bombers would, somehow, get through to the target and succeed. My contention is that the perceived (or, perhaps, over-confidence in) technological superiority of the RAF (power turrets, ground-based radar warning, fighter control organization etc) may have led to the type of pre-war thinking you describe. Rather than blame the pre-war planners for having insufficiently attuned crystal balls, I'm trying to understand why they failed to comprehend the reasons for the contradiction in strategic thought.
 

The pre-war British air planners lacked intelligence and information about the purpose of the Luftwaffe and about aircraft performance, guns and bombsights. They simply assumed that its role would not be very much different to the role they envisioned for the RAF. Their was a near panic during the Munich crisis, as war became inevitable. The British were really worried about a massive German air strike aimed at producing a quick British surrender. They were still worried that the Luftwaffe's bombers would get through, and assumed that their own would, despite the simultaneous hope that Fighter Command could somehow prevent the Germans. There is no evidence anywhere that I have seen that shows the British distinguishing between their bombers and others.
British defence was really predicated on the counter offensive. A highly influential paper by the Joint Planning Committee in 1936, which was heavily influenced by the Air Ministry's representative, a certain Group Captain Arthur Harris, summed it up. The committee supposed that the Germans would launch unrestricted attacks on Britain to persuade the population that "surrender was preferable to the continuation of the attacks". The working classes were considered particularly likely to be unsteady in the face of a German onslaught. The committee accepted that defensive measures might mitigate the effects of such an attack but admitted that "they had been unable to discover any method of direct defence sufficiently effective to guarantee the security of objectives in the country", believing that "the only real answer lies in a counter offensive of at least similar effectiveness". RAF air planners 'mirror imaged' assumptions about the Luftwaffe's likely role in wartime. As Wesley Wark wrote, "Nothing distilled from the sources that became available in 1937 challenged the Air Ministry's preconceptions about the Luftwaffe's strategic air mission. The picture indicated instead that the German air force would have both an army support and a strategic bombing role. On this basis, a German knock-out blow could not be discounted."

Bomber Command was utterly incapable of delivering such a counter offensive in 1936 and equally incapable in 1939. The entire premise of Britain's air defence was very nearly built on a fallacy. In fact it was the ability to prevent the bombers from getting through, fortuitously and unintentionally aided by the economic consequences of the Inskip report (which gave some members of the Air Council apoplexy) that would save the day. The Air Ministry and RAF deluded themselves throughout the 1930s and continued to do so after war was declared. They did it, and argued it in government and in public, for selfish reasons, principally the preservation of the RAF as an independent service. They believed that their bombers would get through not because of some notion of their superior armament, or any other technical advantage, but because they had to believe it. If they didn't, then what was the point of the RAF?

Cheers

Steve
 

Fair enough but what then of the USAAF which wasn't an independent air force but wore similar blinkers when it came to strategic bombing? Bottom line is that there isn't a single air force (independent or otherwise) that was accurately and adequately prepared for the Second World War. To single out the RAF in that regard still seems a little harsh. Yes, senior RAF officers were trying to justify the independence of the service...but how well prepared would Britain have been if the RAF was disbanded back into the RFC and RNAS? What chance the defence of Britain in 1940 under those circumstances?

To your point "The committee supposed that the Germans would launch unrestricted attacks on Britain to persuade the population that "surrender was preferable to the continuation of the attacks""...isn't that what happened? Both sides held off bombing civilian targets until the Luftwaffe accidentally bombed London (And why did that happen? Because the Germans weren't much (if any) better than the Brits at night-time navigation). Once the gloves came off, the effort expended by the Luftwaffe against British cities resulted in a considerable lessening of pressure on Fighter Command airfields and installations. However, the Luftwaffe was neither configured nor equipped for this strategic role. Ergo, it could be argued that the RAF did deliver on its strategic promise (your quote "the only real answer lies in a counter offensive of at least similar effectiveness".) it's just that the Luftwaffe attack wasn't particularly effective from a strategic perspective...and the RAF's response was equally ineffectual.
 

You beat me to the punch. Actually the US was far worse. They had observed over 2 years of war which quite clearly showed that unescorted bombers were siting ducks and yet they convinced themselves that their aircraft and tactics were superior and they that would succeed where everyone else had failed. Even after several spectacular failures they continued to delude themselves that success was just around the corner. "The cornered wolf fights hardest." Of course believing your own BS was a big help in that regard. 6 Me 109s shot down for very B17 lost. The magic number of 300 bombers per would solve the problems, etc.
And of course we should never forget the YB-40 escort "fighter" which was an idea that never should have seen the light of day.
 
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