We seem to be getting into the rather
flexible abilities of some of the German aircraft.
The Ju-88A-1 had some rather severe limitations as a bomber in 1940. Basically it had some real problems with range and payload. Lots of range with little or no bomb load or a fair (but not great) bomb load with little range. It also wasn't all that fast. Faster than a Whitley or Wellington to be sure but only 10-15mph faster than a Blenheim and that is not enough to keep it out of trouble. The A-4 was significantly better But the "improvements" also meant an increase of over 2500kg in
empty weight.
The big British twins and the HE 111 were slower but could carry much greater loads over longer ranges. Granted they often couldn't find the right city without special navigation aids but
that problem was not the fault of the engines or airframes.
Neither Project were technicaly disaster. And both could really make a difference. Disastrous was the way RLM controled and directed those programmes, also the political consiracies didnt help.
There were around 270-280 Ju 222 engines built and they powered
0 service aircraft. The Few prototype aircraft that used them suffered long waits for airworthy examples, frequent engine failures/replacements and later prototypes in the same series fitted with lower powered alternate engines in order to get some sort of air time. Granted the changing specifications did not help but that is among worst records for an aircraft engine that I know of. A few Russian engines might rival it (M-106?).
And lets consider the Avro Manchester,
IF the engines and airframe
had lived up to "projections" it would have been the greatest bomber of 1940/41.
Ju 88S was not by any means wundar plane. The S-0 was just a Ju88A streamlined but still powered by Jumos 211. If common sense had prevailed S-0 should be in production since the beginning.
Most sources say the S-0 and S-1 used BMW 801 radials which makes it a bit hard to be in production since the beginning. We also run into the bomb load vs range problem again. The S-0 still had the ventral gondola according to
some sources. Or perhaps it was not always fitted? However the S-1 lost it. We then hit the bomb load problem with early Ju 88s aircraft not having any external racks for streamlining and the rear bomb bay housing a fuel tank leaving only the forward bomb bay. The Later S-1s filled the rear bay with the GM 1 power boost system which certainly helped them become fast bombers but meant the bomb load gets even more iffy. With the forward bay holding bombs (ten 143lb bombs) the rear bay holding the GM 1 the wing tanks were good for 2 hours and 45 minutes at 289mph. If they used the GM 1 range drops to ????? and most performance figures are for the aircraft clean (no bombs). Granted it could carry a pair of 1000kg bombs on external racks but then it doesn't come close to hitting those often listed speeds.
Even B17s with their massive defentive armament were not able to survive by themselves fighter attacks. The only effective defence (except of course thousands friendly fighters) was High Cruise speed
Well, in many areas you only needed hundreds of fighters in 1941/42. Or maybe even dozens. You also half to be able to
reach the target. Being able to flit through the enemies defenses is all well and good but if you have to turn around and go home
before reaching the target the whole thing is rather pointless.
Better navigation (radio beams, etc) allows bombing by night which was also a pretty good defense even if not perfect. Trying to build bombers that could outrun fighters didn't work all that well historically with only a few exceptions. The fighters could always devote a higher percentage of their gross weight to the powerplant. Trying to intercept 2-6 Mosquitos is one thing, trying to intercept 300-600 attacking the same city in an hour or less might have not worked quite so well.
Details. Thats why engineers have a job. But the concept was very sound. Besides, dornier proposed something very similar, the Do317B
Lets see, we
can't modify the He 111 by any substantial amount but we can take a Do 217 and add several thousand KG of power plant, change the wing center section (at the least) and modify all kinds of other parts and that is merely "details".
A Do 217 went around 35-36,000lbs max, Proposed weight for the Do 317 was 52,900lbs max. It used a different cockpit, different fuselage, different tail and a different wing to go along with the different engines. That is a
lot of details.
You are not going to turn the He 111 into a 350-400mph airplane but since ALL the engineering time and manpower to build ALL the prototypes and even a fair number of the supposed replacements (Including some of the He 177) was pretty much wasted a modest improvement might have been worthwhile. The Halifax changed from Merlin XXs to Hercules engines and changed the vertical fins and the loss rate per 1000 missions dropped almost in half (there may have been a few situational changes as well).
Some other British planes suffered rather high loss rates for rather stupid reasons. Underpowered and having trim/flap/landing gear controls in awkward cockpit locations means a higher than necessary accident rate. An extra 10-15% power per engine can mean the difference between a twin engine plane getting home on one engine or not.
You don't need invulnerability, you need to keep the losses to an acceptable level to continue the campaign. Russians claimed the IL-2 with rear gun had lower losses than the single seaters. Plenty of the two seaters were shot down.