Me-110 Underrated

Peter Gunn said:

OK, I'll bite. How?

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He was that thang.

pbehn said:

He was that thang.

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What? NO! Biff? Our little Biffer? Has he been telling tall tales again?

I keep telling him to stay on his medication so these things don't happen...

tomo pauk said:

Long range fighter was a function of mentality - the air services/forces that were against it will never have it.
Japanese A6M Type 11 did almost 7 hours on 180 kt = 1260 nm, or 1450 miles, in 1940, with under 1000 HP under the hood. No need for a 2-engined fighter.



They have at least one in their own country - DB 601A, use it just like Japanese did it.

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It is also a function of geography. Japan is an Island group, how far away from another nation? Or any place that actually made aircraft? How far away from where they planned to use aircraft? The distances in the Pacific were huge. Talk of 700 or 1000 miles range in Europe makes no sense. From Wick at the tip of Scotland it is just over 1000 miles to Milan, just over 1100 miles to Marseilles. It is 760 miles to Berlin. In the Battle of Britain the closest airfields were almost within sight of each other in perfect weather. The major concentration of forces were about 100 miles apart, I just don't see how a plane with 1000 miles range will improve anything. The LW was made to support a ground advance. At Dunkerque in 1940 the LW were at the limit of their practical range because they hadn't moved from home bases, but the German army were also at their limit for a rapid advance, against a defending force. You cant sent tactical bombers and fighters to a battle front a thousand miles away so why make an aircraft for it? Whatever they do they can only do it every other day, even if they survive. There was no time before 1945 that you could float above enemy airspace at 200MPH and live for long, unless in a well protected raid.

If you have an aircraft that can fly with a combat range of 1,000 miles, as distinct from an aircraft with a combat range of 400 miles, you can:

Fight over the target twice as long (combat endurance). This is probably the single most important thing.
Fly mission with a greater margin of safety in terms of getting back to base without running out of fuel.
Escort bombers to targets (like aircraft factories, radar stations, airfields, fuel storage, railyards, bridges, ports) which are further away from the (intended or actual) battlefield but directly relevant to it.
Escort bombers to attack maritime targets farther out to sea (beyond the Channel, like convoys bringing raw materials or supplies from Atlantic into North Sea zones).
Conduct fighter sweeps much deeper over enemy territory, to catch any aircraft as they are forming up.
Conduct fighter sweeps which attack from less obvious directions, or from multiple directions at once.
Escort bomber missions which attack from less obvious directions, or from multiple directions at once

And if we are talking about something beyond the Battle of Britain, i.e. where there is an actual land battle taking place such as over the Med or on the Russian Front

Escort bombers to attack troops moving up to the battle area, not just directly over the battlefield.
Escort bombers to attack supplies / logistics in the operational area beyond the battlefield.

Schweik said:

If you have an aircraft that can fly with a combat range of 1,000 miles, as distinct from an aircraft with a combat range of 400 miles, you can:

Fight over the target twice as long (combat endurance). This is probably the single most important thing.
Fly mission with a greater margin of safety in terms of getting back to base without running out of fuel.
Escort bombers to targets (like aircraft factories, radar stations, airfields, fuel storage, railyards, bridges, ports) which are further away from the (intended or actual) battlefield but directly relevant to it.
Escort bombers to attack maritime targets farther out to sea (beyond the Channel, like convoys bringing raw materials or supplies from Atlantic into North Sea zones).
Conduct fighter sweeps much deeper over enemy territory, to catch any aircraft as they are forming up.
Conduct fighter sweeps which attack from less obvious directions, or from multiple directions at once.
Escort bomber missions which attack from less obvious directions, or from multiple directions at once

And if we are talking about something beyond the Battle of Britain, i.e. where there is an actual land battle taking place such as over the Med or on the Russian Front

Escort bombers to attack troops moving up to the battle area, not just directly over the battlefield.
Escort bombers to attack supplies / logistics in the operational area beyond the battlefield.

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But in 1940 they were met at the coast, they didn't even plan a mission to knock out UK industry apart from aircraft factories in Southampton and Kent. The Radar stations are not distant targets they are the first thing you come across, the Germans could see the RADAR installation at Dover and still didn't knock it out. Within Days of D-Day taking place engineers were constructing airfields for the RAF and USAAF because there is no point in your fighter support being based over 100 miles away. Not only does it take a lot of time to get there and back the pilots dont know what to hit.

There is an awful lot of use of the retrospectroscope here.

We are also mixing up different countries needs, abilities, and design considerations/requirements.
We are also tending to ignore the state of the art and more importantly the actually availability of communications and navigation equipment in the years leading up to 1940 (and for some years after that depending on nation).

we also have advocates of cheap, light fighters but they seem to want these cheap-light aircraft to be equipped with the latest and greatest communications/navigation gear if not equipement that would not exist for several years.

One reason fighters stayed with bombers in Spain and China was that the fighters had no radios (mostly) and were depending on the bombers for navigation. How long that persisted into WW II changed from country to country. Sending your fighters 4-500 miles into enemy territory if they can't reliably find their way back is not a good plan.

different countries had different strength requirements for aircraft which meant different structural weights for a given power engine and size aircraft. The US may have had one of the strictest requirements at 12 "G"s ultimate load for fighters A few other nations may have been higher (Italy?) for fighters. There were requirements not just for a "pull out" load but also negative loads and yaw and perhaps other directions/factors. US attack planes (A-20) may have been around a 6 G load factor and larger bombers were somewhere in the 4G load range.
This is as originally designed. Other countries had different requirements.

A lot also depends on how much different countries were willing to "bend" some of these requirements. The Merlin Mustangs were a 12 G aircraft (actually 8 Gs in service with a 50% overload safety margin but at only 8000lbs. A 9000lb Mustang was operating at about a 7.1 G limit. When Mustang pilots got G suits there were reports/stories of planes landing with several more degrees of wing dihedral than they took off with

as this affects aircraft design the P-40 gained about 300lbs of weight in the wing structure over the P-36 as the plane grew from 6000lbs to over 8,000lbs.
Hawk 75s for export were rated at 12 Gs ultimate load when powered with the Cyclone engine but dropped to 11.5 Gs when powered by the heavier Twin Wasp. The 12 G rating could be restored at extra cost and extra weight according to Curtiss advertising material.

Things in general were also changing fast.
The spec sheet for the P-36C claims an optimum (read theoretical) range of 1080 miles (after being magically levitated to 10,000ft with a warm engine) at 200mph using 380hp and burning 31 gallons and hour at a weight of 5800lbs.
The P40-B specification sheet already referred to says optimum (read theoretical) range of 1010 miles (after being magically levitated to 15,000ft with a warm engine) at 202mph using 322hp and burning 24 gallons and hour at a weight of 6833lbs.
Please note the P-40B could also hold 160 gallons if it's tanks were full but at a higher weight.

another problem we are running into seems to names or classifications. Just because you stick a battery of fixed machine guns (or cannon) in a plane doesn't really make it a "fighter" in the common use of the term. Different countries used somewhat different names for the same type of aircraft or included different aircraft in the the same general description. Or they changed over time. The P-36 was called a Pursuit aircraft, not fighter or interceptor. However the P-40B is described as a Pursuit interceptor on it's official summery of characteristics
The interceptor was apparently added later as the plain P-40 (no letter) is still a pursuit.

Zipper730 said:

I remember something by Captain Brown which stated that the Me-110 got a bad rap and had it been used right it would have been impressive.

In what way?

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When used in it's original intended role, that of sweeping ahead of the bombers to catch enemy interceptors in the climb, it was a very successful aircraft. It not only had the range to get the job done, it had decent armament and excellent climb and level speed, even at altitude. Allowed to use their speed and height advantage, Bf110 units in the BoB weren't scared to attack Hurricanes or Spitfires, they just tried to avoid getting into turning fights where the big twin was at risk.
The Bf110s biggest issue was it was expensive for resource-strapped Germany to make in numbers. It was forever being cancelled in expectation of a better, simpler-to-make and cheaper replacement, only to be put back into service as the ME210 and ME410 faltered. But it's main problem was you could build two Bf109s for less money, time and material than one Bf110, and the Luftwaffe was always losing the numbers game after 1940. The Bf110 stayed in production for roles that the Bf109 couldn't perform, namely long-range day interceptor over the Med, radar-carrying night-fighter over Europe, and heavy weapons carrier for ground-attack.

A few further notes,
In Jan of 1940 a French agent was trying to purchase 30 extra wing sets for the Hawk 75 fighters already delivered for repairs, this is over and above the the amount of spare parts that had been contracted for initiatially, which was the equivalent of 50 air frames in money value, for 200 complete airframes. The French even asked if the US Army would delay delivery of their aircraft so the french order for replacement wings could be expedited. (request not granted). However this alarmed the US Army that they too might suffer higher than expected wing consumption. The US Army requested that their Military Intelligence Division look into the matter. The MID reported that damage due to enemy gunfire was negligible, damage due to wartime airdromes is not a direct cause. A high rate of landing accidents was the major cause along with insufficient spare parts.

We have very little information on the attrition of many aircraft due to differences in construction or operation. We hear (read) about instances of landing gear or structural failure on landing or take-off runs on rough fields but we don't know the the actual percentages to compare one plane to another. And descriptions like "rough field" don't help. Rough compared to what? concrete or a British rolled grass field (which sometimes were totally constructed, that is a layer of gravel for drainage, a layer of dirt, the sod on top and the whole rolled or compacted as it was built, rather far from using a grass meadow) or a hastily bulldozed strip?

A figure of merit when comparing "like" aircraft is the percentage of useful load to the gross weight for a clean aircraft (external loads can get weird) as it shows how well the designer did at accommodating the "load" which for fighter aircraft would be the crew, fuel, oil, operational equipment and the armament. This could vary from the low 20% area to the low 30% area.
However without knowing what was considered normal load and what was considered overload things can get a bit weird. Like the US Navy considering 110 gallons of fuel in a Buffalo as "normal" and 160 gallons as "overload".

Peter Gunn said:

OK, I'll bite. How?

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Because my wife told me!

pbehn said:

It is also a function of geography. Japan is an Island group, how far away from another nation? Or any place that actually made aircraft? How far away from where they planned to use aircraft? The distances in the Pacific were huge. Talk of 700 or 1000 miles range in Europe makes no sense. From Wick at the tip of Scotland it is just over 1000 miles to Milan, just over 1100 miles to Marseilles. It is 760 miles to Berlin. In the Battle of Britain the closest airfields were almost within sight of each other in perfect weather. The major concentration of forces were about 100 miles apart, I just don't see how a plane with 1000 miles range will improve anything.

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In other words - you've questioned existence of fighters with 1000 mile range, and when pointed out that such fighters existed, now there is no need for them? C'mon.

The LW was made to support a ground advance. At Dunkerque in 1940 the LW were at the limit of their practical range because they hadn't moved from home bases, but the German army were also at their limit for a rapid advance, against a defending force. You cant sent tactical bombers and fighters to a battle front a thousand miles away so why make an aircraft for it? Whatever they do they can only do it every other day, even if they survive. There was no time before 1945 that you could float above enemy airspace at 200MPH and live for long, unless in a well protected raid.

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I see that 'tactical-only' Luftwaffe myth is alive and well, despite 1000 mile capable Bf 110s, He 111s, Do 17s and Ju 88s.
Nobody is asking that a fighter floats over enemy airspace at 200 mph.

tomo pauk said:

In other words - you've questioned existence of fighters with 1000 mile range, and when pointed out that such fighters existed, now there is no need for them? C'mon.



I see that 'tactical-only' Luftwaffe myth is alive and well, despite 1000 mile capable Bf 110s, He 111s, Do 17s and Ju 88s.
Nobody is asking that a fighter floats over enemy airspace at 200 mph.

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I questioned that it would improve the prospects of the LW in 1940. A raid by He 111s and Ju88s on Manchester escorted by Bf110s isn't going to go well in daylight

That's why a more capable (and genuinely long ranged) fighter would have been quite helpful.

Schweik said:

That's why a more capable (and genuinely long ranged) fighter would have been quite helpful.

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If it were possible, in 1940.

Shortround6 said:

There is an awful lot of use of the retrospectroscope here.

We are also mixing up different countries needs, abilities, and design considerations/requirements.
We are also tending to ignore the state of the art and more importantly the actually availability of communications and navigation equipment in the years leading up to 1940 (and for some years after that depending on nation).

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I'm really not doing any mixing up of anything. The limitations of navigation and communications gear were what they were. Nations which decided and managed to create long range fighters (including single seat fighters like the Zero) figured out ways to deal with these limitations, or they failed and suffered accordingly. By and large they succeeded. The Japanese for example managed to carry out very long range air strikes in the early days of the war with great success and precision, despite not having radios in many of their (mostly single-engined) fighters.

we also have advocates of cheap, light fighters but they seem to want these cheap-light aircraft to be equipped with the latest and greatest communications/navigation gear if not equipement that would not exist for several years.

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We seem to have someone here mixing up arguments made regarding light weight fighters of the early war with lightweight fighters from mid war and the end of the war.... and mixing all those with arguments about (usually but not always heavier weight) long range fighters. As I have shown in previous posts, it is objectively the case that there was a niche for both lightweight and long range fighters which continued to exist throughout WW2, and there were fighters designed, produced and deployed operationally which fit into these niches, sometimes both simultaneously. Not everyone was able to do it, hence the speculative side of the argument, but all I was pointing out was that the need was there and that some did manage to pull it off.

Early war fighters obviously had fewer bells and whistles than late war, that is hardly news.

different countries had different strength requirements for aircraft which meant different structural weights for a given power engine and size aircraft.

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Requirements are part of what determined who did and didn't get useful aircraft to fight with, every bit as much as design.

When Mustang pilots got G suits there were reports/stories of planes landing with several more degrees of wing dihedral than they took off with

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That actually happened with a wide variety of aircraft, it was one of the things which determined if an airframe was 'clapped out' and needed to be sent back to the rear for training, or in some cases 'donated' to the Soviets rather cynically.

as this affects aircraft design the P-40 gained about 300lbs of weight in the wing structure over the P-36 as the plane grew from 6000lbs to over 8,000lbs.
The spec sheet for the P-36C claims an optimum (read theoretical) range of 1080 miles (after being magically levitated to 10,000ft with a warm engine) at 200mph using 380hp and

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Please note that I never included any version of the P-40 in any list of either lightweight OR long ranged fighters. You definitely didn't need to magically levitate an A6M or a Beaufighter to get it to fly 1,000 miles.

another problem we are running into seems to names or classifications. Just because you stick a battery of fixed machine guns (or cannon) in a plane doesn't really make it a "fighter" in the common use of the term. Different countries used somewhat different names for the same type of aircraft or included different aircraft in the the same general description. Or they changed over time. The P-36 was called a Pursuit aircraft, not fighter or interceptor. However the P-40B is described as a Pursuit interceptor on it's official summery of characteristics
The interceptor was apparently added later as the plain P-40 (no letter) is still a pursuit.

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Fighter is a broad category, while "pursuit" is more of a pre-war concept which was held over for a little while into the war. There were fighters meant to destroy other fighters and win air superiority, fighters meant to fight at high or low altitude, fighters meant for escort, and fighters meant to destroy bombers or recon planes far out to sea, fighters meant to fly at night and so forth. All of the aircraft I listed as fighters, with the exception of the Battle, were at some point or another used to shoot down enemy aircraft during the day.

How versatile a fighter was could be a major aspect of the design and how good it actually was. Some great fighters were very much niche specialists, while some somewhat mediocre fighters (and other types of aircraft) turned out to have a much longer useful life than expected due to their versatility for a wide variety of missions.

pbehn said:

If it were possible, in 1940.

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Well.... the A6M is one example.

Shortround6 said:

A few further notes,
In Jan of 1940 a French agent was trying to purchase 30 extra wing sets for the Hawk 75 fighters already delivered for repairs, this is over and above the the amount of spare parts that had been contracted for initiatially, which was the equivalent of 50 air frames in money value, for 200 complete airframes. The French even asked if the US Army would delay delivery of their aircraft so the french order for replacement wings could be expedited. (request not granted). However this alarmed the US Army that they too might suffer higher than expected wing consumption. The US Army requested that their Military Intelligence Division look into the matter. The MID reported that damage due to enemy gunfire was negligible, damage due to wartime airdromes is not a direct cause. A high rate of landing accidents was the major cause along with insufficient spare parts.

We have very little information on the attrition of many aircraft due to differences in construction or operation. We hear (read) about instances of landing gear or structural failure on landing or take-off runs on rough fields but we don't know the the actual percentages to compare one plane to another. And descriptions like "rough field" don't help. Rough compared to what? concrete or a British rolled grass field (which sometimes were totally constructed, that is a layer of gravel for drainage, a layer of dirt, the sod on top and the whole rolled or compacted as it was built, rather far from using a grass meadow) or a hastily bulldozed strip?

A figure of merit when comparing "like" aircraft is the percentage of useful load to the gross weight for a clean aircraft (external loads can get weird) as it shows how well the designer did at accommodating the "load" which for fighter aircraft would be the crew, fuel, oil, operational equipment and the armament. This could vary from the low 20% area to the low 30% area.
However without knowing what was considered normal load and what was considered overload things can get a bit weird. Like the US Navy considering 110 gallons of fuel in a Buffalo as "normal" and 160 gallons as "overload".

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If I catch your drift successfully (I'm not certain I do) then I concede the point that we don't necessarily know if we are comparing like with like when looking at aircraft ranges. They are measured different ways, so if we decided to explore this subject more deeply a more serious survey of the range, cruise speeds, navigation equipment and so forth may be advisable, as well as some analysis of actual combat histories to determine how far they really flew on missions.

So while I think the basic point I was making, or the two points about light and long range fighters, are valid, a deeper dive into the specific examples would certainly give us a more detailed and nuanced picture, in terms of looking at WW2 planes from this particular angle.

But we never got to that point because some folks decided that the very notion was so heretical it needed to be strangled in the crib so to speak.

Ok, let's suppose, for the sake of the argument, that the Luftwaffe realized that the He112 was quite capable of longer ranges (especially if using drop-tanks for the ingress) to escort bombers into Britain and used them instead of the Bf109.

It wouldn't change the outcome of the Bob, because the RLM (and the chief fat bastard) did not have a cohesive strategy that included striking the RADAR network as well as sweeping the airfields before hitting strategic manufacturing centers (and/or shipyards) in force.

Such fighters (1000 mile range) obviously existed.
However were such fighters built to the same standards as US or some European fighters?
Were they equipped to the same standards?
Were they armed to the same standards?

Ki 43, if equipped with two 12.7mm machine guns carried about 100lbs of guns and about 100lbs of ammo (90lbs ammo plus links?) plus mounts/ammo boxes etc. A Spitfire II was carrying over 400lbs of guns and ammo. A P-40B was carrying around 600lbs (granted some of that was the over abundance of ammo for the cowl .50 guns). Ki 43s with less armanet were carrying less weight.

A P-40B, if loaded with 160 US gal of fuel should have been able to warm up and reach some sort of cruising altitude on 40 gallons leaving 120 gal for the trip. Estimated range at 200mph was around 800 miles at a specific consumption of 0.56lb/hp/hr which actually not that great. most engines should be able to be leaned out to get under 0.50 lb/hp/hr. optimoum fo rthe P-40B was supposed to be 0.45lb/hp/hr.

However the P-40B was judged as unsuitable for combat in NW Europe in 1941 when they showed up and were shipped off to Russia or North Africa or the Far East.
P-40Cs got a drop tank but increased operational equipment (like better/heavier self sealing fuel tanks) further hurt performance.

The Japanese aircraft may have been built to a lower strength standard which means a lower structural weight.

Most of the single engine fighters in 1939-41 that could get close to 1000 mile range did have to "float" for most of the trip at 200mph or less. Obviously if the trip was shorter they could use more speed.

Please note that a Spitfire V, if measured the same way as some of these aircraft (magicly levitated to cruising altitude with a warm engine) was good for about 650 miles so obviously large adjustments have to be made to get to operational ranges/radius.

Was this magical levitation device located at Muroc Airfield?

GrauGeist said:

Ok, let's suppose, for the sake of the argument, that the Luftwaffe realized that the He112 was quite capable of longer ranges (especially if using drop-tanks for the ingress) to escort bombers into Britain and used them instead of the Bf109.

It wouldn't change the outcome of the Bob, because the RLM (and the chief fat bastard) did not have a cohesive strategy that included striking the RADAR network as well as sweeping the airfields before hitting strategic manufacturing centers (and/or shipyards) in force.

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Fair point - one new aircraft type probably wasn't enough to win the war, or even the Battle. It might have made it even more fraught though, and it was a 'close run thing' after all...