Mosquito - the alternative strategic bomber

[stona]

I would note that many "post" war criticisms or alternate strategies assume the opponent will make NO changes to their defensive set up.
Lots of Mosquitoes coming in low and fast and few large bombers at high altitude?
Build lots of 20mm and 37mm AA guns and fewer 88mm and 105mm AA guns.
Problem for Germans is not "solved" but the loss rates for the Mosquito will change.

Indeed. Two of the five premises of the article are false, both relate to bombs and bombing (bullet points 1 and 4). The key point in the original article in this respect is the contention that the
"Mosquito was a proven precision day bomber and the Lancaster was not."
Quite apart from the fact that this is untrue, the Lancaster could be a remarkably accurate bomber in daylight, ask the crew of the Tirpitz, it supposes that the Mosquito would carry out this precision bombing in daylight. The sort of precision daylight attacks required and the number of aircraft needed to complete them, in conjunction with the sort of German response you give above, would not just increase the loss rate of the Mosquito, it would make such operations suicidal and a campaign founded on them unsustainable. Then what happens? A reversion to a night time campaign? Now the Mosquito is no more accurate than any other bomber and we are back to square one, it can't carry enough ordnance to wage an effective strategic campaign by night!
Cheers
Steve

 

[pinehilljoe]

To execute MRAF Harris's strategy of raising burning cities to ground, I think required Lancaster's and Hallifax's with the larger load, including the ability to carry Tall Boys and Grand Slams. Imagine the 8th Air Force trying to do its mission with the A-26.

 

[stona]

It was not Harris' strategy, it was the British government's.
Cheers
Steve

 

[KiwiBiggles]

And Tall Boys and Grand Slams were target bombs, not used for urban destruction bombing.

 

[pinehilljoe]

I thought they were also used to penetrate deep in city block and blow the entire block up?

 

[pbehn]

I thought they were also used to penetrate deep in city block and blow the entire block up?

They were much too valuable for that, taking months to produce.

from wiki
On 18 July 1943, work started on a larger version of the Tallboy bomb, which became the Grand Slam.[2] As with the original Tallboy, the Grand Slam's fins generated a stabilizing spin[7] and the bomb had a thicker case than a conventional bomb, which allowed deeper penetration. After the hot molten Torpex was poured into the casing, the explosive took a month to cool and set. Like the Tallboy, because of the low rate of production and consequent high value of each bomb, aircrews were told to land with their unused bombs on board rather than jettison them into the sea if a sortie was aborted.[8]

 

[Shortround6]

I thought they were also used to penetrate deep in city block and blow the entire block up?

That may have been the original plan (or the mini earthquake shook the block down ) but as Pbehn says, production and cost meant they were reserved for special targets.

 

[pbehn]

That may have been the original plan (or the mini earthquake shook the block down ) but as Pbehn says, production and cost meant they were reserved for special targets.

They must have been valuable to instruct a pilot to land a tail dragging bomber with a 10 ton bomb abord, you could wipe out half an airfield.

 

[stona]

Both were special weapons intended for specific and precise targets (exactly what the premise of the original article claims the Lancaster was incapable of carrying out).
Tallboys were used against various hardened structures from V weapon establishments to U-Boat pens, railway tunnels, canal viaducts and other infrastructure as well as famously the Tirpitz.
Far fewer Grand Slam bombs were used, against railway targets and hardened structures like U-Boat pens. Even a near miss (within about 100m) was often good enough to collapse a bridge or viaduct through the effect of the bomb, undermining the structure.
They were far too precious,requiring modified aircraft (very heavily modified for the Grand Slam) with the SABS bombsight, to be used in run of the mill area raids.
Cheers
Steve
.

 

[pbehn]

Stona from what I know of the theory of the grand slam a near miss was what was desired, the explosive effect on a viaduct not only destroyed the viaduct but also the foundations making rebuilding a major operation.

 

[stona]

Stona from what I know of the theory of the grand slam a near miss was what was desired, the explosive effect on a viaduct not only destroyed the viaduct but also the foundations making rebuilding a major operation.

The idea was indeed to achieve a huge underground explosion, so in that sense a very near miss would be ideal. The bomb aimers aimed at the target. With a typical error of just over 100 yards from 10,000ft (617 Sqn/SABS bombsight) a near miss was the most likely outcome.

I would like to address one of the other contentions in the original 'Mosquito article'.
This is the contention that a Mosquito cost just 1/3 the price of a Halifax. This may be true in terms of the cost to the government per unit produced, but it is a much to simplistic way of estimating the cost of an aircraft on operations. The BBSU used the figure of man months invested per 1000lb of bombs dropped and here the Lancaster at 9.5 man months per 1000lbs is much cheaper than the Mosquito at 16 man months per 1000lbs of bombs dropped.

It is also worth putting into perspective the total weight of bombs dropped by the two types, I've started in 1943 to be fair to the Mosquito whose 1942 contribution was negligible. The two figures ('43-'45) are 29,863 short tons for the Mosquito and 668,900 short tons for the Lancaster. This is not an entirely fair comparison, given the numbers of aircraft and roles carried out, but it does give an idea of the sheer weight of bombs required to carry out a strategic bombing campaign in WW2.

Cheers

Steve

 

[buffnut453]

Steve,

Those stats are interesting. It might be more worthwhile to determine the total weight of bombs carried per aircraft for the 2 types. If we determine how many of each type served in Bomber Command and then divide the relevant tonnage figures by those numbers we'd get a gross "per airframe" throw weight of ordnance.

The above suggestion clearly won't be perfect (it's statistics, after all!) due to role specializations etc but most of the gross errors should cancel each other out. Either way, I think it would be an interesting comparison.

Cheers,
Mark

 

[Milosh]

Link I came across on the Allied bombing of Europe in WW2.
Animation shows every bomb dropped by Allies during Second World War

 

[stona]

It might be more worthwhile to determine the total weight of bombs carried per aircraft for the 2 types. If we determine how many of each type served in Bomber Command and then divide the relevant tonnage figures by those numbers we'd get a gross "per airframe" throw weight of ordnance.

Surely the simpler measure is the average load per aircraft type throughout the war? 9,186lbs for the Lancaster and 2,101lbs for the Mosquito.

Cheers

Steve

 

[buffnut453]

Certainly simpler but doesn't factor in, for example, the oft-quoted observation that the Mossie could accomplish 2 sorties per night which would skew the metrics somewhat. It's a blinding statement of the obvious to say that BC had more heavy bombers that carried more bombs than an aircraft like the Mossie, therefore the heavies delivered more bombs over the course of 3 years. I think it would be more insightful to determine an average of how much tonnage was dropped per airframe over that period and see how that compares with the simpler statistics.

 

[stona]

The problem is to know how many aircraft were operational.
Bomber Command had 72 Mosquitoes 'available for operations' in January 1944, but 206 in January 1945. What number do you use for that year?
The Lancaster numbers rose from 627 to 1,096 in the same period, same problem.

In 1944 Mosquitoes dropped 16,980 short tons of bombs. What do you want to divide it by?
In 1944 Lancasters dropped 404,300 short tons of bombs, Same question.

The BBSU gives a weight of bombs per aircraft despatched for 1944 (8,250 lbs) but does not break it down by type. Incidentally that number for the aircraft of the US 8th Air Force is 3,980 lbs.

Cheers

Steve

 

[buffnut453]

As always, finding the data to develop the statistics is the hardest part. My preference would be to tally the total number of an aircraft type used by the Command (ie how many individual airframes contributed to the tonnage total overall rather than the number of operational airframes which is impossible to define). Doing so would factor in issues like loss rates, maintainability etc. Viewing the numbers over the period 1943-1945 would smooth out some of the short-term decisions that might skew numbers in a shorter timeframe. That said, I'm not sure such data exist so it may be an impossible statistic to gather at this remove.

 

[parsifal]

It would be difficult to come up with a meaningful number of the average bombloads carried by the Mosquito. There were many subtypes where bombs were not needed to be carried, many other missions where bombs were being carried by the fighter bomber versions where the load for low level tactical strikes were inevitably about 100-2000 lbs.

This debate is looking like a total mis-manipulation of the statistics to me, and reminds of the way a hostile BC received Bennett in his report on the mosquito in 1944 as they were trying to can it as a bomber in the inventory.

'Group commander Donald Bennett, who later commanded the Pathfinder Force of Mosquito bombers which were equipped with the latest electronic navigation equipment and located and marked targets for the formations of heavy bombers which followed, described this beaurocratic attitude well: "I test flew the Mosquito by day and by night. At a meeting at the Air Ministry on the subject, Bomber Command and the Air Ministry both very strongly opposed the adoption of the Mosquito. They argued that it was a frail wood machine totally unsuitable for Service conditions, that it would be shot down because of its absence of gun turrets, and that in any case it was far too small to carry the equipment and an adequate Pathfinder crew. I dealt with each one of these points in turn, but finally they played their ace. They declared that the Mosquito had been tested thoroughly by the appropriate establishments and found quite unsuitable, and indeed impossible to fly at night. At this I raised an eyebrow, and said that I was very sorry to hear that it was quite impossible to fly it by night, as I had been doing so regularly during the past week and had found nothing wrong. There was a deathly silence. I got my Mosquitoes."

But even so, and despite all the accumulated information and statistics of the Mosquito's proven success and advantage as both a day and night bomber, Bennett (and others) were completely unable to pursuade people that mattered of the Mosquitoes capabilities. Bomber Command used the Mosquito until the end of the war only as a secondary bomber, very successfully operating ahead of and beside the large formations of heavy night bombers, and impressively performing as a precision day bomber, but never replacing the big and slow heavy bombers, because bomber command remained locked with its belief that the only way to destroy Germany was with big heavy bombers carrying large crews and gun turrets. This wasn't their only misbelief'. I believe that was a mistake, borne out of prejudice and not any objective appraisal of the types capabilities

 

[stona]

So how could the Mosquito have carried the strategic bombing campaign to Germany? By day, by night or both, the choice is yours

I think that the data does show that it was no more accurate by night than any other bomber, and operating by day, certainly through 1943 and 1944 presents another set of survivability problems. It couldn't be precise operating at the altitudes at which it was more or less immune from interception and a potential German reaction to lower level attacks has already been mentioned by another poster. I don't think this is a mistaken view born out of prejudice

By 1944 the heavy bomber force had been developed, Bomber Command had relatively few Mosquitoes and they were very much in demand for other roles and Commands. It would have taken an enormous leap of faith to abandon the heavies, particularly the Lancaster. Harris and others fought tooth and nail to get rid of the Halifax inlieu of greater Lancaster production with no success, for reasons discussed before. Now we want them to reduce that the heavy bomber force, replacing presumably substantial numbers with an aircraft capable of carrying, at best, one third of a Lancaster's 'Usual Load' and historically about one fifth of its average load.
What would that have done to the 'bomb lift' of the Allied air forces? This was something that both the BBSU and USSBS were keen to note as an ever increasing number. Calculations of what was possible (or not) were made using this capacity as a sort of base figure.

Of course you may have another view.

Cheers

Steve

 

[Milosh]

One Lanc is worth 5 Mossies by bomb load. If a Mossie is shot down, 4/5 of the bomb load is delivered but if a Lanc is shot down, no bombs are delivered.