P-38 or Mosquito? (1 Viewer)

Which was better?

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By day, a lone Lancaster would also be picked off. If you are talking at night, obviously, the 17s would have flown differently than they did during the day to keep from hitting each other. That's kind of a no brainer. As Erich pointed out, the Luftwaffe crews figured out how to counter the corkscrew, so it wasn't perfect. Do you know for a fact that the B-17 couldn't perform a corkscrew?
 
The altitude advantage would help most of all with the flak. I'm not sure about this, but I believe some of the German night fighters (such as the Do-217 derivatives) would have been unable to reach the B-17s but the Bf-110s and Ju-88s could still reach their altitude.
 
but flack could still have got up there, however the german gunners and luftwaffe had an agreement that the gunners would go for anything below a cirtian height, the fighters anything above that height............
 

The B-17 could engage in some evasive manuvers, certainly suitable for night fighting. However it would indeed rely on its firepower more than evasive manuvers to defend itself. These would have been more effective at night, where only rear attacks are possible, and the target night fighter is nearly stationary w.r.t. the bomber it is trying to attack.

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Lunatic
 
German flak was almost useless anyway. Something like 100,000 rounds expended per bomber damaged or destroyed. It was necessary for moral purposes, and had some effect on the wits of the bomber crews, but was of little use beyond that, even in the day. At night, it'd have been nearly meaningless.

Radar guided flak was not a big issue. There was still such a huge lag between aiming/loading, fuse setting, and firing that the odds of scoring a hit were tiny. Without a proximity fuse, flak was ineffective.

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Lunatic
 
It should be noted that Bomber Command used a number of B-17's on night missions as part of 100 Group on what is now know as 'Wild Weasel' counter measure missions.
The more spacious crew areas made them more suitable for the task than British bombers
 
I would have to take exception with Flak being useless. Most bomber crews were far more affraid of Flak than of fighters.
 
Lightning Guy said:
I would have to take exception with Flak being useless. Most bomber crews were far more affraid of Flak than of fighters.
Click to expand...

That is only true late in the war when there were very few fighters, but lots of flak.

Perhaps useless is the wrong way to put it. It was increadibly inefficient. To achieve what success they did have, huge numbers of flak guns and associated resources were expended.

It is often said that the battle of Stalingrad was lost because of all the 88's that were tied up firing at Allied bombers. 18000 rounds were fired for each bomber destroyed (this is a correction to an earlier figure I posted). 20,000 heavy AA guns were used to defend German cities in WWII. That's hugely inefficient.

Had Germany been able to develop a proximity fuse similar to the VT fuse, this number would have been reduced to at most around 6000 rounds per bomber destroyed in late 1943, and to at most around 3000 rounds by mid 1944.

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Lunatic
 
It may be inefficient, but inefficient is a long way from being ineffective. American bomber crews had an extremely difficult time facing Flak. Flak was far more terrifying than a fighter attack since flak was so random. At least when facing fighters, the crewman could shoot back. Against flak all they could do is watch and PRAY. Many crewman admitted they would rather face a sky full of fighters than fly through the flak. Much the same could be said of the escorting fighters who stated they would have hated trying to fly through that stuff.
 

But that just means they didn't like it. Flak didn't stop them from bombing the targets nor did it force the USAAF or the RAF to abandon bombing of German cities. To me, that means it was ineffective.

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Lunatic
 
Those people in the bombers that saw aircraft falling out of the sky due to FlaK shots would disagree completely. And I'll take their word for it.
To be ineffective, they had to fail in shooting down bombers. Take 'Black Thursday' for example, over Schweinfurt, the bombers had awful time due to FlaK and lost a lot of men. On top of actually bringing the bombers down, often crewmen would be hit and killed while in the bomber.
 

As I recall, on the USAAF's Black Thursday (as opposed to the Luftwaffe's in 1940), 60 B-17's out of about 275 were shot down, most by fighters, a few by flak. But even that is not indicative of flak results.

Overall effectiveness was horrible. By the end of 1944 it took an average of 33500 shells to down a bomber. Sure it was scary but that's war. It was not effective, that's just the math of it.

Soldiers were more afraid of those wirblewiffer (whatever they were called) rocket launchers than of machine gun fire too (sreaming meanies), but they were no where near as deadly. Those kind of opinions are often based upon perceptions far more than reality.

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Lunatic
 
RG, by your own "definition", the entire Luftwaffe was ineffective since it's efforts were not enough to prevent the USAAF and RAF from blasting the cities of Germany into rubble.

Furthermore, a direct comparison of the numbers of bombers shot down by flak and fighters is bound to be inaccurate. Fighters could attack during virtually any part of the mission while flak was often only encountered over the coast and over the target.
 
Yes, the Luftwaffe' was ineffective.

The question is, if you doubled the strength of the Luftwaffe' or the number of flak guns, which would have been more effective? I have to go with the Luftwaffe'.

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Lunatic
 
Those rockets were Nerbelwerfers, RG. I notice you didn't mention the fact that people still got killed without the actual bomber going down due to FlaK. Those incidents don't get counted, or at least haven't been shown.
 
 
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