Spitfire V ME109. I have found these links on the net.

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Well, what you can accomplish with a 650-700hp engine and what you can accomplish with a 2000hp engine are rather different things. While the 109 may have been intended for the DB 600 series from the start, Willy had to win the contract using the Jumo 210 and provide usable fighters for the time (mid 30s) for several years using the Jumo 210. If he HAD designed a larger plane to take better advantage of an improved DB 600 series engine (that won't show up for 4-6 years) he very well could have lost the initial production contract to Heinkel and been out of business regardless of his personnel philosophy of fighter design.

With the 700-1000hp engines available (or promised near term) in 1935-37 nobody was designing large single engine fighters and all "long range fighters" were twins.
 

Thanks shortround

The spitfire was originally designed for 4 MGs, they managed to shoehorn and extra 4 in but the thickness of the wing created a problem for cannons. Two cannons could be fitted in each wing but the 2 outer cannons couldnt be heated and so were useless for work at altitude.

I agree the two stage Merlin didnt appear until 1943 but with an Allison or earlier Merlin it would have made an impact in N Africa/ the Med across the channel and many other areas compared to a P40, P39 spitfire and others purely for its range/speed not necessarily for escort work.

@ Donl, Shortround made a good point concerning the BHP of engines when the Bf109 was designed. The Bf 109 first flew with a Kestrel engine I believe. For a designer putting the internal load of a Mustang in a 700BHP Bf109 would be folly 100 gallons weighs about 1/2 a ton
 
I think the Mustang showed up about as fast as could be expected. Perhaps a bit more could have been done with an earlier version but considering how long it takes to tool up factories and get planes from the factories and into action I don't hink much more could have been done.

As I pointed out in another thread ALL the Tomahawks that the British used were ordered before lend-lease was started. The First Kittihawks were ordered in April of 1941 but the first to see combat weren't until Jan 1942. And this was from a factory that was already turning out hundreds of aircraft of that basic air frame per month. NA did a fantastic job but getting more air-frames earlier would need both a second source factory coming on line earlier and a re-allocation of engines.
 
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Shortround from the document below
THE P-51 MUSTANG AS AN ESCORT FIGHTER
DEVELOPMENT BEYOND DROP TANKS TO AN
INDEPENDENT AIR FORCE

by

Karen Daneu
Lt Col, USAF

quote
The airframe was ready in just 100 days, but installation of the Allison V-1710-39
engine with 1,150 hp was delayed because all available Allison engines were slated for P-40 production. The aircraft took to the air the first time on 26 October 1941 and the first plane was delivered to the British in November 1941, one month before the attack on Pearl Harbor.
and later

Although it exhibited better performance, had greater range, cost less than other
fighters, and accumulated more air and ground kills than others, the P-51 was almost
overlooked by the U.S. military. General H.H. Arnold frankly admitted this mistake in
his memoirs: "It may be said that we could have had the long range P-51 in Europe rather sooner than we did. That we did not have it sooner was the Air Force's own fault."
 

Really good post. I do have a bit of a disagreement with item 4. I think one of the strong points of the P-51 was in deep interdiction efforts, especially against airfields. Four and six 50s are powerful weapons against lightly/non armored targets like planes, trains, barges, etc, and their presence had to be very disruptive both physically and morale wise.

Also, what you say about early intercept is certainly true, however the allies had an answer, P-47s. Had it been necessary, they could actually have provided "escort' for the P-51s, staving off fighter intercept of the P-51s/bombers till they crossed into Germany.
 

Quite right. Designers seldom told air staffs what to order. they could present an idea and see if the air staff went for it but that was about it. Air staff wasn't going to pay for anything they didn't OK.

That is easy to see in hindsight. It was not so easy to see at the time. the American spy or intelligence system may have been a little lacking.
But the US planner//s knew what they were planning. The B-29. They knew what they had built already, the B-15 and B-19 bomber prototypes. They had an idea of what was technically possible even if it turned out not to possible in large scale production.
Not to build the P-47 was to gamble that the Germans and Japanese could not/would not build long range/ high altitude bombers just like the US was planning to build. The bombers needed more time to bring to operational status than the the single engine fighter but for a number of unforeseen reasons. Granted any large complex aircraft is going to have more problems than a small one but the B-29 seemed to have more than it's share.
Betting the Germans COULD NOT come up with something would have been seen as irresponsible if they had.
The British were able to bomb Genoa Italy from England using Whitleys, not the most advanced bomber in the world, in June of 1940. Most Military planners were also vastly over estimating the effectiveness of the size of bomb loads at the time. A bomber that carried 2000-4000lbs of bombs was seen as a very effective threat rather than a large nuisance.
The P-47 may not have been designed to defend the Continental US. In it's radial engine form it was designed with lessons from the BoB (not 1939). With combat taking place in 1940 at 25,000-30,000ft, at what altitude was combat going to take place in 1942-43 regardless of what airfield/country the plane is flying out of?

Again it turns out that combat didn't much higher than 25,000-30,000ft but who knew that in 1941-42? Certainly not the Germans who spent time and money on Pressure cabins, NO2 systems, Turbo charged diesel Reconnaissance/bomber planes, and planes with fuselage mounted engines to supercharge the wing mounted engines.

With eight .303s proving less than desired in the BoB what should they have specified in armament? for fighter to go into service more than two years in the future?
A single 20mm and two .30cal MGs??

They knew they had 2000hp engines, they knew the British had 2000hp engines (3 of them in the works) How were they to know that the Germans would drop the ball and NOT develop a working 2000hp engine by 1942/43?
 

I agree Davparlr but there is a limit to how far you can go on an interdiction mission. Escorting a bomber formation means the Germans have to go for the bombers at altitude. Attacking a train or airfield you must go down to ground level, cruising around the suburbs of Berlin looking for trains is a great way to be bounced. P 51 s did attack airfields on escort missions later in the conflict and suffered losses as any watercooled plane did. The type of mission you describe is precisely what the British wanted the Mustang for except we wanted 4 cannons.

In fact you describe what happened in reality a P51 couldnt actually escort a formation from UK to Berlin and back, the bomber formation was "ferried" by more than one escort formation with rendezvous points arranged beforehand.
 

A few minor mistakes/typos. It was 117 days not 100. First flight was Oct 26, 1940. RAF does not fly the Mustang in England until November 1941. Production of Mustang I peaks in Jan 1942. Mustang flies first combat mission in May 10th 1942, but back on April 16 the order for 500 A-36 dive bomber versions was placed. July 25th 1942 contract is placed with NA to install two stage Merlins in two air frames. Now the USAAF may have been a bit late in recognizing the Mustang but speeding up production by more than a few months doesn't seem likely.
The Dallas factory that produced the P-51C turned out it's first airplane (an AT-6) in Dec 1940. After the Mustang Prototype first flew and turned hundreds more AT-6s building up a skilled work force before it started working on P-51s. It got it's first order of 1350 P-51Cs in Oct 1942, it is Aug 5th 1943 before the first one flies at Dallas. 2500 additional P-51s are on order from Dallas at this point.
 

I agree shortround but only with respect to NAA handling the job. If the USAAF had evaluated the P51 and fully realised its potential it could have been given a priority of national importance much more could have been done. The lack of allison engines at the start is a bit of a scandal for such a promising plane. Having to order fighter bombers because of budget restrictions is a joke in hindsight compared to the budget of the strategic bombing operation as a whole. It is also a tragic waste of 500 planes and pilots. If production was brought forward by 3/4 months that has P51b/cs available for the October raid on Schweinfurt for example
 
Mustang nut said:
If production was brought forward by 3/4 months that has P51b/cs available for the October raid on Schweinfurt for example
Click to expand...

I have a fair bit of experience setting up production lines and speeding things up is not at all easy. You can throw money and men at a problem and get things moving a bit quicker but this often leads to problems of poor quality installation. I worked on a project to set up a packing plant for catering cooking fats we were hassled to get things done quicker corners were cut and a 100 ton batch of fats had to be sent to recycling plant because a vital metal detector had not been tested. There almost certainly wasnt any metal in the fat but it couldnt be sold just on the offchance that someone choked on a metal fragment.

A conveyor belt that carried the 12.5 kilo boxes from the filling machines to the packing room was never properly tested, we ran tests with a short batch of 10 boxes nobody tested it with 150 boxes on it that it would have when running at 100% capacity. Result when the belt had to turn a tight 90 degree corner 12.5 kilo boxes of hot cooking fat tipped on the corner and made the mother of all messes. I was the one who had to run and turn off the master switch you try running in steel toe cap boots through a half an inch deep lake of congealing fat, I scooted under the coneyor belt like an Olympic bob sleigh rider. I managed to get the fat out of my overalls by boiling them in a bucket of caustic soda mix by running a steam line through it.

If we had been left to install as planned we would have got that plant running like clockwork on time, by rushing us the plant ended up not getting to full capacity a full 2 weeks after it should have. A disaster all round obviously no one in management had heard the old carpenters saying measure twice cut once.
 
from the same source

Army Air Force indifference to the P-51 was highlighted by the report presented to
General Arnold on "The Future Development of Pursuit Aircraft," in October 1941.
Included in the discussion were eight production and 18 experimental types, but the P-51 was not even mentioned. The Army overlooked the P-51 in favor of its own fighter development—the turbo-charged high-altitude P-38 and P-47 types, and the Curtiss P-40 successor, the P-60. But with British support, the P-51 finally got noticed by the U.S. Army Air Force.

Two Americans in England recognized the potential of this fighter and urged
Washington to take note of this remarkable aircraft. Major Thomas Hitchcock, Assistant Military Air Attaché, and John C. Winant, U.S. Ambassador to England did much to keep the Mustang in the limelight for potential use by the U.S. military. Major Hitchcock flew the aircraft several times and was an avid proponent. He hosted several Americans during visits to England to see first-hand the Mustang operations and those modifications made by the British.
Boylan, in his work on the "Development of the Longrange Escort Fighter," quotes Major General Orville Anderson's reception of the Mustang:

And then it [the plan for the Mustang] came to the Munitions Building at
that time . . . with the request from the British that we build them at least
500 a month of this new airplane, this Mustang. Not having had anything
to do with the design, growth, tests of the P-51, we looked with disfavor
on that airplane. We leaned much more strongly to the P-39, the
Airacobra, and the P-40, two antiquated aircraft in 1941. But because of
the need for compromise, now that this thing had been really built, and
apparently to protect ourselves from sticking our chin out too far, we said,
"Well now maybe there is some use for this airplane. It's a liquid airplane,
therefore rather vulnerable to frontal fire." So we assigned it to production
and called it an A-36. And the first 500 airplanes of this new unit, which
was about six months late in its initial assignment, was [sic] made into an
A-36. A dive-bomber with a liquid engine. [Sic] After we had built 500,
we then belatedly recognized that maybe it was good enough that we could
[sic] put it into our fighter echelon. This attitude of mind on the part of
the Air Force policy makers and planners delayed the strategic deployment
of this critical, almost decisive, weapon by well over nine months before it
was actually deployed for combat.

In early 1943, the need to protect bombers on their bombing missions was finally
recognized. The previously quoted memo from General Arnold to Major General Giles
on development of the fighter escort stresses the critical nature of this program. The first options explored were fighter versions of the B-17 and B-24, the XB-40 and XB-41.
These aircraft were heavily armored versions on the same bomber airframes. A dozen of these aircraft were delivered to the European theater in May 1943, but the few missions flown by these slow, cumbersome aircraft showed this option was not the solution. What was needed was fast, long-range, maneuverable, and lethal protection for the bombers to continue their strategy of long range daylight attack of Germany.16

Based upon the capabilities of the long-range P-51 and the heavy losses encountered at Second Schweinfurt in October 1943, General Arnold directed the entire production of P-38s and P-51Bs for the next three months, October, November and December 1943, be sent directly to England. P-51s originally scheduled for tactical use by Ninth Air Force were rerouted to Eighth Air Force for strategic and escort missions. In early 1944 nearly all Eighth Air Force fighter groups were scheduled to convert to P-51s, with the excess P-47s going to Ninth Air Force.17 By late 1944 only one VIII Fighter Command group had P-47s and the P-38s were gone from the inventory by mid summer the same year.18

General Doolittle stacked the deck to ensure enough pilots were on hand by ordering all qualified P-51 pilots in Eighth Air Force, regardless of rank and assignment, to fly on every mission. The results support this astute use of resources. In July 1943 VIII Fighter Command had only 171 aircraft available on average and could escort on shallow penetrations only. By January 1944 the number of aircraft had increased to an average of 707 aircraft available, and deep penetration escorts were possible. P-51Bs assigned to VIII Fighter Command completed their first escort on 13 December 1943.19 By the end of May 1944, using both the assets of VIII Fighter Command and Ninth Air Force for aircraft and pilots, nearly 1,300 fighters of all types engaged targets all over Germany.

end of quote

In another history of the mustang NAA were driven to distraction my the USA military indifference and indecision.


I dont have an axe to grind on this at all I think the Mustang is a great plane, and I am not having a dig at the American military everyone makes mistakes and every designer thinks they have a world beater. I just get a bit irked when people ask/say why were the British so shortsighted continuing with the Spitfire when the Mustang is obviously so much better. The Brits went blue in the face trying to get more of them.
 
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ctrian said:
Why did you cut out the last part of my answer? Never taught you apples and oranges at school?
Click to expand...
I must say you are entertaining, but you better watch the attitude or you will disappear from the site. The only thing I left out was the comment
The Ta-152H should have been available when? in 1939 ?
Click to expand...
I thought this was an obvious statement and not pertinent. I am sure the British would have liked to have had a Tempest II in '39. We weren't talking about 1939, we were initially talking about Bf-109K vs. Spitfire Mark XIV, which were late war developments. As such, you implied and said that the Bf range was good enough and And my point was that the Luftwaffe seem not to agree with you because they were spending their conventional powered aircraft development money on larger, more armed and longer endurance aircraft like the Ta-152H, which, by the way was the plane they so desperately wanted, a better P-51D. I think they understood how important endurance was to the missions they were faced with.

You know very well the answer to this, and that is speed and its associated survivability. The jets were much faster and basically invulnerable, when flown correctly. But their biggest Achilles' heel was short endurance, which required them to land often, exposing them to high risk landings and take offs. The Germans would have given just about anything to increase their endurance.

Try to make a more coherent argument next time.
Click to expand...
Snide remarks adds nothing to your argument.
 

You cut the last part because i asked if they were supposed to have that in '39 ,apples and oranges...
About the P-51 that's the problem they never needed or wanted a P-51D ,different combat environments different requirements ( not just for aircraft but also for tanks ,AT guns etc) .Doesnt' mean P-51 is good or bad plane or Bf good or bad plane .Every country wanted different things.
 



Hello Tante Ju

The specialist torpedo force was KG 26, its crews were trained at Italian AF torpedo training school at Grosseto. During the big attacks against Arctic convoys in July and Sept 42 it was based at Bardufoss and Banak in Northern Norway, LFl 5 had 2 Gruppen of 109s at that time in North-eastern Norway and North-eastern Finland at Kirkkoniemi and at Petsamo and one Gruppe in Mid and South Norway. PQ 17 didn't have CVE support in July but PQ 18 had CVE HMS Avenger among its escorts in Sept 42.

In Med against Pedestal convoy 6./KG 26, together with some 30 Ju 88 bombers, timed its first attack at the dusk on 11 Aug 42. The attack took place some 360km WSW of Sardinia, where according to Smith's Pedestal The Malta Convoy of August 1942 was a Staffel of 109Fs from I./JG 77 based at Elmas. This attack was without fighter escorts, on next day several escorted attacks were made when the convoy sailed south of Sardinia towards Strait of Sicilia, Stab and II/JG 53 were based on Sicily. Of course it was usually possible to transfer fighters to nearest a/f available, one main advantage of air power was its flexibility. During Med operations KG 26 was based for ex on Sicily, Decimomanu (Sardinia), Montpellier and Salon de Province, optimal fighter base would always have been the nearest to attack area.

I don't agree with the claim that LW did not have any need for a longer range fighter than Bf 109F-K. I have my doubts on the practicality of the ranges claimed that Bf 109 had because of the experiences the Finns had on it and based on the few long transfer flights on which I have info (both FAF and LW made) also showed that they were made in rather short stages. When one notices that taking off and landing are the most dangerous parts of a flight that doesn't make sense if 109G was capable to regularly and safely to fly say 1300km stretches during ferry flights. I'd gladly hear info on long range escort missions or over 1200km stages on ferry flightsmade by 109F-K pilots.

Also I have spent time to find facts for my messages, its part of the game.

JUha
 
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You're saying that the German should have spent limited industrial resources for missions that utilized only a tiny part of the whole LW effort?Long range bombing and antishipping missions where what part of the operations? Tiny .Obviously they'd want a plane with large range if they could get it for free but they had specific fighters and they had to work with them.
The allied AF on the other hand had a specific role to play and they needed 4-engine bombers and a fighter to escort them.That's where they spent all their money.The LW needed many many things( more planes ,more fuel etc) before they could worry about long range fighters.
 

Hello Crtion
No, I'm saying that LW had need on longer range fighter and longer operational time would have helped LW fighter arm generally, FAF and LW pilots often had to disengage because they were running low on fuel (that's true also for Spitfire pilots). If you read memories or combat reports, you see that. Also LW had understood that, that's why Bf 110 was developed. Limited range of 109 hampered even the defence of the Reich. But really, it was you that made the claim that LW didn't have any use of a fighter with longer range than Bf 109F or Fw 190 and I and others have given examples of different situations in which a longer range would have helped. Of course a fighter design is always a compromise between different conflicting demands, Bf 109 was a good fighter, at times the best in the world but it had also its shortcomings.

Juha
 
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I haven't looked this up (yet,I can't find the relevant figures) but it is a possibility that the long ferry flights were made in short stages due to a lack of oil as much as a lack of fuel. Just a thought.
Cheers
Steve
 
did the LW want or neeed a longer range fighter? you bet your bottom dollar they did, the 109's range was a real handicap during the battle of britain with as little as 5 mins loiter time over the battle!
 

I'm sorry but i never claimed that the Bf could do everything.Obviously it couldn't escort 4-engine bombers or be a good ground attack aircraft (even though some units used it in that role).The Bf and FW had the necessary capability for the missions that the LW intended them to do.Germany was in the middle of Europe not an island like UK or a continent like the US.IF there was a German strategic bombing force then obviously they would need something close to the P-51.Sadly(for them) they never built one.Like you said the Bf-110 and occasionally the Ju-88 were used in areas were range was needed but these were exceptions.The idea that the P-51 was some sort of gift from heaven and every AF would need it is ridiculous. You can't take weapon systems from one country where they performed well and ''transplant '' them elsewhere. By the same logic the Tiger would not be a good tank for US army.

Kryten i don't think that is correct.In any case they fixed it : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drop_tank
 
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