Was the self defending bomber really a failure?

drgondog said:

The LGB's were extremely accurate in the latter half of Vietnam with F-4 and F-105s.. Paul Dhoumer Bridge survived a LOT of iron bomb missions but went down with first Mk84 LGB package delivered by 355th F-105D's.

BUF on the other hand wasn't so very accurate w/ Mk 82's and 83's but a LOT better than WWII and Korea..

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and the dumb bombs in Viet nam were still far more accurate then in Korea or WW2 IIRC thats why 1000's were sent to a sindle target and the Brits went to area bombing because of the inaccuracies

pbfoot said:

and the dumb bombs in Viet nam were still far more accurate then in Korea or WW2 IIRC thats why 1000's were sent to a sindle target and the Brits went to area bombing because of the inaccuracies

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Absolutely true. BUFs attacking North during Linebacker II were very effective with iron bomb Mk 82 and Mk83s.

I love the Mosquito - a beautiful design that had good performance. But it could not really fulfill the strategic bombing missions only specific pinpoint missions at low level. As has been pointed out by others - large targets could not be destroyed by the Mossie - without there being hunderds of them at low level all at the same time! The logistics of that don't bare thinking about!
Low level attacks were very useful during the earlier years of the war - but were geting costly later on due to the lighter AA gund being deployed. An example of this is the attacks on Me262' as they were taking off or landing. Allied fighters would lurk nearby and hit them during this vulnerable period. The air defences were increased around these bases and proved to be quite effective. Resulting in these missions being pulled.

Hi Vinnye,

Having raised this thorny subject, I largely agree with you, although there is a world of difference between fighters "lurking" near airfields at sufficient altitude to detect, identify and engage aircraft taking off and landing and a fast, hit-and-run attack dropping bombs on a specific target.

I'm also going to re-state that I'm not suggesting using the Mosquito in the traditional sstrategic vision of heavy bomber usage - ie flattening everything at a target. I'm suggesting destroying the key elements of a target so that the strategic effect is delivered. The 633 Sqn analogy is highly appropriate:

Problem: Germany has developed lethal rockets that could prevent the invasion of Europe by the Allies. The Allies need to stop these rockets being launched.

Potential Solutions and Issues:

1. Bomb the factories making the rockets. The issue is that the rockets have already been built and distributed but are awaiting fuel.

2. Bomb all the rocket launch sites. Potentially feasible but would necessitate attacking multiple launch sites that must first be identified - not an easy task, involves use of large numbers of aircraft and still runs the risk of leaving a few sites operational that could still infliect heavy Allied casualties on D-Day.

3. Attack the Fuel Factory. This is a point target and, although well defended and hard to attack, could be destroyed.

Taking a systems analysis approach, it is feasible to destroy choke points and still achieve the same strategic result (removing the threat or supply means) without flattening acres of urban areas and using only a fraction of the aircraft and bombs compared to "traditional" carpet bombing by high-flying heavy bombers.

I agree that my approach is not valid for every target, and I also accept that there are countermeasures. However, for even light AAA to be effective, the gunners have to know the aircraft are coming to their target. It's notoriously difficult to determine final destination of aircraft flying at very low level - radar couldn't help and visual observation is very fleeting (because the aircraft are so low) making positive determination of course and final destination very difficult. So, a far smaller number of aircraft operating at very low level could, with surprise, engage some (not all) targets to neutralise key components and achieve the same (or better) strategic effect as hundreds of heavy bombers plastering the ground with a CEP measured in miles.

All that said, this is a hypothetical discussion and is quite a tangent from the original subject which is self-defending bombers and whether they were a success or a failure. I still contend they were a tactical failure because they needed escorting fighters to be effective, but they were the accepted way of doing business in the early 1940s to deliver strategic effect at long range (despite the heavy costs on both sides).

No true gunless heavy bomber was built during WW II. Trying to compare a small bomber like the Mosquito to planes like the B-17 and B24 and Lancaster is a bit unfair. The Mosquito with it's 2 engines is not going to compete with a 4 engine bomber.
With out a real airplane to get numbers from a good comparison is hard to make but a gunless 4 engine bomber design (or minimal guns) might show quite an advantage over the armed bombers.
Not just stripping the guns out but a plane designed from the start not to have gun turrets and gunners.

Compared to a B-17 you can loose 6 crewmen easy for 1200lbs, loosing the 13 .50 cal guns means another 900lbs or better not including mounts, turrets, feed ways and other stuff. 4000 rounds of .50 cal ammo is over 1200lbs. All told you could probably reduce the payload by around 2 tons or more. This could mean a smaller wing for the same wing loading and a smaller fuselage. A smoother more aerodynamic design means less drag along with the smaller wing means more performance for the same power.
Is this enough to get the performance to a point where the losses would be no worse than the armed bomber?

I was interested to find out that the Commander of the Fast Attack Group, Group Captain Bennett, following the submission of the Butt report, strongly advocated the adoption of the Mosquito as the principal Bomber of BC. The submission was never adopted, and mass raids by Mosquitoes on strategic targets not implemented until late in the war (they were of course used for tactical strikes, path finder missions, small scale precision nuisance raids). The Mosquito was never used enmasse, I think the Fast Attack Group reached a peak strength of about 10 squadrons, and at the end of the war the group was delivering mass raids in its own right of 60-100 aircraft.

I think there were two main reason as to why the Mossie was not adopted as per Bennetts recommendations, one very valid, and one not valid. The valid reason was that at the time of the Butt report, the Mosquito was still experiemental, and far from its enviable loss records of the later war period, was actually experiencing attrition rates of around 8% compared to the force average around 5%. Its understandable why the brass were not prepared to take the risk on the Mosquito

The second reason is not valid. There was an enormous amount of latent distrust regarding the Mosquito, as the RAFs experience with the "fast light" bomber concept as epitomised by the Blenheim, showed just how quickly todays revolutionary uninterceptable bomber could become tomorrows flying deathtrap. For years the RAF had veered away from this concept to the idea of the heavily defended, slow moving heavy bomber carrying heavier bombloads....That the RAF heavy bomber concept in daylight had proven to be a deathtrap as well seems to have escaped people like Harris

Shortround6 said:

No true gunless heavy bomber was built during WW II. Trying to compare a small bomber like the Mosquito to planes like the B-17 and B24 and Lancaster is a bit unfair. The Mosquito with it's 2 engines is not going to compete with a 4 engine bomber.
With out a real airplane to get numbers from a good comparison is hard to make but a gunless 4 engine bomber design (or minimal guns) might show quite an advantage over the armed bombers.
Not just stripping the guns out but a plane designed from the start not to have gun turrets and gunners.

Compared to a B-17 you can loose 6 crewmen easy for 1200lbs, loosing the 13 .50 cal guns means another 900lbs or better not including mounts, turrets, feed ways and other stuff. 4000 rounds of .50 cal ammo is over 1200lbs. All told you could probably reduce the payload by around 2 tons or more. This could mean a smaller wing for the same wing loading and a smaller fuselage. A smoother more aerodynamic design means less drag along with the smaller wing means more performance for the same power.
Is this enough to get the performance to a point where the losses would be no worse than the armed bomber?

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RJ Mitchell's final design was for a 4-engined fast bomber much along the lines you describe. Mitchell's untimely death and the destruction of the mock-up in a German bombing raid effectively halted the project. The problem with the big bomber is lack of manoeuverabilty at low level, which was the only way of delivering bombs with any degree of precision (except dive bombing but that needed air superiority to be effective) during WWII.

buffnut453 said:

So, a far smaller number of aircraft operating at very low level could, with surprise, engage some (not all) targets to neutralise key components and achieve the same (or better) strategic effect as hundreds of heavy bombers plastering the ground with a CEP measured in miles.

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That's the theory and a worth wild goal but in reality with WW2 technology that concept could not be consistently undertaken IMO, at least not to the point to "Neutralize Key components of a target." I ask you, how could one determine if that was achieved during WW2 when the only way you're going to analyze mission results is through aerial photography and by spies on the ground, and the latter of the two weren't always available?

To achieve the results required to end the war, you would have had to have thousands of aircraft like the Mosquito operating 24-7. I think you do do the math, consider loss mitigation and determine risks, it was better to send hordes of heavy bombers over Germany around the clock as was done by the allies. Bill makes excellent points in identifying factors questioning this.

I could see half the forests across Canada gone in an attempt to build that many Mosquitoes to support using that aircraft in lieu of all the allied heavies!

As I've said before, Joe, I have no fundamental problems with what you're saying. I'm just positing a different perspective on the problem...and it's generating some interesting discussion. One final point, although I've been banging the Mosquito drum, it could equally apply to other fast medium bombers - B-26 without dorsal turret, B-25 (this would be great in the role) etc. I simply selected the Mossie 'cos it was a fundamentally different design philosophy - a totally unarmed bomber - that truly was groundbreaking.

buffnut453 said:

As I've said before, Joe, I have no fundamental problems with what you're saying. I'm just positing a different perspective on the problem...and it's generating some interesting discussion. One final point, although I've been banging the Mosquito drum, it could equally apply to other fast medium bombers - B-26 without dorsal turret, B-25 (this would be great in the role) etc. I simply selected the Mossie 'cos it was a fundamentally different design philosophy - a totally unarmed bomber - that truly was groundbreaking.

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And agree - I think the solution to your points came several years later with the Canberra.

think that it could be argued that Canberra is an extension of Mosquito, as far as design operational philosophies go.

On a related note, would the USAF fared better with their bomber OPs with, say, triple the Canberras instead of historical number of their B-52s vs. N. Vietnam?

It absolutely was Tomo. Not only the Canberra but also the TSR 2 and Tornado too. The Mossie had a profound effect on RAF thinking. That effect is also why the V Bombers had no defensive guns whilst US and Soviet bombers of the same era retained rear gun positions.

Agreed with all you say, with one additional point. I believe the Vulcan possessed better manoeuverability than the US and Russian equivalents - according to one book I have on the tin triangle, the Vulcan's defensive manoeuvre, which was not dissimilar to that of the Lancaster corkscrew and proved highly effective until the arrival of the F-16. Allegedly, the first time a Vulcan tried the manoeuvre against an F-16, the V-bomber crew were surprised to find the adversary fighter formating with the Vulcan on the inside of the manoeuvre. It's also worth pointing out that the defensive armament on the Buff was removed later on in its career.

The USAF bombed extensive areas of jungle during Vietnam
Do you think the Canberra, even triple the number, could have handled a carpet-bombing job better than the king of the carpet-bombers?

It appears to me that radar directed light flak helps a great deal. I don't have numbers at hand but I've read dozens of first hand accounts of low level strike aircraft being shot to pieces.

By far the highest losses in 8th AF FC was due to airfield flak - which was a) attacked by fighters a lot faster than Mossies on the deck, and b.) not near as heavily defended as targets like Ploesti or Misburg or Merseburg refineries.

tomo pauk said:

think that it could be argued that Canberra is an extension of Mosquito, as far as design operational philosophies go.

On a related note, would the USAF fared better with their bomber OPs with, say, triple the Canberras instead of historical number of their B-52s vs. N. Vietnam?

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The USAF used 'Canberras' ie, B-57's in Vietnam. The most notable were 'Tropic Moon' program conversions to, for then, highly advanced night vision and laser guided bomb capability (LGB use in SEA was first highly publicized in 1972 from F-4's, but it started eariler during the 'bombing halt').

But basically the answer is definitely not, for replacing B-52's with B-57's. The overwhelming majority of B-52 bombing sorties were against essentially undefended targets. The 15 or so losses to Vietnamese defenses late in the war comprised a tiny per sortie loss rate over all sorties in SEA (though 2% of those over NV duing that short period). In the typical B-52 mission in SEA, a bigger plane simply had better economies of scale, and no reason to substitute a smaller one.

Even against a SAM-defended target, a plane like B-52 had substantial ECM capability to defeat the attack. Remember that most of the B-52's lost in Linebacker II were B-52G's which while newer as planes had less advanced ECM fit than B-52D's in SEA did at the time. Eliminating losses in the later LB II missions was partly achieved by not assigning 'G's' to the toughest targets.

Back to WWII, an 'undefended' bomber concept is one thing, it might be realistic (or not, I think not but it's reasonably debateable). Where things can get clearly unrealistic is assuming that the bombing accuracy issue can be easily solved by low altitude operations. Light AA could easily make this prohibitively costly if it was the main method of attack. In the actual situation, there was *some* targets not well defended by any AA; naturally, 'he who tries to defend everything defends nothing'. But those targets had to be selected carefully, true of either Mosquito low level attacks, or A-20 low level attacks pre D-Day (latter were always v non-Reich occupied territory former often were), but in either case it was by definition against somewhat marginal targets, those not heavily defended by light AA. Later in the war there were attractive dispersed targets like for example Type XXI U-boat module fabrication sites, but these had been dispersed *because* of heavy bomber operations against conventional shipyards. If you assume no conventional bombing campaign, the defense can react in ways that make low level bombing implausible as the main method.

IMO the unescorted defended bomber concept mainly failed, undefended day light unescorted bomber concept would have failed also, escorted bomber that could take care of itself against limited intensity and duration of fighter attacks (ie B-17/24 types, they generally could) was the right concept.

Joe

JoeB said:

The USAF used 'Canberras' ie, B-57's in Vietnam. The most notable were 'Tropic Moon' program conversions to, for then, highly advanced night vision and laser guided bomb capability (LGB use in SEA was first highly publicized in 1972 from F-4's, but it started eariler during the 'bombing halt').

But basically the answer is definitely not, for replacing B-52's with B-57's. The overwhelming majority of B-52 bombing sorties were against essentially undefended targets. The 15 or so losses to Vietnamese defenses late in the war comprised a tiny per sortie loss rate over all sorties in SEA (though 2% of those over NV duing that short period). In the typical B-52 mission in SEA, a bigger plane simply had better economies of scale, and no reason to substitute a smaller one.

Even against a SAM-defended target, a plane like B-52 had substantial ECM capability to defeat the attack. Remember that most of the B-52's lost in Linebacker II were B-52G's which while newer as planes had less advanced ECM fit than B-52D's in SEA did at the time. Eliminating losses in the later LB II missions was partly achieved by not assigning 'G's' to the toughest targets.

Back to WWII, an 'undefended' bomber concept is one thing, it might be realistic (or not, I think not but it's reasonably debateable). Where things can get clearly unrealistic is assuming that the bombing accuracy issue can be easily solved by low altitude operations. Light AA could easily make this prohibitively costly if it was the main method of attack. In the actual situation, there was *some* targets not well defended by any AA; naturally, 'he who tries to defend everything defends nothing'. But those targets had to be selected carefully, true of either Mosquito low level attacks, or A-20 low level attacks pre D-Day (latter were always v non-Reich occupied territory former often were), but in either case it was by definition against somewhat marginal targets, those not heavily defended by light AA. Later in the war there were attractive dispersed targets like for example Type XXI U-boat module fabrication sites, but these had been dispersed *because* of heavy bomber operations against conventional shipyards. If you assume no conventional bombing campaign, the defense can react in ways that make low level bombing implausible as the main method.

IMO the unescorted defended bomber concept mainly failed, undefended day light unescorted bomber concept would have failed also, escorted bomber that could take care of itself against limited intensity and duration of fighter attacks (ie B-17/24 types, they generally could) was the right concept.

Joe

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As usual, great post Joe and you beat to some points about the Buff in Vietnam. Also remember that although Nixon "pulled out all stops" there were still some idiots who were in charge of planning the Linebacker II missions where the B-52s flew the track in and out of NVN, so they were basically giving the SAM sites a "shooting gallery" that could predicted on almost a daily basis.

tomo pauk said:

On a related note, would the USAF fared better with their bomber OPs with, say, triple the Canberras instead of historical number of their B-52s vs. N. Vietnam?

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NO. When the B-52s were unleashed with no restriction during Linebacker II it was like using a steam roller to crush a peanut. In the end those strikes brought the North Vietnamese leadership back to the Paris Peacetalks and ultimately ended the war.