What if America built De Havilland Mosquitoes instead of the B-17 Flying Fortress?

[JDCAVE]

Do you know what the abbreviations mean? Interested to know why briefing notes were sent from S.I.C. in Middleton St George to G.I.C. HQ of 6 Group

I suspect that these formed part of the ORB's. Probably some sort of administrative requirement.

The abbreviations:
SIO Senior Intelligence Officer.
GIO Group Intelligence Officer.
M/Y Marshalling Yards, AKA railway sidings.
Forts and Libs, B-17's and B-24's
A/P Aiming Point
POW camps 'R' Turning Point 'R' in this instance 4955N and 1030E. Convention is 49 is degrees, 55 would be minutes. Note that the letters used for Turning points may differ between groups and even stations. They are not specified by their letters in the Form "B" orders sent by teleprinter from Group to Stations.
'T' Turning Point 'T' in this instance 5055N and 1355E.
T/E Twin Engine, S/E Single Engine.
0600E refers to the Longitude on Track on the outbound route to the Target, where H2S was to be turned on.
'S' Turning Point 'S' in this instance 5050N and 1200E.

I.A.Z. Edited correction: the Inner Artillery Zone.
See: https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/82/a5900582.shtml
'D' Turning Point 'D' in this instance upon crossing the French coast on the outbound route, over the Somme Delta. The force was to be at 10,000', a heading of 127 T and 175 "Indicated Air Speed" (IAS). On the return trip, 'O' Turning Point 'O' in this instance upon crossing the . French coast near Dunkirk, although my plotting has them crossing on the Belgium side of the border. The force was at 10,000' on crossing the coast in the homeward route.
This is my plotting for the route for the second attack on Dresden, by 1, 3, 6 and 8 Groups:

February 13-14 Target Dresden – Google My Maps

At the bottom of the page, he refers to "New evasion aids". This is in my dad's "collection" and this is what the IO is referring to. It is printed on parachute silk, folded into a clear "Plastic" folder and has a lanyard for around your neck. I have seen it referred to as a "blood chit". I believe he also carried it with him on ops to Chemnitz and Dessau, also near the "Russian Front". A search of the web will reveal that the Americans had their own version.

Jim

 

[JDCAVE]

These are the turning points from the "Navigator Logs" from my dad's navigator, F/O Seale:

Outbound Route

Homeward Route

Note that they were diverted to an American Base at Sudbury on the way home, hence the Yellow line on my route plot.

 

[Akuma]

Considering the survivability and comparable bomb loads,would we have been far better off with the former? Would we even have built the lumbering Liberator had we had thousands of these?

Question: What was the cost of a Dehavilland Mosquito at that time?

 

[Admiral Beez]

What if America built De Havilland Mosquitoes instead of the B-17 Flying Fortress?

I don't see how one would cancel out the other. They're in entirely different categories, akin to Jeeps canceling out Shermans. But I could see America building the Mosquito instead of the A-20 Havoc or A-26 Invader as the category is closer.

If there are no B-17, does that mean Boeing is out of the design biz, and is just a contract manufacturer? So no B-29, etc?

 

[JDCAVE]

I don't see how one would cancel out the other. They're in entirely different categories, akin to Jeeps canceling out Shermans. But I could see America building the Mosquito instead of the A-20 Havoc or A-26 Invader as the category is closer.

If there are no B-17, does that mean Boeing is out of the design biz, and is just a contract manufacturer? So no B-29, etc?

I agree. I think this is an arm-waving exercise. I think it is much more interesting researching what actually happened, not what "coulda-shoulda been".

 

[Admiral Beez]

I agree. I think this is an arm-waving exercise. I think it is much more interesting researching what actually happened, not what "coulda-shoulda been".

Canada produced Mosquitos using US-sourced Packard Merlins, so I see no reason the USA couldn't either. But we need to ask why does the Mosquito exist, wasn't this to use non-strategic materials in resource-poor Britain? That's hardly the case in the USA where everything to make anything is plentiful.

 

[Dimlee]

Nobody seems the least bit concerned about the demise of Chongqin, Nanking, Shanghai, Warsaw, Poznan, Bialystok, Jaslo, Polanow, Zabludow, Gubin, Oradour sur Glane, Murmansk, Bryansk, Vitabsk, Stalingrad, Vyasma, Minsk, Smolensk, Kursk, Voronezh, Sevastopol, Chernogov and so on.

There is some sad irony here...
Shanghai and some other cities were damaged heavily by the Chinese themselves. Chinese Army has breached the Yellow River dikes and killed hundreds of thousands of fellow civilians and made millions homeless in 1938. This tragedy was repeated in the USSR three years later when NKVD blew up DneproGES and destroyed with remote explosive charges most of downtown Kyiv. And then again, when vast areas near Moscow were flooded in subzero temperatures destroying up to 40 villages with population. 300 villages or so were burned to the ground by the Soviet saboteur groups in the same period. Sevastopol, my hometown, was destroyed twice: by Germans in 1942 and by Soviets in 1944. When marshaling yards in Kursk were under LW attacks in July 1943, Orel was heavily bombed by VVS - at night, bombs up to FAB-5000, no radar, no pathfinders... And no attempts to access the "collateral damage" after the liberation.

Should we question and scrutinize those and other similar operations and where do we stop? I see it in a different way: if we do not question and do not scrutinize, such actions - done by a friend or a foe - will never stop.

 

[GrauGeist]

Instead of "questioning the motives" behind select events, we need to scrutinize and learn from all of these tragedies so that we can be vigilant and prevent such terrible events in the future.

 

[ThomasP]

"This must never happen again" - Dwight D.Eisenhower, comment during WWII about WWII

"To not question the action of others, because it happed in the past, is to approve those actions." - anonymous Greek c.300 BC

"Lest we forget" - many people

 

[ThomasP]

re "If there are no B-17, does that mean Boeing is out of the design biz, and is just a contract manufacturer? So no B-29, etc?"

Maybe Boeing builds a smaller number of B-17s, a considerable number of Mosquitoes, and concentrates on getting the B-29 on line sooner? (I do not know how much delay there was in the B-29 program, so this scenario might not make sense.)

 

[Akuma]

Considering the survivability and comparable bomb loads,would we have been far better off with the former? Would we even have built the lumbering Liberator had we had thousands of these?

I remember reading a similar question; I think it was in Quora topics. The answer said something about Dehavilland having both sufficient experience in wood constructed aircraft and having the people with wood working skills to build airplanes like the Mosquito, Dragon Rapide, Tiger Moth, and so on. By that time the US aviation industry had been building in metal for a number of years and numbers of the people required and capable of that level of wood working expertise were no longer available.

 

[GrauGeist]

I remember reading a similar question; I think it was in Quora topics. The answer said something about Dehavilland having both sufficient experience in wood constructed aircraft and having the people with wood working skills to build airplanes like the Mosquito, Dragon Rapide, Tiger Moth, and so on. By that time the US aviation industry had been building in metal for a number of years and numbers of the people required and capable of that level of wood working expertise were no longer available.

*if* the US licensed the Mosquito, they would have most likely made it from Aluminum instead of wood.
The reason being that US had more resources in aluminum than Britain did.

Also, the US was quite capable of manufacturing aircraft with wood or wood components and had quite a few types in service that were made with wood such as the Beech AT-10, Cessna AT-17 and so on.

 

[Shortround6]

This whole wood vs metal Mosquito thing comes up again and again and again, almost as bad as the P-plane that must not be named.

Getting enough wood to build thousands more mosquitos would be a major problem, perhaps solvable, perhaps not.

Keeping the external shape/form of the Mosquito and designing an all new, all metal structure (or even substantially metal) is going to take months. It might also degrade performance as part of the Mosquito's performance came from the high quality surface finish the doped fabric covering gave compared to a metal aircraft with rows of rivets even if counter sunk.

You might have been better off just telling a few companies to design a new airplane with a two man crew, two Merlin engines and a bomb bay of size A by B by C and a fuel load of 536 Imp gallons internal and see what they can come up with.

You also have to be careful about mucking about with production tooling and factory allocations too much.
A case can be made that shipping six Sidestrand centerless grinders to Napier/English Electric to help solve the Sabre Engine sleeve valve problem cost the US around 600 R-2800 series C engines in 1944 due the delay in finishing the Kansas city Factory and starting production. By the end of 1944 KC was building over 400 engines a month so delay in getting started in late 1943 and early 1944 was worth?????
Things could be (and were) done quickly, the Grinders were loaded on the Queen Mary on one of her high speed unescorted runs across the Atlantic for quick transit. P & W had to wait while replacement grinders were either located or built. I have no idea who got shorted to fill the P & W order.

 

[wuzak]

This whole wood vs metal Mosquito thing comes up again and again and again, almost as bad as the P-plane that must not be named.

Getting enough wood to build thousands more mosquitos would be a major problem, perhaps solvable, perhaps not.

Keeping the external shape/form of the Mosquito and designing an all new, all metal structure (or even substantially metal) is going to take months. It might also degrade performance as part of the Mosquito's performance came from the high quality surface finish the doped fabric covering gave compared to a metal aircraft with rows of rivets even if counter sunk.

I think it more likely that if a metal Mosquito was to be made it would be a new design based on the unarmed Mosquito concept.

As a later design it would be able to take advantage of advancements in aerodynamics, such as using laminar flow wing profiles.

If it was to be used by the Americans, it would need a larger bomb bay, even if only to carry 4 x 500lb GP American bombs, due to the extra size of the tails compared to the British designs.

It need not use the Merlin, either.

An engine such as the R-2800 could be utilised, if desired.

 

[SaparotRob]

It wouldn't seem very Mosquito-like with radials.

 

[wuzak]

It wouldn't seem very Mosquito-like with radials.

No, but the aim of a high speed unarmed bomber could still be met. It just wouldn't be a Mosquito.

EDIT: One of the issues with proposed Mosquito successors in the UK was lack of suitable engines.

There was a Griffon Mosquito proposed, but the performance was not increased sufficiently to justify its adoption.
There was the "Super Mosquito" DH.101, which was to use the Sabre. But Sabre production and reliability wasn't up to the required level for that to proceed.
It was a similar story for the Hawker P.1005, which was also to use the Sabre.

At the time, the options were thin - the Vulture had been cancelled, the Sabre was having difficulties and the Centaurus was a few years away, mainly because it was a low priority while Bristol sorted the Hercules.

 

[Akuma]

*if* the US licensed the Mosquito, they would have most likely made it from Aluminum instead of wood.
The reason being that US had more resources in aluminum than Britain did.

Also, the US was quite capable of manufacturing aircraft with wood or wood components and had quite a few types in service that were made with wood such as the Beech AT-10, Cessna AT-17 and so on.

It's true that the smaller US aircraft companies still were making airplanes in wood but note the planes you're using as examples. They were all straightforward relatively simple designs again built in relatively small numbers. An airplane like the Mosquito is a bit more complex both in building as well as in the numbers the military was looking for.

 

[GrauGeist]

It's true that the smaller US aircraft companies still were making airplanes in wood but note the planes you're using as examples. They were all straightforward relatively simple designs again built in relatively small numbers. An airplane like the Mosquito is a bit more complex both in building as well as in the numbers the military was looking for.

The US didn't need to build aircraft out of wood.
There was a slight concern early in the US involvement that Aluminum would be in short supply, but Alcoa stepped up with several new manufacturing sites and that fear was eliminated early on.
And as I stated before, the US was quite capable of manufacturing aircraft of wood or wood components, but there was no need to manufacture strategic aircraft using that method.

And as I mentioned earlier, *if* (and this is a HUGE if) the US licensed a copy of the Mosquito, it would have most likely been rendered in aluminum, not because Americans lacked woodworking skills, but because their aluminum manufacturing was state of the art and lead time would have been shorter.
The main question would have been where would all the additional engines come from?
Rolls Royce and Packard were doing their best to keep up with demand - add this new Mosquito demand into the mix and now what? Who gets shorted and who gets blessed?

 

[wuzak]

The US didn't need to build aircraft out of wood.

The UK didn't really need to either.

The Mosquito was built from wood because that was the expertise that de Havilland had, being relatively new to stressed skin metal construction.

When de Havilland proposed the concept, the Air Ministry was not too keen. de Havilland were given the go ahead because the Mosquito used little in the way of strategic materials, which it was though would not affect the current production programs.

 

[SplitRz]

I think it more likely that if a metal Mosquito was to be made it would be a new design based on the unarmed Mosquito concept.

As a later design it would be able to take advantage of advancements in aerodynamics, such as using laminar flow wing profiles.

If it was to be used by the Americans, it would need a larger bomb bay, even if only to carry 4 x 500lb GP American bombs, due to the extra size of the tails compared to the British designs.

It need not use the Merlin, either.

An engine such as the R-2800 could be utilised, if desired.

So, to misquote Douglas Adams: "Something almost, but not entirely, quite unlike a Mosquito".....?