What was the best - or most significant - fighter-bomber of the war?

[GrauGeist]

I'd say that the Hs129 or the Fw190F was a far more effective ground attack platform than the Do217...

And the Fw190F could at least make a showing of itself if pressed by enemy fighters.

 

[stona]

By air to ground weapons I was referring to Machine guns and cannons, not other ordnance. I didn't make that obvious in my post.

SOME ordnance is delivered more accurately. Comparing bombers and fighter-bombers, which many do today, is not a fair comparison.

A Ju 87 in 1940 was just as capable of taking out a WW2 tank as an A-10 is today. To destroy a bridge P-47s would have to make less sorties than the F-16 with all it's attendant protection.
A B-52 might be able to do that it would have taken many B-17s to do, and it can do it at night, through cloud cover, but it is so vulnerable that it can only be used in theatres were opposition is negligible or absent.

Other things don't change much either. A year before Operation Iraqi Freedom General Eric Shinseki told Congress that a field unit would normally have to wait 25 minutes for air support, about the same as the RAF achieved in the Western Desert in 1942 and four times as long as that achieved by the RAF during the Arab Revolt, Palestine, 1936-39 !
Of course many factors come into play. Operating in a very small theatre, close to home, the IAF had a response time of just 30 seconds during Operation Cast Lead (Gaza).

Also relevant to any measure of accuracy is who or what and where you are bombing. Indo-China is a good example. The US dropped about 8 million tons of bombs on the region between 1964 and 1975, but only 643,000 tons on North Vietnam. What they hit in the jungles of Laos, Cambodia and even South Vietnam is largely anyone's guess.

We like to think that we live in times of rapid progress but compared to 1939-45 nothing could be further from the truth. No front line fighter squadron in 1945 was operating any aircraft it had in 1939. In the current USAF inventory the average age of an aircraft is 38 years old, considerably older than most of the men and women who fly them.

Cheers

Steve

 

[Aozora]

Steve that's what I meant in a way. A Bomb is obviously more effective when it hits the target, a lot of them didnt. Was there ever any thought given to fitting air brakes to the typhoon or spitfire?

The Spitfire wasn't just being built as a fighter-bomber, so modifying the airframe or wings sufficiently to incorporate dive brakes would have completely disrupted the production lines for all versions. The Typhoon was a more likely candidate, but, fitting effective dive brakes retrospectively is rarely easy and seldom yields worthwhile results. The A-36, derived from the P-51, is one of the rare (possibly unique?) examples of dive brakes being successfully fitted to an existing fighter airframe, yet the dive brakes were rarely used on operations.

Not forgetting that air brakes were fitted to later P-38s and P-47s; these were not dive brakes, but were used to stop these fighters getting into the subsonic buffet-zone while diving, and were not used to slow the aircraft sufficiently to promote bombing accuracy.

 

[stona]

Bombing accuracy would not have improved much anyway. The Ju 87 was a purpose built dive bomber with built in systems to achieve reasonable accuracy. The crews were also highly trained in the art of dive bombing. They were not fighter pilots who had undergone a three week course covering dive-bombing and rocketry like the Typhoon pilots of the 2nd TAF.

Iron bombs are inherently inaccurate.

Here's a quote from a fighter-bomber pilot.

"The odds of unguided iron bombs hitting their target are not high. A bewildering number of fundamental errors infest the system. Our bombs impact point in relation to the target will be affected by unforeseen winds, natural ballistic bomb dispersion, inherent radar tracking inaccuracies, my limited ability to fly the jet precisely, target location uncertainty, map errors, computer setting time, my reaction time on the pickle button, the rotation of the earth and gravity."

Not WW2 but Vietnam, nearly thirty years later. Not much had changed. That pilot had been reduced to patrolling roads, railways and rivers looking for targets of opportunity. Given the expense of the aircraft and their operations and the size and elusiveness of the targets a less effective use of air power is difficult to imagine. There's a lesson there which still hasn't been learnt

Cheers

Steve

 

[buffnut453]

I don't think it's as much that the lesson hasn't been learned, more that the alternatives (financial, human and political) are still too costly to even consider.

 

[pbehn]

Personally I think the greatest effect of the Typhoon was knocking out fuel bowsers for which cannon are deal. Taking out a tank isnt easy but if you cut its fuel its helplesss.

 

[Friskykillface]

The BEST fighter/bomber of WWII? The Tempest was pretty nasty, but it would be too close to call. The P-47 was successful in that role as well. Along with some of the FW190's. Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the Tempest and the P-47 carry more "ground ordinance" than the FW190? One of the MOST SIGNIFICANT would have to be, in my own biased opinion, the P-40. It was around early on in the war, easy to produce, there were LOTS of them! Functioned well enough in both the fighter and "bomber" (ground attack) role. Just by sheer numbers I think the P-40 deserves the "most significant" title. Not sure its reliable, but I read somewhere that there were a total of 11,998 P-40s built before they were discontinued. The way I see it, there were so many of them, they probably made more of a difference early in the war, (where I personally believe it mattered most) compared to the diferences the Tempest and P-47 made later on in the war. The P-40 was doing work on air and ground units earlier than the tempest and the P-47. Also dont forget how effective the P-40 was in the fighter and ground attack role in the Pacific.

 

[stona]

The BEST fighter/bomber of WWII? The Tempest was pretty nasty,

But was designed, like the others, as an air superiority fighter. The difference is that this was the role in which it was deployed to Europe. It wasn't even cleared to carry bombs until too late in the war to be significant as a fighter bomber in any meaningful sense. It proved itself a decent ground attack aircraft post war during the Malayan "emergency" though one engine and a lot of jungle meant that it was soon replaced.
The Typhoon was a far more significant fighter bomber along with the P-47.
Cheers
Steve

 

[gjs238]

Breaking it down by country.
Germany: Do-217 series - Russia: Il-2m (variant with the rear gunner) - Britain: Hawker Typhoon/Mosquito - USA: P-47 - Japan: A6M series

No F4U?