Again put the ego in park, Herald.  You can talk about all the DESIGNS but I was hoping for the photo's of the pusher a/c flying over Bonn, or Essen, or the pictures of the pusher a/c in the Solomons or over Peleliu.  And then the discussion of the aerial combat pro's and con's of these a/c, with a short summation of the kills or strike statistics. But, of course, these don't exist, because no one fielded such an a/c in the Second World War!  There are no Zoom n' Boom, fighters, strike fighters, night fighters or naval strike a/c that are pusher a/c, that saw active combat...or active combat in any meaningful way.  So again, not only drop the Herald Canard, just drop the whole idea of pusher canard...it didn't happen in World War II, and not for want of thought and effort.  So the only conclusion is if Bell or any of a number of other design firms couldn't bring one to fruition, it wasn't going to happen.

Speculation? It is speculation you know.

Nobody tried until it was too LATE in WW II . We've since seen that it can be done very well. Every design we have now that is reaction jet based is a pusher.

SUMMARY:

1. You said the Japanese didn't use night fighters much. I proved you wrong.

You mean they HAD night fighters...and do you have any evidence that they scored any kills?  Did they achieve anything like the effectiveness of the German Fighter Fighter system?

I have proved it in passing. Red herring and as a lawyer or physicist would say: an incompetent argument presented at variant with presented fact in evidence. Nicks and Irvings shot down US bombers, both B-17s and B-29s. You might nibble at the edges concerning but the main point has been irrefutably made. Drop it.

2. You said we didn't use night fighters much. I proved you wrong.

And did we use them over the Home Islands?  Not until after Okinawa fell,, May/June/July 1945 because NO night fighter had the range to reach the Home Islands.  It wouldn't be until March/April/May that P-51's could range to the Home ISlands, from Iwo Jima.

Your concession on point is accepted. Reread what you just wrote.

3. You assumed that I said we used night fighters as escorts. I did not say that. I said that in the DAYLIGHT TOKYO RAID, (can't read?) there were 158 P-51s present and that 26 B-29s failed to RTB as shown in the data for a 5% loss rate.

What else would you use the night fighters, FOR?  And though you keep talking about this loss rate, you don't break it down so that we can see if fighters, of any kind, would have made a difference.  That is to say, did those losses come from Flak or fighters?  Or operational causes?  You've NEVER answered that.  IF, the bulk of the losses were flak or operational, THEN fighters were an irrelevance.  Get back to on the break down of losses.  You MIGHT have a point, but as of now, you have nothing.

Defense of Tinian, Guam, and Saipan from night time Judy raids. This is easy!

4. Didn't mention P-61s at all. Are you making this nonsense you claim all up in JRKY fantasyland?

No you just mentioned "night fighters", and then you mentioned the P-70...I'm just fleshing out the concept of "Night Fighter" for you...that the P-70 wasn't much of a night fighter and that the best US night fighter, the P-61, didn't have the range or the numbers to make any difference in night operations over Japan.  Not the range, until Okinawa fell, and NEVER had the numbers...fewer than 50 P-61C's were built.  In the ETO, the -A and -B models were limited to about one SQUADDRON per TAC...and due to maintenance and logistics issues, seldom could generate 20 sorties a day., well really night.  But no it's not fantasyland, it's just history...anyone can read.  Night fighters are what XXI Bomber Command needed, for FIGHTER escort in February/March, the period of destructive firebombing...because those were NIGHT raids.  And not only were NO fighters available for coverage, only night fighters would have been of any value.

The P-70 was the A-20 Havoc refitted with a gun pack and a radar. It was a triple whammy I threw you because:

• a. It couldn't point for crap

• b. Its burdened service ceiling was terrible.

• c. And it was structurally fragile.

I already knew that my canard would meet and overcome the A-20 shortcomings. If the pig of a plane like the BF-110 could do it, then my little ?duck? would have no trouble.

Incidentally I don't need you to try to create your own strawman arguments and then try to pin them on me. I'm not that stupid that I will allow you to get away with assuming I would agree to YOUR canard, when its MY canard that is the focus of my discussion in this hypothetical. (I love puns.). Don't try to extrapolate your errors into my arguments, Okay?

Well actually the Navy did a fairly good job of it.  Parafrags or retarded fall bombs and nose cannon? Now you concede my point? Just read yourself, JRKY. You no longer even can keep track of your own arguments?

No, actually the USN and the USAAF did a POOR job of suppressing air fields, both for Okinawa and then for Operation Olympic.  The Japanese launched several thousand Kamikaze sorties against Okinawa, AFTER the Navy attempted to suppress the air fields and the fact, which you bring up, that the Japanese had 10,000 a/c prepared for Olympic would suggest, strongly, that the US did a rather POOR job of air field busting.  To give the Japanese credit they did a GREAT job of camouflage and decoys.

The Navy actually survived the kamikazi swarm from Kyushu and they did knock out the airfields on that island toward the end fighting for Okinawa. Takes time to bomb everything. The Japanese withdrew to Honshu. What was your point again? (Chuckles)

Well we began this with YOU discussing how fighters were going to be necessary to defeat the Japanese air threat thru "Offensive Counter-Air"...which you had to admit was really low-level BOMBER operations.  So it seems to me the guy who's back-tracking here is you.  And of course, non of this sort of counter-air was possible until Okinawa fell, so really we are looking at May/June 1945 before it gets under way.  So until then counter-air is either engine factory attacks or area bombing...and P-51s didn't figure into it at all, did they?

Nope. If you look at what I said on another thread: the types of bombing that worked at that stage of the war were high altitude area bombing (impossible over Japan because of the jet stream) or low level dash bombers releasing retarded fall bombs over precision targets. So it was going to be a Mixmaster (if it had been ready) or a B-29 (which was a rather safe substitute), and you just stepped into it JRKY. I think you just cooked yourself. If you go the Mixmaster route you are going to need fighter support either daylight before to shoot up the defense to clear for the night raiders, or during the actual daylight raid. As for that, Iwo just becomes all the more important to fall early to us, doesn't it? We should have gone for it in September 1944 like SPRUANCE wanted.

Red Herring and strawman. Mines had nothing to do with the Lemay campaign to destroy the Japanese aviation industry building Kamikaze planes which was what a significant part of those firebombing raids was all about.

Well it wasn't just Lemay's goal to destroy the a/c plants or destroy Kamikaze's..it was to cripple Japan's ability to wage war.  Lemay only knew that home factories were CRITICAL to the Japanese war industry.  He didn't care WHICH houses burned, he understood that if enough of them DID burn, he'd cripple ALL industry, not just a/c manufacturing.

The point was lost on you? Mining was not part of the aviation industry campaign.

 And the mining campaign completed that.  And it's not relevant what Lemay PLANNED so much as what he ACHIEVED.  And his mining campaign, may not have been a high priority for HIM, but it was decisive in it's results.  It destroyed the ability of the Japanese to run an integrated economy.  And an integrated economy is what fuels, if you will, an aviation, much less ANY industry.  Lemay destroyed factories, and his mines removed the ability of the Japanese to move goods, food or raw materials within the Empire.  It WAS pretty much the final nail in the coffin of the Japanese ability to wage war.

The mining didn't stop the Japanese from building planes. That is the point I was trying to get you to see. LeMays, targets in order of priority should have been powerplants, metal foundrys and final assembly shed. No electricity, no metals, no assembly workers means no planes.

Mine warfare could starve the Japanese in time, but for immediate results, you have to knock out the tech tree in progress, not wait for a shortage of food and fuel to do it for you. Siege is a horrible and safe way to kill somebody into surrender. I'm all in favor of it, but don't forget, we had that eager idiot , MacArthur, ready to hurl a million Americans into a buzz-saw. Anything LeMay can do to get them ashore on Honshu today is preferable to what he will accomplish six months in the future. Sometomes you have to fight stupid in order to prevent fight imbecile.

Which leads to my point, again...P-51s, P-47's were NOT essential to the strategic campaign against the Japanese economy.  The mass fire raids occurred before they were available.  The mining campaign, didn't need them.  And right now I have no evidence that Japanese fighters, night or otherwise, inflicted  losses, crippling or negligible, on the B-29's at all.  Certainly we know that they inflicted almost no losses PRE-Lemay, to be fair Pre-Lemay it was pretty irrelevant, too, as the USAAF was inflicting almost NO DAMAGE on the Japanese.  That fighter escort was a welcome addition to bomber missions, may be true, but that is not the same thing as saying that the bomber campaign REQUIRED them (Which in Europe was true).  They were NOT a requirement because the Japanese had nothing close to the German air defense network, not nearly the radars, flak, or fighters, night or otherwise, that approached the operational altitudes of the B-29's.

Senty has covered this, but I'll spell it out for you. Once we knew we had to come down to below 20,000 feet and slow down to 220 miles per hour to have a prayer of hitting anything in Japan, our B-29s were within easy reach of Japanese flak and fighters. Our loss rates prove that. Japanese night defense was pathetic, but they were still shooting us down in the tens or more per major raid.

We switched to daylight for a few raids because we had to precision bomb key critical targets. We were still stuck with the medium altitudes and slow speeds. Though. You don't like it, but physics is physics. The B-29 then could not bomb accurately in a jet stream and it was at the limit of its burdened range in 1945. You had to cruise to conserve fuel.

And the Japanese exploited this set of facts. We needed the fighters.

Herald