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Subject: Magic Mossies
Aussiegunneragain    7/11/2010 9:01:10 AM
There was a thread on here a few years ago put up by a fellow named Shooter, who was trying to make the argument that the Dehavilland Mosquito was a strategically insignificant aircraft which should never have been produced for the RAF, because it represented a waste of engines which could have better been used in Avro Lancasters. Shooter, an American, had a hobby of trying to diss any non-American type that had an excellent reputation (the Spitfire was another favourite target) and most people here told him he was being a clown with that being the end of it. However, the thread has stuck in the back of my mind and made me wonder whether in fact the Mossie, despite its widespread usage in a variety of roles, was in fact underutilised in the daylight strategic bombing role? It did perform some very important low level raids such as the daylight raid on the Phillips radio works (along with Ventura's and Bostons - far less Mossies were shot down)in Holland during Operation Oyster. However, I can't find many references to the Mossie being used for the sort of regular high altitude daylight strategic bombing missions that the B-17 and other USAF daylight heavies conducted. Consider its characteristics: -It could carry 4 x 500lb bombs all the way to Berlin which meant that you needed three mossies to carry a slightly larger warload than one B-17 did, which upon this basis meant more engine per lb of bomb in the Mossie. -However, the Mossie was hard to catch and was more survivable than the Heavies. The latter only really became viable with the addition of long-range escort fighters, something that the mossie could have done without. -It only required two crew versus ten on a B-17. Without intending to be critical of the USAF daylight heavies, because they were one of the strategically vital assets in winning WW2, I am wondering whether had the RAF used the Mossie in the role at the expense of night bombing operations in Lancasters? I have read accounts that suggest that the later were not really directly successful in shutting down German production, with the main contribution being that they forced the Germans to provide 24/7 air defence. If they had used Mossies more in the daylight precision role is it possible that the impact that the fighter-escorted USAF bombers had on German production might have been bought forward by a year or so, helping to end the War earlier? Another idea that I have is that if Reich fighter defences had started to get too tough for unescorted Merlin powered Mossies on strategic daylight missions, that they could have built the Griffon or Sabre powered versions that never happenned to keep the speed advantage over the FW-190? Up-engined Fighter versions of the Mossie would also have probably had sufficient performance to provide escort and fighter sweep duties in Germany in order to provide the bombers with even more protection. Thoughts? (PS, in case anybody hasn't worked it out the Mossie is my favourite military aircraft and my second favourite aircraft after the Supermarine S-6B ... so some bias might show through :-). I do think it has to rate as one of the best all round aircraft of all time based on its merits alone).
 
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Hamilcar    One of the reasons the Lancaster remained viable.....   7/11/2010 11:29:13 AM

There was a thread on here a few years ago put up by a fellow named Shooter, who was trying to make the argument that the Dehavilland Mosquito was a strategically insignificant aircraft which should never have been produced for the RAF, because it represented a waste of engines which could have better been used in Avro Lancasters. Shooter, an American, had a hobby of trying to diss any non-American type that had an excellent reputation (the Spitfire was another favourite target) and most people here told him he was being a clown with that being the end of it.

However, the thread has stuck in the back of my mind and made me wonder whether in fact the Mossie, despite its widespread usage in a variety of roles, was in fact underutilised in the daylight strategic bombing role? It did perform some very important low level raids such as the daylight raid on the Phillips radio works (along with Ventura's and Bostons - far less Mossies were shot down)in Holland during Operation Oyster. However, I can't find many references to the Mossie being used for the sort of regular high altitude daylight strategic bombing missions that the B-17 and other USAF daylight heavies conducted. Consider its characteristics:

-It could carry 4 x 500lb bombs all the way to Berlin which meant that you needed three mossies to carry a slightly larger warload than one B-17 did, which upon this basis meant more engine per lb of bomb in the Mossie.

-However, the Mossie was hard to catch and was more survivable than the Heavies. The latter only really became viable with the addition of long-range escort fighters, something that the mossie could have done without.

-It only required two crew versus ten on a B-17.

Without intending to be critical of the USAF daylight heavies, because they were one of the strategically vital assets in winning WW2, I am wondering whether had the RAF used the Mossie in the role at the expense of night bombing operations in Lancasters? I have read accounts that suggest that the later were not really directly successful in shutting down German production, with the main contribution being that they forced the Germans to provide 24/7 air defence. If they had used Mossies more in the daylight precision role is it possible that the impact that the fighter-escorted USAF bombers had on German production might have been bought forward by a year or so, helping to end the War earlier?

Another idea that I have is that if Reich fighter defences had started to get too tough for unescorted Merlin powered Mossies on strategic daylight missions, that they could have built the Griffon or Sabre powered versions that never happenned to keep the speed advantage over the FW-190? Up-engined Fighter versions of the Mossie would also have probably had sufficient performance to provide escort and fighter sweep duties in Germany in order to provide the bombers with even more protection.

Thoughts?

(PS, in case anybody hasn't worked it out the Mossie is my favourite military aircraft and my second favourite aircraft after the Supermarine S-6B ... so some bias might show through :-). I do think it has to rate as one of the best all round aircraft of all time based on its merits alone).


Was that it could carry heavy bombing radar and navoigation and blind area bomb a city above a cloud deck. The Mossie could not.
 
Ir was too small.
 
With the typical weather over Central Europe, that EW at night really matters more than RAF or USAAF historians let on. In those days, the four engine heavy bomber was the only thing that could carry the watts, the gear and the bombs all at the same time and navigate or bomb through overcast.    
 
H.
 
 
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Arbalest       7/11/2010 1:44:08 PM
Aussiegunneragain:

You typed the magic name: Shooter. There are 4 or 5 recent threads on this board by "45-Shooter", who might be the same guy ............ If you can find the "King Tiger vs. T-29" thread, you will find his comments near the very end ............ There's also a thread about some sort of alternate-reality WW2 and .................... , but I can't force myself to look at it again.

Back to the topic:

There's no question that the Mosquito was a superior, first-rate aircraft.  Your math is correct, as far as it goes, but let us add a few more items.

Each Mosquito requires a pilot, so to get the equivalent tonnage of bombs dropped requires 3 pilots rather than the 1 for a Lancaster.  Maybe 3 navigators, too.  The training time for a pilot is greater than that needed for a gunner.

Recall the necessity for 3 Mosquitos to replace one Lancaster. A 200-Lancaster raid becomes a 600-Mosquito raid, including the (now 3x larger) issues of getting the formations created, avoiding collisions, and making sure all aircraft have enough fuel.

While a given production-month of the Mosquito is about as fast, maybe faster, than the same production-month of the Bf-109 or FW-190, this is of little advantage when facing daylight head-on attacks, or several waves of head-on attacks. Increase pilot training time to include some fighter-pilot training; no crew of gunners makes this training a requirement.  This also raises the question of the Mosquito's range at high-throttle settings, maybe half-time cruise, half-time combat.

The Mosquito seems to have made an excellent pathfinder aircraft, for guiding RAF heavy bombers, and this was clearly a major strategic task.

I wonder if hundreds of Mosquitos would have survived night raids much better than Lancasters or any other heavy bomber.  The heavy bombers at least had defensive armament, and I can't immediately find any reports of night-time dogfights.  I see this as a toss-up; there will be losses, and not just a few.  Which choice will get the most useful results for the fewest losses?


H.'s points about equipment and overcast are well-taken.  High-altitude day raids using Mosquitos make little sense. The Mosquito's capabilities, while superior, do not make it a good replacement for a Lancaster in most situations.


But with the Mosquito's speed and maneuverability, low-level precision day strikes in 1's, 2's or 3's seem to be a better plan.  Perhaps 200 unloaded Mosquitos or so simply fly deep patterns into Germany, shooting anything they find, and generally stirring up and fatiguing the Luftwaffe. Another 200 or so, carrying bombs, run similar patterns, but converge on various targets for a strafing / bombing fest.  Sounds sort of like what was done historically.
 
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WarNerd       7/11/2010 3:29:01 PM

I wonder if hundreds of Mosquitos would have survived night raids much better than Lancasters or any other heavy bomber.  The heavy bombers at least had defensive armament, and I can't immediately find any reports of night-time dogfights.  I see this as a toss-up; there will be losses, and not just a few.  Which choice will get the most useful results for the fewest losses?

 
Were there any night-time dogfights?  If so, were they confined to periods of the greatest available lighting (3/4 to full moon or assisted by searchlights)?
 
My general impression is that the radar sets were to cumbersome to use for a sole source of information in head on attacks or true dogfighting.  Most successful attacks were by surprise from behind and below.  In that situation a Mosquitos speed would have made it a difficult to impossible target.
 
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Aussiegunneragain       7/12/2010 10:33:00 AM

Thanks for the comments gents. I would make a couple of points:

1. I'm not sure that I was clear enough that I'm not talking about using mossies to replace Lancasters on night time bombing missions. Rather I am talking about reducing the numbers of night time missions, and hence Lancasters, dramatically and instead concentrating on precision daylight visual missions to supplement the B-17 and B-24's effort with mossies. The night bombing missions were arguably not effective anyway while the latter were highly effective, so I see it as a better use of resources.
2. To allow the Mossies to drop their bombs when the target was socked in they would have only had to fit a proportion with Obe and bombing radars in place of the glass bombing nose, with the rest of the formation taking its cue off those. Alternatively if the target was important enough the Mossies could just dive below the cloud base and hit the target from lower level. Risky but if they were going to wallop a target like a fighter plant worth it. Try that in a heavy!
 
3. The big bombers used two pilots and a navigator (and a radio operator too I think, unless the navigator operated the radio) and many more of their crew got killed or captured than the mossies, so I don't think that would have been a resoucing issue.
 
4. The Mossie was able to operate at a sufficiently high altitude and speed that generally the fighters couldn't get up to where it was fast enough to do a head on attack and by the time it had dropped its bombs it could out pace them. If however that had become a problem then that is what the Mossie escorts and fighter sweeps would be for, to bounce the fighters from above over the formation or over their own airfield before they could get to the bombers. I also wonder about fitting the bombers with wing mounted, proximity fused rockets to fire in swarms at any fighters coming from the front.
 
5. Being so much faster than the Lancaster would have meant that the larger number of Mossies could have been formed up over a much greater territory and still dropped the bombs within the same window of time, so less problems with collisions etc. Whats more remember that the Mossies would be concentrating on precision strikes, not on destroying cities, so there would be less need to have such large formations on one target at a time.
 
6. There were night time "dogfights" involving Mossie night intruders. They weren't radar equipped as they couldn't risk the Germans capturing a set, so they used to just navigate to the German airfields, set up a circuit and pick of the night fighters like the ME-110's as they took off or came in to land. Accordring to my copy of "Air War at Night" by Robert Jackson they got a three to one kill ratio, another indication of the excellence of the type.
 
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Hamilcar       7/12/2010 12:06:02 PM

Thanks for the comments gents. I would make a couple of points:

  1. I'm not sure that I was clear enough that I'm not talking about using mossies to replace Lancasters on night time bombing missions. Rather I am talking about reducing the numbers of night time missions, and hence Lancasters, dramatically and instead concentrating on precision daylight visual missions to supplement the B-17 and B-24's effort with mossies. The night bombing missions were arguably not effective anyway while the latter were highly effective, so I see it as a better use of resources.

I am not sure you can say that the nighttime raids did not need to be laid on. There were almost a million LW troops tied up in home defense in the critical 1940-1943 years when they would gave been more use in Russia. Despite the USAAF myths to the contrary, it wasn't the 8th Air Force that tied them down, it was the RAF Bomber Command.


Doctrine and equipment limits for Bomber Command meant night area bombing through crummy weather with four engine heavy bombers and dumb bombs at least until 1943 when all the Barnes Wallace gadgetry was finally worked out. I can fault a lot of things Harris did, but blaming the man for not knowing his tools he was issued is one I cannot lay on him anymore. I had to admit I was wrong about this recently.


  1. To allow the Mossies to drop their bombs when the target was socked in they would have only had to fit a proportion with Obe and bombing radars in place of the glass bombing nose, with the rest of the formation taking its cue off those. Alternatively if the target was important enough the Mossies could just dive below the cloud base and hit the target from lower level. Risky but if they were going to wallop a target like a fighter plant worth it. Try that in a heavy!


How? The whole point of the Pathfinders was to mark a target with fires so that the bombardiers could bomb by optics. When they had to fly low, the heavies went in low (RAF Ploesti raid comes to mind.)


What happens to bombing and gunnery accuracy as you come down underneath a 2000 meter cloud layer that acts as a perfect searchlight reflector for all those 20mm and 37 mm Flak machine cannon gunners? ?Shoot where the radar directed searchlight cones intersect, Hans. We cannot miss!?

 

  1. The big bombers used two pilots and a navigator (and a radio operator too I think, unless the navigator operated the radio) and many more of their crew got killed or captured than the mossies, so I don't think that would have been a resourcing issue.


That is a good point. But then as has been remarked you still need three times as many planes to deliver tonnages, which means 50% more engines and still twice as many pilots as the Mossie co-pilot has to know how to fly the plane, too?

So instead of 42,000 bomber pilots, you need 84,000 fighter bomber pilots? Where? Those guys are the top 0.1% of your population cohort just to make air crew. The pilots are even rarer.


  1. The Mossie was able to operate at a sufficiently high altitude and speed that generally the fighters couldn't get up to where it was fast enough to do a head on attack and by the time it had dropped its bombs it could out pace them. If however that had become a problem then that is what the Mossie escorts and fighter sweeps would be for, to bounce the fighters from above over the formation or over their own airfield before they could get to the bombers. I also wonder about fitting the bombers with wing mounted, proximity fused rockets to fire in swarms at any fighters coming from the front.

    "

The rockets the allies had, were too unstable. We did not have a radio proximity fuse in production until 1944 that was worth a flip. The Mossie's speed is also not an issue here I'll wager when it comes to bombs on target. Her lateral drift in a bombing crosswind at high altitude just might be. It was one of the complaints about the American Liberator versus the Brit

 
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Ispose    My 2 cents   7/12/2010 12:08:28 PM
A bomb laden Mossie wouldn't be faster than Bf 109's or FW 190's...they would be shot down in droves...once they dropped their bombs they could exit the area fast...but going in wouldn't be pretty.
Also diving down to bomb from low altitude would expose them to Light AA and the Germans had lots of 20mm and 37mm multiple gun mounts...again not pretty.
P-47's got chewed up by german light AA at low altitude and it's a much more durable aircraft and harder to hit.
The Mossie was good at what it did but using it in place of a B-17 or B-24 would have been a slaughter.
 
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Heorot    crew training   7/12/2010 2:49:45 PM

The pilot shortage would not have been as high as has been postulated. Remember, more than 50% of all Lancasters that flew were lost to enemy action Stirlings were even worse, nearly 900 were lost during the war. I suspect that the Halifax had a similar loss rate to the Lancaster.

 

Those are dead crews that need to be replaced and the RAF was constantly training new crews as casualty replacements. The RAF probably trained the 84,000 quoted in Hamilcars post if you take into account the crew losses.

 

It is unlikely that Mosquito loss rates would have been anywhere near the loss rates for the heavies so the requirement for extra pilots would not have been as severe as has been suggested.
 
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45-Shooter    Different reason why this does not work?   7/14/2010 2:29:42 AM

There was a thread on here a few years ago put up by a fellow named Shooter, who was trying to make the argument that the Dehavilland Mosquito was a strategically insignificant aircraft which should never have been produced for the RAF, because it represented a waste of engines which could have better been used in Avro Lancasters. Shooter, an American, had a hobby of trying to diss any non-American type that had an excellent reputation (the Spitfire was another favourite target) and most people here told him he was being a clown with that being the end of it.

However, the thread has stuck in the back of my mind and made me wonder whether in fact the Mossie, despite its widespread usage in a variety of roles, was in fact underutilised in the daylight strategic bombing role? It did perform some very important low level raids such as the daylight raid on the Phillips radio works (along with Ventura's and Bostons - far less Mossies were shot down)in Holland during Operation Oyster. However, I can't find many references to the Mossie being used for the sort of regular high altitude daylight strategic bombing missions that the B-17 and other USAF daylight heavies conducted. Consider its characteristics:

-It could carry 4 x 500lb bombs all the way to Berlin which meant that you needed three mossies to carry a slightly larger warload than one B-17 did, which upon this basis meant more engine per lb of bomb in the Mossie.

-However, the Mossie was hard to catch and was more survivable than the Heavies. The latter only really became viable with the addition of long-range escort fighters, something that the mossie could have done without.

-It only required two crew versus ten on a B-17.

Without intending to be critical of the USAF daylight heavies, because they were one of the strategically vital assets in winning WW2, I am wondering whether had the RAF used the Mossie in the role at the expense of night bombing operations in Lancasters? I have read accounts that suggest that the later were not really directly successful in shutting down German production, with the main contribution being that they forced the Germans to provide 24/7 air defence. If they had used Mossies more in the daylight precision role is it possible that the impact that the fighter-escorted USAF bombers had on German production might have been bought forward by a year or so, helping to end the War earlier?

Another idea that I have is that if Reich fighter defences had started to get too tough for unescorted Merlin powered Mossies on strategic daylight missions, that they could have built the Griffon or Sabre powered versions that never happenned to keep the speed advantage over the FW-190? Up-engined Fighter versions of the Mossie would also have probably had sufficient performance to provide escort and fighter sweep duties in Germany in order to provide the bombers with even more protection.

Thoughts?

(PS, in case anybody hasn't worked it out the Mossie is my favourite military aircraft and my second favourite aircraft after the Supermarine S-6B ... so some bias might show through :-). I do think it has to rate as one of the best all round aircraft of all time based on its merits alone).


I would pose a different idea. The only reason the Mossy flew unopposed was because the Germans never had enough night fighter assets to chase both the Lanc and the Mossy. Which do you choose to go after, a big plane with 7-14,000 pounds of bombs up or a smaller plane with 2,000? Be honest here!

This choice was made in light of the fact that night time bombing was so much less effective. They would have made the assets available if this was not true. So they chassed day bombers with almost everything they had and for all intents and purposes ignored the night fliers.

As to speed being a defense, that is only true if the Germans are not racing. Think Do-335/Do-335NF, Ta-152H, Me-262&Me-262NF, He-162, Me- Quote    Reply


Hamilcar    You have not factored in how the Mossie has to be used.   7/14/2010 3:35:15 AM

The pilot shortage would not have been as high as has been postulated. Remember, more than 50% of all Lancasters that flew were lost to enemy action Stirlings were even worse, nearly 900 were lost during the war. I suspect that the Halifax had a similar loss rate to the Lancaster.


 


Those are dead crews that need to be replaced and the RAF was constantly training new crews as casualty replacements. The RAF probably trained the 84,000 quoted in Hamilcars post if you take into account the crew losses.


 


It is unlikely that Mosquito loss rates would have been anywhere near the loss rates for the heavies so the requirement for extra pilots would not have been as severe as has been suggested.
Its a fighter bomber with LC ICE engines. The equivalent is the loss rate for tactical fighter bombers not heavy bombers and the loss mechanism is flak.
 
Those two errors compounded by your underestimate of the flight training needed for aircrew that not only have to fly, but do their own precision bombing and navigation at night using two or three men instead of the usual five shows that you don't really know the difficulties involved.
 
H. 
 
 
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Aussiegunneragain    HC   7/17/2010 8:10:09 PM


 Those two errors compounded by your underestimate of the flight training needed for aircrew that not only have to fly, but do their own precision bombing and navigation at night using two or three men instead of the usual five shows that you don't really know the difficulties involved.

What part of the basic premise of the thread, that the Mossies would be operating by DAY do you not understand? I'm trying to promote a cordial discussion where we can agree or disagree agreeably, but it is very frustrating when somebody can't even take the time to understand the argument that is being made, even when it is pointed out to him. The same goes for your searchlights against the cloud backdrop comment .... not an issue at daytime.
 
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