AHC: Better Bomber Command by 1939.

It Is worth noting that it was not the Air Ministry or the RAF who increased fighter construction pre WW2. This was done by the Minister for the co-ordination of Defense in the face of fierce opposition from the Bomber establishment in the RAF and AM who claimed such prioritisation of fighters would fatally weaken the RAF and detract from it's primary Mission of bombing the enemy into submission. The Government did not put all their eggs (money) into the RAF Basket but they certainly put less into the other forces baskets than they might have. The saving grace was that when presented with a Game changing technology such as Radar in 1936 the Government not only reacted with commendable rapidity they also poured significant sums of money into building the required infrastructure. This vision and sense od purpose on behalf of the government and a few in the AM and RAF is a very rare thing and was only just in time to give Fighter Command a chance in the BoB. Finding a PoD for Bomber Command that does not iTTL undermine Fighter command and Radar would be problematical given the financial and personnel restraints existent at that time.
 
It Is worth noting that it was not the Air Ministry or the RAF who increased fighter construction pre WW2. This was done by the Minister for the co-ordination of Defense in the face of fierce opposition from the Bomber establishment in the RAF and AM who claimed such prioritisation of fighters would fatally weaken the RAF and detract from it's primary Mission of bombing the enemy into submission. The Government did not put all their eggs (money) into the RAF Basket but they certainly put less into the other forces baskets than they might have. The saving grace was that when presented with a Game changing technology such as Radar in 1936 the Government not only reacted with commendable rapidity they also poured significant sums of money into building the required infrastructure. This vision and sense od purpose on behalf of the government and a few in the AM and RAF is a very rare thing and was only just in time to give Fighter Command a chance in the BoB. Finding a PoD for Bomber Command that does not iTTL undermine Fighter command and Radar would be problematical given the financial and personnel restraints existent at that time.

The man was Thomas Inskip, a man with a background in law. His tenure in the position was regarded as a means of showing that Britain wasn't preparing for war, or acting in a war-like fashion, to the Germans. That is, of course, a meaningless show, just for show. Whether Inskip was effective or ineffectual is a topic for debate which could go on until the end of time. The names Dowding and Freeman come up with regards to AM, RAF and Fighter Command's preparation for war, but the names of the "Bomber Establishment" do not. Do they have names, and positions of power?
 
The man was Thomas Inskip, a man with a background in law. His tenure in the position was regarded as a means of showing that Britain wasn't preparing for war, or acting in a war-like fashion, to the Germans. That is, of course, a meaningless show, just for show. Whether Inskip was effective or ineffectual is a topic for debate which could go on until the end of time. The names Dowding and Freeman come up with regards to AM, RAF and Fighter Command's preparation for war, but the names of the "Bomber Establishment" do not. Do they have names, and positions of power?

Yes Thomas Inskip was described as "Caligula's Horse" upon his appointment as the Minister for Co-ordination od Defense, as he was a political non entity, which meant he had no links to any particular service or faction there in. The Bomber establishment was led by Lord Trenchard in the House of Lords and had the ear of nearly the entire political establishment of the day, Hence Baldwin's infamous 'the Bomber will always get through' speech of 1932.
 
Yes Thomas Inskip was described as "Caligula's Horse" upon his appointment as the Minister for Co-ordination od Defense, as he was a political non entity, which meant he had no links to any particular service or faction there in. The Bomber establishment was led by Lord Trenchard in the House of Lords and had the ear of nearly the entire political establishment of the day, Hence Baldwin's infamous 'the Bomber will always get through' speech of 1932.

Which begs the question, what would have happened if Trenchard had replaced Inskip or Newall or both and Dowding asked to retire. Would the BoB have been fought with Whitleys?
 
Which begs the question, what would have happened if Trenchard had replaced Inskip or Newall or both and Dowding asked to retire. Would the BoB have been fought with Whitleys?

Inskip was a political appointment, Chamberlain didn't view the military with awe and accept what they said. So the idea of him appointing a former Head (and Father) of the RAF, is a complete - no, no.

According to Terraine p.50/511:
Slessor and his fellow directors "drew up a scheme to produce what is militarily the proper insurance for safety... The result was Scheme 'J' (October 1937).
Scheme 'J' proposed a bomber force of 90 Squadrons (as compared to 70 in Scheme 'F') of which 64 would be heavy and 26 medium(as compared to 20 heavy and 65 medium in the abortive Scheme 'H'). The first-line strength (1,442) was actually slightly lower that proposed in Scheme 'H' but the aircraft were to be more powerful and the figure was real.... There was also better provision for reserves within the scheme. Scheme 'J' was due for completion by the spring of 1940 - if agreed. It had however, two snags: first, it involved the mobilization of industry, and even the lowering stormclouds of 1937 neither the Government nor the nation was yet ready to go that far. Secondly, the Ministry for the Coordination of Defence recoiled from the cost - and in doing so used the argument of the knock-out blow to challenge the Air staff's view of strategy:

The RAF's role, argued Inskip, is not an early knock-out blow ... but to prevent the Germans from knocking us out. He was not he insisted arguing for nothing but fighters".

So, Scheme 'J', was referred back for a rethink to make it cheaper via Scheme 'K' (Jan 1938) - meanwhile the heavy-bomber programme was delayed.

But it's quite possible that Salmond and Trenchard connived to get Newall replaced by Portal, because they were afraid that Churchill may make Dowding CAS in 1940!
 
Inskip was a political appointment, Chamberlain didn't view the military with awe and accept what they said. So the idea of him appointing a former Head (and Father) of the RAF, is a complete - no, no.

But it's quite possible that Salmond and Trenchard connived to get Newall replaced by Portal, because they were afraid that Churchill may make Dowding CAS in 1940!

It has been suggested that the position created for Inskip was at the insistence of Trenchard, being unhappy with Slessor, Newall and Dowding, but Inskip the man let him down. Indeed it has also been suggested that Trenchard connived to remove both Newall and Dowding. It's not easy going against the will of a man called Boom.
 
WI no Boulton-Paul Overstrand (biplane bomber) meant no powered, enclosed gun turrets?
WI gun turret development was delayed by a few years?
 
I doubt it would have a huge effect. The Martin B-10 already had an enclosed turret before the Overstrand, though the Martin turret wasn't powered.

Actually, the RAF might see a benefit if turret development were slowed just enought to stop the development of the Boulton-Paul Defiant, etc.

WI no Boulton-Paul Overstrand (biplane bomber) meant no powered, enclosed gun turrets?
WI gun turret development was delayed by a few years?
 
Meant to reply again but got side-tracked and then completely forgot. I knew that the Butt Report of 1941 had the rather unsettling statistic of only one in three of Bomber Command's aircraft getting within 5 miles of their targets but assumed that could in large part be blamed on having to operate at night, at longer ranges, and other war conditions but reading up a bit on them they were apparently equally as dire pre-war. Two best examples I ran across were in 1935 Wing Commander Peter Warburton getting lost over Iraq and in the following Board of Inquiry, which only took place as the then Under-Secretary of State for Air was on a local inspection tour so it got reported to the Air Council rather than just being written up as business as usual, he testified that "he hadn’t the foggiest notion of navigation and that wasn’t surprising as it was not taught at flying school"; the other a year later being a squadron of seven Heyford bombers setting off from Aldergrove in Northern Ireland for Finningley in South Yorkshire but because the weather wasn't very good only one managed to find its way there, four of the others crashed killing several of the crew and injuring others, and the remaining two had to make forced landings. In 1937 and 1938 there were 478 forced landings by bomber command pilots who lost their bearings and weren't able to make it to their destinations. That's just insane.

It really does seem like improving their air navigation would be the cheapest way to improve their performance, it also has the added bonus of being as equally attractive to civilian aircraft as well so rather than just relying on the Air Ministry and Royal Aircraft Establishment they could also hit up other departments such as the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research and private industry for funding as well. The Drift Sight apparently took all of a few months to develop when looked at properly. Other system were the Air Mileage Unit (AMU) that calculated an aircraft's true airspeed and was apparently being worked on in the 1930s but stalled for some reason, the Distant Reading Compass (DRC) which was a gyro-magnetic compass to track the aircraft's heading that started trials in 1935 but the decision wasn't made to put it into production until 1940, and the Air Position Indicator (API) which took direct inputs from the AMU and DRC to as the name suggests work out what the aircraft's position in the air was. Whilst pretty effective the one main drawback of the API was that it wasn't able to factor in wind vector so that had to be manually calculated using the drift sight and factored in, it had to wait until the follow-on Ground Position Indicator (GPI) which could do that automatically. Since the systems were under development from the mid-1930s it would seem like if there was an increase in funding and commitment they might be developed by say 1939 and entering service in mid- to late-1940.
 
It really does seem like improving their air navigation would be the cheapest way to improve their performance, it also has the added bonus of being as equally attractive to civilian aircraft as well so rather than just relying on the Air Ministry and Royal Aircraft Establishment they could also hit up other departments such as the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research and private industry for funding as well. The Drift Sight apparently took all of a few months to develop when looked at properly. Other system were the Air Mileage Unit (AMU) that calculated an aircraft's true airspeed and was apparently being worked on in the 1930s but stalled for some reason, the Distant Reading Compass (DRC) which was a gyro-magnetic compass to track the aircraft's heading that started trials in 1935 but the decision wasn't made to put it into production until 1940, and the Air Position Indicator (API) which took direct inputs from the AMU and DRC to as the name suggests work out what the aircraft's position in the air was. Whilst pretty effective the one main drawback of the API was that it wasn't able to factor in wind vector so that had to be manually calculated using the drift sight and factored in, it had to wait until the follow-on Ground Position Indicator (GPI) which could do that automatically. Since the systems were under development from the mid-1930s it would seem like if there was an increase in funding and commitment they might be developed by say 1939 and entering service in mid- to late-1940.

[FONT=&quot][/FONT] Currently reading E E Vielle's 'Almost a Boffin', he has some choice things to say about the state of navigation in the RAF and some interesting comments about F W Meridith, Jack Richards and Ben Lockspeiser doing their best to undermine efforts to improve navigation and anything else that would help.
 
Currently reading E E Vielle's 'Almost a Boffin', he has some choice things to say about the state of navigation in the RAF and some interesting comments about F W Meridith, Jack Richards and Ben Lockspeiser doing their best to undermine efforts to improve navigation and anything else that would help.
Yeah I mentioned that on one of the previous pages. The state of navigation systems I can easily believe due a combination of bureaucratic drift and the fact that the RAF didn't seem all that interested themselves, after the Great War they laid off most of the observer/navigators except for a very small number with the coastal reconnaissance squadrons and didn't bother teaching navigation to their pilots, the whole communist conspiracy allegations though just seem rather baroque. You'll have to tell me what you thought of Almost a Boffin after you've finished it, I looked it up on Amazon but have too large a pile of books to read already to justify spending the £15 or so on it at the moment. :)
 
Yeah I mentioned that on one of the previous pages. The state of navigation systems I can easily believe due a combination of bureaucratic drift and the fact that the RAF didn't seem all that interested themselves, after the Great War they laid off most of the observer/navigators except for a very small number with the coastal reconnaissance squadrons and didn't bother teaching navigation to their pilots, the whole communist conspiracy allegations though just seem rather baroque. You'll have to tell me what you thought of Almost a Boffin after you've finished it, I looked it up on Amazon but have too large a pile of books to read already to justify spending the £15 or so on it at the moment. :)

He directly accuses Meredith, Richards and Lockspeiser of deliberately slowing things down and says they were being watched but nothing was done about it. He was warned not to say too much about Richards and that his life may in in danger.....he was almost killed in an air accident not long afterwards in what looked like sabotage.

This was in the Times a few years ago

A centenarian who helped develop the technology to take the fight to Hitler tells Marcus Scriven his work was undermined by communist traitors who came close to costing Britain the war

“The dining room can be bloody noisy. I’ve arranged sandwiches and a mug of beer in the library. Would that be the answer?”

Group Captain EE “Tubby” Vielle OBE, parade ground moustache imprinted on upper lip, has been up since 5.30am, a self-imposed reveille followed by ablutions, exercises, breakfast, appraisal of the news and the markets (“online”), before starting writing, “till about 12.30pm, then again from about 2.30pm till about 5pm”.

Currently, the harmony of routine is diminished by Windows 8. “I hate the bloody thing: too complicated.”

It is unlikely to impede him for long. A bookcase in his rooms at his Wiltshire retirement home displays 85 editions of the books he co-wrote in the 1960s and 1970s; Hitchcock paid £100,000 for the film rights to the first, Village of Stars, though he got no authorial credit.

But his recently completed memoirs, Almost a Boffin, contain perhaps his most disquieting and startling story — extraordinary disclosures about the long-acknowledged Soviet penetration of Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough, during the Second World War.

It is a suitably dramatic epilogue for a life of epic accomplishment and longevity.

Born on April 29, 1913, Vielle’s first memory is of a Zeppelin being hit by anti-aircraft fire over London. “Suddenly it burst into flames. Hydrogen, of course. I can see it exactly.”

Climbing in the Alps aged 15, second from right with his family (PhilYeomans/BNPS)A healthy appetite and robust frame had earned him his nickname by the time he arrived at Dulwich College, south London, where he was a prize gymnast with a problem-solving brain. At 15 he acquired a driving licence and a motorbike, and partnered a pretty 22-year-old in a game of tennis. Two years later he asked her father for permission to marry her.

“Absolutely amazing,” he says, awed by his own audacity. “Bunny was the second girl I ever met. We had a wonderful life together.”

Plans for university were derailed by the Depression of the 1930s, in which his father’s business perished. He became a clerk in a London accountancy firm — opposite the RAF’s administrative headquarters. Learning that prize cadetships were available to the top six in RAF Cranwell’s entrance exam, he tutored himself — and came fourth out of 700.

In a 25-year career, he flew 150 types of aircraft, beginning with an Avro biplane — flying wing-tip to wing-tip, without radio — and ending supersonic. Fatalities were frequent. His own survival, he says, was “very lucky”. As an exuberant youth, he hit a pylon cable. During the war, he displayed what a much younger air commodore describes as “extraordinary courage . . . the greatest feat of flying I have read about or witnessed”, piloting a Hudson, its wings overloaded with ice, its radio broken, below cloud cover that descended to just 50ft above the ground.

His adventures included flying Hurricanes (PhilYeomans/BNPS)Graded “exceptional”, he was seconded to the Fleet Air Arm before being transferred in 1939 to the special duty list at Farnborough to test emerging technology.

He was horrified by what he found. There was, for example, an oxygen system that “failed and failed. I had two air marshals killed simply because the bloody thing switched off itself.” The new distant reading (DR) compass — “a Heath Robinson job” — was no better. “They put it in the tail [of the bomber] on a swing, hoping that it would be mainly upright. It couldn’t work and didn’t work.” There was no gyroscope-stabilised bomb-sight, so those crews who “did find the target couldn’t hit it”.

This, he learnt, resulted not from incompetence but determination by eminent figures in Farnborough’s hierarchy “to make sure that Bomber Command could not operate”, with consequences far beyond the deaths of innumerable aircrew. “I think the war wouldn’t have started if we’d been capable — and shown we were capable — of navigating and bombing accurately. The Germans wouldn’t have dared invade France. We could have bombed the hell out of them.”

Instead, British aerial supremacy was first undermined and then eradicated during the inter-war years. “From 1920 to 1939, three scientists in particular prevented Bomber Command from being able to operate — made it impossible to drop a bomb accurately, or to navigate accurately. The lack of a bomb-sight was critical.”

Two of the key figures responsible he names as Ben Lockspeiser and FW Meredith. Both, Vielle argues, were thwarting innovation at Farnborough so as to benefit their true masters — in the Soviet Union. Meredith became managing director of Smiths — “producing instruments for aircraft” — while Lockspeiser, knighted in 1946, became the first president of Cern, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research. He died in 1990.

Farnborough’s records show that Lockspeiser and Meredith were monitored by the security services because of communist sympathies that had become apparent during the General Strike in 1926.

Documents at the National Archives in London additionally record that Lockspeiser’s mail was intercepted, though there was insufficient evidence to justify his dismissal from RAE. Both, says Vielle, were eclipsed by a third man who has, until now, eluded mention — Jack Richards, the wartime head of Farnborough’s instrument department, a man who went out of his way to befriend Vielle.

When Richards asked if he could spend a week with him and Bunny, while his wife was in Wales recuperating from illness, Vielle agreed. He was staggered by what followed. Night after night, Richards tried to “turn” his intended protégé. “He got very impassioned, said that in Russia they were all equal. Extolled the virtues of communism.”

Not long afterwards, it was almost unanimously agreed that RAF bombers should be fitted with the American-designed Sperry autopilot; Richards alone dissented, insisting that Farnborough’s own autopilot should be installed instead. Its performance proved as abject as that of the oxygen system and DR compass.

The pattern recurred after the war, when radar developments repeatedly fell behind schedule: Richards had by then become head of the Telecommunications Research Establishment in Malvern, Worcestershire.

Asked why he was delaying a particular project, Richards replied: “I do not think it will benefit the world for the RAF to have it.”

Vielle reported the remark to the RAF’s director of intelligence, who, a week later, warned him that his life could be in danger, explaining that Richards had allies “in even higher positions”.

Later that year, in December 1949, while piloting a Meteor, Vielle inexplicably stalled. Both wings, both engines and the fuselage disintegrated in the ensuing crash; the cockpit — and Vielle — survived. “Miraculous,” he agrees. Only afterwards did he notice that the airspeed indicator was of a superannuated type, calibrated in mph rather than knots, with indistinct markings, as if they “had been rubbed with a bit of emery paper”.

The director of intelligence, investigating why an obsolete instrument had been fitted to a modern aircraft, concluded that an attempt had been made on Vielle’s life, but added that it would be “unwise to try” to discover by whom.

Vielle concentrated, instead, on developing an idea he had had during the war — of gyroscope-guided missiles — and another, exploiting sideways-facing radar to allow aircrew to plot their positions precisely over land. He produces the original folder, headed: “Vielle Bombing System: Report on Visit to USA, October 1950, by Group Captain EE Vielle OBE.”

The Americans embraced his ideas, initiating what became the first cruise missile programme; Britain did not. “Richards was on the distribution list,” observes Vielle. Offered double the salary of an air marshal to develop an anti-collision system, Vielle left the RAF aged 43. In 1962 he started on his memoirs. “Then I thought, ‘This is dangerous; I’d better not.’”

Today, 24 years after Bunny’s death, he sees Pat, the middle of their three daughters, once a week, and has 15 great-grandchildren — and “a girlfriend who rings twice a week. A bit of a problem with my prostate, therefore the sex side is rather out of it.”

He gave up skiing “at about 85, and driving at 95”. Cancer meant that “a bit was cut out here” — he touches his right ear.

But his appetite is good. “Nothing like a bit of red meat — very rare.” He laughs, then stops. He describes what happened at Farnborough as “evil”.

The man from the Zeppelin age has opened up the battle on Facebook and YouTube.

“I feel I’ve too short a time, probably, to do much,” he says, “but I’ll do anything I can to get that bloody man Richards — and the others — into public knowledge.”
 
the whole communist conspiracy allegations though just seem rather baroque.

When I googled Jack Richards, Communist, I came across the book preview. There have been quite a few revelations at this late date. Red Cheeks, TSR2, and Miles M52 cancelled by communists. I also read that Geoffrey Pyke, of Habbukak fame, was not just crazy. Harold Wilson, of course, was a communist. I suppose giving RR Nenes to the Soviets doesn't seem at all weird in this context.
 
A few paragraphs from the Kindle version of the book


Drift Sight


To illustrate the crazy situation that I found, I will mention one of the first projects that I scrutinised – the Periscopic Drift Sight – an instrument to enable the navigator to measure drift (and so calculate in what direction and how much the wind was additionally causing the aircraft to move). It had been designed by RAE to meet the requirements laid down by the Operational Requirements branch of Air Ministry some years previously for Bomber and Coastal Command aircraft. A dear old boffin, who was brilliant in his field of optics, proudly showed me the result of his several years work. It was a magnificent instrument and I would dearly have liked to test it in the air. Unfortunately, it was so enormous – nearly as big and heavy as a submarine periscope (on which its design was based) – that the RAF had no aircraft into which it could be fitted. Also, it needed such precision of manufacture that it would have been extremely costly and, under wartime conditions, impossible to produce. The dear old boffin was absolutely devastated when I pointed out these simple facts to him. He showed me the specification on which he had worked so hard to meet, and he pointed out, with tears in his eyes, that it completely fulfilled every detail. It did – but was quite impractical for use in RAF aircraft. I felt terribly sorry for the old boy. But that was only one of the many examples of effort being misdirected, either through lack of knowledge of the practical application or – as I later realised – quite deliberately by Meridith (the former head of the Instrument Department) and Richards (who had succeeded him in that post).

I put the problem of designing something simpler to replace the Periscopic Drift Sight to Lamplough. Within a week, with help from me, he came up with the design of a small gadget that we thought would do the trick. Pritchard arranged for a trial model to be made up in the workshops. Lamplough flew with me to try it out. A second model, weighing about a pound, cheap to manufacture and easily fitted to any aircraft that needed it, was produced two days later. I rushed with it down to Pembroke Dock to try it out on an anti-U boat patrol over the Atlantic in a flying boat, then tried it in a bomber, demonstrated it to other navigation specialists, and recommended its adoption. Quite soon it was in production and being fitted to all appropriate aircraft – the Drift Recorder Mark 2. It did everything that the big Periscopic Drift Sight could do – and more. Within just a few weeks we had a better instrument than that dear old boffin had produced in several years – not only through incorrect practical guidance, but under the directions of Meridith and Richards. Lamplough (quite rightly) got an award for it at the end of the war.


Inertial navigation System


Anything concerning navigation ended up on my desk. Many were useless, some relevant to work we were already starting to do – but one which seemed to me to be brilliant, and a possible solution to all our problems. It proposed an arrangement of fast-spinning gyroscopes which would measure any movement from the originally set position with an accuracy which only decreased slightly with the intervening time – in other words, an inertial navigation system. The principle had been known for years. If only the RAE boffins had previously put their effort into developing that, then the RAF would by then have had few navigational problems and we would have won the war far earlier. Why, I asked Pritchard, had RAE not developed an inertial navigation system for the RAF? “That,” he replied, “is a question you should put to the former heads of the Instrument Department here.” Unfortunately, as Pritchard pointed out to me, now the war had started we could not develop, and then produce, gyros of sufficient accuracy to make it worthwhile. Later, of course, the inertial navigation system became the main (and I believe only) basic system of navigation which was independent of radio and is used worldwide. It would have made such an enormous difference to our ability to bomb targets accurately that the war, had Germany dared to start it, could have been quickly ended.


Distant Reading Compass


One of the main navigation projects at RAE had been, for several years, to try to develop a better type of magnetic compass – one which gave the pilot a steady reading on a dial in the dashboard, instead of him having to peer down and guess the average from a swinging needle by his side. The design, however, of the Distant Reading (“ DR”) Compass was based on a “Heath Robinson” idea which, in practice, would obviously be unsuitable. The entries in my flying log book record that I spent many hours flight testing it in various aircraft, which confirmed its inferiority compared with other designs; but Richards insisted on continuing with it. Other designs – mainly American ones – were far superior and immediately available. But through sheer momentum, and the evil influence of Richards, the RAE version had been adopted for most of our aircraft, thus making Bomber and Coastal Commands far less efficient than they should have been.
 

hammo1j

Donor
Fascinating stuff especially the espionage!

I suppose the question divides itself into 2

1. Was the strategic bombing doctrine correct?
2. Given this was the strategy how to best persue it.

In answering question 2 there is one obvious achievable goal which would have been an earlier Lancaster without having to go through the Manchester first.

It seems strange that, given this failure of coupled engines, the Germans persisted with their He177.

If a coupled engine could be made to work was there really that much advantage. I can only see less drag. Any ideas?
 
My two cents worth:
1 - strategic bombing was one of things that defeated Axis countries, and it could be argued that it contributed to the defeat of Poland and other non-axis countires. However, the startegic bombing of 1943-45 was very different thing than what was forecasted in 1930s.
Germany probably used greater percentage of it's budget to defent against Allied air forces and bombers in particular, than the percentage of British and especially US budget allocated for strategic bombers. Toss in the prevoius worth of now destroyed asstes and it looks like defender spent more than attacker - not good for defender.
2 - The 4-engined bomber probably gives the best for bang, for ww2 technology. Once the RAF starts with night bombing, every effort should been invested in the bombers that are as fast as possible, sacrificing the turrets as much as possible.

The coupled engines were not failure, the problems with DB 606 were mostly a thing of installation. The DB 610 was a trouble free in service, the V-3420 didn't gave too much of headache, too. The He 177 with plain 4 engines should've been designed, instead with coupled engines, gives a better 'cushion' in case one type of engines encounteres the problems. Does not need extra-large prop, the U/C strut can be shorter & stiffer. One lucky shot has less chances to kill half of engine power (the halves of the DB coupled engines could be run separately), so less problems with asymetric thrust.
 

Deleted member 1487

My two cents worth:
1 - strategic bombing was one of things that defeated Axis countries, and it could be argued that it contributed to the defeat of Poland and other non-axis countires. However, the startegic bombing of 1943-45 was very different thing than what was forecasted in 1930s.
Germany probably used greater percentage of it's budget to defent against Allied air forces and bombers in particular, than the percentage of British and especially US budget allocated for strategic bombers. Toss in the prevoius worth of now destroyed asstes and it looks like defender spent more than attacker - not good for defender.
In terms of the US you're right, but the British spent a huge sum on their strategic bombers and then only were able to do so because of its LL supply. In terms of its overall spending they probably spent close to what the Germans did on air defense in terms of a percentage of their war economy. What was probably most effective in terms of percentage response to percentage spent on offensive weaponry was the V-1 missile and the Uboat. The Allies spent a lot more countering those weapons than the Germans invested in them as part of their war economy.

If you want to include the destruction strategic bombers wrought on Germany, then yes the British invested far less into strategic bombing in terms of budget than they inflicted in damage. For the US it was even less costly for them as a weapon as part of their overall output and did huge damage as a result. Overall strategic bombing was money well spent by the Allies, though it could have been done more efficiently at less cost to the British in particular had they opted out of just city bombing and dehousing and instead gone after more important targets.
 
When you compare a pair of coupled engines (e.g. Avro Manchester) versus 4 separate engines (e.g. Avro Lancaster) the 4- engines require lighter wing spars, because you can distribute the weight of the engines more evenly along the wing span.
Distributed weight only becomes a disadvantage when an engine quits an asymmetric thrust tries to yaw the airplane. Then the pilot has his hands full trying to keep the airplane flying straight and maintaining enough airspeed to keep enough air flowing past the rudder, etc.
 
When you compare a pair of coupled engines (e.g. Avro Manchester) versus 4 separate engines (e.g. Avro Lancaster)

Strictly speaking, the Vulture wasn't a coupled engine, but rather an X engine. One could argue that a bomber powered by 2 powerful twin-row radials could be compared with one powered by 4 lesser single-row engines. The Lancaster and Halifax were designed to be two different airplanes that turned out to be better than they would have been but we'll never know what they would have been had an effective and timely twin-engine option, been available. Both twin and four-engine arrangements have advantages and disadvantages and both can be designed well or poorly.
 
Top