De Havilland’s new light bomber and long-range reconnaissance aircraft, the Mosquito, was, because of its high speed (almost unmatched by German fighters), operational ceiling, and range, seen by some of the military as ideal for the selective attacks they were aiming at; its cheap wooden construction meant a saving of materials in short supply, so it could be mass-produced. The Air Staff, however, took a sceptical view of the Mosquito and, not really knowing what to do with it when it came into frontline service in March 1943, at first used it solely for long-range reconnaissance. Soon 2 Bomber Group had two squadrons of Mosquitoes, one of which was used against Cologne and Essen in late May/early August 1942.107 On 19 September 1942 a Mosquito even made a first raid on Berlin, without its presence there being noticed. On 25 September four Mosquitoes, one of which was lost, attacked the Gestapo headquarters in Oslo, to lend the Norwegians moral support; most of the damage was, however, done to the house on the opposite side of the street.108 While the economic warfare ministry, encouraged by a few precision-raid successes, drew up lists of individual targets to be destroyed in daylight precision attacks, Bomber Command told the Mosquito squadrons that their main task was not the destruction of individual industrial targets, but the breaking of enemy morale. In setting targets, more thought was given to the built-up areas themselves than to the factories these contained although Mosquitoes had not been designed for area bombing.109 On 6 December 93 twin-engined bombers, including ten Mosquitoes, flying low by daylight, hit the Philips works in Eindhoven with 60 t of bombs, causing severe damage to a factory whose output was important for electronic warfare; but at 15 total losses and 53 aircraft damaged, the cost had been high.110
A daylight raid on the molybdenum mines at Knaben in Norway on 3 March 1943, with ten Mosquitoes, was more successful. For the loss of only one aircraft, the site was so badly damaged that production was halted for about a year and the Wehrmacht economic staff was very fearful for the supply of specially hardened steel.118 Particularly successful was a long-range attack on the Zeiss works at Jena on 27 May 1943, by only 11 out of 14 Mosquitoes that took off. Five of these were, however, lost. It was one of the deepest penetrations by this light bomber into Germany. In spite of heavy flak, only 24 high-explosive bombs of 225 kg each caused a 90 per cent loss of production. Seven civilians in the town were killed, a further seven badly and 47 lightly injured.119 Remarkably, there is no mention of this raid in the official British account of the bomber offensive by Webster and Frankland, and Harris in his Despatch did not waste a single word on it. He had a deep-rooted aversion to precision attacks of this kind against what he termed ‘panacea targets’. It is true that, in the opinion of the Ministry of Economic Warfare and secret service experts, hitting these ought to inflict paralysing losses on the enemy’s war supplies; in his view, however, their effects were invariably made up for in some other way, thanks to German inventiveness, and he regarded them as superfluous.120
He did not, therefore, intend to continue using Mosquitoes as daylight precision bombers, the role for which they were ideally suited. He transferred 2 (light) Bomber Group, whose mode of operation was ‘so different’ from the rest of Bomber Command, via the air defence organization to 2 Tactical Air Force, of which it formed the nucleus; the two Mosquito squadrons of 8 (Pathfinder) Bomber Group he allocated to night attacks, although the aircraft had proved itself by day.121 Naturally, they did equally well as OBOE aircraft at night. In the twelve months up to their transfer, the Mosquitoes had flown 726 sorties with 48 (6.6 per cent) losses, while the Lancaster attack on MAN at Augsburg alone cost over 48 per cent total losses, and that of the light bombers against Eindhoven 16 per cent. Total losses in the Lancaster raids on the Ruhr dams were 42 per cent. In making these comparisons, it must be borne in mind that the loss of a Mosquito meant that of only two aircrew and two engines, while losing a Lancaster or Stirling cost seven men and four engines. Up toNovember 1943 a further 819 Mosquitoes were used for nuisance raids and for setting off frequent air-raid warnings, and for diversionary or feint attacks to split up the German air defence, as well as for defensive sorties or precision raids. They suffered only 13—that is, 1.6 per cent—losses. In the following period to the end of March 1944, only ten, or 0.4 per cent, of the 2,034 Mosquitoes in action were lost.122
In 1944 some versions of the Mosquito could even carry a 1,800-kg bomb all the way to Berlin. Undoubtedly the light strategic bomber units, consisting of Mosquitoes with their aircrew-saving speed and precision, would, as Bowyer has written, have been able to achieve even greater daylight successes and done ‘so much more for victory’, had the tactical development they already had at the start been taken further, and ‘had 2 Group been equipped entirely with them’. This view was shared by the planners in the Ministry of Aircraft Production, one of whom, Sir Alec Cairncross, wrote: ‘The Mosquito might very well have surpassed the record of the Lancaster in terms of damage done per hour of work in building it’;123 it was much cheaper to build and delivered its bombs on individual targets with greater accuracy, while the Lancaster could bomb only broad areas, which was far from producing such a decisive effect. The building of heavy bombers should, he said, have been left to the Americans, since their four-engined machines were equipped for the more accurate daylight bombing.
The Air Ministry had, on the contrary, given the building of heavy bombers ‘overriding priority’, and showed no interest in the light Mosquito bomber. Although almost as many Mosquitoes (6,710) were built during the war as
Lancasters (7,372), most of the early ones were used as fighters.124 Harris gave the following, not very convincing, explanation for neglecting the Mosquito as a light bomber in favour of the heavy Lancaster
The decisive factor was the supply of pilots; the heavy bomber carries about three times the load of the medium type [the Mosquito], but both aircraft only need one pilot. It is certain that even with the whole resources of the Empire Training Scheme we should never have got enough pilots to fly enough medium and light bombers to drop the bomb load that was dropped by the heavies. And, of course, the problem of concentrating the bomb load, if it had been carried by many light bombers instead of by a comparatively few heavies, would have been insoluble.125
This argument gives the impression of reasoning in economic terms, and ignores the fact that the far more accurate Mosquitoes needed far fewer bombs than the heavy Lancaster to destroy a target, so that the number of pilots needed cannot logically be set against the absolute tonnage of bombs. The thought that more accurate bomb-aiming would mean fewer civilian casualties did not even cross Harris’s mind. The supremacy of the bomber doctrine, with its area attacks on industrialized centres of population, once again becomes clear.