[Milsurplus] Fwd: Re: "Lancaster" - no copilot

[Mark K3MSB]

Hi Ken --

I found the following:  “There were two dangerous and connected fallacies
underlying Bomber Command's confidence in it's ability to win the war
through such a campaign of bombing. The first was the belief that escorted
bombers could survive in daylight against fighter defenses by using their
multiple guns, mutual fire-support between aircraft, and their speed. Even
in July 1939 this policy was being questioned by the Commander-in-Chief of
the bomber force, Sir Edgar Ludlow-Hewitt. Gunners, he noted, “have no real
confidence in their ability to use this equipment [powered turrets]
effectively, and captains and crews have little confidence in the ability
of the gunners to protect them”....Even though some officers blamed the
losses on poor formation-keeping and flak rather than fighters – Harris, by
January 1940 in command of 5 group, still believed after these losses that
three bombers in company “considered themselves capable of taking on
anything” - the fact that daylight operations were near suicidal was slowly
driven home” “ From “AVRO Lancaster by Bill Sweetman

Looking from the other side though,  the British did not employ the large
formations that the USAAF did.    The large formations did provide better
defensive / overlapping fire cover than occurred with a three ship formation

The British got their hats handed to them when they tried to use the B-17C
in an offensive capacity.   Not only was the delivered C model (the British
called it "Fortress I") not suitable for combat,  they did not employ the
suggested large formations - because they didn't have enough planes.  Aside
from this causing the British to incorrectly conclude that the B-17 was an
inferior bomber, the results reinforced their belief that daylight bombing
was too costly.   Good discussion of this in "Flying Fortress" by Edward
Jablonski.

73 Mark K3MSB

On Wed, Oct 4, 2017 at 12:54 PM, Kenneth G. Gordon <kgordon2006 at frontier.com
> wrote:

> On 4 Oct 2017 at 12:27, Mark K3MSB wrote:
>
> > My point was that I don't think the Lancaster was developed as a night
> > bomber;  it transitioned to that role as a result of the loss rate for
> > daylight bombing.
>
> From my reading, that is absolutely true.
>
> Ken W7EKB
>
> ---
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