Much has been written about RAF Bomber Command in WWII, especially the mass night bombing raids over Germany.
Somewhat less well known, at least here in the US, are the exploits of the RAF’s light and medium bombers. Having recently done some research on them, all I can say is “These people were nuts”.
Before the Battle of Britain, even before Dunkirk, Bomber Command started taking the fight to Germany. The results were initially less than spectacular.
At the time, they were primarily equipped with Bristol Blenheims and ironically named Fairey Battle.
The Battle was a single-engine light bomber introduced in the late 1930s. Like many 1930s designs, it was already obsolete at the beginning of WWII.
The Blenheim was a twin-engine bomber with a crew of three. A mid 1930s design, it was also hopelessly obsolete by 1940. Like the Battle, its greatest drawback was almost total lack of defensive armament. The Blenheim was defended by a single .303 caliber machine gun in a dorsal turret. They were completely undefended from below, but they usually flew so low that nothing was going to get underneath them.
The .303 was essentially the same round as an infantryman’s rifle and far less powerful than the American .50 caliber machine guns which our bombers were armed with.
The .303 would go on to dog most British bombers (and some of their fighters) throughout the war. It just lacked the range and hitting power of a .50 caliber, or better yet a 20mm cannon. Towards the end of the war the British finally started equipping their bombers with American .50s.
I’m guessing it was largely a matter of logistics. The British had a lot of .303 left over from World War I and the United States probably needed all the .50s we could produce initially for our own forces.
The Blenheim also carried a relatively small bomb load of four 250 pound bombs. Even when one managed to hit its target it was only going to do so much damage. My B-52 carried more than 50 times that.
Still, it was what they had, and they made do.
The light bombers frequently operated at insanely low altitudes. To avoid detection, they crossed the English Channel at altitudes of 50 feet or less. The lead aircraft normally flew at about 50 feet and the following aircraft in the “Vic” (v-shaped formation) stacked successively lower to avoid the wake turbulence. That meant the last guy was pretty much skimming the surface.
Over land they operated literally at treetop level, occasionally having to climb to miss power lines. Except for when they didn’t miss the power lines, or each other. A percentage of them were lost simply due to running into things. Quite a few were also lost due to bird strikes. Hitting a flock of gulls at 250 mph could ruin your day.
I initially wondered how they were able to drop “slicks” (regular high altitude bombs) from low altitude without blowing themselves up. When you drop a regular bomb from low altitude if flies formation with you until it hits the target and blows both of you up.
The fairly elegant solution was to use 11-second delayed fuses to give the bomber time to get away before the explosion. When attacking ships the bombs were also equipped with armor piercing noses.
They took a toll on German shipping, but the loss rates were horrific. German cargo ships were usually escorted by “flak ships” and patrol boats which could put up a wall of lead that the bombers had to fly through. There wasn’t much you could do on the bomb run except hope your luck would hold out. Frequently it didn’t.
Reading about the loss rates on these sorties almost made me physically ill. 50% losses were not uncommon. If the crews saw 11-second delayed bombs on the schedule they knew they were going low, and might not be coming back. If you got hit at such low altitude bailing out was not an option.
One raid on a German airfield near Brussels saw 11 out of 12 Blenheims shot down. The other one turned back early. That pilot didn’t survive long enough to face courts martial. He was killed on a subsequent mission.
To survive a tour in Blenheims was nothing short of miraculous.
The Blenheims were supplemented by lend-lease Lockheed Venturas. The Ventura was developed from an airliner, which has never really worked well. Airliners don’t make very good bombers (or vice-versa). The RAF crews thought the only thing it did that the Blenheim couldn’t was burn twice as much gas. Bomber Command didn’t find the Ventura particularly well suited to the daylight bombing mission and they were eventually transferred to Coastal Command. It was probably better suited to that mission, as the US Navy also used a version of the Ventura as a patrol bomber.
The badly outmatched Blenheims and Venturas were mostly replaced by Douglas Bostons. In case you've never heard of a “Boston”, it was what the Brits called an A-20 Havoc. The Boston was fast, maneuverable and better protected than the poor Blenheim. Still, daylight low-level raids were risky and they took their share of losses.
Okay, time to talk about the Mosquito even though it really deserves its own diary. I feel like I’m not doing it justice here.
Writing about the Mosquito is like writing about the Spitfire or the P-51. What can I really add to something that has already been covered so well by others?
The Mosquito was the plane that did everything. Recon, day bomber, night bomber, fighter bomber, night fighter, torpedo bomber even a fast VIP transport. Day and night, the Mosquito roamed into Germany hitting targets as far away as Berlin.
Constructed mostly of plywood, the “wooden wonder” was powered by two of the wonderful Merlin engines. The bomber and recon versions carried no defensive armament, relying purely on speed. The fighter-bomber version carried guns and cannons in the nose plus an assortment of bombs and rockets.
I used to think that the Mosquito was so fast that it couldn’t be intercepted. This was not the case, however. If something like an FW-190 started with a height advantage, it could chase down a Mosquito. The Mossie’s great maneuverability, however, made it a difficult target.
Despite flying incredibly dangerous low-level missions, the Mosquito had the lowest loss rate of any RAF bomber. From the standpoint of damage inflicted on the enemy versus cost, the Mosquito was much more effective than the RAF “heavies”.
The Germans so respected the Mosquito that shooting one down was counted as two kills. They even had fighter units specifically assigned to hunting them.
It makes me wonder what would have happened if the British had built a lot more of these instead of the 4-engine heavies. Assuming they didn’t run out of plywood, and pilots. The RAF had enough of a pilot shortage that even a 4-engine Lancaster flew with a single pilot.
The US Army Air Forces evaluated the Mosquito and (wrongly in my opinion) decided not to pursue it. We had no shortage of aluminum and considered wooden construction to be obsolete. US pilots who flew both preferred the Mosquito to the P-38, at least as a night fighter. Hap Arnold was very impressed with the aircraft and considered it to be a mistake not to adopt it.
Just imagine if these things had been cranked out of US factories in the kind of numbers we were capable of.
I’ll let Herr Goering himself have the final word:
In 1940 I could at least fly as far as Glasgow in most of my aircraft, but not now! It makes me furious when I see the Mosquito. I turn green and yellow with envy. The British, who can afford aluminum better than we can, knock together a beautiful wooden aircraft that every piano factory over there is building, and they give it a speed which they have now increased yet again. What do you make of that? There is nothing the British do not have. They have the geniuses and we have the nincompoops. After the war is over I'm going to buy a British radio set – then at least I'll own something that has always worked.*
*Goering obviously never drove my Jaguar XJ-12.
Overall, Bomber Command’s loss rate was nothing short of horrific. No less than 44% of RAF bomber crews died during the war. A World War I infantryman had a better chance of survival. Even the US 8th Air Force crews had a much higher survival rate.
I’m not sure why that is exactly. I’m guessing that US aircrews eventually got rotated out of combat while the Brits were in it for the duration due to their manpower shortage. There were (a few) people who started out flying Blenheims in 1940 and managed to end the war flying Mosquitos in 1945.
Out of a total of 125,000 aircrew in Bomber Command, the butcher’s bill for the war was:
55,573 killed
8,403 wounded
9,838 POW
Throw in another 5,327 killed in training and it’s tough to wrap your brain around it.
Now that Fascism seems to be making a comeback around the world, it’s worth remembering the sacrifices that were made to get rid of it the first time around.