What if nobody thought to try the Mustang airframe with the Rolls Royce Merlin engine?
The P51 exists as a decent low-level fighter and a not particularly good ground attack plane with its original Allison engine.
Would the US have ramped up production of another fighter to fill the escort role? I would guess the Hellcat just wouldn’t be fast enough and I don’t know much of anything about its high altitude performance. Could they have pushed up the development and manufacture of the Bearcat or the Tigercat? What about the Corsair? I know it was considerably faster. Did it have the range? Did any of the later British designs have the performance/range?
Would the Army Air Force have stopped daylight bombing because of unacceptable casualties?
The Hellcat, Tigercat, Bearcat and Corsair are all navy aircraft. The P-51 wasn’t a navy aircraft, so I don’t see why it would get replaced by one.
If the P-51 never got it’s new engines, then maybe the P-47 and P-38 would have taken over the long range escort role. Perhaps modified with a larger internal tank, or bigger drop tanks if needed. Though the P-38 had pretty long range to begin with.
Given the Allied cooperation in technology and the fact that we were already making the veneer for the Mosquito in Wisconsin I think a version of that aircraft would have worked.
Yes, I know they were Navy planes, but I doubt that would have been an obstacle of they were needed in Europe. Presumably they would have just cranked out more and given them to the army. I was asking whether any of them had the necessary performance to fill the role.
The P47 was better suited to ground attack then high level escort, and apparently didn’t have the necessary range even with drop tanks. The P38s? Well, I don’t know. The best thing I heard said about them was the with two engines they could get pretty shot up and still make it home. While that’s great for the pilot, it doesn’t say a whole lot for its ability to outperform the German fighters.
No, the Mosquito was an excellent night fighter, and under some conditions could outrun the opposition, but it didn’t have the maneuverability to confidently take on the Me109 or Fw190.
“In Europe in the critical first three months of 1944, when the German aircraft industry and Berlin were heavily attacked, the P-47 shot down more German fighters than did the P-51 (570 out of 873), and shot down approximately 900 of the 1,983 claimed during the first six months of 1944.[24]”
Looks to me like other options were available. The P51 was very useful but not irreplaceable.
The P-38 had the range and maneuverability. (it performed great in the Pacific against the nimble Japanese fighters). The cold climate in Europe was havoc on some systems though…needed decent cockpit heat, for one. With improvements, it would have done very well. Most things were much better in the late Js or Ls.
The P-47 was outstanding at altitude. The main problem was range…they made it better with drop tanks, and the P-47N added fuel tanks in the wings which fixed that entirely.
We’re talking about high altitude bomber escorts. They’re not suppose to wander all over the sky chasing anything. And you’ll note that I said a version of the Mosquito. There was talk of hanging more powerful engines on it. Like any wartime plane they were modified as needed and the Mosquito was already a fairly fast and high flying plane capable of long range flight. Upgrade to Griffon engines, tweak the control surfaces and assign another model number to it.
As far as fighting FW109’s there were capable of doing that without modification:
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The FB Mk VI proved durable in dogfights with single-engine fighter aircraft. Retaining the forward firing armament Mosquito FB Mk VIs of No. 143 Squadron RAF were engaged by 30 Focke-Wulf Fw 190s from Jagdgeschwader 5 on 15 January 1945. In the ensuing battle the Mosquitos lost five aircraft but shot down five Fw 190s in return as well as sinking an armed trawler and two merchant ships.**
As an escort plane they could have traded bomb load for more cannons and made the plane deadly. Imagine 4 cannons and 8 guns bearing down on you.
Some misconceptions here, although it’s hard to come by accurate information through the thick gloss of romanticism that overlays our memories.
The reason Navy planes wouldn’t have done as well is the sturdier landing gear required for carrier service apparently made a significant performance impact – a HUGE impact in the knife-edge world of competing for air superiority. For example, let’s use the F6F Hellcat vs the P-47 Thunderbolt. Both used the same engine, the Pratt & Whitney R2800 Double Wasp. Given that performance figures are pretty hard to pin down, indulge me in some rough numbers:
Ceiling
P-47: 43,000 ft (wiki)
F6F: 37,300 ft (wiki), 35,000 ft (chuckhawks)
Radius of action
P-47: 800 mi (wiki), 1800 mi one way (both sources)
F6F: 945 mi (wiki), 1,530 mi one way (wiki), 1495 mi (chuckhawks)
That’s a substantial difference militarily, from the same power plant. Much of the reason had to do with naval modifications. Generally land-based fighters always have better stats than carrier planes of the same period.
The P-47 was designed as a high-level air-superiority fighter. Here’s a fun fact: the Jug was regarded as the most maneuverable fighter at extreme altitudes. Yeah, surprised me too…maybe that huge engine and great supercharging system gave it energy other couldn’t match? It was later used for ground attack for four main reasons – its famous durability, its heavy armament, the fact that it cost four times as much fuel to operate as a P-51, and the lack of Luftwaffe air opposition reducing the need for air superiority…not because it was bad at air superiority.
IMHO the P-38 Lightning would have been used in lieu of the Mustang. The first ones in Europe had some trouble with the BF-109s mostly because of faulty tactical employment – iirc they didn’t realize the 109s had such great zoom climb, and Lightnings, used to exploiting their own great climb rate, tended to get into trouble before they changed tactics. The Lightning was faster than most opponents, out-dove everything except maybe a P-47, and was discovered to be famously maneuverable at low altitudes. The Germans were soon calling the better-employed '38s “Fork-Tailed Devils.” The centerline guns of the Lightning were another advantage; despite having only 4 .5os and a balky cannon, the plane was famously hard-hitting because the bullets didn’t fan out and disperse; the pilots called the gun suite “the buzz saw.”
P-38s with drop tanks were already escorting missions fairly deep into Germany. More effort could have been put into extending their range if the '51 han’t come along. Late-model Lightnings were fearsome aircraft (especially after they added the dive brakes to control the compressibility problem) and would have done a fine job of erasing the Luftwaffe.
What the Mustang really brought to the table was twice as many aircraft per engine as the Lightning, one quarter the operating cost of the Thunderbolt, somewhat more speed than either (but only narrowly) and substantially better range.
An aircraft that can fight as well or better than the existing ones, but that uses substantially less avgas (and thus less precious shipping capacity) and can affect a greater area of the enemy’s territory right now (even if exiting aircraft can be modified soon) will become the darling of any planner.
Make no mistake, the Mustang was a fantastic combatant, but the late-war contemporaneous sister aircraft were almost equally formidable.
The other advantage of centerline guns are extended range of fire versus a converging pattern.
From Wiki:
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A Lightning could reliably hit targets at any range up to 1,000 yd (910 m), whereas other fighters had to pick a single convergence range between 100 and 250 yd (230 m). **
Any help? Here is a Lanc being flown at treetop height over Derwent reservoir by a man with balls of steel. You’ll need the sound well up and won’t hear it for long, but may find it worth the wait.
Follow-up: Lancaster and Vulcan flypast. And the universe miraculously doesn’t implode from the accumulated cool.
Also: People seem to forget the Spitfire. They didn’t have much range, but they were excellent fighters. They held their own against Me-109s during the Battle of Britain and early part of the war. The Mk. IX was a great improvement over the Mk. V, which itself was an improvement over the BoB Mk. Is and Mk. IIs. The Mk. IX was a match for the FW-190. Later Marks were even more capable, especially when they got the Griffon engines.
Without the P-51, I think the P-47 would have continued to do its job, which it was very good at. I’m not convinced that the P-38 could have taken on the role. But it was the only U.S. fighter that could fly home after losing an engine. The P-80 came too late to see combat in WWII, but it might have had not one crashed in England during a demonstration flight. Had the war lasted longer, it would have taken on all comers.
The importance of long range escort was so great that the Allies would have come up with a solution. If the P-51 wasn’t the solution, they would have developed something else - modifying the P-38 or P-47, a Navy plane, the Tempest, the Mosquito, a modified Spitfire, something. It is a need that would not have gone unfulfilled. The greatest combined aerial warfare effort in the history of the world wouldn’t have just given up on this point.
And as has been pointed out, what’s important is not so much that you have a fighter that definitively outperforms the 109 and 190, but just that there are fighters with the bombers all the way there and back. German fighters that are busy with your escort fighters aren’t attacking the bombers.
According to a program I saw about WWII fighters, the Spitfire’s wings weren’t structurally strong enough to hang fuel tanks or bombs on, so while they could certainly do they job, they couldn’t get to the place where the job needed to be done.
The P-80 came too late to see combat in WWII, but it might have had not one crashed in England during a demonstration flight. Had the war lasted longer, it would have taken on all comers.