The Area Bombing directive was, in my opinion, an almost war losing move. Bomber command alone lost 55,000 crew flying death traps with comparatively little return. Even judged on it’s own morally dubious objective to kill as many Germans as possible (however understandable at the time), if you take out Hamburg in late 43 and Dresden in Feb 45, and 3 other raids in 45 in the Ruhr, you are left with under 2 Germans civilians for each RAF crew killed, injured or captured. You had a better chance of climbing out of a trench on the Somme and coming home than you did working for Bomber Command.
It was only when Harris was told to start taking out infrastructure systematically on the run up to Overlord, that the Mosquito was used extensively for it’s original, primary, design purpose, i.e. a fast bomber, as oppose to performing every role imaginable to help the area bombing directive and anything else we could get it to do.
The RAFs own report after the war estimated that the mossie was almost 5 times more effective than heavy bombers. I dont know if this figure factors in the following
- lowest casualty rate of any bomber
- much cheaper to build. I cant find a figure, but a lanc was £7,700 I think, I’d like to know how many mossies you could build for that. The extensive use of wood meant that you could use the ally on something else obviously, and also you can use the thousands of skilled wood craftsmen too old to fight but plenty young enough to make stuff.
- actually uses less fuel to drop the same bomb load as a b-17
- and is so fast doing it that they regularly flew two sorties a day!. (and still use less crew than one heavy bomber sortie)
There is also the ability to bomb targets simply inaccessible from altitude, e.g. sticking a bomb in a railway tunnel which they did regularly. I accept that, if we’d gone out to stick a bomb through the front door of every building carrying a swastika in occupied Europe, that they’d be sticking up more barrage balloons. But they’d still have to get around to doing that, and we’d have done spectacular help to the resistance in doing it.
I also accept the negating factor that the mossie was the tool of choice for anyone with squadron leader in his name, and hence you’d expect better stats than ackack fodder in a halifax. But that in itself tells a story. We’ll never know if highball would have brought those dams down but I know which plane I’d rather be trying to do the job in. I read somewhere that a mossie was once accidentally loaded with 10,000lbs and still took off, so in theory I guess it could have carried Upkeep (the larger bouncing bomb used for Chastise).
In my view, it’s not “what if” (we’d built more than the 7,000 that we did), but “why the hell not”. We (Britain and the US) built over 60,000 heavy and medium bombers. I guess you could have built at least 150,000 mosquitoes with the same effort. Just double what we built, an extra 7,000 deployed in a relentless 24*7 onslaught, would have left the Germans running a guerilla war, and cost less of our own lives.
The obvious culprit is the Area Bombing Directive. This came right from the top, and while Harris was obviously the front man with his famous “well I say, no one has ever tried it” remark in his cine address, I am afraid Churchill has to take a significant amount of the blame. His own scientific advisors falsified data as to the effectiveness of the German campaign on British towns in order to justify the policy.
Perhaps another aspect ironically working against it was it’s sheer versatility. It’s hard to think of anything this plane couldnt do better than almost anything else. A preposterous sounding claim perhaps, but I reckon you could have even towed the gliders in with it. I guess, given the number of jobs it was doing, claiming that this is even 5 times more effective as a bomber than the mighty beasts tasked with the job, must have sounded too much. I think, given the factors I listed above, it was between 1 and 2 whole orders of magnitude a more effective weapon than a Lanc. That has to be regarded as an almighty cock up.
But I am going to have a dig at our allies on this as the biggest failing. USAF didnt drop a single bomb from a mossie. And yet American pilots were forbidden from flying the Lightning next to it (which of course was a long range fighter) . So if you were so embarrassed about how this wooden wonder, a bomber, outperformed your (perhaps 2nd) best fighter plane, why didnt you instruct your industrialists to start building these (despite their protests) and save tens of thousands of American lives. And that’s just in the air.
Ironically, but in a way pleasingly, the only one flying these days is in the States. Indeed I have read very many glowing appraisals by Americans. It seems to be better appreciated by U.S. historians these days than by Brits.
The Mosquito was in my opinion, as you will gather, the greatest “get lost” weapon anyone had in the entire horrific shooting match. It’s a bloody national disgrace we havent got any flying.
