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That "classical" aproach to the bombers self protecting capacity is not that fair at all. If Germans tried to take down American bombers as any other single flying aircraft, they will probably got serious losses. Even if they look dumb on Hollywood films, they played smart with their resources, and instead of making extremely daring attacks on bombers, by single engined fighters, they picked them with heavy two engined fighters and with long range devices. Those bombers forced to fall back, were then to be finished by single engined fighters.
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This ignores the fact that the Luftwaffe had already demonstrated that they had heavily armed, long range heavy fighters like the Bf 110 and the Ju-88C, and had demonstrated that they were particularly useful against bombers, long before anyone came up with underwing rocket canisters. In fact, we could consider the American P-38 the ultimate WWII expression of the twin engine, high speed bomber destroyer concept (it was originally built to USAAF requirements for an interceptor rather than for a fighter), and the American bomber generals were certainly well aware of the Lightning’s capabilities, and the basic military principal that if you can do it, chances are very good that the enemy can do it too.
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So, the doctrine wasn`t that wrong, it just generated new tactics, and new weapons that made this doctrine obsolete. Actually US bombers faired fairly well at he begining. Germans just happened to readjust faster than expected. When escorts started coming with the bomber formations, single engined fighters were not as good as the bi-motors on the bomber killing task, but will have some chance against escorts, where bi-motors would have none.
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I would agree that the high altitude massed formation heavy daylight bomber doctrine would have worked very well against Bf 109E-1s over a Germany without an early warning radar system, but those days were long past by the time the 8th Air Force even arrived in England in 1942.
The US bombers fared well at the beginning because the JGs had never fired at such
big targets before, and because they if anything
over-respected the defensive fire from the gunners. It didn’t take them long to figure out how to estimate the range or re-set their convergences and recognize that for all the tracers flying past their ears that they were rarely hit before they could do serious damage and veered away. Even so, they recognized that being hit was a serious thing and when they were hit, they returned to base (unlike certain ai routines I could mention). If anything, the early confusion and hesitancy by the German fighters served to sucker the bomber groups into overconfidence and the early fiascoes over Germany
before they had adequate numbers according to their own doctrines, much less adequate fighter escorts.
By that time, the Germans had said to themselves, “Hey, we have all these
zerstörers and trained aircrew for them; they may not be very useful against enemy fighters, but they will be deadly to
viermots. Let’s kick some Yankee air pirate ass.”
The reality was that long after the bomber generals’ doctrine was nullified, the bloody-minded commitment to ever bigger formations continued for reasons of ‘face’; if you look at what happened every time an unescorted US heavy bomber formation was detected and attacked by single engine fighters, the casualty figures were heavily in favor of the fighters, period.
Luftwaffe Over Germany authors Caldwell & Muller reported several instances late in 1944 where bomber formations would miss their rendezvous with their escorts and were caught by even ‘light’ fighter formations of Bf 109Gs without gun pods and were decimated while the fighters got away with much fewer losses—and this was with the supposedly less capable ‘new growth’ generation of LW fighter pilots.
In any case, being hit by defensive fire is more a matter of the numbers of guns being fired in your direction than it is any one (or five) gunner's accuracy or skill. The closer you get, the more gunner skill enters into the equation, but
individual accuracy did not become a factor unless the range was very short (as in under 150m) and the speed difference and angles were minimal.
cheers
horseback