P51

[Voyager]

Foz, if any plane could have done it, then the first two Schweinfurt's would not have been unescorted raids.

In large part, the reason the British switched to night bombing was because they couldn't escort their bombers, and they weren't willing, or even able to take the sort of casualties that unescorted daylight bombing incurred. We really couldn't either, but we had just started and had more reserves to go through before we started to hit the wall.

The Mustang has three time the internal tankage of the Spitfire, and its wet hardpoints were stressed for 1000lbs, about 150 gallons, theoretically, if/when drop tanks that could hold that much were developed. I believe the Spitfire could carry a ~100 gallon conformal tank under the centerline, but it was nondroppable, contained more fuel than the plane's maximum internal load, and significantly degraded performance.

It's not as simple as add tanks until the wings fall off, and to pretend that it is, is roughly equal to saying any plane could turn in on a Zero; true only under such tightly limited conditions as to render the statement no better than false.