Flying Fortresses

DESCRIPTION: "The Yanks were flying Fortresses at 20,000 feet, (x3) With bags of ammunition and a tweensy-weensy bomb." "The RAF were flying Lancasters at zero-zero feet, With fuck-all ammunition and a bloody great bomb."
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1967 (collected by Dr. Kevin Bucknall; see the SuppTrad text)
KEYWORDS: war technology derivative flying
FOUND IN: Canada
REFERENCES (1 citation):
Hopkins-SongsFromTheFrontAndRear, p. 61, "Flying Fortresses" (1 text, 1 tune)
ST Hopk061 (Full)
Roud #29394
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "John Brown's Body" (tune) and references there
cf. "A Fortress Song" (subject of the B-17 bomber)
cf. "The Fortress Song" (subject of the B-17 bomber)
ALTERNATE TITLES:
One Little Teensy-Weensy Bomb
The B-17
NOTES [1734 words]: This British version of this is a comparison of two heavy (4-engine) bombers used in the European Theater of World War II, the British Avro Lancaster and the American B-17 "Flying Fortress." (The American version drops the reference to the Lancaster and says "The B-17 will climb to 20,000 feet (x3), But it'll only carry one little teensy, weensy bomb." I strongly suspect it is secondary.)
In essence, the argument of the song is that the Flying Fortresses, because they had so many defensive guns, couldn't carry a very large bomb load. The Lancaster, with less defensive weaponry, had a much larger bomb capacity. What's more, it suggests that the Americans flew very high (meaning they couldn't aim their bombs very well) and the Lancasters very close to the ground (so they had better aim).
The second claim is pretty marginal. The Lancasters occasionally flew low -- they had to, on some occasions such as the great Dambusters raid in which they took out several important Germany hydro power plants (Tubbs, pp. 83-95). And when they dropped mine into the sea, they had to drop them from a height that would not destroy the mines (Dunmore/Carter, p. 250). They also started flying low during the work-up to the Normandy invasion, when they were used to knock out precise targets like transport hubs (Dunmore/Carter, pp. 236-238, etc.). But mostly the Lancasters, like the B-17s, flew high -- they were engaged in nighttime bombing, which meant that they had to fly high lest they crash into something! Plus it took longer for a fighter that started on the ground to reach interception height if they were flying high. Only at the end of the war, when the Germans had almost run out of fighters and the Allies had developed the P-51 Mustang fighter which had enough range to fly to Berlin, did the Lancasters start flying over Germany primarily in daylight (Tubbs, p. 128) and so were in position to fly low. (The advent of the P-51 was so shocking that Marshall Göring bawled out the subordinate who first reported fighters over Berlin; Dunmore/Carter, p. 271.)
It is true, though, that the British and the Americans had different philosophies, despite all the incentives to cooperate; Ira Eaker, commander of the American 8th United States Army Air Force, preferred daylight bombing and Arthur Harris, the British officer in charge of RAF bombers, had them fly at night. The disagreement was papered over with the description "round-the-clock bombing" (Dunmore/Carter, pp. 83-85), but it doesn't change the fact that it reduced bombing effectiveness. And it didn't always reduce casualties; if a plane was attacked by a fighter during the day, the crew usually had warning and was likely to be able to bail out and survive as prisoners; planes shot down at night tended to crash quickly and kill their airmen (Bercuson, p. 89).
The first claim, though, is basically true. The Lancaster carried a lot more weight of bombs. The Lancaster from very early was able to carry 14,000 pounds of bombs (Munson, p. 28); it eventually was modified to carry bombs up to 22,000 pounds. The Flying Fortress was generally limited to a bomb load of about 6000 pounds. Some of this is just because the B-17 was the slightly older plane. More of it is philosophy. At the time both aircraft were designed, there was no possibility whatsoever that a fighter could accompany a bomber from England all the way to Germany. If bombers were to hold off enemy fighters, it had to be with their own defensive armament. Most bombers had at least some defensive weaponry. But the Fortress had more than any other bomber of it time -- and so it weighed more, and had to carry more crew, and that limited its bomb load.
Tubbs, p. 8, summarizes the Lancaster thus: "The Avro 683 Lancaster was the last of the RAF's four-engined bombers to enter war service, and the best. Air Marshall Sir Arthur Harris, Commander in Chief, Bomber Command, called it greatest single factor in winning the Second World War. Hyperbole, perhaps, but the big Avro bred hyperbole as lesser designs breed criticism...." Harris would later write, "The Lancaster far surpassed all other types of heavy bombers. Not only were there fewer accidents with this than with other types [i.e. it was easier to fly]; throughout the war the casualty rate of Lancasters was consistently below that of other types."
The basic Lancaster frame had begun as a two-engine bomber, the Manchester, which was a flop; the engines were just too unreliable (Munson, p. 172). So someone decided to turn a two-engine bomber into a four-engine machine, with reliable Merlin engines replacing the cranky Rolls Royce Vultures (Munson, p. 26). This required the wings to be lengthened, but the resulting plane, the first version of which flew on January 9, 1941, was so successful that it went into production almost at once; the first production versions were reaching combat units at the beginning of 1942. And once in service, every squadron wanted them; I can't cite all the pages, but there were constant complaints that this unit or that unit wasn't getting its due share Lancasters (e.g. Dunmore/Carter, p. 144). Hard to blame them; the Lancaster had a much higher service ceiling than the other contemporary bombers, and so could fly too high to be hit by anti-aircraft guns (Dunmore/Carter pp. 179-180). By 1943, it had essentially forced one British heavy bomber, the Short Stirling, out of the bombing role (Gunston, p. 465) and caused the British to cut back production of their other heavy bomber, the Handley-Page Halifax, except at facilities which could not produce other planes (Dunmore/Carter, p. 144).
Not that the B-17 lacks for fans -- at least nowadays. There seem to be more books about the B-17 than any type of World War II aircraft I've checked except maybe the Spitfire. Birdsall/Freeman, p. 7, call it "the most famous United States military aircraft of all time."
The original 1934 specification for which the B-17 was designed called for a top speed of 200 miles per hour, a range of 1020 miles, and a bomb load of 2000 pounds (Patterson/Perkins, p. 10) -- figures which would have been ridiculously inadequate had such a bomber been used in World War II. Boeing decided to go above and beyond, producing a four-engine design rather than the two-engine models offered by competitors. The name "Flying Fortress" may have come from newspaper coverage (Patterson/Perkins, p. 11). The initial model could carry 8000 pounds of bombs but had only five guns. By the time the first real production model, the B-17C, came out, there were more guns -- but the bomb load had been reduced to just 4000 pounds (Patterson/Perkins, p. 12). And the final versions required a large crew of ten (pilot, co-pilot, radio operator, engineer, bombardier, navigator, and four gunners; Patterson/Perkins, pp. 15-19). Fortunately, the bomb load would increase a little in the later versions.
Ironically, it was the British who first flew the B-17 in combat -- not entirely voluntarily. In 1940, the British (who had not yet developed the Lancaster and were finding many of their aircraft quite inferior) came to the Americans to see what they could buy. American engineers reportedly didn't think the plane was ready yet, and the British generals didn't think any plane could serve in the role the American cheerleaders envisioned for the plane -- but Churchill wanted to get an American plane (almost any plane, really) because it would imply American support for Britain, and Roosevelt wanted to justify producing more planes, so the politicians forced the planes on the RAF (Birdsall/Freeman, p. 11). As it turned out, it wouldn't take long to show that the American engineers had been right -- the plane wasn't ready. It was unstable and vulnerable to attack from the rear. It wasn't until the B-17E model came out that it gained a tail turret and was given a modified tail design to fix the stability problems; this was the first true mass-produced model and the first one to really fight in the European theater (Patterson/Perkins, pp. 12-13; the B-17D had been used in defense of the Philippines from the Japanese, with little success). The last two models, the B-17F and the B-17G, improved the defensive armament and the range (Patterson/Perkins, p. 13), but the result still had limited lift ability and was still vulnerable to fighters,
It should be noted that the B-17 wasn't even the most important American heavy bomber; that was the later B-24 Liberator, which had similar speed and a not-too-different weapons load (8000 pounds of bombs, 10 defensive guns of a heavier caliber than the B-17), and was harder to fly, but had greater range (Gunston, pp. 362-363), and so became the most common American heavy bomber. (The Lancaster also had good range, although not as good as the Liberator; Carter/Dunmore, p. 306, observes that, with a standard load, a Lancaster could make a flight of 1850 miles; its main British competitor, the Halifax III, could only carry the same load 1300 miles.)
Even Birdsall/Freeman, p. 7, ultimately admit that the B-17 "became legendary despite the fact that other contemporary warplanes contributed more to victory." Among which, as the song says, was the Lancaster.
To summarize the basic abilities of the two planes, the primary models would have had these characteristics:
TOP SPEED: Both were in the 275-290 mile per hour range.
BOMB LOAD: B-17: 6000 lbs. Lancaster: 14000 lbs.
DEFENSIVE GUNS: B-17: 13. Lancaster: 8.
SERVICE CEILING: B-17: 35,000 feet. Lancaster: 24,500 feet. (Thus the B-17 could fly higher, but not to the 50,000 feet claimed in some versions of the song.)
CREW SIZE: B-17: 10. Lancaster: 7.
Thus to deliver, in round numbers, 12000 lbs of bombs took one Lancaster and seven men; it took 2 B-17s and 20 men -- in other words, to deliver the same bomb load took twice as many B-17s as Lancasters, and three times as many highly trained men. Yes, the B-17s had "bags of ammunition" -- but all her defensive guns didn't actually shoot down all that many more enemy fighters than the Lancaster's; the truth is, the defensive guns on both planes (and every other heavy bomber) were too light and too hard to aim.
For another song about the Lancaster, see Hopkins-SongsFromTheFrontAndRear's "Bless 'Em All -- Lancasters" verse under "Bless 'Em All." For more songs about the B-17, see the cross-references. - RBW
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File: Hopk061

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