soc.history.war.world-war-ii

"Bombardier" wrote in message
news:ce7ebaeb-ec2c-49e6-b221-0557e6f2bfd5@s12g2000prg.googlegroups.com...
> Were the B-25's too lightly armored to survive the flak fields over
> Germany and therefor shipped out to the Med and pacific theatres and
> replaced by the heavlity armored B-26?

No. It was a range and logistics issue. It made sense to use only
the one type in the 9th Air Force and the B-26 was already there,
the first groups had arrived, the first in December 1942. Note the
flak fields of German were in the future, even the strengthening of
the French flak defences was a late 1943 and 1944 effort, as the
fighters were withdrawn towards Germany.

So the B-26 went to Europe, the B-25 to the Pacific and the
B-25 and B-26 to the Mediterranean, with some of the B-25
groups making it to France as part of Dragoon/Anvil.

The RAF operated B-25s in the ETO. Unfortunately the statistics
I have wrap the Boston (A-20) and Mitchell (B-25) day operations
together, figures for 1944 day operations,

14,148 sorties of which 10,647 were successful, 23 lost to flak, 2
to fighters, 7 not due to enemy action, 21 to unknown causes, total
53, which works out at 0.5% of the successful sorties.

By the way the Mosquitoes had a higher loss rate, 32 from 1,320
successful sorties, or 2.4% but of course they were doing things
like low level attacks.

Night operations were more dangerous to the Bostons/Mitchells
25 lost in 988 successful sorties so 2.5%, meantime the Mosquitoes
lost 78 aircraft over 8,877 successful night sorties, 0.9%.

Geoffrey Sinclair
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