Below from Bill Sweetman’s ‘Mosquito’.
(How many Mosquitos would it take to equal a long range 1,000 Bomber Raid with Lancs?)
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It has been argued that Bomber Command could have done far more damage to Germany, with far less loss of life among its own crews and far less wastage of wartime production capacity, had it embraced the concept of the fast unarmed bomber earlier. Certainly, the Command’s post-war policy reflected this experience, with its jet bombers being designed around advanced H2S and electronic countermeasures and relying on speed and altitude for defence.
It takes fairly simple arithmetic to calculate that the Mosquito in its ultimate form could deliver more weapons over the same distance than the typical heavy bomber, when the two aircraft were compared on the basis of crew man-hours, total engine hours and fuel consumption; also, that the average Mosquito could be expected to deliver far more bombs during its far longer life expectancy, and its crew could expect to survive a far longer tour of operations. The only serious weakness of this argument is that the relative invulnerability of the Mosquito was itself indirectly brought about by Bomber Command’s own policies. Because the RAF concentrated on producing the four-engined heavy bombers, the Luftwaffe’s main task was to destroy these; Germany’s aircraft-production chief Erhard Mitch accordingly opposed production of the Heinkel He 219 night-fighter, which was faster than the Mosquito, in favour of the slower Ju 88G, which was adequate to deal with the heavy bombers and could be built more cheaply than the He 219. The practical difficulties of a shift to the unarmed bomber philosophy would have been enormous at any stage (including the need to train crews to the high standards demanded for the Mosquito) and would have given the Luftwaffe time to re-equip with the He 219, undoubtedly increasing Mosquito losses.
The final Mosquito bomber version was the B.35, basically similar to the B.XVI but powered by the high-altitude-rated Merlin 114. It remained in front-line service with the RAF until 1953, when the English Electric Canberra replaced it. Even the B.35, however, was restricted to operational weights and loadings in peacetime which were well below those of wartime B.XVIs; the “war emergency” weights at which the B.XVI operated were 4,000 lb (1,815 kg) higher than the peacetime weights, which limited the Mosquito’s bomb-load to 1,500 lb (680 kg). These restrictions could, of course, be lifted in wartime, and were an excellent indication of the abuse which the Mosquito would put up with in the hands of a skilled and dedicated crew.