Originally Posted by
POBJOY
SNIP
Our defences in 1940 were not geared up to having an enemy only 20 miles away, and the Defiant should never had been used to deal with 'fighter escorted bombers' for obvious reasons.
SNIP
I wonder if
anybody's defences were really ready for 'fighter escorted bombers'? Most air forces seem to have assumed that bombers would be able to operate unescorted, protected either by their speed or defensive armament. Perhaps also there was an overestimation of the effectiveness of bombing, so people were not prepared for the long attritional campaigns in which a loss rate of, say, 6% or more was a losing proposition, even though the bombers were certainly getting through.
Before the experience of 1940 the task looked different, simply fighter vs bomber, and as the bomber forces had great confidence of the effectiveness of the four-gun turret, the Defiant evidently looked like a good idea; attacking from below was already well established from WW I, and turned out to be still a good tactic in WW II (hence
Schraege Muzik, anticipated by the Sopwith Dolphin).
Things turned out differently, and the Defiant turned out to not be a good idea, though neither was it a scandal for it to have been built (although Colin Sinnott in
The RAF and Aircraft Design 1923-39 records adverse reaction to the proposal to build it without forward armament). Perhaps the crews reported that they liked the aircraft because it was a good implementation of an idea that turned out not to meet the circumstances. It wasn't much slower than a Hurricane, and was surely a lot better than the Blackburn Roc. Presumably most of the aircraft that ended up as target tugs were not bad aircraft, just aircraft without any more useful aggressive role.