megan,
Your: "
With the reputation of the Stuka in the background, the USAAF planned on using the Vengeance in the dive bombing role. On 4 February 1942, Col. K. B. Wolfe, Chief of the Production Engineering Section wrote, "We will not have a useful dive bomber before March 1943". He recommended cancelling the Vengeance and obtain "a suitable dive bomber, low altitude attack fighter in its place".
This interests me greatly, for Col (soon to be Brigadier) Wolfe's letter (and much else from him) is quoted at length from p.40 onward in Peter C. Smith's 1986 "Vengeance" (which is the nearest thing to a Vultee Vengeance "bible" I've found).
As one of the very few people left who flew VVs operationally, I know a little about their capabilities. Col Wolfe may no doubt have been an excellent production man, but he is confusing two entirely different tactical requirements here.
A dive bomber needs a long dive, as near vertical as possible, to give the accuracy which you buy it for in the first place. It is not - and cannot be - "a low altitude attack fighter". If they wanted a dive bomber, they had one already - the Douglas SBD "Dauntless", which had destroyed all the four Jap big fleet carriers at Midway in two days in June '42 (the first three in 20 mins). The US Army got some, called it the A-24, but did not do much with them
AFAIK.
We got the VVs in India/Burma (basically as no one else wanted them). Any ground attacking (which is what Col Wolfe seems to mean by "low altitude attack fighter") was done by (first) the "Hurricane" IIC and "Beaufighter" (4x20mm each), and later the Thunderbolt (6x0.50) and Mosquito (4x20mm), plus 250 and 500-pounders to taste. The A-10 would have been useful, too.
The VV was of limited value in the first Arakan campaign, as the advancing Japs were mobile, widely spaced out, and you could only find them "static" in Akyab. But in the second ('43/'44 "Dry Season"), the 14th Army were pushing
them back; the Jap reverted to his standard tactic: dig in deep in a strong point carefully chosen to hinder our advance, and fight to the death (the US Marines knew this all to well, as they had to reduce these redoubts on the Pacific islands by frontal attack, and that was expensive).
Our VVs came into their own. Flying always in "box-of-six", the Army would mark for us, with mortar smoke bomb, such a place which was troubling them. In 30 seconds we would unload on it 12x500 and 12x250s (a total of some 4 tons) of HE, which would go deep into the moist jungle soil and simply excavate the entire site and everything in it.
Up around Imphal/Kohima it was not so simple, as in the ferocious close combat in the last battles, we dare not go for troops as they were so closely intermingled, but helped by destroying roads and bridges which the Jap needed to get up his supplies.
Hope this is of interest.
Danny42C.