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Re: Me 262 should have been used as a bomber?
Graham.
1. Your jaundiced view of the Vultee Vengeance would not survive a reading of Peter C Smith's book, would it? He persuaded me.
2. The fact is that the RAF was completely prejudiced against all dive bombers for a simple reason. They were specically designed for army support, and no self-respecting airman would accept that as part of his job description, which was to bomb German civilians until morale cracked. The army could then be despatched in soft-skin vehicles to occupy Germany. Anyone who talked to the Army about their needs was a traitor. Beaverbrook oredered the Vengeances, and the RAF ensured they were never used - except in the East where they became a raging success such that the RAF had to suppress the information and quickly scrap them before their embarrassment became public. That was the background to making the Vengeance tow targets.
3. And your statement that there was never any serious argument about the superiority of guns sounds to me like re-writing history. Apart from all the other evidence available that the RAF wanted RPs to succeed because they could strap them cheaply under Typhoons in the belief that speed rather than armour provided security over the battlefield, why would the Typhoon pilots have tried to sell Rudel on the benefits of RP, I wonder?
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