The Revolution Will Not Be Televised wrote:

On Wed, 23 Jul 2003 15:35:11 +0100, "Keith Willshaw"
wrote:

John H.

snip

Close formation flying both increased the concentration of the bomb
pattern and the effectiveness of return fire from the gunners. The
RAF were extolling this in 1939 with Wellingtons over Heligoland
Bight, and continued to do so in "large-scale" daylight ops (e.g. the
Lancasters in the Augsburg raid).

Which were unmitigated disasters.

Of course they were. The point is that the RAF when flying in
daylight, did rely on some extent to formation flying and gun defence.

And immediately after the Heligoland mission, when it was found that the nose
and tail turrets were unable to bear to the sides where Mfighters were
deliberately making high deflection passes, the RAF added waist guns to their
Wimpeys before going over to night bombing. IIRR, some of the early 9 Sq. a/c
had a sliding hatch on the top of the fuselage with a gun deployable from it,
but this was removed in later production. As it happened, the .303 was pretty
useless when facing cannon-armed (and armored) fighters, but there was at least
some deterrent value in the tracer, and they could always get lucky.

Guy