Avro Manchester, Lancaster, Lancastrian, Lincoln, Shackleton

[pyro-manic]

JCF, your tone is unnecessarily aggressive. There's no need for it.

[rickshaw]

Why yes, like most Canadians, I love to claim the US won the war single-handedly and that Commonwealth airmen, like my
Great-Uncle Norman 'Doc' Gordon who was the fourth commander of the Halifax 'Friday the 13th', were all useless twats. Oh
and of course my grandfather who, much to his chagrin, was kept at Borden for the entire war training tank drivers, such was
the price of being an experienced heavy equipment operator, he was completely useless. Along with my mum's Uncle Albert,
he was RCN and had two destroyers blown out from under him. There are others in the family, but you know they did nothing
at all. I just prefer to ignore those folks and wrap myself in the Red, White and Blue. Yeah right.

If that is not your intention, Jon it is very much your attitude it seems and how your come across as.  I've read many posts of yours.  They are usually informative, occasionally they are very aggressive and sometimes very chauvinistic.  Perhaps you might like to reconsider not only what you're typing but the way in which you're expressing it?

Your relatives' service was valuable.  Not everybody gets to be the hero.  Not everybody gets the vanquish the enemy.  Those who wait and all that.   My father never left Australia but he still served in a combat zone (the Northern Territory) and was subject to Japanese air attack.   I wouldn't class his service as less valuable than someone who served in New Guinea or elsewhere, so I don't class your relatives' service as being less valuable than anybody else's.

The Superfortress weren't a Super-weapon? Well shut ma mouth. Actually compared to any other four engine bomber of the period that is exactly what it was, nothing else was as big, as heavy, flew as fast or as high. The B-29 weighed more empty than most Lancs did loaded. I'm well aware of the problems with the B-29, the most serious of which were caused by an engine design that was not ready for prime time.

It was all those things and very wonderful - when it was a mature system, working well.  In 1944 when first deployed it was not and even by August 1945 there were still questions hanging over its utility as far as the USAAF was concerned.  The aircraft was definitely "pushing the envelope" of the day.  Having been rushed into service had not helped.

Indeed the Lanc could lift big bombs, which always leads to a trade-off with fuel and thus range. The maximum range of
the Lanc with Grand Slam (a little factoid: range figures, like all aircraft performance specifications, are always
ideal condition projections, operational reality is often very different), is given as 1,550 miles at 15,000 ft, which is a
combat radius (the really important figure) of 775 miles. With a 12,000 lb load i.e. Tallboy, range goes to 1,730 miles,
combat radius of 865 miles, max ceiling of 19,000ft (Enola Gay dropped the bomb from 31,00 ft and was still heavily buffeted
by the blast). Iwo is about 850 miles from Hiroshima, 880 from Nagasaki, so even if the mission flies from Iwo
(doubtful) with the 9,000 lb Little Boy (plus the weight of the special mission equipment) your nuclear Lanc may make it to
Hiroshima and back, provided everything is perfect, a Nagasaki mission with the heavier Fat Man is rather unlikely. However,
one major fly in the soup is that the arming of Little Boy was done in flight, kinda hard to do with a Lanc. Anyhow using TigerForce with its proposed in-flight refueling as proof that a Lanc could fly the mission is pointless as it was never realized as an operational force.

Jon, you raise some good points however, remember this is a "what if" site.  You assume that if the Lancaster was chosen, everything would be the same as if the B-29 had been used.   In any discussion of counter-factual history, one must understand that once a different trouserleg of time is chosen by a chosen, the effects of that decision will have flow on effects which force increasing changes, rather like ripples on a pond which spread out from the point at which a stone is dropped into it.   These in turn reflect back and create other changes.   As has been pointed out, the decision, if it was made, would have occurred in 1943.   From that other decisions would flow.   The B-29 might not even have been out of the running completely but the pace of it's development for atomic weapons use would have slowed.   The Lancaster might not have been the best choice but as the old saying, "the best is the enemy of the possible."

With hindsight, its possible to see that perhaps the Lancaster might not have been the best choice but when the decision was to be made in 1943, that was all two years in the future and of course, even then when the B-29 did fly the first mission, the effects of the Atomic bomb on the dropping aircraft were completely unknown.  Enola Gay survived more by good chance than design.  If the decision had been made to drop it from a lower altitude, we'd be reading about the "brave but necessary sacrifice of Tippetts and his crew", rather than celebrating a successful mission and be arguing the what-if of "if only they had used the B-36..."

As to Tiger Force, the planning was in process and the force was forming, Jon.  If the war had continued, it would have come into existence.  The UK was committed to its formation and use.   Your effort to paint it as a "paper tiger force" was not terribly respectful.  You want us to respect the service of your relatives yet you denigrate the service of the UK and Imperial/Commonwealth servicepeople who were serving or going to serve in Tiger Force.  Hardly fair, mate.  Not terribly becoming of you.

The fact is that the US was logistically and strategically committed to the B-29, which was why the decison to capture Saipan and Tinian was taken in December 1943, the 509th started training in October 1944 and, finally,there was simply no need for the Lancaster. In order to make a Lanc scenario work you'd have to change the sequence of events in the Pacific War and overall US strategy. BTW the only reason the Lanc came up originally was that the early Thin Man designs for the uranium 'gun' bomb posited a length of 17 feet in order to achieve the necessary velocity of the 'slug'. This led to the original 'Pullman' single bomb-bay conversion of one B-29. The improved design that was Little Boy made the need for a long bomb-bay moot. As Robert points out the Silverplate B-29s did use the Tallboy-type bomb shackle, with the forward bay provisioned to carry the Little Boy-type uranium gun bomb and the aft bay the Fat Man-type plutonium implosion device.

Again, you lose sight of the point of this site (excuse the pun).  The US may have been logistically and strategically committed to the B-29 but that does not mean that it was necessarily committed to its use for single, special missions, Jon.  If the decision had been taken to use the Lancaster then it would have become logistically and strategically committed to it, rather than the B-29 for the atomic mission.    You seem to assume that there was only one course of action and that was the only one which could be followed.    That's IMHO very narrow thinking and which I'd suggest is not suited to the ethos of this site.

Now, in your defence, I will admit that we are all, at some point given to adopting strong opinions about one matter or another.   However, we should all recognise that and not be too judgemental about others.  Recognising one's own biases is important.   The key is not to get too emotionally involved.  A little more detachment is a good idea for us all, I think.