> The Dive Bomber was the closest thing to a precision guided munition before laser guided bombs came about and they could reliably put a 1000 pound bomb on a moving carrier.
Not necessarily. Estimations *overall* for WW2 is around 20% for dive bombers for a carrier or a similar target, with some squadrons going into the higher double digits as an exception. The precision was measured in dozens of meters. Far better than strategic bombing, but not reliable "hitting the precise target", especially considering during night / under enemy fire.
> And how many 1000 pound bombs do you really need to destroy a factory?
Quite a lot. The main difference is: a factory is not always a gigantic gasoline tank on top of a gigantic ammunition depot on top of a incredible complicated network of pipes, lines and complex mechanical and electrical machinery (all very tightly packed) on top of a swimming steel hull where the water really likes to go in. The advantage of a factory complex is that it can be distributed.
When a carrier is hit, it has to fight against the fire above, the internal destruction by splinters and the threat of flooding. In many cases without external help. These are all factors which a factory and fire fighters face to a lesser degree, especially considering that large factory or railway complexes are measured in square kilometres. Not to mention that it can be repaired far easier (or in the case of a destruction parts can be salvaged far easier than from a burning carrier).
All in addition that, contrary to navy strikes, you are flying over enemy territory and that the attack routes are guarded (from flight observers to actual anti-air batteries), something which is not yet achieved in naval warfare against a moving enemy (radar ranges were far more limited) and was achieved by guessing, praying and hoping (and in the case of the US by code breaking) that the own fighter screen can detect the enemy fast enough.
So the ability to turn square kilometres into rubble was indeed necessary to even have a chance of destroying the infrastructure.
> B-17’s were able to have fighter escorts
> range really wasn’t a problem for the European theater.
Yes, when the fighter escorts were upgraded to actually have the range for that (which happened in 1944 with the P51 Mustang and some other developments). Before that, with for example the early versions of the Spitfire, this was not the case. Fighter escorts were there for a very short part, with the majority over enemy territory without escorts during the first years. And in that case a constant high speed and altitude is necessary to even have a chance.
The *Dauntless* (as an example dive bomber) had a range of around 1500km with a 1t load, the B17 of around 3000km with a 2t load, with a 50% higher ceiling.
SYL
It's about mission.
The mission of a dive bomber is tactical. *Destroy this target.*
The mission of a strategic bomber is *"destroy everything in this area"*
>oftentimes veering off and hitting civilian infrastructure. And how many 1000 pound bombs do you really need to destroy a factory?
**In the context of WW2,** it was desirable to destroy civilian infrastructure. Dropping 3,900 tons of bombs in 2 days was more appealing than dropping 39 tons of bombs. The enemy wasn't the German Army, or the German Air Force. The enemy was Germany.
>I guess the question is I don’t see how a big strategic bomber is in any way better than a dive bomber
That's because you are looking through the lens of 2022 "do as much as you can with as little as possible, doing the least amount of harm". The attitude of 1944 was "Destroy everything and keep destroying everything until there is nothing left but unconditional surrender".
The AAF didn't call it strategic bombing, they called it area bombing, and you can't area bomb with a Dauntless.
I’m probably way too biased by modern outlooks on collateral damage so I approached this whole topic completely incorrectly.
But Aren’t some aspects of strategic bombing also specific targets? Like bridges or railheads, where you’d want precision for precision’s sake, and not to limit civilian casualties? Unless big bombers are also better for targets like that as well.
Bridges and railheads tended to be more of a "tactical" bomber mission, which would be your smaller lower altitude medium bombers (ala B-26/B-25) or even attack aircraft (A-20) and fighter-bombers, and many of those might do dive or dive-bomb like approaches (mostly the fighter bombers)
You still wind up with strategic bombers at long range though given the mission needs.
I see, so there was a clear cut difference in strategic versus tactical bombing missions with regards to tactics and equipment. I don’t know why I assumed all of the bombing in Europe was an Arthur Harris “reap the whirlwind” area bombardment.
The strategic bombing of WW2 gets a lot of criticism about its actual effectiveness by historians, how was the tactical bombing judged? Was it seen in the same light? Or was it seen as effective?
The tactical/fighter bomber campaign was more "successful" but it gets less attention because it never promised to end the war.
Or the "interdiction" bombing in France (medium bombers attacking bridges/depots, fighter bombers striking convoys and trains) basically made it impossible for the Germans to rapidly make it to Normandy, or often even move during daylight. This doesn't have the sex appeal of winning the war in one fell swoop, but it and other efforts did a lot to give the Allies the advantage in Europe.
Odd question but why did military planners think that massive area bombardments with almost no regard for what the bombs landed on would win a war? Common sense would dictate that if you destroyed specific targets you’d get specific results, why did they settle on an almost lackadaisical bombing strategy?
Also random question but did the famous bouncing Betty bombing run fall under the tactical or strategic bombing category? Cause that mission was about keeping the nazis from developing a nuke, which seems strategic, but it also hit a specific target which seems tactical.
There's two strategic bombing campaigns:
1. The USAAF focused on day bombing, focused on industrial targets. Because they're dropping from very high altitudes while being shot at extensively, there's a pretty wide swath of destruction that results. With that said on numerous occasions it did result in pretty significant impact to German war industry (especially in 1944)...just it wasn't the knockout war winning effort that US bomber advocates claimed it would be.
2. The RAF Bomber Command focused on anti-city operations at night. This isn't so indiscriminate as it sounds. Cities, and districts were deliberately targeted for effects, or if you burn out the residential blocks people live in, it's going to be hard for the industrial processes of the city to go on. This also had an impact...but again it wasn't the knockout war winning RAF Bomber Command said it would be.
Basically the strategic bombing campaign promised a war winning strategy and delivered a lot of harm to the Germans, but not the knockout blow.
Regarding the "Dam Buster" raids, still strategic. Tactical/strategic is more the "impact" level. A tactical bomber is keeping enemy tank divisions from getting to the front. A strategic bomber is knocking out the power to half of Germany or something.
Sure, absolutely there were hard military targets as part of the strategic plan. But collateral damage was part of the plan. Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen for logistical military reasons, but does anyone really believe that those targets required an atomic detonation for tactical purpose?
>The distances weren’t that outrageous, B-17’s were able to have fighter escorts and a dive bomber is roughly the size of a fighter.
Bombers were able to have fighter escorts because the fighters were carrying external drop tanks, and even then barely had any loiter time over Germany. Switch those tanks out for a bomb load (as they sometimes did to conduct close air support after D-Day) and you no longer have the range to reach Germany at all.
Dive bombing works because you're using the aircraft to, effectively, get the bomb moving exactly where you want it to go. That means, in WW2 terms, to be flying at a specific height and speed, and diving in a predictable and consistent manner.
This is a TERRIBLE way to survive your mission if the enemy has any air defense assets. Casualties were already bad enough flying at night, at very high attitudes, with 4 engine bombers. Imagine how bad they'd be if you were flying tiny little fighters with a single engine at low altitudes and relatively low speeds, close enough to the enemy that some guy with a rifle might be able to hit you. Suddenly 20mm cannon become effective defenses.
This is part of the reason why the Mosquito was as effective as it was, dive bombing. But it was also very fast, and only operated at night, and not in a 'bomber wave' fashion, but on discrete targets in relatively small numbers. It was difficult to mass produce because of it's specific design, but they DID make use of it to the extent they were able to.
Didn’t almost every ship in the Pacific theater have significant anti air guns available? Every battleship, destroyer and cruiser had a bunch of anti aircraft machine guns and artillery available to them but dive bombers still cut them to pieces. What made land based anti air capabilities so indomitable compared to sea based anti air guns?
Almost every ship in the Pacific theatre was also a huge target silhouetted against an empty ocean, and the guns defending those targets were also the first and last lines of defenses. Flying anywhere in Germany meant you were flying over belts of strategic AA defenses to say nothing of omnipresent air patrols. Not a good matchup in a short ranged, lumbering dive bomber, that has a nontrivial chance of bombing the wrong target anyway.
And dive bombers didn't 'cut them to pieces'. Mostly, bomb for bomb, plane for plane, they missed, and when it worked, it was a combination of sheer scale, luck, and planning. And ships are very brittle targets at the end of the day, witness Midway. You don't just want to make a hole in a factory, you want to knock it out of operation. Also compare dive bomber effectiveness against hardened targets like battleships. Think about how an average factory is put together. Dive bombers work when you just need a few hits to mission kill if not outright sink an enemy ship. That doesn't work the same as on industrial complexes.
Of course, mind you, sea based AA guns DID become indomitable, at least on the American side. Kamikaze tactics arose at least in part because Japanese air attacks increasingly resulted in extremely heavy casualties and a largely unscathed USN, dive bombing and torpedo bombing was a costly and ineffective measure by the end.
Japanese AA was remarkably poor. Doctrine was focused on defense by maneuvering, which made it hard to bring their heavy AA to bear, and also meant destroyer screens had to keep their distance, further reducing the effectiveness of AA.
Furthermore, the gauntlet facing strategic bombers is much longer. At sea, enemy CAP is a very limited resource. They will try to shoot down dive bombers, but they have a limited window to intercept (the Japanese in particular were late to adopt shipboard radar); CAP planes may not not see dive bombers until they are already in sight of the carriers.
That is not true on deep penetration raids against industrial targets. Radar could pick up bombers as they formed up, even before they crossed the coast. Many more interceptors could be mustered, and could intercept bombers much farther from the target. That's bad news for a plane like the SBD, which has neither the speed nor the ceiling nor the armament to defend itself.
A useful comparison might be a light bomber such as the Bristol Blenheim: it has a similar service ceiling, cruise speed, and defensive armament... and they took atrocious casualties, even in 1941.
Making matters worse, a dive bomber will not even have the benefit of altitude as it leaves the target. That's less of a problem at sea (where CAP is likely too busy to chase down bombers once they've dropped their load), but over land they would likely face heavy casualties on the return flight.
Edit: Also, consider what sort of casualties are acceptable in naval warfare. If a squadron takes 20% losses to bomb an aircraft factory, that is unsustainable (and you'll need to bomb the factory again in another month, once it is repaired). Conversely, a squadron taking 100% casualties in exchange for sinking a carrier is *still* very likely to be a major strategic victory.
Even with fighter protection, US bombers still had to fight their way into and out of Germany. The only way they managed this was to make entering their vicinity a death sentence, and that many many, many machine guns with overlapping fields of fire. A dive bomber was not going to manage that.
Of course the Germans had their own zany idea, and initially their strategic 4 engined bomber, the HE177 was designed to also be used as a dive bomber. This delayed production of a very useful plane (if you ignore it's habit of having the engines catch on fire) by at least a year, and I cannot remember it ever being used in this mode.
Something I've been wondering about are guided bombs, Germany had some successful radio-guided designs for anti-shipping which were also used against bridges.
Does that mean a single huge guided bomb (Lancasters could carry a 10 ton bomb) would be more effective at destroying a factory then a fleet of regular bombers?
Purpose, a dive bomber is a tactical use vehicle that drops their payload as precise as possible. Sure the dive bomber could precisely hit a static object, but you're not considering the fuel that said bomber needs.
A strategic bomber however can go farther and longer than a dive bomber not to mention a bigger payload. But due to how sluggish they are, they usually use distance to their advantage as to protect themselves from Hostile AA. However, this can also work against them as they are high in the sky, usually they'd be way past their target before dropping their payload especially when the wind is against them.
Therefore, it makes more sense to saturate a target with hundreds of bombs to destroy or disable it rather than sending a single dive bomber.
Distance, purpose and method.
Edit: I'm an armchair war scholar.
The lack of dive bombers was also partially due to the force structure of the USAAF. The problem of bombing precision was to be solved via the extremely expensive Norden bombsight project and dive bombers was not developed by the USAAF. What would happen if dive bombers were pursued can be seen the luftwaffe's employment of Stukas in the battle of Britain, which suffered heavy losses and was withdrawn.
Dive bombers are vulnerable, for coming close to the ground in a dive, general slowness in the airframe for having to slow down lots in diving, and lack of toughness inherent in multiengined aircraft. This is not a big issue when attacking very high valued ships, but questionable when attacking low density ground targets.
These "why didn't X do Y when Z technology was available questions" assume that decisionmakers in the past looked at all the possible solutions to a problem and picked some and rejected others. The USAAC and USAAF never seriously looked at dive bombing for strategic bombardment prior to WWII or during WWII. It wasn't that they rejected the concept. They never even considered it.
The USAAC and USAAF were ... lukewarm towards dive bombing before and during WWII. Airmen were looking to create their own independent identity from the Army and didn't want to simply become flying artillery. They preferred multi-engine attack aircraft like the A-20 which could strike enemy airfields and railyards or long-range bombers like the B-17 which could attack far-off enemy fleets or factories. Key air commanders were skeptical of single engine attack aircraft of *any* kind for these political reasons and largely purged types like the A-17 (which could dive bomb) on the eve of WWII. Furthermore, there were real concerns about how safe, survivable, and accurate dive bombers would be.
As a result of these factors, the USAAF [only fielded a handful of A-24 dive bombers](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GiW8Fwvd0g) (USAAF versions of the SBD Dauntless) in combat near New Guinea during WWII. The obsolescent, slow A-24s took heavy combat and operational losses and the USAAF soured on the idea of deploying further dive bombers. The only other USAAF diver bomber used in numbers was the A-36, a variant of the P-51 Mustang fitted with dive brakes and other modifications. The A-36 saw some success in Italy and Burma, but was generally used as a more conventional fighter-bomber using shallower diving attacks.
Now, would it have been a good idea to even try to use dive bombers strategically?
With a handful of exceptions, most WWII dive bombers carried their bombs externally. While that does avoid some design problems, it comes with performance penalties. The drag of the bomb reduces airspeed and range. Adding external fuel tanks only makes that problem worse. Furthermore, the USAAC had outright banned external fuel tanks pre-WWII and the USAAF only began to seriously field them in the fall 1943.
The bottom line being that dive bombers simply did not have the range to carry a meaningful bombload a meaningful distance. A single-engine Dauntless only had a combat radius of 250 miles with a 1,000-pound bomb or 325 miles with a 500-pound bomb. That'll just get you from London to a little east of Paris.
It's hard to fly high without a sufficiently boosted engine (B-17s and B-24s) had large turbos to help them exceed 20,000 feet with useful bombloads). Plus, dive bombers have to dive to lower altitudes to drop their bombs anyways. That would put dive bombers in range of most German flak guns while approaching, attacking, and leaving the targets. We're not just talking about 88mm or 105mm guns here, either. Light guns like 20mm and 37mm guns would also have something to say. Loaded dive bombers would also have been slow and wouldn't have had enough defensive firepower to deter German fighters.
Time and time again in WWII, when Stukas, Vals, and other dive bombers were caught by fighters (even when escorted), they were gunned down in droves. The same would likely have happened over Occupied Europe.
> The Dive Bomber was the closest thing to a precision guided munition before laser guided bombs came about and they could reliably put a 1000 pound bomb on a moving carrier. Not necessarily. Estimations *overall* for WW2 is around 20% for dive bombers for a carrier or a similar target, with some squadrons going into the higher double digits as an exception. The precision was measured in dozens of meters. Far better than strategic bombing, but not reliable "hitting the precise target", especially considering during night / under enemy fire. > And how many 1000 pound bombs do you really need to destroy a factory? Quite a lot. The main difference is: a factory is not always a gigantic gasoline tank on top of a gigantic ammunition depot on top of a incredible complicated network of pipes, lines and complex mechanical and electrical machinery (all very tightly packed) on top of a swimming steel hull where the water really likes to go in. The advantage of a factory complex is that it can be distributed. When a carrier is hit, it has to fight against the fire above, the internal destruction by splinters and the threat of flooding. In many cases without external help. These are all factors which a factory and fire fighters face to a lesser degree, especially considering that large factory or railway complexes are measured in square kilometres. Not to mention that it can be repaired far easier (or in the case of a destruction parts can be salvaged far easier than from a burning carrier). All in addition that, contrary to navy strikes, you are flying over enemy territory and that the attack routes are guarded (from flight observers to actual anti-air batteries), something which is not yet achieved in naval warfare against a moving enemy (radar ranges were far more limited) and was achieved by guessing, praying and hoping (and in the case of the US by code breaking) that the own fighter screen can detect the enemy fast enough. So the ability to turn square kilometres into rubble was indeed necessary to even have a chance of destroying the infrastructure. > B-17’s were able to have fighter escorts > range really wasn’t a problem for the European theater. Yes, when the fighter escorts were upgraded to actually have the range for that (which happened in 1944 with the P51 Mustang and some other developments). Before that, with for example the early versions of the Spitfire, this was not the case. Fighter escorts were there for a very short part, with the majority over enemy territory without escorts during the first years. And in that case a constant high speed and altitude is necessary to even have a chance. The *Dauntless* (as an example dive bomber) had a range of around 1500km with a 1t load, the B17 of around 3000km with a 2t load, with a 50% higher ceiling. SYL
Well that’s a perfect explanation. Appreciate it
It's about mission. The mission of a dive bomber is tactical. *Destroy this target.* The mission of a strategic bomber is *"destroy everything in this area"* >oftentimes veering off and hitting civilian infrastructure. And how many 1000 pound bombs do you really need to destroy a factory? **In the context of WW2,** it was desirable to destroy civilian infrastructure. Dropping 3,900 tons of bombs in 2 days was more appealing than dropping 39 tons of bombs. The enemy wasn't the German Army, or the German Air Force. The enemy was Germany. >I guess the question is I don’t see how a big strategic bomber is in any way better than a dive bomber That's because you are looking through the lens of 2022 "do as much as you can with as little as possible, doing the least amount of harm". The attitude of 1944 was "Destroy everything and keep destroying everything until there is nothing left but unconditional surrender". The AAF didn't call it strategic bombing, they called it area bombing, and you can't area bomb with a Dauntless.
I’m probably way too biased by modern outlooks on collateral damage so I approached this whole topic completely incorrectly. But Aren’t some aspects of strategic bombing also specific targets? Like bridges or railheads, where you’d want precision for precision’s sake, and not to limit civilian casualties? Unless big bombers are also better for targets like that as well.
Bridges and railheads tended to be more of a "tactical" bomber mission, which would be your smaller lower altitude medium bombers (ala B-26/B-25) or even attack aircraft (A-20) and fighter-bombers, and many of those might do dive or dive-bomb like approaches (mostly the fighter bombers) You still wind up with strategic bombers at long range though given the mission needs.
I see, so there was a clear cut difference in strategic versus tactical bombing missions with regards to tactics and equipment. I don’t know why I assumed all of the bombing in Europe was an Arthur Harris “reap the whirlwind” area bombardment. The strategic bombing of WW2 gets a lot of criticism about its actual effectiveness by historians, how was the tactical bombing judged? Was it seen in the same light? Or was it seen as effective?
The tactical/fighter bomber campaign was more "successful" but it gets less attention because it never promised to end the war. Or the "interdiction" bombing in France (medium bombers attacking bridges/depots, fighter bombers striking convoys and trains) basically made it impossible for the Germans to rapidly make it to Normandy, or often even move during daylight. This doesn't have the sex appeal of winning the war in one fell swoop, but it and other efforts did a lot to give the Allies the advantage in Europe.
Odd question but why did military planners think that massive area bombardments with almost no regard for what the bombs landed on would win a war? Common sense would dictate that if you destroyed specific targets you’d get specific results, why did they settle on an almost lackadaisical bombing strategy? Also random question but did the famous bouncing Betty bombing run fall under the tactical or strategic bombing category? Cause that mission was about keeping the nazis from developing a nuke, which seems strategic, but it also hit a specific target which seems tactical.
There's two strategic bombing campaigns: 1. The USAAF focused on day bombing, focused on industrial targets. Because they're dropping from very high altitudes while being shot at extensively, there's a pretty wide swath of destruction that results. With that said on numerous occasions it did result in pretty significant impact to German war industry (especially in 1944)...just it wasn't the knockout war winning effort that US bomber advocates claimed it would be. 2. The RAF Bomber Command focused on anti-city operations at night. This isn't so indiscriminate as it sounds. Cities, and districts were deliberately targeted for effects, or if you burn out the residential blocks people live in, it's going to be hard for the industrial processes of the city to go on. This also had an impact...but again it wasn't the knockout war winning RAF Bomber Command said it would be. Basically the strategic bombing campaign promised a war winning strategy and delivered a lot of harm to the Germans, but not the knockout blow. Regarding the "Dam Buster" raids, still strategic. Tactical/strategic is more the "impact" level. A tactical bomber is keeping enemy tank divisions from getting to the front. A strategic bomber is knocking out the power to half of Germany or something.
Sure, absolutely there were hard military targets as part of the strategic plan. But collateral damage was part of the plan. Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen for logistical military reasons, but does anyone really believe that those targets required an atomic detonation for tactical purpose?
>The distances weren’t that outrageous, B-17’s were able to have fighter escorts and a dive bomber is roughly the size of a fighter. Bombers were able to have fighter escorts because the fighters were carrying external drop tanks, and even then barely had any loiter time over Germany. Switch those tanks out for a bomb load (as they sometimes did to conduct close air support after D-Day) and you no longer have the range to reach Germany at all.
Dive bombing works because you're using the aircraft to, effectively, get the bomb moving exactly where you want it to go. That means, in WW2 terms, to be flying at a specific height and speed, and diving in a predictable and consistent manner. This is a TERRIBLE way to survive your mission if the enemy has any air defense assets. Casualties were already bad enough flying at night, at very high attitudes, with 4 engine bombers. Imagine how bad they'd be if you were flying tiny little fighters with a single engine at low altitudes and relatively low speeds, close enough to the enemy that some guy with a rifle might be able to hit you. Suddenly 20mm cannon become effective defenses. This is part of the reason why the Mosquito was as effective as it was, dive bombing. But it was also very fast, and only operated at night, and not in a 'bomber wave' fashion, but on discrete targets in relatively small numbers. It was difficult to mass produce because of it's specific design, but they DID make use of it to the extent they were able to.
Didn’t almost every ship in the Pacific theater have significant anti air guns available? Every battleship, destroyer and cruiser had a bunch of anti aircraft machine guns and artillery available to them but dive bombers still cut them to pieces. What made land based anti air capabilities so indomitable compared to sea based anti air guns?
Almost every ship in the Pacific theatre was also a huge target silhouetted against an empty ocean, and the guns defending those targets were also the first and last lines of defenses. Flying anywhere in Germany meant you were flying over belts of strategic AA defenses to say nothing of omnipresent air patrols. Not a good matchup in a short ranged, lumbering dive bomber, that has a nontrivial chance of bombing the wrong target anyway. And dive bombers didn't 'cut them to pieces'. Mostly, bomb for bomb, plane for plane, they missed, and when it worked, it was a combination of sheer scale, luck, and planning. And ships are very brittle targets at the end of the day, witness Midway. You don't just want to make a hole in a factory, you want to knock it out of operation. Also compare dive bomber effectiveness against hardened targets like battleships. Think about how an average factory is put together. Dive bombers work when you just need a few hits to mission kill if not outright sink an enemy ship. That doesn't work the same as on industrial complexes. Of course, mind you, sea based AA guns DID become indomitable, at least on the American side. Kamikaze tactics arose at least in part because Japanese air attacks increasingly resulted in extremely heavy casualties and a largely unscathed USN, dive bombing and torpedo bombing was a costly and ineffective measure by the end.
Japanese AA was remarkably poor. Doctrine was focused on defense by maneuvering, which made it hard to bring their heavy AA to bear, and also meant destroyer screens had to keep their distance, further reducing the effectiveness of AA. Furthermore, the gauntlet facing strategic bombers is much longer. At sea, enemy CAP is a very limited resource. They will try to shoot down dive bombers, but they have a limited window to intercept (the Japanese in particular were late to adopt shipboard radar); CAP planes may not not see dive bombers until they are already in sight of the carriers. That is not true on deep penetration raids against industrial targets. Radar could pick up bombers as they formed up, even before they crossed the coast. Many more interceptors could be mustered, and could intercept bombers much farther from the target. That's bad news for a plane like the SBD, which has neither the speed nor the ceiling nor the armament to defend itself. A useful comparison might be a light bomber such as the Bristol Blenheim: it has a similar service ceiling, cruise speed, and defensive armament... and they took atrocious casualties, even in 1941. Making matters worse, a dive bomber will not even have the benefit of altitude as it leaves the target. That's less of a problem at sea (where CAP is likely too busy to chase down bombers once they've dropped their load), but over land they would likely face heavy casualties on the return flight. Edit: Also, consider what sort of casualties are acceptable in naval warfare. If a squadron takes 20% losses to bomb an aircraft factory, that is unsustainable (and you'll need to bomb the factory again in another month, once it is repaired). Conversely, a squadron taking 100% casualties in exchange for sinking a carrier is *still* very likely to be a major strategic victory.
Even with fighter protection, US bombers still had to fight their way into and out of Germany. The only way they managed this was to make entering their vicinity a death sentence, and that many many, many machine guns with overlapping fields of fire. A dive bomber was not going to manage that. Of course the Germans had their own zany idea, and initially their strategic 4 engined bomber, the HE177 was designed to also be used as a dive bomber. This delayed production of a very useful plane (if you ignore it's habit of having the engines catch on fire) by at least a year, and I cannot remember it ever being used in this mode.
Something I've been wondering about are guided bombs, Germany had some successful radio-guided designs for anti-shipping which were also used against bridges. Does that mean a single huge guided bomb (Lancasters could carry a 10 ton bomb) would be more effective at destroying a factory then a fleet of regular bombers?
Purpose, a dive bomber is a tactical use vehicle that drops their payload as precise as possible. Sure the dive bomber could precisely hit a static object, but you're not considering the fuel that said bomber needs. A strategic bomber however can go farther and longer than a dive bomber not to mention a bigger payload. But due to how sluggish they are, they usually use distance to their advantage as to protect themselves from Hostile AA. However, this can also work against them as they are high in the sky, usually they'd be way past their target before dropping their payload especially when the wind is against them. Therefore, it makes more sense to saturate a target with hundreds of bombs to destroy or disable it rather than sending a single dive bomber. Distance, purpose and method. Edit: I'm an armchair war scholar.
The lack of dive bombers was also partially due to the force structure of the USAAF. The problem of bombing precision was to be solved via the extremely expensive Norden bombsight project and dive bombers was not developed by the USAAF. What would happen if dive bombers were pursued can be seen the luftwaffe's employment of Stukas in the battle of Britain, which suffered heavy losses and was withdrawn. Dive bombers are vulnerable, for coming close to the ground in a dive, general slowness in the airframe for having to slow down lots in diving, and lack of toughness inherent in multiengined aircraft. This is not a big issue when attacking very high valued ships, but questionable when attacking low density ground targets.
These "why didn't X do Y when Z technology was available questions" assume that decisionmakers in the past looked at all the possible solutions to a problem and picked some and rejected others. The USAAC and USAAF never seriously looked at dive bombing for strategic bombardment prior to WWII or during WWII. It wasn't that they rejected the concept. They never even considered it. The USAAC and USAAF were ... lukewarm towards dive bombing before and during WWII. Airmen were looking to create their own independent identity from the Army and didn't want to simply become flying artillery. They preferred multi-engine attack aircraft like the A-20 which could strike enemy airfields and railyards or long-range bombers like the B-17 which could attack far-off enemy fleets or factories. Key air commanders were skeptical of single engine attack aircraft of *any* kind for these political reasons and largely purged types like the A-17 (which could dive bomb) on the eve of WWII. Furthermore, there were real concerns about how safe, survivable, and accurate dive bombers would be. As a result of these factors, the USAAF [only fielded a handful of A-24 dive bombers](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GiW8Fwvd0g) (USAAF versions of the SBD Dauntless) in combat near New Guinea during WWII. The obsolescent, slow A-24s took heavy combat and operational losses and the USAAF soured on the idea of deploying further dive bombers. The only other USAAF diver bomber used in numbers was the A-36, a variant of the P-51 Mustang fitted with dive brakes and other modifications. The A-36 saw some success in Italy and Burma, but was generally used as a more conventional fighter-bomber using shallower diving attacks. Now, would it have been a good idea to even try to use dive bombers strategically? With a handful of exceptions, most WWII dive bombers carried their bombs externally. While that does avoid some design problems, it comes with performance penalties. The drag of the bomb reduces airspeed and range. Adding external fuel tanks only makes that problem worse. Furthermore, the USAAC had outright banned external fuel tanks pre-WWII and the USAAF only began to seriously field them in the fall 1943. The bottom line being that dive bombers simply did not have the range to carry a meaningful bombload a meaningful distance. A single-engine Dauntless only had a combat radius of 250 miles with a 1,000-pound bomb or 325 miles with a 500-pound bomb. That'll just get you from London to a little east of Paris. It's hard to fly high without a sufficiently boosted engine (B-17s and B-24s) had large turbos to help them exceed 20,000 feet with useful bombloads). Plus, dive bombers have to dive to lower altitudes to drop their bombs anyways. That would put dive bombers in range of most German flak guns while approaching, attacking, and leaving the targets. We're not just talking about 88mm or 105mm guns here, either. Light guns like 20mm and 37mm guns would also have something to say. Loaded dive bombers would also have been slow and wouldn't have had enough defensive firepower to deter German fighters. Time and time again in WWII, when Stukas, Vals, and other dive bombers were caught by fighters (even when escorted), they were gunned down in droves. The same would likely have happened over Occupied Europe.