As I said before, bombers were huge planes used for carrying out bombing raids all over Nazi occupied Europe; yet there was a different type of plane known as the fighter/bombers. These planes had two main purposes: to escort bombers to there destination and to attack ships. One of the best fighter bombers and probably my favorite is called the North American P-51 Mustang. The was a plane of the USA Air force (USAAF). As the Germans were in a war with the German Air force (Luftwaffe), they needed a very good plane. They had a lot of decent fighter/bombers, but they needed a plane to make casualties for the Luftwaffe yet not inflict damage to the USAAF and RAF (Royal Air force). The answer came with the invention of the Mustang. The first time the USAAF took it out, the mustang showed itself to be a very good plane. The P-51 did exactly what the Air force wanted. It pushed the Luftwaffe back and headed straight into Germany allowing the bombers to complete its mission.
Another wonderful fighter/bombers was the Supermarine Spitfire. The Spitfire, a lot of the times, traveled on an aircraft carrier. The fighter/bomber was a small plane which meant it could not hold a lot of fuel. In World War 1 & 2, the air force was not actually called the air force, but the American Expeditionary Forces, so the air force was not its own branch of the military. Most of the aircraft in WW1 took off from regular battleships. In WW2, the military invested in a gigantic ship. It was called the Aircraft Carriers. Great Britain already had a good navy, so they added aircraft carriers to their fleet and filled them with aircraft.
The Japanese also made a fighter/bomber known as the A6M5 Zero. This was a naval plane and as I also talked before, this was the plane used for the Kamikaze.What all fighter/bombers had in common was they all were used to sink or defend ships. As the picture above shows, these planes usually had one or two bombs on the bottom. The Aircraft Carriers were not made to lug around heavy bombers that had a big bomb loads, so the fighter/bombers carried either torpedoes or bombs.
The fighter/bombers did not play a huge part in the war yet they did help to make our country what it is now.
