B-24..B-17 Comparison
A comparison between the B-24 Liberator and the B-17 Fortress is perhaps inevitable. The Liberator was slightly faster than the Fort, carried a heavier bombload and could carry it farther and higher than the Fort. It was slightly more maneuverable than the Fort, and was much more adaptable to other missions. On the debit side, the Liberator was harder to fly, less stable, and much more difficult to hold in the tight bomber formations that were mandatory in the European theatre of operations. The Liberator was not capable of absorbing nearly the same amount of battle damage that the Fortress could handle. Any sort of solid hit on the wing of a Liberator was generally fatal, the high-aspect ratio Davis wing often collapsing and folding up when hit. In comparison to the B-17, there are relatively few photographs of Liberators returning home with half their wings shot away or with major sections of their tails missing. The Liberator was not very crashworthy, a 'wheels up' landing generally causing the fuselage to split into two or three pieces, resulting in a complete writeoff. In contrast, a Fortress which had undergone a 'wheels-up' landing could often be quickly repaired and returned to service. When ditching at sea, the Liberator's lightly-built bomb bay doors would often immediately collapse upon impact, the interior of the aircraft quickly filling up with water, causing the aircraft to sink rapidly. In spite of the Liberator's defects, Eighth Air Force records show that B-17 operational losses were 15.2 percent as compared with 13.3 percent for the B-24,which meant that a crew had statistically a better chance of surviving the war in a Liberator than in a Fortress.
The British also flew Liberators on anti-submarine patrols over the Atlantic due to their greater range - noble duty but without the fighter opposition the Forts encountered over daylight Europe.
The Liberator had another advantage over the Fortress in that some models had a retractable ball turret, meaning that if the plane didn't crack up in a wheels-up landing it was easier to repair than the Fort, which needed special tools to retract the ball gun underneath the fuselage.