It should be said that the Typhoon itself didn’t fail so much as that the requirements moved, perhaps excessively, towards higher altitude operations for which the Sabre was unsuitable. This makes it difficult to see how the Typhoon could have been employed as an interceptor, other than the way that it was. Had the UK been faced with a significant Luftwaffe bomber threat in 1943, the Typhoon would have been capable of dealing with it. but no such threat existed.
Apologies for a slight digression;- Whatever the requirements were – and all designs were subject to these changing – in the early days the Typhoon was very problematic. Whereas the Spitfires wing naturally facilitated significant development and saw it through a doubling of power, the Hurricane had no such potential and as the Typhoon was already in development no attempt was made. Unfortunately, the Hurricane’s greatest Achilles Heel, it’s thick wing, was repeated to a large extent in the Typhoon and no amount of power was able to get around the problems of a low Critical Mach number. (Not a problem confined to the Typhoon, as the P38 suffered the same shortcoming for example.). All this was clear to Hawkers from quite early on. Their response, the Tempest, solved this issue – but not the problems with the Sabre – which never seem to have been fully solved and was doubtless why all the Sabre-engines Typhoons and Tempests were withdrawn and scrapped in very short-order as soon as the war ended. Lack of power was never really the issue with the Sabre. Aerodynamic issues aside, the problems with the Sabre and structural problems with the empenage (Later fixed.) all mitigated against the Typhoons success as a fighter when introduced. The Spitfire’s original wing, never being designed with hardpoints did not lend itself, structurally, to the ground-attack role. Being large and powerful, the Typhoon filled this role by default, despite it’s own shortcomings.
Early in the war, the RAF were somewhat obsessed with high altitude performance. Later in the war, other than for the interception of the occasional German high-altiude PR a/c, much of the action was at medium to low level.
Of course, strictly-speaking, the Typhoon was never a true dive-bomber like the A-36. Was one really needed..? Probably not. I agree with Graham – and the results speak for themselves. Nor would the A-36 have been able to carry the same bomb-load as effectively as the Typhoon.
There is an important aspect of the Typhoon’s ground-attack operations in the ETO that greatly added to it’s effectiveness, namely the ‘Cab-Rank’ system (Perfectly augmented by the introduction of RP’s.). This was effectively a force-multiplier – in much the same way as radar was during the BoB. I may be wrong – but I think that bomb-equiped Spitfires also participated in this system, but the higher bomb-load made the Typhoon far more suited to this type of operation.
It’s also worth stating that, even if the Typhoon had have been a success as an interceptor at higher altitudes, there is no logical reason why it should not also have been used as it actually was, at lower levels, as in fact the Tempest was.
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