I was playing combat flight simulator 3 last night. Flying along in my p-47d, escorting a flight of b-26cs. We were attacked by a flight of German 109s. I roll in and everyone starts firing. I’m firing machineguns, the bombers are firing, the German fighters are firing. About 80 to 90% of all these shots don’t hit anything in the sky. My plane alone could fire over 1200 rounds of 50 caliber ammo. Had this been real life, it would have fallen thousands of feet to the ground below.
My question is; are there any records of how much damage a WW2 arial dogfight caused on the ground? Compared to an area caught in a bombing run, I’m sure the damage was light. But lots of folks have been hurt by bullets falling from the sky after some celebrating dufus fired his gun into the air. A 30 round clip is nothing compared to what these aircraft could put out. Some of the aircraft of the time fired cannon shells. Picture a 20mm cannon shell landing in your backyard.
And of course there’s the other obvious problem from a dogfight; in addition to falling ammo, sometimes there are falling planes.
I do not know about Germany, but I recently finished a book in reference to the Asian-Pacific war with Japan. The author quotes many of the participants as stating that they commonly came under “fire” or “bombardment” from the dogfights in the skies above.
As you already mentioned those rounds have to go somewhere, and as gravity takes no breaks, even in times of aerial wars, they usually have to go down! Also, the destroyed aircraft were known to be quite hazardous to the health of the people below.
But, I guess this does not really answer your question, though.
However, considering the population dispersion in the two arenas, it would make perfectly good sense to infer that if the POW’s in the Phillipines suffered from the “fallout”, that the peoples of Europe and Britain did too.
Well, consider the Pan Am flight that crashed into Lockerbie, Scotland. It killed more than a dozen innocent people on the ground. Now, how many aircraft have ben blown up over land by terrorists? I doubt it’s a hundred, yet one managed to land on a town and kill people.
Now how many aircraft were lost in the European theatre? It’s in the thousands, maybe the tens of thousands. Plus add on hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of round of ammunition, .303 and 7.92mm and 20 and 30mm cannon shells and .50 cal bullets.
Plus, some of these aircraft were carrying bombs. The Lancaster and the Halifax could carry well over 10,000 pounds of bombs, and the B-24 and B-17 were pretty close to 10,000, IIRC. That would make a very big boom when it landed. Most would hit a field or a forest, but you have to think some crashed into towns.
Another hazard was the anti-aircraft shells ( either the shrapnel or the whole shells ) when they fell back to earth.
I thought the AAA shells were timed to detonate at a certain alititude. I could imagine some would be duds and not go off though.
The other day I was playing Battlefield 1942 on the Coral Sea map. There were about 60+players in the game, and most were in planes attacking their opponent’s carriers. While scrambling on the flight deck to get into the bridge to make some some hasty repairs, there was an enormous dogfight above us. And all sorts of stuff was hitting the carrier- bullets, bombs, and pieces of airplanes (also flaming airplanes crashing). Lots of players died on the flight deck because of all the debris falling down.
During the attack on Peral Harbor, there were initial reports that the Japanese had attacked Honolulu suburbs, as well. As far as I know, all those reports turned out to be spent rounds from anti-aircraft weapons in which the fuze failed to explode at altitude or the fuze was improperly set, so that it did not explode until it hit the ground. There is is least one photo of a car in which three men were killed. The driver can be seen sitting in the car with what appears to be rather little damage done to it–but the “little” damage represents several shell fragements that pierced the car and killed the occupants.
I went to college with a guy a few years older than me who remembers watching dogfights in Britain and having shell casings fall near him.
However, one reason that injuries are probably not widely reported is that, unlike the inhabitants of Lockerbie, the civilians below a dogfight knew what was going on and knew what it meant–so they usually took shelter. It would not prevent death from a 50,000 lb plane landing on them with 8,000 lbs. of high explosives, but a cellar would generally protect them from a several ounce spent round of ammunition for which the speed was limited by its terminal velocity.
In addition, with all the other ammunition and ordnance that exploded across much of Europe for several years, the amount of aircraft detritus was probably not a serious percentage (except in Britain where no other fighting took place).