To be fair, McCain was only shot down once, as far as I know, and even then, he never lost a dogfight (primarily because he flew attack planes and thus never engaged in air to air combat). Same for President Bush (the older one, of course), who was shot down by ground fire during WWII flying a TBF Avenger.
To get picky, the Allies achieved air supremacy (the ability to conduct air operations essentially unimpeded by opposing air forces) as distinct from air superiority (a mere advantage), over most fronts well before the end of the war.
The extent of Allied air supremacy by late 1944 was extreme, and had a dramatic effect on the ability of the German army to operate. Operation Cobra began with the bombardment of Panzer Lehr division by over two thousand airplanes, stunning the entire division to the point of being unable to offer substantive resistance.
As the German joke went, “If you see white planes it’s the Americans, if you see black planes it’s the British, if you see no planes, it’s the Luftwaffe.”
I seem to remember that the Allies required confirmation before recording a kill, but the Luftwaffe accepted the pilots’ claims. Is that correct?
I’m sure that the pilots were mostly honest when claiming kills, but mistakes happen, and at least some kills would happen without another pilot seeing them.
I remember reading somewhere that the best way to describe the situation (referring to German aces) was that there were as ever shrinking number or extraodinarily capable pilots gaining more expertize facing more and more opponents. These aces were superb to begin with, and simply had much more time in combat and more targets than Allied pilots had.
Italians?
D&R
Your last sentence (in this extract) does not actually support the first one. Correlation <> causation and all that. Plus, of course, the last sentence is only true if the Vietnam War is considered a draw.
You’re right. He should have said that air superiority is critical to winning battles. As Vietnam showed, you don’t have to win battles to win a war.
Some work in this area was done for the Pacific Theatre, and post war record research shows that both the Japanese and the Allies, on average, over-claimed enemy aircraft losses by 100% (which means actual losses were about half of what was claimed as kills), while they maintained accurate claims of their own losses.
This was not done on purpose, but a function of the fog of war.
Another big problem for the axis air forces was the loss of experienced pilots. As operational demands became more and more urgent, training programs became truncated, as lesser quality pilots were graduated than compared to pre-war graduates.
Also, whatever experienced instructors there were removed from their training duties to become “core” leaders of newly created units, hampering the air-training schools and the curriculum that could be offered… (I remember reading somewhere that a lot of experienced pilots were “temporarily” tapped for use in flying supplies in to the army trapped at Stalingrad. A “temporary” assignment that ended up rather permanent for a lot of pilots.)
Japan had the same problems, only more so, as Germany, in regards to it’s ability to turn out good quality pilots in the numbers required.
Pre-war, all of the major nations greatly underestimated the number of pilots that would be needed to pass through the schools during wartime.
OK, I’ll bite: at what times on the WWII Russian Front did each side have air superiority? In particular, which side (if any) had air superiority during the Battle of Stalingrad?
I’ll bite on the second question.
The Battle for Stalingrad lasted from July '42, and lasted until Feb '43. The Germans maintained air superiority until Nov '42.
Then the USSR launched a surprise counter offensive (Operation Uranus) that encircled the city, and captured the majority of the German airfields nearby (and removed the possibilty of fighter cover for Stalingrad, as well as Stuka support). Once that was done, and with winter coming on, the Russians were able to retake the air over the city, and exact a heavy toll on the German attempts to keep Sixth Army supplied by air.
Unsurprisingly, the Germans began with air superiority over Stalingrad, but the Soviets poured enough reinforcements in that, combined with the attrition sustained by the Luftwaffe, the VVS substantially outnumbered by November '42. By the time the Soviets were advancing around the city to cut off the German 6th Army, the Luftwaffe was unable to protect the attempted aerial supply of Stalingrad and suffered heavy losses.
This is the basic pattern for the entire air war on the Eastern Front. The VVS is slaughtered in the early going, but between lend-lease P-39’s and the highly competitive Yaks and MiGs, was competitive again by the end of '42. The Il-2, easily the finest ground attack plane of the war, was utilized in vast numbers (I think the most numerous single model of aircraft in the war) and the close air support it provided was a critical element in many of the tank battles later in the war.
Yeah, most of those guys were volunteered into Adolf Galland’s JV-44 at the end of the war (that namesake was my first squadron back in the days of Air Warrior).
I’ve heard it said, by any number of pundits (tho Jim Dunnigan comes to mind first) that there were only Aces, and Targets-supposedly no such thing as an “average” pilot. That ignores a pretty vast number of pilots (on all sides) who were good enough to stay out of trouble, stick with the gameplan (teamwork was a very big thing with the Americans & Germans, less so with the Japanese or Russians), but weren’t good enough marksmen to run up many kills. So they flew with the aces, helped cover their sixes, and survived the war with low kill totals.
Weren’t the Germans flying some pretty obsolete aircraft (by the end of the war)? I mean, absent the ME-262 jet fighters, they still were flying planes from 1940. The JU-87 was ok in 1939, but by 1944, it was totally obsolete. And, as the Allie’s air forces improved, the Germans fell behind. I also understand that the ME-262s were fairly unreliable planes-the engines had short lives, and lots of them burned.
The Me-262 was horribly unreliable, yes. Plus there were critical parts shortages and very little fuel, not to mention virtually no pilots who had the training to fly a flame-out prone twin engine jet. But the late-war variants of the Bf109 and Fw190 fighters were on par with anything the Allies had in the air. The Ju87 was obsolete before the war even began, but that close air support role was the only place the Luftwaffe was lacking in terms of designs.
The biggest problem throughout the war was pilots. As the war progressed, the Luftwaffe replacement pilots had fewer and fewer hours of training under their belts.
The wiki page for the top nazi ace (Erich Hartmann) claims 352 victories, all but 7 against the Soviets, and the guy lived through the war. So yeah, sounds like they were running up the score against the Russians.
Still, that is an insane kill number. I would’nt have thought anybody would have cleared a 100 until I saw that chart.
It was a good plane, and utilized in vast numbers, but “easily the finest”? How’d you figure that, comparing and contrasting to, say, the P-47 and the Hawker Typhoon for a start, and assorted twin-engined contenders from both sides of the Atlantic?
Of those three, the Il-2 was the only one specifically designed for ground attack, with an armored tub protecting the engine and the pilot (the gunner, not so much, but in practice he was often/usually replaced by a fuel tank). The P-47 and Typhoon were designed as fighters, though the Typhoon was not very successful in that role.
As for the twins, the Henschel Hs-129 was the only one specifically designed for ground attack and built in any quantity, but there were still fewer than 900 built. Other aircraft were adapted for ground and water attack–I’ve always been a sucker for Pappy Gunn’s field-modified B-25s packing a 75mm cannon in the nose, augmented by more .50cal MGs than you could shake a stick at–but none could come close to the Ilyushin’s production of 32,000 Il-2s. It may not have been the fastest, most maneuverable, or most heavily-gunned ground attack airplane, but there was a shitload of them and they made an enormous mark on the Eastern Front.
Well, the P-47 was designed for air-to-air combat, and was a marvel of engineering considering that they overcame a deficiency in American engine design (the Allison radials being generally less powerful than the British and German inline engines) effectively through brute force: They designed and installed a turbosupercharger setup that resulted in an absolutely enormous fighter plane that through raw power alone could keep pace with the smaller German fighters. The mass of the turbosupercharger provided the pilot with additional protection, as did the rock-hard reliable air cooled radial (radial engines’ big advantage over inlines was that they were much more capable of shrugging off damage).
That said, for such a well designed fighter plane, it had a strong reputation for ground attack, being able to carry a respectable payload (IIRC a half ton of bombs) and packing 8 .50 cal machine guns (nothing to sneeze at) combined with its resistance to damage allowed it to dish out all sorts of hurt to enemies on the ground and water.
Also, from what I have read, the B-25 with the 75mm gun wasn’t the greatest idea ever. The gun was wildly inacurate, and caused considerable stress to the airframe when fired. They’d lob a few shots off with it to see if they could hit anything, but the most effective ground-attack variant of the B-25 was the steel-nosed one with the 12 .50s firing forward.
As for the Il-2, indeed, being able to blot out the sun is always a nice feature in small attack craft.
Hartmann scored most of his kills in a Bf-109G, if I remember correctly. God, that was a beautiful plane:
Yeah, but not nearly as cool! 