Training wasn’t as dangerous as some of the other jobs, but it was by no means safe. And you couldn’t even take evasive action or shoot back.
The father of one of my friends recalls the “fump” that you’d hear periodically from the training base near him.
I’m unable to find a cite, but I sort of recall reading the Boyington also had the advantage of being able to endure higher G loads than other pilots. Whether that was due to stronger abdominal muscles, genetics, body geometry or all of the above for just plain toughness, I can’t say. I’m assuming being able to pull more G’s, and for longer than your enemy pilots, results in a aerial combat advantage with WWII fighters - meaning the pilot was the weakest link in performing maneuvers in those planes.
It started out on divebombers. Back in the 30’s when this tactic was devised, the recognizable WWII tactic I mean, not releasing a bomb in any kind of descending flight path which goes back farther, there was a fair amount of public to-do about requirements and health risks of high-g pullouts. But the g’s weren’t really that high or sustained for that long by today’s standards. And note that fighter pilots now don’t always wear g-suits (the USN Blue Angels demonstration team does’t) nor do g-suits make pulling g’s a physical non-event (g-suits were introduced during WWII though not really common in that war).
This was even more true of g in horizontal maneuver. A P-40 or F4U (Boyington’s a/c in the AVG and later with USMC in South Pacific) had very low sustained g capability compared to today’s fighters. The were structurally strong enough, but the engine wasn’t powerful enough to pull the plane along in a steady state at a wing angle of attack high enough to produce lift equal to several times the plane’s weight, what you has to do to produce sustained g’s. Pilots could suffer from G induced loss of consciousness from transient high-g, and g-suits again were figured worth introducing, but WWII fighters could only pull significant g’s for a limited time before they bled off speed down to a low sustained g capability easy to physically endure. High g could be extended somewhat by losing altitude, same way even lower powered dive bombers pulled significant g at the bottom of their dives.
Speaking of the AVG, its pilots were on average quite old compared to the cross section of age in mass produced WWII air units in the US military services. Senior peacetime military pilots, from which the AVG recruited, were fairly old in the 30’s. They didn’t spend money training people in peacetime and then rush them right out of flying. Pilots were younger in WWII mainly because the air arms were expanded enormously in a short time, and they took younger rather than older untrained men as raw material. Which probably made sense. But in the peacetime decades even since the WWII pilots went into retirement in the 60’s (one of the highest claiming USAF pilots in Vietnam, Robin Olds, also had victory claims as a very young pilot in WWII), full training is really expensive and lengthy now. It’s wouldn’t be economically feasible (even if it were military desirable) to keep the average pilot age anywhere near as low as it was in WWII.
At least a couple of older AVG pilots hung it up quickly after the war started (the AVG was organized before Pearl Harbor but first combats were after) in recognition of their own sense of mortality, in their 30’s, vs that of younger men, another potential factor.
But in skill sets, reflexes counted for a lot in WWI, vision not as much as later though important. In WWII as the radii and time of fighter turns increased, reflexes were less important, vision more so. In the afterburning jet era reflexes became relatively unimportant, vision and ability to strategize a relatively slowly unfolding combat (paradoxically, planes faster, but take more time to turn around) became paramount, as well as pulling significant sustained g’s, though generally with the help of g-suits. Improvements to vision devices (eg. the F-35’s all around vision FLIR system) and decision aids (the a/c getting smarter) might change this in the future. But vision became more not less important in the era when all fighters starting being fitted with radar. It was still critical to catch view of the enemy, even where the radar said to look, as early as possible, all the more if not approaching in the radar’s field of view. And with the enemy carrying weapons, air to air missiles, of much longer range than the guns only air combat of the world wars and Korea.
Thanks Corry El, great info. Vision it is! (Plus of course all the other skills sets, mental and physical, that great WWII combat pilots individually brought to the table.)
Minor note of clarification for Corry El’s comprehensive post: “AVG” expands to “American Volunteer Group,” much better known as the Flying Tigers. They flew P-40 Warhawks in China and Burma prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The US hadn’t entered the war, obviously, so these Americans were volunteers who fought for our future WWII allies, not technically for the US.
Also, “FLIR” expands to “Forward-Looking InfraRed,” and is a somewhat outdated term. FLIR is also a company that makes infrared cameras, though not the ones on the F35. I believe the current term is SWIR (short-wave infrared) and LWIR (long-wave infrared).
Another reason why high-g manoevers were not as necessary in WWII - flying in underpowered fighters is all about energy management. As Corry El says, high G manoevers bleed energy like crazy. The high angle of attack of the wing causes induced drag to go through the roof. Any private pilot who has done steep turns can tell you what happens if you don’t add power.
If pilots yank their airplanes around the sky, they slow down. To speed up, you either lose altitude or add power, but if you are already at max power you just have to wait for that power to be converted back to speed and altitude, and in the meantime you are at a significant disadvantage.
To further clarify and repeat, the AVG didn’t actually encounter Japanese a/c till after Pearl Harbor, first on December 20, 1941. The intent was for the unit to function as a nominal unit of the Chinese Nationalist AF regardless of whether the US and Japan were yet at war, but in the event was not ready until the eve of the Pacific War and didn’t happen to encounter Japanese a/c till after it started.
Greg Boyington was a member, though had no official victories (he recalled some in at least some later accounts) and it seems unlikely in the details he downed any Japanese a/c while with the AVG. Later he returned to active duty with the USMC and was a high claiming F4U pilot in the Solomons Islands from 1943 until shot down and captured in early 1944.
Another clarification – the sirens on Stukas – somewhat dramatically known to the Germans as Jericho Trumpets – were intentionally designed to terrorize people on the ground. Early in the war, during the period of Luftwaffe dominance, this was pretty effective, as depicted in the recent movie Dunkirk.
Isn’t one of the benefits of the dive bomber is that the bomb is striking the ship’s deck, thereby bypassing the armor belts which protect against shellfire from other ships?
Yikes! You’re totally right! I realized my error on when the AVG group started fighting just now and hurried here to correct myself. I figured you probably beat me to the correction, but I wanted to acknowledge the error. Thanks for correcting me!
Also, had you previously expanded “AVG?” If so, my post was both erroneous and redundant, in which case: darn.
Only true for older ships; after carriers became dominant, designers began upgrading deck armor. Bismarck had 100-120mm, for example, and the Midway class carriers were given 200mm.
By the way, Boyington’s book, ‘Baa Baa Blacksheep’, is a pretty good autobiography that covers his time in the AVG, the Marines, and his imprisonment in Japan.
Isn’t that 200mm figure for the belt armor, not the deck? My understanding is even with upgraded deck armor designs later in WWII, the deck armor was still much thinner than 200mm thus making deck strikes by dive bombing more effective.
Someone please correct me if I’m wrong, but weren’t there some older carriers in WWII that had no deck armor? I seem to recall some still had wood decks, such as teak. Perhaps the design for those ships had the elevated flight deck on pillars above a more traditionally armored hull and deck, like the Hiryu.
In fact, American carriers did not have deck armor until 1945, with the Midway class. The British had the only armored flight deck carriers in the world when the war started, and they proved to be a really big deal. At the Battle of Okinawa, both American and British carriers were hit by kamikaze and bomb attacks. The British carriers suffered limited danage and not many casualties; the American carriers suffered horrific casualties. USS Franklin had two bombs punch through the unarmored flight deck and explode in her hangar, killing over seven hundred men.
I think you mean Essex, but Lex & Saratoga also had deck armor, altho not a armored flight deck.
Deck: .75–2 in
Decks: 2.5 in (64mm) STS hangar deck; 1.5 in (38mm) STS 4th deck
However, the British armored flight deck reduced greatly the number of Aircraft she could carry.
British naval historian D.K. Brown put the practical difference between American and British design philosophies in no uncertain terms: “More fighters would have been better protection than armour,” but that British designs were good for the circumstances in which they were meant to be used.
Only one USA Aircraft carrier was lost due to a deck hit- the Independence-class light carrier, USS Princeton.
So more airplanes was better than deck armor.
answered/ninjaed
The belt of the Midway class was almost that much in one thickness. The flight deck armor was only 3.5", IOW to keep a vertically dropping projectile out of the ship altogether, but the combined thickness of decks a bomb or projectile would have to penetrate to get to machinery or magazines was around 8", hangar deck and armor deck both around 2" and some other thinner decks. Of course decks adding up to 8" aren’t as resistant to penetration per se as a single 8" deck of a given material, but OTOH there’s more potential for the bomb/projectile to detonate early before getting through all of them.
As others pointed out the difference in some British WWII carriers, and postwar carriers v WWII USN and IJN carriers was flight deck armor, the US and Japanese WWII ones generally had hangar deck armor and other supporting decks. It was assumed damage control measures could limit damage to explosions between the flight deck and hangar deck relatively to hits in magazines, machinery spaces and avgas tanks that were armored against bombs. Which was sometimes true and sometimes not. But, armoring the flight deck was a major design compromise in terms of a/c capacity and flight operations, not a free ticket to a less vulnerable ship.
Back to dive bombers v heavily armored ships. In general WWII divebombers had limited or no capability to kill post Washington Treaty or heavily modernized pre Treaty battleships by penetrating their horizontal armor all the way down to main machinery and main battery magazines. They didn’t generally carry very big bombs (though German dive bombers heavier than US/Japanese), and for one of the major reasons their accuracy was greater, lower altitude of release less time to accelerate by gravity, the bombs were not going fast enough. Penetrating battleships with reasonable horizontal protection by WWII standards, even modernized older ships, required level bombing with big AP bombs from significant altitude, like the Japanese attack on USS Arizona*. But again it was very hard to hit moving ships that way. The solution to killing moving battleships by bombing was the German guided bomb Fritz X that sank the Italian Roma. Big, dropped from high enough to be going very fast when it hit, guided so it had some real chance of hitting a moving ship (at least as long as the ships lacked effective electronic countermeasures, and if German bombers could hope to survive Allied fighters, later on the idea didn’t work as well for those two reasons).
The US dive bomber attacks on the big Japanese battleships Yamato and Musashi were generally more of distraction and suppression AA fire. The killing damage was done by torpedoes. One bomb hit started a secondary battery ammo fire on Yamato that couldn’t be put out so it’s debatable what would have happened if there were not so many torpedo hits, but it did not penetrate all the way through the ship’s armor to the machinery or magazines.
*even there it’s not 100% clear the exact mechanism of the ships’s destruction and the penetration by hits on some of the other ships wasn’t that impressive compared to Japanese trials which showed the bombs used capable of penetrating 6" of armor in one thickness from the altitude employed.