And, to piss on the USMC’s parade a little bit, the US 8th Air Force alone lost more aircrew killed in action than the entire USMC did throughout the war. That’s not even counting the losses of the other numbered air forces.
WWII aerial warfare was on an entirely different scale than any aerial warfare since, and I don’t think people realize that. Bomber raids back then sometimes had upwards of 300 bombers on them… that’s roughly the TOTAL number of US heavy bombers in inventory today. And that WWII raid wasn’t everything we had available either…
Never saw an estimate of total WWII plane losses, gotta be well over a hundred thousand. Maybe twice that. IIRC Russia lost a couple of thousand (mostly obsolete) on the first day of the German invasion.
In early 1945, Meteors were deployed to western Europe in the 3 or so months before the German surrender, where they entered combat against German ground forces, piston-engined fighters, and Arado jet bombers.
According to Wiki, US Army Air Force lost about 23,000 planes in combat , another 20,000 “overseas” – in training, transport, etc., and yet another 20 thousand within the continental US.
Bomber Command had a mortality rate for aircrew of about 44%, with 55 thousand-odd deaths over the course of the war. A tough old business, the heavy bombing.
I think they are probably the most deadly large formations for anyone to have served in for either the UK or US in WWII?
USN lost 15,053 aircraft from all causes. I would have thought that the heaviest casualties were in 1943, before they gained such dominance over the Japanese. But I was wrong. In 1941 and 42 the navy lost 1443 planes, in 1943 the Navy lost 1897 planes, in 1944 the lost 5402 planes, and in 1945 (and only through mid August), they lost 6311 planes
[QUOTE=TokyoBayer;19105627The second highest ace was from France, with 75 kills and the thirds highest was from Canada. [/QUOTE]
What do the kill counts of single pilots have to do with aerial warfare anyway? The US and to a lesser extent Britain pulled aces out of combat to teach new pilots to be better. This meant that they didn’t get the super high kill counts for single pilots, but instead had a much better trained pool of pilots who got a better kill ratio for the entire force instead of one guy. Also, a lot of the really high kill counts come from things like German pilots blowing up surprised and/or untrained Red Air Force pilots during Barbarossa, not from one on one duels of skill that I think people are picturing.
I may have skimmed that - you’re right, the wording implies that the Meteors weren’t in the air - ironic, since they were originally deployed for airbase defence!
It’s not as clear cut as that. The Germans did a lot of things right, as well. They had a better formation during the Battle of Britain than the RAF, for example.
The US also did a lot of stupid things, including trying the same tactics for daytime strategic bombing in 1943 while mounting more and more casualties until the losses got too high.
Exactly.
The Allies also benefited from inexperienced German and Japanese pilots at the end of the war. The Japanese were sending clearly unqualified fliers as kamikaze pilots and it was much easier to shoot them down rather than the earlier, top notch Zero pilots at the beginning of the war.
Total losses from all causes was probably around a quarter of a million. It is certainly more than all the aircraft losses in all other wars combined.
The industrial scale of aerial warfare in World War II is hard to imagine, especially today, when military aircraft are ludicrously expensive and the number any country can own is pretty limited. Today the Royal Air Force, which is a pretty good air froce, operates about 800 aircraft. The RAF built more aircraft (a lot more) than that just during the twelve weeks or so that the Battle of Britain ran. And they ramped UP from that point.
Oh, definitely. I wasn’t trying to imply that the RAF’s Bomber Command was any less bloody than the US 8th Air Force. Heavy bomber raids were perilous in the extreme, regardless of who you flew for.
Here in the US, the US Marine Corps has portrayed itself as having a somewhat outsized role in WW2(to hear them tell it THEY won the war in the Pacific single-handedly), and suffering correspondingly massive casualties. Which is sort of true, in that the USMC fights tended to be short, sharp, extremely bloody affairs. But when all was said and done, the US 8th Air Force had more KIA than the entire USMC, which isn’t something that is very well known.
Just to point out the RAF flew a 1000 Bomber Raid as early as May 1942 (though to get the magic number they had to scrape together every plane and crew that could fly!) and by October 1944 they could launch a 1000 bomber raid using only front line aircraft. In fact most raids were smaller as it was found a short sharp raid that saturated the defenses was both less costly and more accurate and destructive. Big raids led to larger numbers of stragglers who were easy prey for the German fighters.
Oh, sure… I just picked 300 as a number of bombers that seemed to signify a “serious” USAAF raid, and it happily coincided with being about 10% of the entire current USAF/USN total of combat aircraft.
The USAAF put up quite a few 800-1000 plane raids in 1944 as well… by then it was getting somewhat easier than earlier, when the raids were smaller, and the losses were much heavier.
There is an excellent book called *America’s Hundred Thousand *which covers just the major fighters produced in the US from just before the war until it’s end.
When I sorted this database by aircraft type, I saw that it didn’t have any F6F Hellcats listed as having been destroyed. That’s a major hole in the data. If there are whole aircraft types missing, there are probably thousands of more losses than the data now indicates.
Not really. France was the dominant miliary power on land from about 1650 not as a result of its innovative approach of warfare (with probably the exception of the art of siege thanks to the genius of Vauban), but simply by virtue of being the wealthiest country with the largest population, hence having the biggest army. Otherwise, during the 18th century the example to follow was the Prussian army. War was indeed redefined by France during the revolution/empire era, but other countries caught up, and then the reputation of the Napoleonic model outlived its actual usefulness as the American civil war in particular demonstrated. France then collapsed against Germany in 1870, and didn’t display any more brillance in doctrine than anybody else during WWI. Paradoxically, France’s military reputation peaked again between WWI and WWII, until the actual performance in 1940 demonstrated that this reputation wasn’t exactly deserved.
And finally “the war as we know it” (or at least as we expect it to be, I’m not convinced it’s still considered a valid model) was mostly defined during WWII, and France obviously didn’t have much part in it.