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You don't need much range for close support aircraft. Supporting the troops in Normandy from English airfields was a temporary condition.
I would also take a second look at that quote from Wiki, it may not be wrong but it may be being misinterpreted. "destroyed or damaged from all causes" may include take-off and landing accidents, engine failures and the like in addition to Flak. All the armor in the world won't stop those losses.
In some Spitfire books there is a photo of a Spitfire that took 3 20mm hits to the rear fuselage. If you find it and look carefully you can see a wrinkle or buckle in the fuselage skin in addition to the shell damage. The Plane go the pilot home but it was a structural write-off. You can increase the armor on radiators, oil coolers, cockpits and even fuel tanks and engine cowlings but trying to armor the entire airframe is impossible. There is no such thing as 'Flak-proof', just greater or lesser resistance to fFlak hits in vulnerable locations. Multiple hits in wings, rear fuselage and tail can still bring down the aircraft.
The FlakVierling also used a rather powerful 20mm round and did not use mine shells. It might very well be able to defeat armor that would withstand 20mm MG/ff or MG 151/20 ammo.
Sure we did. American volunteer pilots flying prototype P-51Bs swept the Luftwaffe from the sky at El Alamein, allowing British 8th Army to counter attack.
Britain achieved daytime air superiority when and where it mattered most. If that doesn't count as defeating the Luftwaffe then what does?British and Soviets achived great victories, but still they didn't defeated the majority of Germany's fighter force
Britain achieved daytime air superiority when and where it mattered most. If that doesn't count as defeating the Luftwaffe then what does?
That would be 1939 to 1943 when Germany lost control of airspace over the English Channel, North Africa, Sicily, Italy, the Bay of Biscay, naval base at Brest (France), various parts of the Soviet Union etc. Otherwise Rommel would have kept rolling all the way to the Suez Canal and Allied troop landings in North Africa and Italy would have been impossible.
Field Marschall Franz Halder had scathingly declared that Hitlers refusal to take Moscow in early 1941 was the turning point of the war.
Britain and the Soviet Union were both critically dependent upon U.S. economic assistance. But they don't need the U.S. Army Air Corps to win the war.
Field Marschall Franz Halder had scathingly declared that Hitlers refusal to take Moscow in early 1941 was the turning point of the war. Hitler while brilliant and diplomatically transcendant he was a timid military tactician and unable to fight the Blitz-Blitzkrieg his generals were convinced was necessary to win. He seemed overly concerned with securing the materials that had lost Germany WW1 and therefore lost the initiative by living in the past. Hitlers thrust at France via Belgium was about securing the Alsation Iron ore supplies not some brilliant flanking tactic, his invasion of Norway was about securing Iron ore supplies (and probably neccessary, Vikidun Quisling had informed Hitler that the Norweigen cabinet had decided not to fight should Britain invade Norway thereby allowing violation of its neutrality) and his stopping at the gates of Moscow and performance of a bizzare swing down south to attempt to secure oil fields and resources of the Ukrain before settling down for a sieg. Germany might have smashed the Sovet Army instead the swing down south gave it time to consolidate.
After the failure to take Moscow, when the German army was in a position to do so, the rest was perhaps only a matter of time due to the time it gave the Soviets to recover and then bring their greater manpower and material wealth to the fore. However, I suspect that had the Germans succesfully secured their cyphers they may still have won. For instance there would have been no Palm Sunday Massacre of Transports to Nth Africa, no massive causualties of Paratroops over Crete, no warning to Air Marschall Dowding of Adler Tag. This was a close run thing: had the Germans complicated their enigma machines with say an extra wheel or two, a fully rewirable keyboard (instead of the 10 'optimal letters') and had they actually deployed the rewirable reflector UKWD in quantity in early 1943 they would have secured their cyphers. The UK Typex and US Sigba cypher machines were merely elaborated copies of captured German machines.
The P-51B only performed its first tentative missions in December 1943. I would regard the Germans as having reached full performance parity 10 months latter in October 1944 when the Me 109K4 performed its first missions. A partial closing of the gap occured in March 1944 with the Me 109G6ASM with the slightly improved Me 109G14AS 3 months after that.
Prior to that ie during 1943 and late 1942 there seems to have been a very puzzling policy of emphasising Me 109 cost and production advantages over performance improvement by compromising aerodynamics to allow armament, armour and equipment growth. It is hard to determin how much production would have been lost had they decided to produce more refined upgraded Me 109. To me it seems the main effect would have been simply to delay introduction of more heavily armed and armoured versions of the Me 109 as tooling for the more refined upgrades was distributed although while the tooling for these upgraded models was distributed perhaps the tooling for more ordinary models would be compromised. It would have been worthwhile to blow of some other aircraft program to pull an extra 10mph out of the Me 109.
Britain achieved daytime air superiority when and where it mattered most. If that doesn't count as defeating the Luftwaffe then what does?
People, the topic is about the suitability of the 'Sturmovik-type' airplane for the Western Allies, late war. Please, if you want to discuss the Hitler's refusals, or the contribution of the various AFs to the destruction of Luftwaffe, I'm sure you can find the appropriate topics to share your opinions there.