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Henning, the Luftwaffe did have a whole 1943 to halt the daylight bomber offensive. Even though USAF suffered greatly, Luftwaffe failed. So it's fair to say that they struggled.
Plus four and 1/2 months in 1942, although those were 'raids' to occupied France and Holland mostly - and escorted by Spitfires.
As for the numbers statistics for A6M vs. B-17/B-24, I myself would love to see them
The Zero exploied the lack of firepower on the B-17D and many of the missions did not have enough formation strength to offset even 'in trai' attacks with cohesive defensive fire. The Luftwaffe experienced the 'combat box' formations in early 1943 in multiple group attacks in formation. In my mind this was a significant difference in defensive capability that the Luftwaffe faced.
I truly believe Zero vs B-17D and early E in PTO is a distinctly different air war than late model E/F/G in 1943 over Germany - and the Luftwaffe definitely punished the 8th AF (and 12th) for unescorted target attacks.
Considering the lack of armor and self sealing tanks of the Zero, and its reliance on a pair of low performing cannons ..... the B17 had a far better chance of defending against and surviving atatcks by 1 or 2 Zero's.
From what I recall, it was often massed attacks by the Zero's and Oscars that did the B17's in.
I think that the B17 was not the most commonly used bomber in the PTO after the initial months of the war but rather the B24 because of it's range and bombload. Seems like I recall most of the bombing raids out of Guadalcanal were B24s. B26s and B25s were heavily used in the Papua campaign(can't spell New G)
Hi Lucky,
>Hey buddy! Would you mind tell my in what way the -4 were as worse performer than the -3 of the Wildcat? Slap me if I'm wrong here....
Hehe, no need to ... you're wrong but the question was a good one. I bet the Navy pilots asked it, too!
As you can see indicated on my diagram, the F4F-3 weighed in at 3204 kg in fighter trim, a figure confirmed as typical by the evaluation report Claidemore posted above. The F4F-4 according to the BuAer Airplane Characteristics Performance sheets weighed in at 3617 kg, a gain of more than 400 kg without any gain of power and while drag increased quite a bit, too.
(At least, the increase in drag is evident if you compare the early-production F4F-3 tested for performance with the data given in the BuAer sheet for the F4F-4. However, BuAer also shows a markedly lower full throttle height for what should be a virtually identical engine, so both sources appear to be not perfectly consistent. I just see that Mike has a lot of new data on F4F Performance Trials which I haven't checked yet - maybe it will help to explain the difference.)
The hefty increase in weight was due to the re-design of the wings to include a folding mechanism, which was of great operational value since it allowed the carriers to take a lot more fighters aboard, and early war experience had shown that fighters were more important in naval warfare than anticipated. However, the weight increase probably exceeded everything that had been expected when Navy ordered the F4F-4, so I'm sure there were a lot of people who were just as surprised as you about F4F-4 performance.
Note that the evaluation report Claidemore provided shows that the US Navy had been guaranteed a top speed of 350 mph for the F4F-3 when they were just achieving 331 mph in practice. 19 mph is a big difference for early-war fighter aircraft ... and the F4F-4 was down to 320 mph.
Regards,
Henning (HoHun)