Dac said:
And the Hs-129 hardly made up the bulk of the Luftwaffe ground fleet. I do however agree that past 1944 the bulk of the Luftwaffe needed to defend the Reich.
Ad: This forum contains affiliate links to products on Amazon and eBay. More information in Terms and rules
Dac said:I was was talking about the Hs-129 and Ju-87G, when I said underpowered.
DerAdlerIstGelandet said:And the Hs-129 hardly made up the bulk of the Luftwaffe ground fleet. I do however agree that past 1944 the bulk of the Luftwaffe needed to defend the Reich.
Yeah, read somewhere they did that to the HS 129 as well. Man all you need was one of those HS 129 with the 6x75mm recoiless rifles PLUS the 55 mm rockets.
Like the a-10, not fast, but by God, the punch!
Not Bofors - the smaller and much less powerful Vickers S.Falk44 said:Can you give me any informations? For
example on prominent Hurricane tank busters? The Hurricane - I belief
to remember that the Hurricane Mk IID with two Bofors 40 mm flew
earlier than the famous Ju 87 G.
I do not think the IL-2 is the best tank killer of WWII, at all.
The USAAF has worked hard to prove all their fighters were absolutely superior to anything the Germans had (they were not). The soviets have worked likewise.
The Shturmovik has been overinflated by the soviet propaganda.
Even the alleged nickname German troops gave to it, "Black Death" was a very dumb name invented by the soviet themselves.
The German troops never referred to it as such.
It of course made an important contribution for the soviet war effort and certainly inflicted damage to the enemy, but to say it was an extremely efficient tank destroyer is quite beyond the domain of reality.
While it could carry powerful armament like 37mm cannons, rockets and bombs, the IL-2M was not a very stable gun platform. It was an armored pig.
The Germans captured big numbers of intact Il-2s (both the single-seat and two seat versions) and after being tested they could not believe such a piece of crap had been put into massive production. Please do not tell it was for the sole purpose of "reassuring" the German soldiers in the front lines (i.e. the Germans praised the capabilities of the La-7.) who of course knew what the conditions at the front were.
The Shturmovik´s heavy weight armor could be very efficient against personal infantry weapons being fired at them, but against weapons up the mid caliber it was as vulnerable as any other plane of its size. The casualty rate of the IL-2s is perhaps the most frightful suffered by any war plane fielded by any of the nations involved.
The nearly 1 ton of armor fitted to the Shturmovik, providing "all around heavy armor protection" has similarities with the doctrine of the boxes of heavy bombers of the USAAF. The boys of the USA were convinced a massed formation of heavy bombers, each packed with up to 12 .50 cal machine guns could more than deal with the German interceptors all by itself. In the skies of western europe just like in the steppes of the Soviet Union, both notions were proved gruesome failures.
Differences however exist. The USA did not have the absolute contempt for the lives of its men the soviet side displayed, and the heavy bombers eventually received fighter escorts while the IL-2s continued to be sent in massed numbers against the enemy. Sergei V. Ilyushin spent a good part of the war with a gun pointed at his head to produce more and more of those planes.
The Shturmovik could be regarded as the aerieal version of soviet infantry. Many times, when the target was large (armored or motorized units or big concentrations of troops) they would literally charge in large numbers at extremely low altitude, being greeted by a barrier of fire involving every firing tube available, many many times receiving fatal damage, having the soviet pilot -at the very last moment- smashing his plane against the enemy positions, causing terrible losses and damage. But that has nothing to do with quality of the plane.
I have soviet propaganda footage of the Shturmoviks (made right after the war), shown diving with all 37mm blazing, and hell, it had a punch!
From the armament approach, it surely carried toys that could destroy any tank. It surely hit and destroyed panzers but not in the fashion many appear to believe.
All sides overclaimed, that is a very well known thing. Still I do think the best aerial tank busters of the war are the Germans.
Most soviet pilots were hastily trained then put in the cockpit of their machines. Pokryshkin and pupils were exceptions. Losses of soviet aircraft in 1945 alone (Jan 1st-May 9th) made +/- 11,000 aircraft (eleven thousand); does that tell anything?
These of course leads to other lines of discussion, like the alleged reorganization and re-birth of an extremely capable and highly skilled VVS masterminded by Aleksandr Novikov and many others.
A research made by Niklas Zetterling revealed the USAAF and RAF, during the previous months to D-day over Normandy, claimed numbers of destroyed panzers which surpassed the entire order of battle of panzer units in the entire Normandy campaign. In fact they destroyed nearly ten times less panzers than those claimed by their pilots.
The USAAF and RAF were far better trained air forces than the VVS ever was.
Willkommen aus Ansbach hier.
200, according to Operational Research. Even when practicing in ideal conditions (and with no-one shooting back at them) it took, on average, 20 RPs fired for every hit on a tank. And RPs were accurate, compared with bombs...The Typhoons had a very bad hit rate against armour with their rockets if I remember right - upwards of 100 rockets used for one hit.
beautiful picture....did you make it?