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Mitya
Sure looks like it was an easy target, counting holes....low and slow is good for crop dusting...............but when there are guns around..not so good.
what Mitya is trying to show, is that a IL2 could take that kind of punishment, whilst a P-47, or any other fighter a/c would't live to talk about that.
The plane shown above was flown by Lt. Karl Hallberg of my fighter group, the 366th. He had one hung bomb and tried to land at our base at Asch, Belgium, in January 1945. As you can see, the bomb fell off and exploded, but, amazingly, Lt. Hallberg survived. He suffered a head injury, but made a full recovery.
Lt. Robert S Johnson. Lawton, OK. 61st Fighter Squadron. P-47C 41-6235 HV-P "Half Pint". Detail shot of damage to canopy area
Lt. Robert S Johnson. Lawton, OK. 61st Fighter Squadron. P-47C 41-6235 HV-P "Half Pint". Well known photo but worth looking at again as contrary to popular belief, this a/c was not written of but repaired and issued to the 9th AF's 36th FG where it was finally lost on 18 August 1944.
Capt. Warren S "Pat" Patterson Jr. Jarrettown, PA. 61st Fighter Squadron. P-47D 43-25579 HV-H "Widget". Damage to port stabiliser possibly the result of a mid-air collision suffered by Capt. Patterson over France on 7 August 1944
Lt. Bill May�s P-47D 42-75505, E9:M looked decidedly battered after the Munster mission of 22 February 1944. Following a scrap with Fw190s north of the Ruhr, 376th Squadron flights were reforming for return to base when Lt. May was attacked from astern by a single �190. With fuel running very low, he headed for the deck, but collided with trees and high tension wires. After landing at Manston, however, only ten gallons of fuel were found in his tanks.
Charlie Rife and Richard Kik
A Mission to Remember August 12th, 1944
20mm, 40mm 88mm flak hits taken
"We took off on a usual mission armor cover flight at the Falaise
track. Down at the Falaise track it was hard fighting, a lot of anti-
aircraft fire, a lot of infantry, armor, trucks, a lot of everything. I went
down on a strafing run and hit this truck Previous to that I heard a
thump somewhere in the airplane and I didn't realize what it was, but
when I came off the strafing run my wingman, Chuck Rife said "have
you got the water on?" I said "no, why?" Chuck said "you're trailing
smoke." He came up and looked around and said "it's coming off
the bottom of the engine." It Turned out a 20 mm knocked two or
three cylinders off my engine. I'm telling you, those people deserve a medal for that engine, I've
never seen one like it."
Chuck caught a burst of anti-aircraft fire. Both of his wings were struck by 40mm rounds. The flak rounds exploded and pieces of metal entered his cockpit. The explosion damaged his instruments and shredded his parachute pack. So as we got across the line I told Chuck, "you better get ready to bail out." He said "I can't, my parachute's all tore up." I told Chuck you've got two live bombs on your wings, you're not going to be able to belly land with those, can you drop them? He said "no, I can't" and held up his bomb release, "cause here's my bomb thing." It was a mess.
WW II ACE STORIES
SHOT FULL OF HOLES
Don Blakeslee's P-47 Upon Return From The Paris Mission
September 1943
In what respects? I've received a comment from an aeronautical engineer who likes examining old designs that the proposal is entirely feasible.I checked out Tony's website, finding the 'Brit WWII Multi' interesting, but not esp convincing...
I don't think so - from what I recall of the Hurri IID accounts they were going flat-out when they attacked.As cannon fire must directly impact the tank to be effective, accuracy demands a close-range attack at very low-altitude, the slower the speed the better.
It depends what you mean by "viable weapon". It was certainly possible to make a good ground-attack plane which was well-protected and armed with a gun powerful enough to be effective against tanks - but no-one quite managed to put the combination together.Neither the armament, the armor, or the engines existed to make the cannon-armed tankbuster a viable weapon on a hotly-contested battlefield. Not 'til thirty years later did a truly effective armored, big-gun tank-killer become a reality.
? I know the engines had reliability problems, but the Hs 129 was heavily armoured against ground fire. It was the closest WW2 equivalent to the A-10.The qualities required to make an a/c a viable combat weapon include more than imposing firepower and armor. First and foremost, it must be survivable and reliable. The Hs 129 was neither.
Where were those esteemed German big-gun 'panzerknackers' in the last desperate year of the war? Other than Rudel's elite little group, the so-called 'best' were no more, blown out of the skies, their few surviving pilots flying the very able, if less-specialized Fw-190 fighter-bombers against the ever-encroaching hordes of enemy armor. Curious indeed...
As renrich pointed out, the F4U was nearly as accurate a dive bomber as the SBD (and about the same as the SB2C), so there's at least one big exception to the fighter-bombers being less accurate bombers. (although in this context, bombing a tank with anything other than napalm would be very difficult, even for a dedicated dive bomber)
Hi Tony
There are indeed quite a few references that suggest the presence of Japanese tanks at the Imphal-Kohima battles, however, this is not supported by the Japanese reference materiel
Interesting Parsifal, I just had a quick flick through "The air battle of Imphal" by Norman Franks and he states that 20 sqn RAF (Hurricane IID) knocked out 12 tanks in June 44. Franks states that the squadron was operating inside the valley, finding the tanks in the Southern end. Apparently 20 sqn weren't flying outside the valley because it was too dangerous to fly over the mountains due to the monsoonal clouds which were obscuring the tops.
I have no specific information on the combat record of the 190F series. However, it was an interesting and logial approach to producing a reasonably well-protected ground attack aircraft which still maintained some self-defence capability against fighters.Tony, in ur opinion, where do u rate the 190F-8 Panzerblitzer II??? There are a few of us purists who think that arrangement with those R4M powered bastards was the best multiroller tank buster....
I agree - size is not a benefit for a close-support plane, it just makes it a bigger target.On the same topic, what do you think of the Beech XA-28 Grizzly? It seems awfully big to me...
I'm not so sure that speed affects accuracy very much, but it will affect the number of shots the pilot has time to fire. Even so, the Tsetse (which was probably travelling fast when it attacked, although I have no specific info on that) had time to fire four 57mm rounds per pass. And with a 33% hit rate against a tank-sized target, that meant one tank per pass.My comment about the need for gun attacks to be carried out at lower speeds concerns accuracy.
I am surprised to read that, since the Hs 129 carried more armour than any WW2 plane except for the Il-2. if it was indeed vulnerable (compared with a P-47 say) that means the designers must have made some fairly major errors.The Hs 129 was extremely vulnerable to even small-arms fire,
The design purpose is the same, and the concept of substantial armour plating also, plus the ability to carry a big gun (for the Hs 129 anyway - the Il-2 was less successful at that). Of course, the execution of the design was very different, but I stand by my statement that the Hs 129 and A-10 were conceptually closely related.The Hs-129 and Il-2/10 are fundamentally different from the A-10, even allowing for the technological gap.
The USAAF/USAF has always made that argument. They regard fighter-bombers as far more versatile than CAS planes because they can be switched to other priorities when required. They also, I suspect, are doctrinally opposed to CAS because it subordinates the USAF to the needs of the army. They have on at least two occasions tried to scrap the A-10 fleet (in the early 1990s they produced a few "A-16" planes with a 30mm gunpod, but this proved a failure). Conversely, the army loves CAS planes like the A-10 for exactly the same reasons that the USAF hates them!While the less-specialized fighter-bombers may seem less effective than the dedicated big-gun tankbusters, an argument can be made that the opposite is true.
I should perhaps clarify that the ground attack version of my "multi-purpose compact twin" concept for the WW2 RAF was not really a dedicated tankbuster, but was more a fighter-bomber in the 190F mould: take one fighter and add armour to enhance protection against ground fire. It would have been comparable in size, weight and performance to the P-47, only with the safety benefit of two engines and with the ability to carry a big gun on the fuselage centreline - as well as a couple of 20mm cannon and all the RPs and bombs you could ask forOf course, if your idealized 'big-gun tank-buster' would actually work as well as you imagine, I retract my support for the lowly Jug
At the "Gathering Of Eagles" VIP capabilities demo three A10's came in on a convoy of 4 M60A1 tanks, two tanker trucks, 4 APC's and a couple of trucks. There was one pass using the GAU-8 gun of each of the three aircraft. Thats all it took. There was not one target left that was viable or not on fire.
Wasn't the muzel velocity of the Mk 103 (for AP round) ~760 m/s? (much slower than the GAU-8's ammo)
For the much lighter ~330g HE(M) round MV was ~940 m/s iirc (same ammo as the MK 101) Although, due to the lighter structure of the gun, it was usually reduced to 860 m/s for HE ammo. (full propellant load was used on AP ammo though)
I was sure about my facts when I started this, but now I am starting to get confused......I cant seem to make much sense of it all, the dates, the activities, the locations are just not adding up for me....
Its quite feasible for the allies to be knocking out tanks in June '44, because by that time the Japanese had retreated. They were back on the eastern side of the ranges by then, retreating towards their supply heads, with the Allies hot on their heels. What doesnt gel in this case is the statement about the a/c not wanting to cross the mountains. In order for the allies to be attacking Japanese in that "Imphal-Mandalay" axis, they would have had to be overflying numerous mountains by that time.
My reading of the basic history is this....the Imphal-Kohima battles were fought March-April, and early May 1944. The Japanese then finally retreated, believing that the Monsoons would cover their retreat. The allies did not react as expected, and instead broke into a hot pursuit that enable them to capture suitable jump off points inside of Burma once the wet had stopped in mid-october. At the same time this was all happening, the Allies, being basically a mix of Chinese, US (under Merrill) and CW forces managed to capture Mytikina, thereby making it possible to start the Ledo Road to China.
Im not as good a student as you guys about the aircraft histories, but I am not too bad with the general operational history stuff. I cant seem to reconcile what is being said here (your post, and Tony's) with the general history stuff. I dont doubt the veracity of what you and Tony are saying, but neither can I work it out. Its just the details that are wrong....