Dogfighting in a P 38

[Token]

Our two top aces flew the P-38. That would be Dick Bong and Tommy McGuire.

Not only the top 2 aces, but of the top 10 US aces, 3 of them flew the P-38 (the other P-38 driver on the top 10 list is Charles MacDonald). The F4U and the P-47 each have two pilots in the top 10 (although one of the P-47 drivers, Francis Gabreski, got some of his kills in the Spitfire), all other aircraft, F6F, F4F, and P-51 only have a single pilot in the top 10.

T!

 

[GregP]

Yes, the "top ten" are all over the map, aircraft-wise. It tells a story of opportunity and gives credence that a combat outcome was much more dependent on pilot skill and initial situation than on the aircraft being flown.

Greg Boyington would be in there had his AVG victories happened while flying for the USA, but the AVG were not a US military group. So while he DID score 28, only 22 were in US military service. I'm pretty sure his early victories were in P-40s and the US Marines score was in F4Us. You can dispute his AVG score if you have some primary document proof. The Marines recognize his 6 kills with the AVG (maybe 5.75?) with 22 while in US Marine service.

 

[drgondog]

What bothers me, and always has bothered me is that the AVG credited Boyington with 2 air and 2 1/2 ground but the USMC accepted Boyingtons claims for "6 air" with no corroborating authority? Tex Hill stated that Boyington's claims were BS - not just his claims of '6 air' but also his claims of 30 ground. I have no horse in this game but Tex Hill had a lot of credibility with his peers.

 

[bobbysocks]

and didn't Boyington claim he got another one ( not witnessed by anyone else ) just before he went down?

 

[bobbysocks]

there are a few other americans like don gentile who got some of their kills in spitfires and hurricanes. there are some guys who made top aces in certain planes but which plane more aces out of the men??? I would say the 109 for the LW, spitfire for the RAF, and 51 for the US

 

[GregP]

The F6F has to rank right up there near the top of that list, but I couldn't say for sure which one created more aces. Certainly the F6F did whatever it did in a shorter time than the P-51 did, probably due more to more frequent opportunities than to any other factor.

As for Boyington, I am NOT a fan of post-war, and especially WAY LATER post-war, revisionism unless they are going to scrutinize every single kill equally. The guys who raised a stink about Boyington were close friends with Joe Foss and wanted him to out-rank Boyington, mostly for political reasons. They got their wish and he got elected state representative and governor of South Dakota, but I doubt seriously they ever srcrutinized Foss's kills as equally as they did Boyington's.

I make no claim right here that any of Foss's victories were questionable or that Greg Boyington's weren't, for that matter, but to look carefully at one or two individuals and not to look at others with an equally doubtful eye is just wrong. It is "selective review" by people with a personal agenda and the power to implement it ... that almost always results in an unfair outcome. If it hasn't in some case, I haven't heard of it ... which doesn't mean it never happened.

It would be interesting to see how all the WWII victories would stand up to equal review, and not just for US claims. I suspect there would be widespread adjustments downward, mostly not from deliberate overclaiming, but rather from combat events that might preclude someone from continuous observation of a "kill" going down and crashing, particularly if scored at high altitude or above a cloud layer.

The victory claims by bomber gunners in large formations are an entirely different case that I will simply decline to speculate about here.

 

[drgondog]

Greg - the F6F was in combat ops in Southwest Pacific in August 1943, four months ahead of the P-51B. Of the 6300 'all in' P-51 victory credits, including RAF, less than 100 were scored in P-51/Mark I and IA, P-51A and A-36.

The P-51B/C alone was far ahead of the F6F until long after the Mariana's campaign ended in August 1944.

 

[GregP]

Not too sure the F6F was deployed as rapidly as the P-51. The PTO was, after all, the lesser priority of the two theaters as far as new equipment went. Without knowing for sure, I'd bet the F6F was deployed in far fewer numbers in a set timeframe. They didn't have many "bases" to deploy them to and the carriers wouldn't hold all that many Hellcats each.

Not really arguing the point at all, though I have seen it claimed otherwise in the past in other places. Just saying the difference in awarded victories for the two types was not great and the P-51 would seem to have had a definite advantage in having to escort bombers when enemy aircraft were almost certain to be encountered while the F6F had to fly combat air patrols and hope to encounter enemy aircraft over a large ocean. They also could be reasonably certain of encountering Japanese aircraft in the vicinity of well-known locations for Japanese airfields. I'd think that the encounters in the PTO were naturally mostly over water and were much smaller in overall aircraft numbers than any normal raid in the ETO.

I have never located a source for a summary of Naval aircraft victories that has the same information as the USAAF data does, so I can't really tell. But the Japanese certainly made many fewer aircraft than Germany, and they were much more widely spread out due to the nature of being mostly in a big ocean. With a certainty, the P-51 never even approached the kill-to-loss ratio of the F6F against enemy aircraft. That could easily be due to the very fact of lesser numbers and more congested combat area at the same time. If a flight of, say 8 Hellcats encountered a flight of, say, A6Ms, the two flights would almost certainly be more concentrated together than a typical fight in the ETO, where several sets of enemy aircraft could come out of the sun from different directions, more or less all at the same time.

It would be an interesting comparison, and I'm not even sure what questions to ask, much less of the outcome of such an analysis, assuming the data exist at all. Perhaps not. I still think the total victory awards for the two aircraft are so close as be rather insignificant in actual numbers. The local conditions for aerial combat are more interesting to me than the theater.

The F6F probably had a smaller chance of encountering an enemy aircraft on an average mission, but a much great chance of acvtually engaging when enemy aircraft were spotted.

This is NOT intended to make any sort of statement negative about the P-51 at all. I was just thinking about potential battle over land defended by planes trying to intercept more or less known bomber streams versus potential battle of at sea or over some enemy airfield when many fewer aircraft were usually involved in any single encounter.

 

[FLYBOYJ]

Grumman had been working on a successor to the F4F Wildcat since 1938 and the contract for the prototype XF6F-1 was signed on 30 June 1941.

26 Jun 1942 The Grumman XF6F-3 Hellcat prototype made its maiden flight.

The first production F6F-3, powered by an R-2800-10, flew on 3 October 1942, with the type reaching operational readiness with VF-9 on USS Essex in February 1943

31 Aug 1943 The first combat mission of the US Navy's latest fighter aircraft occurred when F6F-3 Hellcat fighters of VF-5 operating from the carrier USS Yorktown assisted in an attack on Japanese installations on Marcus Island.

 

[GregP]

I think they both did a very good job and, behind the F8F Bearcat and maybe the A6M Zero, the P-51 and F6F are my favorite WWII fighters. Perhaps I just like the looks of a radial fighter. When I say favorite, I mean looks alone.

When it comes to effectiveness, the Spitfire, Bf 109, Fw 190, P-51 and F6F are all outstanding. Many others could be added. It is amazing to me that the various designers came up with so many designs with performances so similar to one another yet so different in approach.

It's like Olympic sprinters. They come from all over and from diverse backgrounds and cultures ... and run within a hair of one another.

 

[Thorlifter]

It is amazing to me that the various designers came up with so many designs with performances so similar to one another yet so different in approach.

It's like Olympic sprinters. They come from all over and from diverse backgrounds and cultures ... and run within a hair of one another.

Agree 100%.

But also because of these differences, each had an area where they were better than the others. One performs better between 10 and 15,000 feet. One is better between 15 and 20,000 feet. One dives better. One climbs better.

And this is why we love these little metal beasts!!!!

 

[Peter Gunn]

What bothers me, and always has bothered me is that the AVG credited Boyington with 2 air and 2 1/2 ground but the USMC accepted Boyingtons claims for "6 air" with no corroborating authority? Tex Hill stated that Boyington's claims were BS - not just his claims of '6 air' but also his claims of 30 ground. I have no horse in this game but Tex Hill had a lot of credibility with his peers.

If memory serves, and it is probably letting me down but anyway, back in the late 80's early 90's I think, I heard Tex Hill speak at the Air Force Museum in Ohio. What a guy. During a Q & A session someone brought up Boyington, probably because of that terrible TV show back in the 70's. At any rate, let's just say the General Hill was quite the gentleman about it, but I got the distinct impression he had doubts about Boyingtons claims.

 

[drgondog]

Not too sure the F6F was deployed as rapidly as the P-51. The PTO was, after all, the lesser priority of the two theaters as far as new equipment went. Without knowing for sure, I'd bet the F6F was deployed in far fewer numbers in a set timeframe. They didn't have many "bases" to deploy them to and the carriers wouldn't hold all that many Hellcats each.

The point you made wasn't 'deployed as rapidly as the P-51", it was that the P-51 was deployed earlier than the F6F. The F6F deployment was in the Fleet and extended to Atlantic and Pacific. True the carriers did not carry as many F6Fs per carrier as a single Fighter Group in the ETO/MTO, That said, the Carrier Task Forces sailed into Japanese territory and engaged continuously as part of the assault/neutralization and met continuously and aggressively from strongholds like Truk whereas the LW tended to avoid the P-51 escorts.

Not really arguing the point at all, though I have seen it claimed otherwise in the past in other places. Just saying the difference in awarded victories for the two types was not great and the P-51 would seem to have had a definite advantage in having to escort bombers when enemy aircraft were almost certain to be encountered while the F6F had to fly combat air patrols and hope to encounter enemy aircraft over a large ocean.

Not a very good analogy. The USN didn't randomly 'scour the sea to locate enemy aircraft'. They targeted concentrations of strategic power they wished to neutralize of capture - sailed straight to the target and launched attacks on those targets where concentrations of IJN aircraft met them aggressively. The 8th and 15th AF by contrast were mostly tethered to the bomber stream, often with many holes in the coverage due to inadequate strength to cover more than say 50% sufficiently to prevent an attack by the LW until late summer 1944. The P-51Bs in the CBI didn't have near the air resistance from IJA in CBI as ETO/MTO and the IJA didn't contest the bombers with any degree approaching IJN contesting USN battle fleets.

Joe Posted the following dates
Grumman had been working on a successor to the F4F Wildcat since 1938 and the contract for the prototype XF6F-1 was signed on 30 June 1941.
The contract for the XP-51B July 25, 1942 and made its first test flight November 30, 1942
26 Jun 1942 The Grumman XF6F-3 Hellcat prototype made its maiden flight.

The first production F6F-3, powered by an R-2800-10, flew on 3 October 1942, with the type reaching operational readiness with VF-9 on USS Essex in February 1943
31 Aug 1943 The first combat mission of the US Navy's latest fighter aircraft occurred when F6F-3 Hellcat fighters of VF-5 operating from the carrier USS Yorktown assisted in an attack on Japanese installations on Marcus Island.

The first flight of Production P-51B-1-NA was May 5, 1943 and first combat mission was December 1, 1943

They also could be reasonably certain of encountering Japanese aircraft in the vicinity of well-known locations for Japanese airfields. I'd think that the encounters in the PTO were naturally mostly over water and were much smaller in overall aircraft numbers than any normal raid in the ETO.

For exactly that reason a carrier fleet force was far more likely to encounter an equal force in response from the Japanese land based fighters and such engagements were frequent - far more frequent than Carrier vs Carrier Fighter forces engaging in great numbers. As to 'normal raid in ETO' - no such thing. There were fighter sweeps in which a Group was out in front and occasionally encountered a LW force inbound - but very rare, and occasionally a squadron was in place during escort in which it was able to attack and engage a larger force. That said, the typical battle was short in duration and LW extracted as quickly as possible to conserve pilots to fight another day.

I have never located a source for a summary of Naval aircraft victories that has the same information as the USAAF data does, so I can't really tell. But the Japanese certainly made many fewer aircraft than Germany, and they were much more widely spread out due to the nature of being mostly in a big ocean. With a certainty, the P-51 never even approached the kill-to-loss ratio of the F6F against enemy aircraft. That could easily be due to the very fact of lesser numbers and more congested combat area at the same time. If a flight of, say 8 Hellcats encountered a flight of, say, A6Ms, the two flights would almost certainly be more concentrated together than a typical fight in the ETO, where several sets of enemy aircraft could come out of the sun from different directions, more or less all at the same time.

It would be an interesting comparison, and I'm not even sure what questions to ask, much less of the outcome of such an analysis, assuming the data exist at all. Perhaps not. I still think the total victory awards for the two aircraft are so close as be rather insignificant in actual numbers. The local conditions for aerial combat are more interesting to me than the theater.

The F6F probably had a smaller chance of encountering an enemy aircraft on an average mission, but a much great chance of acvtually engaging when enemy aircraft were spotted.

This is NOT intended to make any sort of statement negative about the P-51 at all. I was just thinking about potential battle over land defended by planes trying to intercept more or less known bomber streams versus potential battle of at sea or over some enemy airfield when many fewer aircraft were usually involved in any single encounter.

The big air to air battles in the Pacific were largely USN fleet fighter engagements with Japanese Land based aircraft. The nature of US bomber stream escort is that the LW avoided engagement with fighters and chose unprotected spots in the bomber stream to attack. Conversely the Japanese fighter sought out the American forces and engaged American fighters without reservation.

As to US claims vs Japanese/German losses. The match up of German losses, when examining available LW loss to AAF fighter credits, was far closer than when comparing US (USN, USMC, AAF) victory credits to actual reported Japanese losses. Additionally, the ocean leaves little evidence of a downed Japanese aircraft

 

[stona]

. Additionally, the ocean leaves little evidence of a downed Japanese aircraft

It, or at least the English Channel and North Sea, also provide a convenient explanation of the yawning gap between aircraft claimed shot down and those you can actually find on your island
Cheers
Steve

 

[drgondog]

One very nice fact about AAF Missing aircrew reports in the ETO/MTO is that the LW wrote their own accounts of that particular downed aircraft found on their soil. The ventured 'cause' was often questionable as it was a ground crew that arrived on-site 15 to 60 minutes afterwards, but the connectivity to the dogtags and serial number/type aircraft often very reliable..

Nobody wrote detailed reports on aircraft destroyed in the PTO/CBI

 

[stona]

One very nice fact about AAF Missing aircrew reports in the ETO/MTO is that the LW wrote their own accounts of that particular downed aircraft found on their soil.

As did the British. Crashed Enemy Aircraft Reports also included photographs, though sometimes of a smoking hole in the ground. RAF Air Intelligence was understandably keen to ascertain any developments in German aircraft and their technologies and the reports were written by department AI1(g) which also maintained close ties with the RAE at Farnborough.

German prisoners were also questioned (obviously) by another department, A1(k), under Group Captain S D Felkin, which was also responsible for captured documents, an amazing number of which Luftwaffe crews were carrying when captured, contrary to standing orders.

R.V Jones, who knew a thing or two about military intelligence, wrote of Felkin's endeavours.

"The fact is that, thanks to Group Captain Felkin's outstanding work, Prisoner of War interrogation reached a standard of efficiency far exceeding that known in any previous war; and the flow of information that he continuously maintained throughout constituted one of our most important sources of Intelligence."

Jones would have been particularly grateful for intelligence gathered by Felkin relevant to the so called 'battle of the beams'.

Cheers

Steve

 

[GregP]

I've been told by more than a few former Naval aviators that the dogfights in the Pacific tended to include only 8 to 16 - 20 aircraft and were a lot easier to keep track of than protracted fights with a lot of airplanes over land. By 8 to 20, I mean two flight of four each fighting or possible two flights of 8 - 10 each fighting. Many fights were 4 on 4.

So, the Navy pilots I have hear are under the impression that their claims are much more reliable than claims from a large melee above the clouds where "victims" might be smoking and trying to get into the clouds to escape or might actually be going down.

I have no way to gauge the accuracy of their thoughts on that, but keeping track of a few planes seems easier than keeping track of hundreds of bombers being attacked by tens to hundreds of fighters while being guarded by several hundred more fighters, many of which might be shooting at the same enemy aircraft from different angles.

I suppose we'll never really know since , if we don't know for sure by now, going back 80 years and finding definitive facts from old reports would be a monumental undertaking, with no sure answers. It would all be a SWAG based on individual interpretations of old combat reports. It might have been different and easier when the people doing the interpreting were fighter pilots who had flown and fought the same skies, but the people looking nowadays have most likely never flown a WWII fighter, much less tried to shoot one down or even get on another one's tail.

I'll stick to the WW2 awarded victories as we know them, including crediting Boyington with 28, 22 in US service. We've been over this before with no resolution, so I don't expect one now. I'll join the revisionist bandwagon when they look at the entire claim list, not when they look at one or two guys to move someone else up on the list for political reasons.

Meanwhile, we can see that the two best US fighters were the P-51 Mustang and the F6F Hellcat. Their victory totals of 5,954 for the P-51 and 5,168 for the Hellcat are at least close to one another. I'd credit the P-51 with having more overall opportunity as well and more planes in combat since they made more P-51s and escorted bombers for a good portion of their ETO service life. So I'll just say that whether you flew a Hellcat or a Mustang, you were in a good fighter aircraft. I'd be elated to have been assigned to either one.

Likewise the P-38 was third on the victories list by a small margin over the P-47 and I wouldn't kick at either one of those either. The normally highly-regarded F4U was 6th on the list by air-to-air victories, just behind the P-40 which, though generally maligned, still scored better than the Corsair in the war. Many will hasten to point out it was in combat longer while I would hasten to point out it was also the only game in town when we rather decidedly didn't know squat about aerial combat with modern fighters, so many of its losses were on the front end of a rather steep learning curve, and we had to lose quite a few before the higher-ups would admit their aerial tactics were flawed.

 

[BiffF15]

Hello Biff; Where did you fly -15s? I was with the "Peace Sun Program" In KSA and got to go on dozens of "Check Rides" after they found out I could shoot A2A pictures with a Mamiya RZ-67 and medium long lens to make incredible blow ups of the Saudi Pilots in their hot ships! It was one of my most favorite stations!

Shooter,

91 - 92 1st Fighter Squadron / 325th Fighter Wing Tyndall AFB, FL (Home of Air Superiority)
92 - 97 60th and 58th Fighter Squadrons / 33rd Fighter Wing, Eglin AFB, FL (The Nomads)
Includes 3 tours at Dhahran, S.A. plus West Coast F-15 Demo Team Narrator
97 - 08 159th Fighter Squadron / 125th Fighter Wing, Jacksonville IAP, FL (ANG)
Includes 1 tour at Prince Sultan Air Base and 1 tour at Incirlik AB, Turkey, plus 1 deployment to Laage AB, GE & 1 deployment to NAS Key West, FL, to fight the Mig-29s (See Attachment - I made the cover shot as well). Okay, can't upload the attachment from work but Google: November 2002 Air Force Magazine Agile Archer and open the PDF (best flying TDY I EVER DID).

If you have any shots of Eagles during my timeframe please share! Tail Codes would be TY, EG or a Lightning Bolt.

Cheers,
Biff

 

[airminded88]

That's... an interesting criteria..

 

[gjs238]

How about the P-39 in Ruski hands? Do you know of any info on that, or where I might find it?
Thanks again, sincerely,
Stewart.

I haven't read it, but have been told that apparently the last word on them is a book called 'Cobra' by Birch Matthews, a former Bell engineer. It's a 416 page hard-cover [Schiffer, 1996]...