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Our two top aces flew the P-38. That would be Dick Bong and Tommy McGuire.
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.
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.
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.
. Additionally, the ocean leaves little evidence of a downed Japanese aircraft
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.
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!
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.