(next bit!)
Good, we will all now stop presenting the German aircraft performance data, since a ship performance data was done, according to you, at an inappropriate loading condition, so the aircraft data is uspect. By the way, just to be sure you know, the USN allowed seawater into ship fuel tanks as the oil was burnt, keeping the ship at roughly the same displacement and thereby enabling heavier armament (top weight), the RN did not, hence quotes of RN destroyers as top speed 32 knots full load, 36 knots light load. Given how many references quote the RN destroyers as 36 knot ships, I have just invalidated allied aircraft test performance results, if I want to.
Compare like with like, the initial proof of maximum performance trials with new aircraft, test pilots etc. or the results from aircraft after or during squadron service, the latter will normally be less. Similarly a warship will be progressively slowed down the longer it goes without a hull clean.
Not an "inappropriate loading condition", a
completely fictional one.
Hence, I have an intrinsic lack of confidence in contextless performance graphs; the RAF tests are more informative and seem easier to understand - the performance figures for the squadron-service fighter of 1942, flown to the practical performance limits rather than the official redlines, are lower than the official German numbers, whereas the comparatively good results for the Jabo appear to be obtained by performing a series of separate speed/climb runs in various altitude brackets and pushing the engine to an impractically hot limit, plus, as it turns out, it's a lightweight plane with just two cannon...
On the Sherman versus the 75mm on a half track.
A main advantage to tanks is they are bullet proof, good to hide behind as you advance, good to avoid exposing the gunners to enemy small arms fire, and the turret can be trained, instead of the half track needing to be pointed at the target. Finally it is notable the idea is the allied system would work so well that the troops could advance without vehicle support and call in effective artillery fire kept out of German sight comparable to having tank support and the Germans would be obliging in terms of allowing targets to be located. A major attribute of a good break through tank is reliability, able to go further into the enemy rear, the Red Army liked the Sherman for that.
My first choice would be to have vehicle-mounted artillery scoot up into a convenient position beyond the opposition's anti-tank perimiter and unload, then move away - this is where my preference for the M3 half-track with the 75mm portee comes in...
And if that doesn't work, why are you placing advancing infantry in the open behind a line of obvious targets? Wouldn't it make more sense to have light infantry work their way forward using cover, looking for ways through or around the perimiter?
But if you really need assault armour, surely the role is better served by a low silhouette, a direct-fire gunsight, tight-turning manoeuvraibility and an ability to wade over mud and climb through rubble - a Valentine, a Cromwell, or a Churchill, for example...?
Perhaps showing you have looked at Morgan and Shacklady would encourage people.
Thanks for the book recommendation - just the sort of thing I'm looking for!!
Ignoring the obvious problems with distances, flying to London means over land areas that have raid observer systems in place, unlike the salt water areas around Britain. Now please define rather closer and a lot of. Target list and distances.
Taking a tip-and-run target I'd just been reading a reference to, Torquay in Devon is 100 miles from Cherbourg, compared with about 90 miles from Calais to central London; the same range applies from both Luftwaffe base areas to targets in Sussex like Brighton, or to Southampton; obviously, there's a group of targets in Kent which are much closer to Calais, and some on the Isle of Wight and the Dorset riviera that are a little closer to Cherbourg; but London is, as I said, inside the envelope of normal tip-and-run sorties.
You could be right that London had better ground-intercept systems, though I'd have thought that Chain Home Low would be more readily able to detect low-flying intruder aircraft over the Channel than GCI would in the ground clutter of the Home Counties...
Probably, yes; it's described in the report as "standard", as opposed to with stores, and the pylons for the wing stores are specifically removed when testing different stores configurations, while photographs of the plane during its test flights show the centreline rack off as well...
Regardless, that doesn't really change the point about the test regime, which seems designed to get maximum speed results without regard for realism...
When a new type emerges the prototype/initial production is sent off to be tested and these become the official performance data, test establishments did a lot of other testing, including reported rogue aircraft for example.
Indeed. The way the various tests for the Spitfire Mk. V are phrased, they sound like they're just taking production planes - and I wouldn't have thought there would be any way to manipulate the performance limits with highly-finished prototype airframes, or unrealistically hot-running engines...
No, your focus is on the fighter bombers, a minority of the Fw190 sorties in the west in 1941/43, everyone else is on the air combat results, which show the Fw190 had a decisive performance edge over most of what it faced into early 1943.
I've not yet found any informative sources on the "air combat results", and by "everybody else", you're excluding the tradition of non-technical British narratives that focus exclusively on the Jabos, and that people like me have read...
I was really just hoping people would respond by recommending better sources that detailed the "air combat results" you're referring to...
The squadron diaries are online at the British National Archives.
</Kosh> "Yes."
A fine example of reputational destruction by adjective. The sloped front plate, the fast turret tracking, the range of useable terrain, the effective HE round.
I'm not sure why you think the glacis, the mobility or the HE round are anything special; the powered turret traverse, though it does seem to have been comparatively reliable, wasn't especially fast, and I'm not sure how good it was at the all-important detail of handing-off to the manual system for precise aiming (its speed might have actually been a disadvantage)...
And at this point I ask myself a semi-obvious question, and discover that the main problem aiming the Sherman is that you can't simply spin the whole vehicle round in a couple of seconds by braking or reversing its offside track... which in turn explains why its gearbox is so reliable, because it lacks the basic precision-steering functionality expected of a tracked AFV...
(And, while looking into this, I
also discover that the Panther
can be skid-steered by braking the offside track, which isn't pretty engineering, but is easier on the notoriously pretty engineering of the transmission...)
I assume those were for humour.
I'm using a bit of a
redactio ad absurdum, and hoping that it will be entertaining whether the reader agrees or not, certainly; but I wouldn't have said it if I didn't mean it...
The altitudes were retrofitted as reasons for a given outcome, please do dig up the information before replying again.
No, they're the altitudes that were implied in your own point; you pointed out, based on what is evidently a
very deep and impressive knowledge of the source material, that Allied planes were not regularly flying above about 15000ft in that context; I'm still puzzled why that means they would necessarily be intercepting German ones which tended to fly below about 5000ft, but would be happy to hear a straight answer or a book recommendation...
Complications like for example how many sorties did the various units undertake? The allied interdiction campaign meant the Luftwaffe airfields rapidly had fuel, ammunition and spare parts supply problems, or even started with them, also bombed airfields tend to have reduced operations even if supplies are available. What remained of the Luftwaffe fighter force was down to 50% serviceability at the end of June. Easy to avoid combat losses if there are few combat sorties. A given unit will have runs of few or heavy casualties, the "Bloody Hundredth" comes to mind in the USAAF, 5 Luftwaffe fighter gruppen had to be withdrawn by June 11 due to losses.
Well, as you could have found out if you'd read through the links, the low-level sources I have easy access to state that:
* IV./JG 3, arriving on 8th June, flew two large-scale sorties against the invasion fleet on 9th June, and at least one more each day on 10th and 11th, with no combat losses then or over the next several days, though their maintenance readiness suffered due to the fact that they'd arrived ahead of their ground crew; they were not pulled back through any "losses" (though incorrect statements to this effect
do often appear in narratives), but because these
Sturmbock interceptors shouldn't have been deployed as close-support Jabos in the first place...
* I./SKG 10, already in Normandy, is attributed a tempo of two to five Jabo missions
per day across June and July, variously directed against the fleet, beaches and bocage; notwithstanding a heavy attack on their airstrip on 11th June, they also managed to fit in a night-bombing attack on London that night; total aircraft losses of 20 planes in two months are stated, without any particular details...
* III./SG 4 were more heavily hit, but the details, more readily locatable online, show that much of the attrition came from Allied fighter sweeps bouncing them during repositioning flights on D-Day, when at least some of them were flying with mechanics as passengers in the rear fuselage (seven shootdowns) or ground-attacks on their airstrips (at least fifteen planes knocked out), compounded by the fact that their ground crew were still redeploying by truck and Ju 52, which slowed the repair of damaged aircraft; they nonetheless managed three sorties a day, normally flight-sized but occasionally rising to nearer squadron strength, beginning immediately after their arrival on the afternoon of D-Day, and continuing on 7th, 8th (when fighter escort started to join them) and 9th, after which they were halted through Allied strafing and bombing rendering their airstrip unservicable; an attempt to resume sorties on 11th ended when their takeoff coincided with being bounced by Spitfires; though apparently intimidated by the numbers of Allied planes, they recorded comparatively few losses during sorties - with no more than six shootdowns (and possibly as few as four), not counting the four caught at takeoff on 12th June (I'm not quite clear how many of these were written off); on 18th, after several days of inactivity, they were ordered south again to resume anti-partisan attacks.
Yes, this is only a glimpse, but insofar as these are the details visible to me, they suggests that Fw 190 Jabo missions over Normandy were comparatively undisturbed by Allied fighters (which was the perception I had to begin with); ground attack on airstrips was a more significant threat if the details of III./SG 4 are anything to go by, but some units seem to have been more resilient against that as well...
Is that the whole story?
I don't know. Were there, for example, days or even spans of days when SKG 10 flew no sorties? What else should I look at to get more information?
And to be clear, even if I'm right, I don't think that either "tip and run" or these sorties over Normandy were an
effective form of attack, just that they were
not interdicted effectively. The difference is that in 1941-1943, over the Channel with nothing else going on, the RAF
noticed their ineffectiveness and it seemed like an existential crisis; in 1944 over Normandy, with huge parades of stripe-winged fighters in the sky and lots of other things happening, they
assumed they'd solved the problem, and the fact that the same thing was stilll continuing underneath their sweeps went largely unregarded...
How many ground attack sorties did the Lysander do in France in 1940? How many sorties in total? They were short range reconnaissance units, how much of the Luftwaffe effort was intercepting these? A large percentage of RAF losses in France were abandoned aircraft. As soon as possible the RAF phased the Lysander out, replacing it with P-40 and P-51 in Britain and other fighters in the Middle East.
These are questions worth asking; but I'm not sure how they shake the fundamental point that abandoned planes seem to have been miscounted as air combat losses...
And I had no idea that the Lysander had a PR capability! I'd taken them to be simply spotter/liaison planes, in which role they were replaced by the Army getting its own Taylorcraft Austers, and close-support aircraft, though I'm not entirely clear whether dive-bombing with two 250lb SAP was actually part of their designed role...
In the fighter role 1941 to 1943 the Fw190 was shooting down allied aircraft at a much higher rate than allied aircraft were shooting down Fw190. In the fighter bomber role the Fw190 was hitting coastal targets and even then taking overall losses that were long term unsustainable, but shooting down few allied aircraft. No wonder you have not seen any specific evidence given the logic of the comparison. And since the Bismarck rule exists you are unlikely to ever see such evidence.
I'm actually looking for recommendations for sources which contain useful detail on these things; if the answer's something like "unpublished Luftwaffe war diaries", that's fair enough...
This comes across as conclusion written, evidence now sought to back it up. While there were plenty of misidentifications the Fw190 had a lot of obvious differences to the Bf109.
No, it's a
suggestion about a
misinterpretation, an off-the-cuff hypothesis, a target I'm towing for gunnery practice...
And I'm emphatically not suggesting that RAF pilots were visually confusing the Fw 190 and the Bf 109, rather wondering if the RAF more generally might have been
misattributing increasing successes by JG 26 to the
obviously new and distinctive and fast-manoeuvring Fw 190, and
underestimating the impact of the equally new-and-improved but much less
visibly distinctive Bf 109F...
(and still more to come!)