Earlier someone said that the Ju87G was less vulnerable than the IL-2. I'm going to be the dummy and say how can you say that? You would need an awful lot of proof like the number of cannon shells needed to shoot each aircraft down. if you try to use any other measure, the results are too easily distorted. Like maybe the german fighters were more efficient, or Russian pilots are hopeless, or something.
I just cannot believe, or accept that the Russians would build 37000 of these f*ckers, because they were easy to shoot down
Parsifal, the IL-2 pretty much followed a pattern similar to most soviet war hardware: let´s produce it in the biggest numbers possible to make up for the huge losses endured in combat operations.
Wise, efficient style of conducting military production affairs one might think; that, however, does not make the IL-2 the alleged superb plane depicted by them Soviets.
Would you agree with the notion USAAF fighter pilots did receive far better training than the Soviet pilots? I mean, the sole question seems silly...
Apart from propaganda outbursts infested with ridiculous claims of "hundreds of German panzers destroyed in a few hours" in battles like Kursk, Soviet data in this regard is rare... so why not to check on USAAF/RAF data that is available with regard to ground attack missions carried out by Tempests, Typhoons and P-47s in Normandy?
Upon examination of abandoned and/or destroyed German panzers and AFVs it was concluded British and American fighter-bomber pilots claimed about ten times as many tanks as they indeed managed to destroy.
Authors such as Niklas Zetterling too had covered this aspect of the war, with nearly identical conclusions: fighter-bomber pilots of RAF and USAAF managed to destroy a ridiculously low number of German panzers, and not just that, their losses during such missions were high due to Flak. In the end, it seemed such missions were a bit more dangerous for the Allied pilots than they apparently were for Panzer crews.
Ten times? With way superior training and equipment...
Also Parsifal don´t you get tired of the typical arguments oftenly launched to downplay the Stuka? What about that one affirming "
without proper fighter cover, it was a sitting duck" -or something for that matter-; the argument , albeit correct to a high degree, is used in a very selective manner...let´s think of the present-day aerial warfare; if an American pilot flying his A-10, or, say, helicopter in combat finds himself being intercepted by the latest MiG fighter, his situation definitely will get utterly nasty. So, 63 years later, no significant changes have occurred with regard to defencelessness of ground attack planes if caught by enemy fighters.
