highest kill ratio

Kevin J said:

Seriously, serious. Franco and Canaris were old friends, and Canaris had advised him at the beginning of WW2 that Germany couldn't possibly win it so the Spanish stayed out.

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Yes he was very wise due to channeling the ghost of Torquemada

Schweik said:

Yes he was very wise due to channeling the ghost of Torquemada

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I don't understand your response. Perhaps you can explain.

GrauGeist said:

The majority of Me262s downed by Allied fighter were not in combat, but rather at their airfields either landing or taking off, where the Me262 was at it's most vulnerable.

As for being damaged or downed by bomber defensive fire, the Me262 was too fast for the turrets to train on them and the flexible-mount gunners had great difficulty leading on them. This is not to say that it didn't happen, but it was not all that common.
Far more piston types, like the Bf109, Fw190 and Zerstorers were downed because of their lower attack speeds.

And Allied fighters were not immune from the four 30mm cannon, the Me262 accounted for quite a few Allied fighters, too.

Considering that a fraction of the over 1,400 Me262s produced ever saw combat (lack of fuel, pilots, transport, damaged at factory, etc.) and even then, many of those were used as bombers and high speed recon, those limited numbers (roughly 300) that saw action inflicted a great deal of damage on the Allied bombing effort in the year that they were operational. So in the end, the Me262 has a record of roughly 509 Allied types downed for about 100 lost which is an impressive ratio all things considered.

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The problem attacking the heavy bombers was two things - one the escorts, obviously, the other the bullet streams from large formations or 'boxes' of bombers. Attacking B-17s wasn't just a matter of getting one plane (it could be against damaged or stragglers, and that was much easier of course) but rather a 'Combat box' with somewhere between 30 - 120 heavy machine guns shooting at you at any one time for each group of 12 planes. A lot more if there were say 6 or 7 of those clustered together. This was very, very dangerous for any airplane.



They did find solutions - attacking from the front reduced the number of guns shooting at you a lot at first, from 50 some odd to about 10 or 12 for that same 12 bomber box. But more gun turrets in the chin etc. partially negated that (back up to 24 then 48 guns), and the skill needed to take down a well armored, four-engined bomber in one pass with even an up-gunned Bf 109 was not exactly widespread. Attacking vertically from odd angles also helped. But ultimately they needed something other than a regular air superiority fighter to do the job.

I think with the clarity of hindsight we can say that the Me 262 had a potentially very valuable niche due specifically to it's effectiveness against the US heavy bombers.



The Germans had Bf 109s and Fw 190s that could duel with Allied escort fighters, but while they could also shoot down the 'heavies' - they were not very efficient at it in terms of losses taken vs. knock down's achieved. Dealing with escorts and dealing with B-17s and their lesser cousin, the B-24 were two very different jobs. The Germans also had heavy fighters, night fighters and fast bombers converted into fighters and so on, Fw 190 with extra armor and guns, Bf 110 and 410, Ju 388 and so on- which had sufficient firepower (numerous heavy cannon, rockets etc.) to silence defensive gunners and quickly shoot down a bomber in a few seconds, but after a few initial successes (Schweinfurt and Regensburg were won largely due to these formidable beasts), when the Americans adjusted these turned out to be highly vulnerable to the fighters.

The Me 262 threaded that needle in that it combined the speed to evade the fighters and to present a limited target to the defensive gunners, but also lethal enough with four x 30mm cannon to take out a B-17 in one pass. It didn't hurt that the Me 262 units that were flying were mostly piloted by a hand picked elite of fighter pilot experten. It's perhaps less clear how well they would have done with less experienced or well trained pilots.

Nevertheless, the issue to me isn't so much that Me 262's got a 5-1 or 2-1 kill ratio or whatever it actually was, it was that they had 5-1 or 2-1 against four engined heavy bombers that were day by day blasting the homeland to dust. If they had more, with good enough pilots to fly them, they probably could have checked the Strategic bombing offensive and then perhaps, concentrated their air assets on their bigger problem of the Raboče-krestjjanskaja Krasnaja armija.


When talking about kill ratios in other words, quality of the target as well as the quantity matters. Shooting down 3 or 4 B-17s in a single sortie is a lot more impressive and has much more impact on the war (IMO) than shooting down 3 or 4 I-153s.

Kevin J said:

Neither the I-153 nor the I-16 were completely useless. The I-153 could be used for close escort where all you have to do is drive off attacking fighters and the later versions of the I-16 were fast enough to intercept and shoot down most German bombers and it was highly manoeuvrable too. In mixed units of I-16's and MiG-3's they scored the majority of victories.

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I'm not saying they were crap fighters, but I am saying that they were obsolescent by the time of Barbarossa. Not useless by then, but obsolescent. The I-16 was a 1934 design, based on the older (1933) I-15 series and before that the (1931) I-5. The I-16 was basically the culmination of that long and mostly successful lineage. Of course the Bf 109 is an old design too but it was a forward looking one, a new branch in fighter development rather than the end of an old one. Much like the difference between the Spitfire and the Hurricane, only more so. The I-16 was agile and maneuverable, but it was an open cockpit fighter, it almost never had a radio, it was hard to fly and took a deadly toll on inexperienced pilots. Most I-16's only had two or four light machine guns (albeit very good ones), Only the last models had cannons (though admittedly those, from I-16 / 24 onward, were more formidable) and it had a top speed of barely 320 mph. That just wasn't enough for WW2. It also couldn't really dive to pick up much more speed because there was risk of tearing the plane apart as you approached 400 mph.

The MiG 3 would have been more useful if there had been much high altitude fighting (it could manage 398 mph at 25,000 ft) but for the Russian Front, it wasn't very good - the very heavy engine didn't perform well down low (top speed 314 mph at sea level) and the plane, designed as an interceptor, was not maneuverable unlike the I-16 so it didn't even have that ace in the hole. It was also prone to stalls, spins etc. like the I-16 and harder to recover from them.

The MiG-3 had excellent high altitude capabilities which meant it was unsuited to the Eastern Front, but okay for top cover.

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Top cover of the Russian front would usually mean just below a 5,000 ft. cloud ceiling so not so much. It was badly outrun by the Bf 109 up to 16,000 feet.

The LaGG-3 is another story, overweight, under powered and shoddily built because the factories building them had been transferred East at the beginning of the war. There were only a few Yak-1's originally, but both this and the Yak-7 were inferior to the Bf 109F; okay for close escort though as they were highly manoeuvrable.

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The problems with build quality were almost universal in the Soviet Union in the first year or two of the war, to a greater or lesser extent in different factories. Yak 1 and Yak 7 had the same kinds of production problems as did MiG-3 and a lot of the later built I-16 and I-153. All of the planes with wood components in particular (i.e. most of them) suffered from delamination and other problems with the special birch plywood they were using which especially early on was vulnerable to moisture.

Kevin J said:

I don't understand your response. Perhaps you can explain.

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Without delving into forbidden territory and discussion of religion, in a nutshell you have people who are Catholic and then you have people who are CATHOLIC!!!. The Spanish nationalists, falangists, Carlists etc. who made up Franco's support base and friends were very much in the latter camp and one of their cherished dreams was bringing back the Inquisition. Torquemada was a famous inquisitor, so that was a little joke.

Also an allusion to the fact that whatever he may have been told, and whatever we think today thanks to hindsight, nobody could have predicted the outcome of WW2 in 1939. I think Spain staying out of it had more to do with their having already lost a million people in the Spanish Civil War and feeling like they had done their bit. Maybe already a little bit weary of the glory of total war as well.

Franco was concentrating on getting revenge on the Republicans and Commies and consolidating his new severe empire.

I also don't think the Yak-1 and Yak-7 were greatly inferior to the Bf 109 for the Russian Front, assuming you had a well built one which is a big assumption. The Bf 109 was a better fighter all around in that it was good in a very wide range of environments and Theaters, it could fly cover for CAS at 5,000 feet or intercept four engine heavy bombers at 25,000 ft or duel with Spitfires at 18,000 ft.

The Yak only had to do one thing - destroy relatively small planes at low altitude over a very, very big tank and infantry battle, operating from forward airfields year round in a place with very bad weather that got down into the 30 below range in the winter. It didn't need a lot of guns for that job and it didn't need very long range or a lot of fancy instruments. It did need to have simple enough controls and forgiving enough flying characteristics that relatively novice pilots could put it to good use an relatively inexperienced ground crew could keep it running.

What it also needed was a level speed well above 350 mph, good agility and roll, good climb and dive rate, and accurate guns. It had all these things and while it may not have been quite as good, depending on the specific model and making the big assumption that you had a properly built one, I think a Yak -1 was pretty close to parity. About as good as a Bf 109E, better than a Bf 110, slightly inferior to a Bf 109F or G. For the Russian front.

Even the much reviled LaGG-3, eventually had a lot of the design problems addressed and once the build issues were more sorted out, while it perhaps wasn't as good as a Yak-1B it was a lot better than an I-16 or a I-153, and by 1942 was better liked by the Soviet pilots than some of the lend-lease planes. There were a few high scoring aces on the LaGG-3, and quite a few on the Yak-1, IB and Yak 7.

Schweik said:

There are good reasons why countries such as Poland, France, and Russia were not fully ready for war around 1939 and 1940 - first they had their hands too full trying to deal with the Great Depression to go on a crash modernization and mobilization effort, and second they knew that the previous war, WW I, was a catastrophe for everyone involved, especially the Germans

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Not Russia but USSR, Soviet Union. Really, please...

USSR was almost immune to the effects of the Great Depression. Actually, it probably benefited of it as it could buy technologies at lower prices and hundreds (thousands?) foreign engineers arrived to participate in the (military) industrial program.
USSR leadership did not care much about WWI consequences and future threats of new war. The course was firm and consistent: get ready to another world war which will put an end to the Capitalism. It was the policy openly stated and written down in the Party documents.

As for the numbers of VVS aircraft destroyed, I'm not convinced. Need to check loss statistics again but there were no 7000 P-5 and P-Z in service in 1941, I'm sure.

I don't know how many P-5 and P-z , there were 7,000 R-5 produced starting in 1930, and it said 1,000 R-Z produced starting in 1935 so probably plenty of those around by 1941, though I admit I don't know how many. Wikipedia says 20,000 - 30,000 Po-2 were produced between 1929 and 1952 so I took a wild guess.

I think the numbers I posted for I-15, I-153, and I-16 are correct, as are the other main combat types.

I would note that of the older Russian types, especially the I-16, there were a number of variations, usually as regards to engines and performance of the older ones could be way down from the later ones. The I-16 is all over the place as not only did the engines go from 715hp in 1936 to 1100hp in 1939/40 but the armament was all over the place. Once you get to 1936 or so it was often four RCMGs with small batches (for soviet planes) of planes with a pair 20mm guns but some of the early cannon armed fighters had the 715-750hp engines and performance in 1941 is rather suspect (speed under 270mph at altitude) . In order to get good performance many of the last series built used two 7.63mm guns and a single 12.7mm machine guns. Please note that even empty rocket racks could knock 12-18mph off the speed of the fighter.

The DB-3 bomber also went through the Tumansky M-85 engine, the M-86, the M-87 and the M-88 on the last models (which continued on in the IL-4) the later versions got variable pitch propellers.

It might be subject to question just how many of these older aircraft were really in active service when the war started. The Soviets tended not to throw anything away but how many of theses planes were available for use and not waiting for spare parts/maintenance or simply "in storage for future use" is certainly subject to question. I have never really read anything on this but the Russian tank park has been written about. The Russians "lost" over 20,000 tanks during the invasion but since in some areas over 50% of the tanks listed on the books were NOT runners (waiting for parts/repairs) the Germans did not kill them on the battlefield but but overran the supply depots/repair shops were these tanks were, they were still "lost" to the Russian forces they had not served as target practice for the German tank and anti-tank gunners.

Schweik said:

I don't know how many P-5 and P-z , there were 7,000 R-5 produced starting in 1930, and it said 1,000 R-Z produced starting in 1935 so probably plenty of those around by 1941, though I admit I don't know how many. Wikipedia says 20,000 - 30,000 Po-2 were produced between 1929 and 1952 so I took a wild guess.

I think the numbers I posted for I-15, I-153, and I-16 are correct, as are the other main combat types.

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I drafted rather long message... before the black out happened.

OK, just briefly at the moment.
R-5/R-Z.
I agree with your numbers. So now we know that 10,000 were not destroyed in WWII.
As for real losses, it is difficult to find the numbers, but my assumption is that there were hardly more than 2,000 of them available in 1941, all modifications and all sources of supply counted, including what was mobilised from the clubs and from the passenger fleet. And we know that they were still used in 1945 in the campaign against Japan and in 1947 against Ukrainian insurgents and lasted in some services until mid 1950s. I'll try get more info from the books of V.Kotelnikov who was probably the only one who studied this aircraft type in details.

I-153/I-16.
12,000 shot down by LW? Sorry, not possible. The most pessimistic figure of all VVS fighters combat losses I remember was some 9,600-9,800 in 1941-1942.

MiG-1/MiG-3.
3,000? Highly doubtful, since total number built was about 3,500.

I have doubts about other figures as well but will not comment right now. Will revert later.

Dimlee said:

I drafted rather long message... before the black out happened.

OK, just briefly at the moment.
R-5/R-Z.
I agree with your numbers. So now we know that 10,000 were not destroyed in WWII.
As for real losses, it is difficult to find the numbers, but my assumption is that there were hardly more than 2,000 of them available in 1941, all modifications and all sources of supply counted, including what was mobilised from the clubs and from the passenger fleet. And we know that they were still used in 1945 in the campaign against Japan and in 1947 against Ukrainian insurgents and lasted in some services until mid 1950s. I'll try get more info from the books of V.Kotelnikov who was probably the only one who studied this aircraft type in details.

I-153/I-16.
12,000 shot down by LW? Sorry, not possible. The most pessimistic figure of all VVS fighters combat losses I remember was some 9,600-9,800 in 1941-1942.

MiG-1/MiG-3.
3,000? Highly doubtful, since total number built was about 3,500.

I have doubts about other figures as well but will not comment right now. Will revert later.

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IIRC, the VVS was losing far more fighters as a result of weather conditions than to actual combat. Yes, wood does actually rot, but if you're only expecting to get about 80 sorties out of each and every fighter, then I imagine that it must be quite a cheap way of building fighters in a wartime scenario.

I'd posit that like most, if not all statistics, the kill ratio doesn't mean much without a lot of context.

S Schweik "Dealing with escorts and dealing with B-17s and their lesser cousin, the B-24 were two very different jobs." Why do you call B-24s "lesser"? The number of machine guns? This is a sincere rather than rhetorical question.

The B-24 was structurally weaker, didn't handle as well, had a much higher wing-loading, had a much lower service ceiling, and yes carried fewer guns (and I think less armor). They were much more likely to break apart when ditching or crash landing.

On the other hand the B-24 had a longer range and at least potentially, a heavier bomb load, and was faster.

Which was better really depended on the mission. For maritime patrol, some version of the B-24 wins out for me, for daylight bombing or anything involving contending with fighters, the B-17 takes the cake.

To me a B-24 was like a UPS truck.

"Lesser cousin"??
The B-24 was on a par with the B-17.

It could carry the same amount of ordnance at comparable speeds at comparable altitudes with comparable ranges.
And "fewer guns"? You realize that the 3 extra guns of the B-17 were idle at one time or another, right?

The Cheek guns had to be manned by the same guy, much like the Ju88, where the radio operator had to jump between one or the other depending on threat. Only the Chin, Ball, Waist, Tail and upper turret on a B-17 were dedicated positions - that's 10, same as the B-24.

I can see the B-25 or the B-26 being a "lesser cousin", but not the B-24.

Schweik said:

The B-24 was structurally weaker, didn't handle as well, had a much higher wing-loading, had a much lower service ceiling, and yes carried fewer guns (and I think less armor). They were much more likely to break apart when ditching or crash landing.

On the other hand the B-24 had a longer range and at least potentially, a heavier bomb load, and was faster.

Which was better really depended on the mission. For maritime patrol, some version of the B-24 wins out for me, for daylight bombing or anything involving contending with fighters, the B-17 takes the cake.

To me a B-24 was like a UPS truck.

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I think if you're handling German fighters then the B-17 is definitely the better plane, but against the majority of Italian and Japanese fighters which were less heavily armed and in theatres that required overflying lots of water, then the B-24 is the better option even though it was not as rugged as the B-17. I imagine this is the reason that 50% more Liberators than Flying Fortresses were built.

Liberators were designed with mass production in mind and were easier to manufacture by far. They could be produced in greater numbers faster than the -17. Plus, one more factory doing the building.
Which was more desirable to fly is a different kettle of fish.

GrauGeist said:

"Lesser cousin"??
The B-24 was on a par with the B-17.

It could carry the same amount of ordnance at comparable speeds at comparable altitudes with comparable ranges.
And "fewer guns"? You realize that the 3 extra guns of the B-17 were idle at one time or another, right?

The Cheek guns had to be manned by the same guy, much like the Ju88, where the radio operator had to jump between one or the other depending on threat. Only the Chin, Ball, Waist, Tail and upper turret on a B-17 were dedicated positions - that's 10, same as the B-24.

I can see the B-25 or the B-26 being a "lesser cousin", but not the B-24.

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From what I understand, when Liberators and Fortresses were flying together, the Liberators had to fly at a lower altitude. That alone made them more vulnerable to fighters and flak. Pilots complained about the limited view from the cockpit, and the aircraft had a wartime reputation as being comparatively fragile. They also seemed to catch fire more easily than the B-17. The wing had less lift meaning it was riskier to fly with one or more engines out.

It is partly subjective but it is by no means a new or unique observation on my part - the B-24 was the lesser cousin of the B-17. Yes definitely easier to manufacture. A bit more efficient in certain respects. To me, it was one of those planes that really did qualify as a 'bomb truck'. A UPS truck to be specific.

Kevin J said:

IIRC, the VVS was losing far more fighters as a result of weather conditions than to actual combat. Yes, wood does actually rot, but if you're only expecting to get about 80 sorties out of each and every fighter, then I imagine that it must be quite a cheap way of building fighters in a wartime scenario.

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True. I can not speak for all war period, but statistics of some regiments in some months indicated up to 60% lost due to non combat reasons, not including vague "did not return from the mission" which could mean anything.

What I found more interesting is Me 262 jet claims against allied fighters.
Heinz Bar, probably the best Me262 Experten, claimed 18 daylight victories whilst flying the Me262, of which 16 were confirmed. Of those 18 claimed, only 2 were B-24's and 3 were B-26's. All the rest were fighters, 5 x P-51's and 8 x P-47's. AFAIKT Me 262 probably shot down 85 allied fighters.