How effective were ground attack aircraft against armor and other hardened land targets (1 Viewer)

You can take out a Tiger with a Webley revolver if you are allowed to sit on top of it for long enough. The question was how close you could get an with what. Being heavily attacked from the air in a tank meant the crew were fairly sure they weren't surrounded by their own guys any more. Proximity fuses had a similar effect at the Battle of the Bulge.

One of the reasons that relatively small guns -- like the GAU-8 in the Warthog -- are disproportionately effective when compared to 105 mm or 120 mm guns on tanks is that the latter are likely to be shooting at the front of the tanks, which have much thicker armor than the top and back or sides. Given comparable-technology AP projectiles (although APDS is not used from aircraft, as a rule), it's not out of the realm of possibility that a 20 mm projectile could be effective against WW2-era tanks, considering that 57 mm anti-tank guns were effective throughout much of the war.

A few points.

Schweik said:

Not every tank was a Tiger or a T-34/85, or even a Sherman or Pz IV.

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You are quite right but then what kind of guns were needed to take out MK IVs made after 1940, or T-70 light tanks or even M3/MV Stuarts? Hint, it won't be a 12.7mm machine gun.

Schweik said:

the StuGG III, one of the most important and ubiquitous German AFV's had armor down to 16mm even late in the war.

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Please remember, if you are in a 30 degree dive the path the bullet/shell has to travel through the top armor is twice the nominal thickness due to geometry, and due the projectiles tendency to ricochet it tends to act like it is 3 times thicker, if the impact angle is shallower the difficulty in penetrating goes up rather rapidly. You may stand a better chance of penetrating the 30mm vertical side armor or rear superstructure armor.

Look at the diagram you provided, a shot that will go through the armor with a 90 degree hit (perpendicular) at 400 meters needs to be at 250 meters to penetrate if the impact is 30 degrees off perpendicular and by the time you get to 50 degrees for perpendicular you have to be at 100meters, at 60 degrees from perpendicular there is no penetration at any distance.

Schweik said:

If and when the local AAA was neutralized, and fighter escort adequate, strafing Il-2s, Ju-87D (with 20mm cannon), and P-47s could do several strafing runs before retiring

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The JU 87D with it's 20mm guns was hardly an armor killer, Same goes for the Russian planes with 20mm guns. 20mm guns varied widely in their actual kinetic energy power.
from about 19,700 joules of energy to about 50,000 joules for the best guns (which includes the Hispano).
A basic formula for armor penetration is the amount of energy per unit of area you are trying to punch a hole in. A 20mm hole takes 4 times the energy of a 10mm hole if the plate is the same thickness. A 20mm is trying to make a hole of about 2.5 times the hole a 12.7mm makes.
Energy is dependent on the square of striking velocity. Projectiles that lost velocity quickly were poor armor penetrators at longer ranges. Long can be a relative term,

Please note that the 23mm guns in the IL-2 were trying to make a hole about 32% bigger than a 20mm but they had around twice the energy (77,400 joules)


Now to put some of this in perspective the British 2pdr gun used in aircraft had 214,000 joules in the MK I loading and the 2 pdr gun used by ground forces had 382,000-392,000 joules. The 3.7cm cannon used by the JU 87G had 218,000 joules for the APHE projectile and 263,000 joules for the Hartkernmunition (which was trying to make a smaller hole).

Aircraft guns (in quantity) never made it past (or even approached) the crappy ground AT guns of 1939-40-41.

swampyankee said:

One of the reasons that relatively small guns -- like the increase in the Warthog -- are disproportionately effective when compared to 105 mm or 120 mm guns on tanks is that the latter are likely to be shooting at the front of the tanks, which have much thicker armor than the top and back or sides. Given comparable-technology AP projectiles (although APDS is not used from aircraft, as a rule), it's not out of the realm of possibility that a 20 mm projectile could be effective against WW2-era tanks, considering that 57 mm anti-tank guns were effective throughout much of the war.

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it is really outside the realm.
The GAU-8 uses special ammunition, granted so do modern tanks but the increased penetration offered by fin stabilized discarding sabot ammo is a huge difference compared to WW II HMG and light cannon ammo.

IN WW II the AP ammo was pretty much the first type with a hybrid between the 1st and second rounds called APCR (Armour Piercing Composite Rigid).

It used the heavy metal core but the light weight collar stayed with the core all the way to the target, this made it a lousy projectile for long range shooting as the projectile weighed less than a standard AP round but had the same frontal area so it lost velocity quicker. They started out faster (one of the advantages) and the heavy tungsten core concentrated the force, the light weight aluminum and steel collar stripped away on impact. The British (and a few others) were trying APDS but getting the collar or sabot to separate cleanly and uniformly was a problem and accuracy was poor for quite some time.

the rule of thumb was that the core was about 4/7ths the diameter of the projectile. A fullbore tungsten carbide projectile would be about double the weight of a steel one and velocity would be very poor without excessive pressure in the gun.

Most WWII AFVs had sloping armor (to a degree) in order to repel enemy rounds fired at them from enemy forces (be it AT crews, enemy AFVs or whatever) and it was that inclined armor that gave the armor it's ability to refuse penetration.

A cannon-armed aircraft, in a shallow dive will negate the advantage of sloped armor, as the angle of attack places the cannon round close to square on impact. Even if the round will not breach the thicker armor, it will send splinters all over the interior.

And again, the armor on top and behind the AFV is much thinner than the front (and to a degree, the sides) as the AFV was designed for terrestrial threats.

An AT rifle gunner would deliberately target the driver or the tracks or the engine so not trying to destroy the tank but to disable or make the crew think twice.

The T-26 was a tank and so was the IS-2. The media and propoganda call anything with a tank like appearance a tank.

One aspect of tank warfare is recovery of tanks. Most tanks break down or throw a track or run out of fuel so the idea is to control the battlefield and recover what you can. Tank recovery becomes very hard under constant air bombardment.

Shortround6 said:

On this subject we are quickly getting into area of weapons vs aircraft carrying them.

By that I mean if, for instance, a 500lb has a certain radius at which it will "kill" tank X then how important is it which plane dropped the bomb?
The Plane's only importance is if can deliver the bomb with significantly more accuracy than than another airplane.

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I think this is indeed a big part of the issue and the crux of the argument.

If we do agree that rockets were potentially lethal but quite often seemed to be extremely inaccurate, to the extent that at least a lot of the time (if not all the time) their effect was mostly psychological, then we are left with bombs and cannon (and for lighter armored vehicles, open topped, halftracks, AAA vehicles and emplacements, armored cars etc., heavy machine guns) as means of destroying armored vehicles and columns.

Certainly for bombing, the aircraft does indeed matter. I know some people think of bombers, any kind of bomber, as a "bomb truck" with the only really relevant factor being their bomb carrying capacity, but that is definitely not the case, whether in WW2 or today.

Which is the better anti-tank aircraft, A Bristol Blenheim with two 500lb bombs or a Typhoon with two 500lb bombs as an extreme example?

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A Typhoon, without any doubt, for several reasons:

• The Blenheim had terrible bombing accuracy, in part because it was basically only a level bomber. Level bombing is an order of magnitude less accurate than even shallow-angle dive bombing. It is probably another order of magnitude less accurate than actual high angle dive bombing ala Stuka.
• The Blenheim had terrible survivability, because it was large, slow, not very agile, not very well armored, and ultimately highly vulnerable to both AAA and fighters. It had an appalling loss rate particularly in the relatively few cases where it was used for CAS.
• The Blenheim had no cannon or HMG to strafe with (even if you are only thinking about bombing in terms of destroying your primary target, strafing is a helpful way to suppress AAA while bombing)
• And to top it all off, the Typhoon actually carried a heavier load of bombs (2,000 lbs vs. 1200 lbs).

The Typhoon may not have been the best CAS aircraft, how good it was precisely I think is still up for debate, but it was beyond any doubt in my mind far superior to a Blenheim.

More broadly, I think one of the key issues here is whether some aircraft were substantially superior to others in the CAS role, and whether air support campaigns in different Theaters and in different periods of the war. For example did early successes with the Ju-87 influence the use of Tactical air support by Allied and Axis war-planners later in the war, even when they were getting very different results?

The Germans (and the Russians) used cassette bombs or cluster bombs to drop a large number of anti-tank bomblets over a wide area inorder to make up for the lack of accuracy of the big bombs, again how important to killing the tank is the type of aircraft?

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Again, yes, absolutely. Loss rate per mission doing these extremely dangerous kinds of strikes would be a key factor. Il-2s had a horrendous loss rate but few aircraft could survive more than a mission or two doing that kind of very low altitude, persistent CAS. Blenheims for example got wiped out when they were used in this manner even in the early war when AAA wasn't as ubiquitous or effective. This is why the Anglo-Americans basically switched to fighters for that role, but fighter bombers while more survivable were less accurate (and they too suffered high casualty rates).

Type of aircraft is important for the survival of the aircraft crew against the defences the enemy tank force as a whole (most tanks had pretty lousy AA defences aside from their armor) could bring to bear, AA guns and general defensive fighter sweeps.

Many specialized anti-tank aircraft were never made in large enough numbers to really affect combat operations (large gun JU-88s fall in this catagory, lots of prototype/small production batches and much loved by modellers but overall effect on the eastern front was negligible )
this version

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Lets keep something in perspective on this as it has come up before.

Soviet
Il-2 with 23mm guns - most widely used variant, at least 15,000 used (some of the ~30,000 Il-2 variants built during the war had 20mm guns or heavier calibers)
Il-2 with 37mm guns - unpopular due to stability issues but 3,500 were built and most were used in combat
Yak-9T with 37mm gun - 2,748 built, issued to squadron commanders, though there were problems initially, after design tweaks it proved very popular with performance not really affected. Main purpose was to destroy larger aircraft but they did have AP ammo and were also used to strafe tanks.
P-39 with 37mm gun - 4,719 delivered, most did not have AP ammunition and CAS was not their main mission but they were sometimes used in that role too and there were plenty of them.

German
Ju-87G with 37mm guns and "wolfram" ammo - ~ 220 built
HS 129 with 30mm, 37mm or 75mm guns - ~800 built

Anglo-American
Hurricane IID and IV with 40mm Bofurs gun - 296 Mk IID, 524 Mk IV (not all of the Mk IV saw action and some later had guns removed) overall maybe ~500

Other "heavy strafers"
B-25G and H with 75mm M4, M5 or T-13 gun - ~ 1,400 produced
Beaufighter with 4 x 20mm nose guns - ~ 5,000 produced
Ju-87D with 2 x 20mm cannon - 3,300 produced
Bf 110 with 2 x 20mm nose guns - ~5,000 produced (plus a few hundred Bf 110G with two x 30mm MK 108, and Bf 110G-2/R1 with 37mm cannon)
+ Fw 190 with 4 x 20mm guns, Typhoon, Tempest, Hurricane IID, etc. with 4 x 20mm Hispano cannon, the P-47 with the 8 x 12.7mm HMG, A-20 and B-25s with 6-10 12.7mm nose guns, P-38 with 1 x 20mm and 4 x HMG nose guns and so on. And nearly 60,000 Soviet fighters had at least one 20mm nose cannon.

So the anti-tank aircraft and 'heavy strafers' were not so unusual as implied, especially in the VVS. Even a few hundred heavy strafers with the larger caliber guns could and did certainly have an impact, but the Soviets had at least ~ 6,000 aircraft flying with 37mm guns (not counting the P-39s), several hundred with larger experimental guns (45mm Yak-9K etc.) and 15,000 or more Il-2's with 23mm cannon. To me that is a huge number which seems likely to have had an impact in their numerous victories after 1942, especially when you keep in perspective how long it was before they really caught up in tank and AT gun capabilities with the Germans. Given the production numbers certainly they were either insane or under a heavy delusions about the success of their CAS aircraft or they had a good reason to believe they did work.

And while I agree generally speaking the Soviets were collectively insane, and they got in their own way quite a bit in the early year or two of the war, by say Kursk, they were rapidly re-organizing along meritocratic lines and increasingly effective against the German war machine. The war machine commanded by Marshal Zhukov was very lethal and the Il-2 was key component of it.



By the way, the Wiki on the Ju-87G mentions "Hans-Ulrich Rudel, a Stuka ace, had suggested using two 37 mm (1.46 in) Flak 18 guns, each one in a self-contained under-wing gun pod, as the Bordkanone BK 3,7, after achieving success against Soviet tanks with the 20 mm MG 151/20 cannon. " I know Rudel is a bit suspect as a source for a few reasons, but I would still call that evidence that the 20mm cannon was not useless against tanks.

Shortround6 said:

A few points.

You are quite right but then what kind of guns were needed to take out MK IVs made after 1940, or T-70 light tanks or even M3/MV Stuarts? Hint, it won't be a 12.7mm machine gun.

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I'm not so sure about that, I wouldn't want to be sitting in a Mk IV getting strafed by P-47s, or a Stuart being strafed by a Ju-87D. By the way even a Pz V Panther had armor down to 16 -17mm on the hull tops, turret top and underneath.

But more to the point, for every MK IV in an armored column you have your AAA vehicles, your halftracks, your open-topped tank destroyers and SP guns, all of which are armored vehicles but all are highly vulnerable to a shower of 12.7mm HMG bullets.

And please remember, once the AAA is taken out, and if you have local air superiority (or at least no enemy fighters around) then you can concentrate your fire on the remaining tanks with multiple strafing runs. Again, imagine those 20 or 30 aircraft coming down from a cab rank to strafe again and again. Would the rate of penetrations with 20mm cannon or 12.7mm MG be high against a mid-war medium tank ? Probably not. Would the crew and engine and fuel systems and tracks and wheels be completely safe? I don't think they would. And when you are talking about tens of thousands of aircraft armed with light cannon or HMG, this is probably part of the reason CAS worked. At the very least, the more vulnerable armored vehicles which were still part of an armored column even to the very end of the war could be easily decimated.

The P-47 or the Yak-1B can be used to strafe the AAA assets and then the heavy strafers or bombers can concentrate far better on the heavier tanks that remain. This is in fact what they did.

Please remember, if you are in a 30 degree dive the path the bullet/shell has to travel through the top armor is twice the nominal thickness due to geometry, and due the projectiles tendency to ricochet it tends to act like it is 3 times thicker, if the impact angle is shallower the difficulty in penetrating goes up rather rapidly. You may stand a better chance of penetrating the 30mm vertical side armor or rear superstructure armor.

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I don't agree, that is a pretty picture but the numbers I see are 11mm thickness on the top, 19mm on the bottom and the back. This is certainly vulnerable to a 37mm gun and in many cases to a 23mm gun. Even at double the effective thickness due to angle your 11mm top armor is subject to being punctured. Would you want to sit in that thing while a couple of squadrons of Il-2 took turns strafing it?

And unless I'm far wrong, that diagram is of a later war, probably 1944 StuG III right? Earlier ones were not as well protected.

Look at the diagram you provided, a shot that will go through the armor with a 90 degree hit (perpendicular) at 400 meters needs to be at 250 meters to penetrate if the impact is 30 degrees off perpendicular

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That diagram represented just the 20mm guns, and strafers did shoot from that close as crazy as it sounds.

A basic formula for armor penetration is the amount of energy per unit of area you are trying to punch a hole in.

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It's actually far more complex than that, and the higher mass also helped crack armor (depending on the ductility of the metal in the armor, whether it was brittle or properly tempered or not), and not all tank armor in WW2 was properly heat treated. You also are assuming that the angles will always be worse when attacking from above, when in many cases they will be better, and aren't taking into consideration speed of the aircraft.

Now to put some of this in perspective the British 2pdr gun used in aircraft had 214,000 joules in the MK I loading and the 2 pdr gun used by ground forces had 382,000-392,000 joules. The 3.7cm cannon used by the JU 87G had 218,000 joules for the APHE projectile and 263,000 joules for the Hartkernmunition (which was trying to make a smaller hole).

Aircraft guns (in quantity) never made it past (or even approached) the crappy ground AT guns of 1939-40-41.

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But here you are talking about the main AT guns, guns designed to face enemy tanks directly. Attacking from the top, sides, rear and even beneath makes them far more vulnerable. The GAU-8 is a special case with special ammo yes, and a monster gun compared to most WW2 weapons, but swampyankee actually had a point - compared to a 105 or 120mm tank gun it's very low in terms of joules of energy. And yet we know it's an effective armor killer.

The same was true of a 23mm or 37mm gun in WW2, at least for some of the armored targets (and especially earlier in the war).

The Basket said:

An AT rifle gunner would deliberately target the driver or the tracks or the engine so not trying to destroy the tank but to disable or make the crew think twice.

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Or at the fuel tanks often carried on the back, which were easy to light up.

The T-26 was a tank and so was the IS-2. The media and propoganda call anything with a tank like appearance a tank.

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And when we have these kinds of discussions, some people will talk past each other by 'correcting' a statement about tanks or airplanes in 1941 with a fact about tanks or airplanes in 1944. WW2 was a long war and it took place all over the world in every kind of environment. We have to keep that in mind when discussing broad subjects like this one.

One aspect of tank warfare is recovery of tanks. Most tanks break down or throw a track or run out of fuel so the idea is to control the battlefield and recover what you can. Tank recovery becomes very hard under constant air bombardment.

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Very true. It's also a difference between temporarily disabling a tank, which is all you need to do to win a battle, vs. permanently destroying a tank which is a much higher bar and has more to do with attrition and Operational or Strategic victory. Both are important, but when it comes to CAS against armor, the first mission is usually to either stop an enemy breakthrough or assist an Allied breakthrough. And for that a single hole in a radiator, a clipped hydraulic or oil line, a blown off track, a fire, or a killed driver or commander may be all that is necessary.

Seems like the PTAB, possibly another major element of the reality of effective CAS was deployed from 1943. According to this Wiki over 8 million were dropped during the war (!!), including over 1 million in 1943 and 5 million in 1944. Those are significant numbers.

Each Il-2 could carry 280 bomblets externally or 192 bomblets internally. Each bomblet was capable of penetrating 60 - 70mm of armor which means no tank was really safe if hit. Of course, accuracy was unlikely to be great but with so many used even a very low percentage of hits would mean significant casualties.

PTAB (bomb) - Wikipedia

StuG III Ausf. F: (Sd.Kfz 142/1; March–September 1942, 366 produced)
StuG III Ausf. F/8: (Sd.Kfz 142/1; September–December 1942, 250 produced
StuG III Ausf. G (Sd.Kfz. 142/1; December 1942 – April 1945, ~8,423 produced

So what?

Add to that -
StuG III Ausf B - June 1940 - May 1941 - 300 produced
StuG III Ausf C & D Apr - Sept 1941 - 200 produced
StuG III Ausf E Sept 41 - Feb 42 - 284 produced

So altogether that is 1,400 B through F produced before any of the Ausf G. The earlier were probably the most important ones because those, B through F, are the ones still in use while the German Army was winning battles. After Stalingrad it was all a slow painful decline....

The Wiki also notes that the early Ausf G until May 43 did not have the complete armor package, most only had 50mm frontal armor to which an additional 30mm piece was bolted, so presumably many did not necessarily have extra top, rear or side armor... or schürzen skirts.

None of these had top armor capable of resisting a PTAB or 37mm guns, nor offering truly secure protection against 23mm guns, or even 12.7mm HMGs.

Not at tanks but note that the Typhoon has pulled up before the rockets have hit the target and is relying on someone else to make a claim or not. Not sure if this was always the case

The drawing is for a Sd.Kfz 142/1.You were the one who said 1944.

The 142/1 also was up gunned.

May '43? Additional 30 mm armour plates were welded to the 50 mm frontal armour from June 1942, making the frontal armour 80 mm thick.

Tanks don't need to be destroyed in attacks, a couple of 20mm AP rounds hitting the gun tube, vision blocks, sights, aerials or knocking a few handles off or jamming a hatch is enough to put a tank out of action. All repair work requires men equipment and parts which adds to the burden of supply lines and support services.

This is going to take a while

Schweik said:

f we do agree that rockets were potentially lethal but quite often seemed to be extremely inaccurate, to the extent that at least a lot of the time (if not all the time) their effect was mostly psychological, then we are left with bombs and cannon (and for lighter armored vehicles, open topped, halftracks, AAA vehicles and emplacements, armored cars etc., heavy machine guns) as means of destroying armored vehicles and columns.

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Rockets also covered a large spread in warhead design and size and thus effectiveness even when they did hit.
And yes the targets did change over the years. The Russian RS-82 rocket for instance similar to an 81-82 mortar bomb in target effect (the early ones were HE, not shaped charge) and since even light tanks are designed to withstand that type of fire (at least every thing but direct hits) the chances of kills from RS-82s was pretty low. The British and American big rockets had warheads closer to destroyer guns (the often used Cruiser analogy was hyperbole for propaganda) but since destroyer guns are usually 12 -12.8 cm that is a considerable difference from the Russian rocket. Please note that the US 4.5in MK 8 rocket (used in the triple cluster tubes) was a very light rocket for it's diameter and weighed under 30% of what the later 5in HVAR did.
The Russians did introduce hollow charge warheads on the rockets in late 1942 which would certainly improve the chances of knocking out an armoured vehicle, assuming that you could hit one.

For a good part of the war the tanks were the main target, I am not saying that lighter armoured vehicles were not attacked by air. I am saying that the infantry was supplied with a fair number of weapons which could destroy half-tracks, armored cars and any SP guns that the enemy was foolish enough to try to use as assault guns. This means the infantry had less need to call in air support to break up such attacks. That and any weapon that would work on a "medium" tank would also work on all the lighter vehicles while the reverse was not true.

Schweik said:

Certainly for bombing, the aircraft does indeed matter. I know some people think of bombers, any kind of bomber, as a "bomb truck" with the only really relevant factor being their bomb carrying capacity, but that is definitely not the case, whether in WW2 or today.

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The carrying capacity is not the only relevant factor but it is an important one. If you have one plane carrying two 500lb bombs and another carrying four 500lbs you need a lot better accuracy and survivability (and more air crew and ground crew) to get the same results with the plane that carries two bombs. If you don't have twice the accuracy you need more missions which gives the enemy more opportunity to shoot down the attackers. Obviously it is a balancing act and they often got it wrong.

Schweik said:

The Typhoon may not have been the best CAS aircraft, how good it was precisely I think is still up for debate, but it was beyond any doubt in my mind far superior to a Blenheim.

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It was far superior to a Blenheim but if we were to hypothetically consider only the 500lb as an effective anti-tank weapon Then the difference between the two shrinks considerably.
I was also only considering the possibility of the aircraft scoring kills on the tanks/armoured vehicles. not the defensive abilities of the two aircraft.

Schweik said:

More broadly, I think one of the key issues here is whether some aircraft were substantially superior to others in the CAS role, and whether air support campaigns in different Theaters and in different periods of the war. For example did early successes with the Ju-87 influence the use of Tactical air support by Allied and Axis war-planners later in the war, even when they were getting very different results?

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The success or perceived success of the JU-87 certainly influenced other countries to buy dive bombers even if by the time they were delivered the pendulum had begun to swing the other way again. US A-24s and A-25s, Brewster Burmudas, Vultee Vengeance and so on.

Schweik said:

Il-2 with 37mm guns - unpopular due to stability issues but 3,500 were built and most were used in combat
Yak-9T with 37mm gun - 2,748 built, issued to squadron commanders, though there were problems initially, after design tweaks it proved very popular with performance not really affected. Main purpose was to destroy larger aircraft but they did have AP ammo and were also used to strafe tanks.
P-39 with 37mm gun - 4,719 delivered, most did not have AP ammunition and CAS was not their main mission but they were sometimes used in that role too and there were plenty of them.

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The difference between the Russian gun and the American was that the Russian gun had 294,000 joules at the muzzle while the P-39 gun had 116,000 joules. I am sure that they tried to use P-39s on occasion to shoot up an armoured column, they just weren't going to be very good at it. The 37mm gun in the P-39 having worse penetration than a 20mm Hispano gun. Granted it made a bigger hole if it did penetrate.

Tony Williams book claims the ShVAK cannon was good for 24mm of penetration at 100 meters at 90 degrees (perpendicular) and the SHVAK used a light shell of poor shape that lost velocity quickly leading to the IL-2 being fitted with the 23mm VYa which was rated at 30mm 100 meters and 25mm at 400 meters.

from page 131 of "Flying Guns of WW II"

"The smaller guns remained more effective than the NS-37 against weaker targets. The VYa-23 was assessed as having about double the kill probability of the NS-37 in a one pass attack against armoured cars and light tanks, with the ShVAK being almost as good against armoured cars (Sd Kfz 250) but virtually ineffective against against tanks such as the PzKpfw 38 (t) Ausf C or the Pz MK IIIG.

I don't know if it was a a misprint or mistake (misidentification?) but Sd Kfz 250

These short half tracks were often used for recconasance and so might be considered armoured cars. However for this discussion they generally had 8mm armor everywhere except the nose and possibly the driver's plate. Russian infantry often had a supply of 14.5mm antitank rifles which were rather effective against light vehicles.

Schweik said:

Ju-87G with 37mm guns and "wolfram" ammo - ~ 220 built
HS 129 with 30mm, 37mm or 75mm guns - ~800 built

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Not all Hs 129s carried anti-tank guns and the number with 75mm guns was tiny.

Plenty of He 113 were shot down by RAF fighters so what a pilot claims are not always what it seems.
The media and propoganda always see anything armoured or anything with tracks as a tank. A tank that has ran out of fuel or broke down and then attacked may also be a tank kill.

It is far more important to stop tanks moving than some theoretical kill by a pilot. If an army is paralysed by fear to not move tanks for fear of air bombardment then that's a win.

There was 25 Hs129B-3s with the 75mm cannon. It was also a 'dog' to fly.

Milosh said:

There was 25 Hs129B-3s with the 75mm cannon. It was also a 'dog' to fly.

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The 75mm could be jettisoned if the Hs129 was bounced, too.

The Ju88 was also used in the Ground Attack role with various cannon and MG arrangements.