How effective were ground attack aircraft against armor and other hardened land targets

[Schweik]

Yes and no

It is poor comfort indeed to the infantryman who's fox hole has just been run over by tanks if tanks run out gas 1-2 miles past his foxhole. He wants the tanks stopped before they get to his foxhole, preferably in his sight and in flames so he knows it won't come back again.

high ranking officers can take a bit less personal view. As long as the the attack is stopped (or the retreat) they really don't care about a mile or two here or there, except perhaps if they lose too many of their men.

Yes, and sometimes it's not just a matter of the life of a few of your troops, there can be much more important reasons why an armored column needs to be stopped - the need to keep them from attacking a beach-head for example, or keep them from seizing a bridge or an important road junction, or a supply dump. Or say, keep them from capturing Moscow or Leningrad, or escaping from the envelopment around Stalingrad. These requirements can be of Tactical, but also Operational or even Strategic importance.

So in other words, sometimes your goal is attrition - in which permanent destruction of the tank is the best thing. Sometimes that single hole in the radiator which stops the tank during the current attack is all you actually need for victory.

Dive bombing land targets also lost a lot of its appeal when the ground troops got better AA guns. Trading a dive bomber for a tank (1 for 1) might or might not be considered a good trade. Trading even a 1/2 dozen dive bombers for a destroyer is a good trade and the larger the ship the better the trade.

I think there is some truth in this - ships are easier to hit than tanks too, and I would say the most devastating effect of German dive bombers in the MTO (both Ju 87 and for a while also the Ju 88s) was in destruction of shipping which they did a sterling job of.

And for the last couple of days I've been reading numerous accounts of the Desert War from El Alamein through Kursk and a bit beyond. It's clear the Ju 87 was the most effective tank killer the Luftwaffe had, they did also make quite (to me a bit surprisingly) effective use of Bf 109 'Jabos' in attacking armored columns, and even Italian CR. 42's, but you don't see much done with their Bf 110s probably due to vulnerability to ground fire. The Stukas seemed to cause real problems at first but the increasing ubiquity of fairly heavy AAA, especially with the arrival of the Yanks, seemed to have put a damper on the fun for the dive bombers, and you see a shift to the much more survivable but also less accurate Fw 190s by mid 1943.

The Allies meanwhile (anecdotally) got their best results from Hurricane and P-40 fighter bombers, then their A-36s when they arrived actually seem to have been doing some damage, while their medium bombers & heavy strafers (Beaufighters, A-20s', B-25s etc.) were used a lot against Axis airfields and shipping. Later they started getting P-47s which were largely relegated to ground attack duties and seemed to have some knack for it, though they took heavy losses.

 

[gordonm1]

I would love to read more. It sounds like you are holding good material.

 

[Fighterguy]

If anyone has seen "The Chieftain" (Nicholas Moran) on YouTube discuss this, he puts forth an interesting set of information. Basically, the effects of tactical air support against armored targets was physically nearly insignificant. Very few tanks were hit, much less destroyed, compared to other conventional methods (artillery, tank destroyers, etcetera). But the moral effects for allied infantry, seeing the enemy being pummeled (not knowing the actual effects), would give them extra confidence. Alternatively, the guys on the receiving end start having severe doubts about future outcomes. All those promises of a Thousand Year Reich become a sour taste in their mouths.

 

[Schweik]

Yeah, I don't quite buy that. It matches several similar historical tropes over the years. I doubt such a tenuous morale effect would be sufficient for the Soviet Army to produce 30,000+ Il-2s.

Artillery is actually a good analogy. You could write a very similar 'debunking' about Artillery that has been done with tank busting aircraft. The vast majority of unguided artillery shells never hit anything of any military value. Probably the majority weren't even close to their targets, or landed after they were long gone etc. Artillery, like air strikes, was far more lethal to soft skinned than armored vehicles, and certainly had a big morale effect.

However enough of them did hit to make a difference in the outcome of countless battles. When it comes to tanks, artillery has similarly controversial effects. Light and medium powered artillery rounds are probably a bit like strafing attacks with ordinary 12.7 or 20mm guns... hard to do real damage to the better protected tanks, though still quite dangerous to open topped and lightly armored vehicles. But at some point the heavier artillery starts to become quite dangerous even to medium or heavy tanks. The threshold is probably around 15 cm for HE shells, maybe 12 cm for rockets.

 

[Schweik]

Bingo! Found a blog with some hard numbers, for a 30 day period of the Ardennes offensive, looks like the Germans lost 6 tanks or 9.7% of their losses, to air attack, 8 tanks (12.9%) to Artillery, and 36 (58.1%) to AP shot, and 2 (3.2%) to "other". However it's significant that one of the tanks K/O by an airstrike was a Tiger II, along with 3 Pz V. All targets that were hard for Allied armor or AT guns to knock out on their own.

The majority lost were abandoned which supports the "destroy the supply train / infrastructure" argument except for the fact that we know that the Germans started that attack with a severe fuel shortage and were trying to make it to Allied supply dumps. Stopping those columns was key to preventing a wider breakthrough.

In the first part of the Normandy campaign, artillery accounted for 9.3% of tank losses, air strikes accounted for 10.3% (10 tanks, mostly Panthers). 10 also fell to "other" which probably means infantry, bazooka's, mines etc.

In the second part of the Normandy campaign, over about 25 days in August, looks like Air strikes accounted for just about 20% of the losses for tanks destroyed in combat, though again the vast majority were abandoned, probably due to encirclement... and the threat of air attack.

At the Falaise pocket it seems that losses to air strikes were actually quite significant, 47.4% of the total, though most of that were lighter vehicles.

 

[Schweik]

So obviously you can interpret this a lot of different ways and no doubt will, the raw numbers don't tell the whole story, but I'll draw a few conclusions:

• The number one way for the German Army in 1944 to lose tanks was through abandonment.
• The most lethal danger to tanks in combat was AP Shot. However..
• In the close battle (Ardennes, first half of Normandy campaign) Air attack seems about as effective as artillery - killing about 10% of tanks lost.
• Air attack was taking out some of the most dangerous tanks - for example 10-15% of the Panthers destroyed. That is significant for troops on the ground.
• In encirclement and escape scenarios (Falaise, Normandy II) Air attack seems to be far more effective than Artillery.
• Air attacks clearly could and did destroy tanks, including the heaviest tanks.
• But it's also obvious they got a lot more open-topped and light armored vehicles (25 vs. 11 tanks & SP guns at Falaise)

We also know in the bigger picture that air strikes and artillery were the decisive factor in several of these engagements Operationally. The critical moments in the Ardennes offensive for example were the siege of Bastogne and shortly after where first massive and effective concentrations of artillery and then as the weather cleared, air strikes were key in halting and breaking up the German assaults, ensuring that they never reached the supply and fuel depots they needed to keep their offensive going (and turn it into a Strategic victory by going all the way to Arnhem etc.).

Finally, lets keep in mind this data is for late war environment in mid to late 1944 through very early 1945. Tanks are stronger, AAA is better, tactics are more well worked out. The Anglo-American aircraft, mostly fighter-bombers, aren't capable of dive bombing and don't (I don't think) have dedicated large caliber strafing weapons.

In the early and middle years of the war CAS aircraft may have found easier pickings.

 

[Schweik]

Finally as far as abandonment goes, here is how I see it. Imagine you are in a column of 12 panthers near the front line, driving down a road through a forest, toward the enemy in Southern Belgium or away from it in France. The clouds break and enemy aircraft appear. You button up, try to disperse as best you can toward the side of the road, and a Pz V at the front of the column is hit by a bomb or rockets and brews up. Then another one near the back of the column is hit. Now what for the other 10 tank crews? The way forward is blocked, the way back is blocked, enemy planes could be back at any second. Do you patiently wait for a recovery vehicle or one of the other tanks to push the wrecks out the way? Try to drive through the forest with enemy planes still circling above? Or bail out and filter out of the battle area on foot?

 

[Schweik]

Of course abandonment also happened routinely as tanks broke down (major problem for the Panthers and Tiger IIs especially) running out of gas or oil, ammunition and so on.

 

[Fighterguy]

I'm guessing that many of those abandonments were the result of mechanical breakdowns. This leads to the attrition effects of the strategic bombing campaign. Though German war production numbers may have remained stable, they did so at a loss of quality levels. Kind of a latent interdiction. It also demonstrates the earlier point, that combat vehicles require their support assets to be close at hand. The Germans, in the Ardennes offensive, were relying on potential capture of assets, lacking the required logistics themselves due to the sustained allied bombing campaign.

 

[Schweik]

I'm guessing that many of those abandonments were the result of mechanical breakdowns. This leads to the attrition effects of the strategic bombing campaign. Though German war production numbers may have remained stable, they did so at a loss of quality levels. Kind of a latent interdiction. It also demonstrates the earlier point, that combat vehicles require their support assets to be close at hand. The Germans, in the Ardennes offensive, were relying on potential capture of assets, lacking the required logistics themselves due to the sustained allied bombing campaign.

Agreed, and by the late war the Germans also had serious problems inherent in using slave / forced labor which in many cases was being worked to death. These laborers went to great pains and took huge risks to sabotage German war materiel. Fuel lines on Panthers for example were messed up in such a way that they would work initially but fail later. Many other subtle defects and flaws were put into the German war machines.

 

[Milosh]

According to Stephen Napier's book, The Armoured Campaign in Normandy, June – August 1944, the Germans lost 1,223 tanks and self-propelled guns in the Falaise Pocket, half the armour they committed to the Normandy campaign. 75% of those vehicles found in the pocket were either destroyed by their crews or simply abandoned.

 

[Dimlee]

Bingo! Found a blog with some hard numbers, for a 30 day period of the Ardennes offensive, looks like the Germans lost 6 tanks or 9.7% of their losses, to air attack, 8 tanks (12.9%) to Artillery, and 36 (58.1%) to AP shot, and 2 (3.2%) to "other". However it's significant that one of the tanks K/O by an airstrike was a Tiger II, along with 3 Pz V. All targets that were hard for Allied armor or AT guns to knock out on their own.

Good material, thanks for the link.
There is interesting table on some Soviet armour losses in Kursk Battle as well.

 

[Schweik]

Good material, thanks for the link.
There is interesting table on some Soviet armour losses in Kursk Battle as well.

Yes unfortunately they don't show the German armor losses at Kursk which I think would be more interesting to me.

 

[Fighterguy]

One thing I had seen awhile back, was a talk by Nicholas Moran on the subject of the effectiveness of CAS in destroying armor during WWII. 1) Most fighter pilots found it to be loathsome duty when they preferred engaging German fighters. 2) Flying low, trying to control the aircraft, head on a swivel, not hitting anything [like the ground], while constantly maintaining a route of egress, with stuff flying up at you, is hazardous and physically taxing. 3) Most pilots overestimated numbers of vehicles destroyed. When actual assessments were conducted as the allies advanced, these numbers were off by a wide margin. This may be due to pilots actually hitting targets with what appeared to be spectacular results, but after some repair or recovery, the vehicle was brought back into service.

 

[Schweik]

Nick Moran is a pretty well informed guy, and I agree with your description of the extreme hazards of flying CAS missions (you can add to it that by flying down low, fighter pilots put themselves under potential enemy fighters, which being in a greater E state have an easier time bouncing them). But a lot of that is just a repeat of the cliche's that spawned the start of this thread.

Yes of course overclaiming was extremely common, in all branches of the military. All fighter units overclaimed against other aircraft too, at rates anywhere from 1.5 -1 to 20 -1. Doesn't mean there weren't plenty of planes (and tanks) actually destroyed.
Yes tanks and other vehicles could be repaired after being knocked out by battle damage. So what? Planes were often repaired after being 'shot down' and forced into crash landings too. It is still a victory.
Attrition and tactical victory are two different things. At the risk of repeating myself, sometimes you have to stop that enemy vehicle in the short term.

 

[Fighterguy]

Attrition and tactical victory are two different things. At the risk of repeating myself, sometimes you have to stop that enemy vehicle in the short term.

Agreed. These things are hard to measure through statistical analysis after the fact. Like something N. Moran pointed out, even though the air attack may net little lasting effect, its immediate effect for the German and allied troops on the ground was enough to sway the outcome. More to my point. After action statistical analysis of WWII allied close air support, shows it to have had little measurable effect according to the bean counters, who are only interested in cold-hard facts. Like a child falling off a swing set and scraping a knee, or a chef cutting themselves in the kitchen, at that moment, the kid imagines their leg being amputated, and the chef fears bleeding to death. Later, it's nearly forgotten, but at that moment, the kid stopped playing on the swings, and the chef fell behind schedule.

 

[Schweik]

Here is the thing though - I don't agree. I interpret that data differently. I think looking at the stats I posted upthread from NW Europe in 1944, a time when tanks were better protected against air attack than in earlier parts of the war, it does have a very significant statistical proportion of the losses. To wit - about 10%, same as Artillery, in the close-in fighting, and between 20-50% of the losses during a breakout/ pocket collapse. That is hardly insignificant, even if far more were lost to crew abandonment.

Even 10% is a lot, in my opinion. I think 20th Century postwar analysis was shocked by the realities of overclaiming and pushed the pendulum way too far in the revisionist direction, and I'm arguing it probably needs to be pushed back again. Just as we are currently doing with air to air combat - putting overclaming in it's proper context and looking at the actual losses on all sides.

Of course the majority of knocked out enemy tanks were destroyed on the ground via direct fire, if that wasn't the case there wouldn't have been much need to build armor and AT guns. But the Air power came into play as very important for getting those tanks that were either hard to get from direct AP fire, or that were winning a local engagement.

By mid 1944, Germany was experiencing fuel, training, maintenance / supply, and communications problems, the latter seriously exascerbated by air power, and was fighting a two (really three) front war while outnumbered in every direction. By mid-1944 many of their troops were hastily trained conscripts. So crew abandonment was a major issue. It would be nice to see some stats for other battles closer to the beginning or middle part of the war.

But to reiterate, based on the hard data I've seen so far, the number of tanks knocked out, especially heavier Panther tanks, does seem quite significant to me. When I first read the 'revisionist' articles with the same dozen or so factoids, like that only 6 tanks were knocked out by air strikes in Falaise, I never knew the total number of tanks lost in combat was only 76 or that air strikes actually knocked out 36 of the armored vehicles killed. The fact that many of the burned out vehicles blown up by Typhoons and P-47s were armored cars, flakwagons, self propelled guns and so forth, does not mean that the pilots were making up their victories. At 200+ mph a Wespe and a StuG III don't look that different. And killing either of them matters just as much as killing a Pz IV.



Finally, one other thing to keep in mind regarding overclaiming of the destruction of tanks and AFV's, from an airplane it's hard to tell if a tank is already abandoned, broken down, out of gas or knocked out. I suspect quite a few pilots and aircrews "destroyed" the same already dead or empty tank, and had really no way of knowing it was already "dead".

We can go round and round with opinions, but ultimately moving this discussion forward requires more hard data. I found something for NW Europe, doesn't anyone here have data for German losses in major battles in 1942, 1943, 1944 on the Russian Front? Or 1941-1943 in the Med?

 

[Fighterguy]

100% agree. This became an issue during the 1991 Gulf War. Pilots would report a hit on a hardened aircraft shelter, but reconnaissance analysis wouldn't see a flattened structure, just a hole where the bomb went in, so they'd order a re-strike of the target. Little did they realize, that the first bomb entered, detonated, and rendered everything inside completely destroyed. This mindset was a layover from possibly skewed WWII analysis.

 

[Navalwarrior]

Agreed. These things are hard to measure through statistical analysis after the fact. Like something N. Moran pointed out, even though the air attack may net little lasting effect, its immediate effect for the German and allied troops on the ground was enough to sway the outcome. More to my point. After action statistical analysis of WWII allied close air support, shows it to have had little measurable effect according to the bean counters, who are only interested in cold-hard facts. Like a child falling off a swing set and scraping a knee, or a chef cutting themselves in the kitchen, at that moment, the kid imagines their leg being amputated, and the chef fears bleeding to death. Later, it's nearly forgotten, but at that moment, the kid stopped playing on the swings, and the chef fell behind schedule.

Resp:
Well said.

 

[Schweik]

Found this interesting analysis of CAS in North Africa. I had noticed that after Kasserine, DAF and American air assets were directed much more heavily against Axis airfields, and because this coincided with the arrival of the Americans, I had assumed it was instigated by them. But apparently not, it was a British officer who changed the Strategy and reorganized the basis of CAS at this time. He also apparently specifically changed the CAS focus from attacking tanks to attacking troops and lightly armed vehicles. This took place around Spring of 1943. Bold emphasis is mine:

https://history.army.mil/html/books/093/93-7/CMH_Pub_93-7.pdf

"Of all the critics, none was more influential than British Air Vice Marshal Sir Arthur Coningham, who replaced Kuter as commander of the centralized Allied Air Support Command during the Kasserine operation. While Eisenhower was opposed to the British "committee system"* of command, he also advocated a commander having the flexibility to organize forces to suit national proclivities, and he gave Coningham the freedom to operate by his own style. Coningham now helped convince Eisenhower and other high-level Allied leaders that close air support forces must be organized on a basis of scarcity and that, in particular, ground commanders could not expect as much close air support as they heretofore thought necessary. In the context of military reversals, such as Kasserine, the senior leaders of the Tunisian campaign found the economy-of-force principle more acceptable. Coningham ultimately discontinued several other Tunisian cooperative practices, some first seen when he took over the Western Desert Air Force. He criticized the defensive air cover flying mode, then used by the XII Air Support Command and No. 242 Group. With the scarcity concept accepted, he promoted the centralization of all tactical air resources under his control as air specialist on the staff of the highest field commander. Division and corps commanders would have to request close air support through the highest army commander. Although they were primarily associated with their national force, the XII Air Support Command and No. 242 Group would be commanded by Coningham rather than by the II Corps or British First Army commanders. Coningham condemned the former employment practice of having fighters on call and assigning them piecemeal to a variety of targets that were not critical to the battle. He proclaimed that, henceforth, air support missions would be offensive, with fighters seeking out the enemy's air force at or near Axis bases.

For ground attack missions, enemy concentrations and soft-skinned vehicles, rather than tanks, would be appropriate targets. Centralized control was a fundamental premise of Coningham's air support concept. In view of limited air resources, all aircraft units should be used in the highest priority missions. None could be held in reserve for the future use of a currently inactive ground unit. Coningham, or another air commander fully conversant with air capabilities, would determine allocation and employment upon the ground commander's determination of objectives. "