Shortround, I'll give you credit for this post because at least you clearly articulated your arguments and we can actually resolve the disagreement to some extent rather than going round and round with flip comments. I still disagree however, I am comfortable with multiple ways of looking at the same problem ala Roshemon, I think in many respects with History you have to settle for that in many cases because no one 'model', theory or system can fully encompass the reality.
Yeah, it is a specialization that calls for different landing speeds and different low speed handling characteristics
What defined a Carrier aircraft varied quite a bit nation by nation and was not a hard science. The very general rule was that Carrier planes carried more stuff they were supposed to be at least a little inferior to land based planes. This
potentially means stuff like arrestor hooks, folding wings (sometimes with corresponding mechanical or hydraulic systems), more navigational gear including all weather instruments, radio direction finders and extra radios, and sometimes even a second or third crewman to help with navigation or spotting etc. (see Fairey Fulmar and Firefly), also extra fuel as longer range is usually required, and extra maritime survival gear for the crew like inflatable rafts, potable water and so on. Sometimes also stuff like anti-submarine detection capabilities and ASW weapons capacity.
Naval planes more generally (beyond just carrier planes) do also often have to take on more kit of this type so it's incorrect to suggest that (non carrier) naval aircraft are identical to land based planes. It may be relatively easy to adjust them from one mission to the other (say PB4Y to B-24, its not that wide of a leap .. or just de-navalizing an F4U) but there is still a difference.
But in practice the actual aircraft that came out of the factories overlapped enough that it really didn't make that much difference. A Fairy Fulmar may not have been a good enough fighter to take on land based fighters, but the A6M, F4F, F6F and Corsair most certainly were. As was the Seafire if you could get the carrier close enough
Some of the characteristics you listed like stronger landing gear and suitability for shorter landings and takeoffs is applicable to carrier planes, but not necessarily. The Corsair for example defies the definition in many respects. The Corsair also turned out to be in no way inferior to land based fighters, in fact quite to the contrary.
But the larger point is simply this as I already stated -
Naval planes in general are just another specialization. Specialization, in turn, is not grounds for dismissal. The F4U - arguably only marginally suitable for Carrier operations**, together with the F6F and the F4F were all among the Great fighters of WW2. Some of these were more generalist than the others. The F4F in particular was not particularly good at ground attack (nor was the Spitfire) but it performed an extremely important mission in breaking the back of the IJN Carrier forces at Coral Sea, Midway and Guadalcanal.
The Yak 3 was a specialized (smaller and faster) variant of the Yak 1, while the Yak 9 was another specialized variant of the (slightly larger and higher flying) Yak 7 (itself originally a simplified trainer variant of the Yak 1). The Yak 9 was very successful, and also one of the great fighters of WW2 without a doubt, while the Yak 3 was 'extra' successful and accelerated the demise of the Luftwaffe while enabling the VVS to destroy the Wehrmacht and Waffen SS forces which had invaded their homeland. Together though the Yak 1, Yak 3 and 9 are at least as closely linked as say, a Spit I is to a Spit XIV. And as I already pointed out several times, the Spitfire was also made quite consciously with low altitude variants.
Heavily engaged refers to rate of use or number of missions flow. It says nothing about the effectiveness of the attacks, like how many sorties were needed to get a given effect. The Russian 20mm cannon was not particularly good at armor penetration.
You have described your theory before that Russian planes weren't any good at destroying German military vehicles because they didn't carry heavy enough ordinance. And you think Russian Rockets weren't effective either.... 60 & 80mm mortars aren't good at destroying tanks etc. All of these are nice theories but they are no more than that - as you know, back of the envelope calculations do not trump historical evidence for me, in fact to the contrary. So post some historical evidence* to support your outlier theory here -
until then don't expect anyone else to operate as if your theories are facts.
Specifically to do with rockets and cannon - as you are probably aware, heavy tanks remained rare in the German army. Not every German tank was a Tiger. Rocket and cannon attacks may or may not be good at knocking out or disabling Tigers, but they are more than capable of destroying all the other vehicles and ordinance that made up the German armed forces. Everything from horse drawn carts, to trucks and prime movers, to halftracks, open topped Marders and Wespes and all sorts of artillery and AT guns, are extremely vulnerable to 20mm cannons and the equivalent of 80mm mortars. In fact, actual light and medium caliber mortars probably destroyed more German troops and kit than almost any other weapon.
A Tiger or Panther tank with no fuel and ammo, and no support from infantry, AT guns or artillery, will in most cases quickly be abandoned. See the Falaise pocket as a good example. Typhoons and Thunderbolts may not have blown the turrets off of that many Panthers, but they wrecked enough of the other stuff that the German tank units were brought to a halt. And the tank crew is going to slink out of the battle area on foot.
We also do have evidence that large numbers of German medium tanks and assault guns (Pz III, Pz IV, StuGG III etc.) were destroyed by Russian fighters, dive bombers, and Sturmoviks especially in 1943 - 1945. I'm not sure about the heavy tanks and Jagdpanzer type vehicles as I haven't dived that deep into it. But if necessary I can provide sources for the above.
Ground attack and close air support, precision vs tonnage
You and I (and some other people in this forum) have a long running debate about the value of a bomber. This came up repeatedly in discussions in other threads about the Pe-2, the Mosquito and many other fighter related arguments including earlier in this one I think. You, and some others here, attribute effectiveness for ground attack to heaviness of ordinance. The notion of the bomber as "bomb truck" - perhaps best summed up as whether a Lancaster is ultimately a better bomber than a Mosquito.
But when we zoom in from bombers in general to the more narrow field of close air support, I think it is obvious and very well established that the role of accuracy is key. For one thing, it's very important not to hit your own troops. This is one of the reasons why their was, and still is a subtype of CAS aircraft that is relatively light, slow and highly maneuverable. For the Russians in WW2, the I-15 / 153 series of biplane fighters were very helpful for CAS for this exact reason. The Germans also used biplanes (see He 51), and today this particular niche is partly taken up by attack helicopters, but also by light aircraft like the Super Tucano, Bae Hawk, Aero L-159A etc..
Ultimately in WW2 the Luftwaffe got the most mileage out of the Ju 87 Stuka. Slow and ungainly like a giant vulture, this single engined bomber carried a fairly light bomb load. On paper it looked like a loser. But in the field, it was the Germans best tank destroyer, even before they specialized it by adding 37mm guns. The reason in a nutshell was not weight of ordinance but precision. As a dive bomber it could hit it's targets vastly, vastly more often than a medium altitude level bomber, while suffering fewer losses. The Sturmovik was the same in terms of accuracy- although it relied more on rockets and cannon.
Today the equivalent of the Sturmovik in Russia is the Su-25, and in the West is the A-10. It continues to be a big debate in the US military, but even though a modern fighter-bomber can do almost everything, for CAS they still specialize.
Conversely, while a B-26 can carry vastly more bombs than a Ju 87 or a Sturmovik, it was far
less effective historically in destroying enemy tanks. The Anglo Americans did try to use medium and even heavy bombers numerous times for Tactical strikes, but quite often it was a failure, sometimes a truly grotesque failure when they accidentally bombed their own forces. Such as
when the USAAF killed 1,000 of their own men in an attempted breakout during Operation COBRA in 1944.
You can move a lot of earth and not actually effect the enemy. I have brought this up before many times. During Vietnam, the B-52 carried far more ordinance than an A-1 / AD Skyraider, but the latter was more effective certainly for CAS.
For the US late model P-38s, P-47s and P-51s were somewhat interchangeable as to the missions they flew. They all could fly bomber escort, they all could fly fighter fighter
But actually they really weren't. P-51s pretty quickly became the main, then the only escort fighter. P-47s were increasingly relegated to ground attack and frontal defense - and late in the war they made the specialized super fast sprinter P-47M specialized specifically for dogfighting the new German jets. P-38s meanwhile were basically phased out of use in Europe when P-51s became available. Spitfires remained the main interceptor for the Anglo-American forces through the end of the war. So they did specialize. Everyone did.
This does not mean the Western allies missed the boat in not adopting an IL-2 type aircraft.
Ah but you are wrong, they did adopt Il2- type aircraft, or more precisely, they specialized existing aircraft to be more like an Il2. They put two 40mm bofors cannons on the Hurricane IID, as you may recall, they put a 75mm cannon and 10-14 machine guns in the nose of B-25s (the main production run of them for a couple of years in fact), made similar (multi gun) modifications to the A-20 and produced dedicated ground attack aircraft like the Douglas A-26.
The US cancelled thousands of dive bombers for Army use once they started using fighter bombers in numbers.
You are making an assumption as to
why though. They apparently started using fighters as bombers, specifically P-40s and Hurricanes in lieux of Blehnheims, at the suggestion of pilots fighting in the Western Desert. Possibly instigated by Australian Ace Clive Caldwell (this claim is made in one of his biographies). Caldwell pointed out that the Blenheims were so slow it forced escorting P-40s to fly along at near stall speed (~100 mph) to keep near them, making them extremely vulnerable. P-40s and Hurricanes turned out to make fairly precise bombers, by one estimate 4 times as effective as Blenheims, and since Axis air power was often not to be found over many battlefields of the Western Desert on a given day, it made sense to make use of otherwise under-utilized fighters to destroy enemy troops and
materiel so the change in Tactics was made. Whether this actually saved any fighter pilots though is another question as many fighters were caught low down on strafing and bombing missions by Luftwaffe fighters.
US and British dive bombers didn't come to the fore, because the newer designs were largely a failure. Vultee Vengeance and so forth just didn't work out. The Helldiver was purchased but probably due to corruption and in spite of serious design flaws, certainly for the first year or so of it's deployment it was a dangerous and disliked beast by it's crews. The best Anglo-American dive bomber was the old Douglas Dauntless, a good aircraft and one of the wars greats certainly thanks to it's destruction of so many Japanese ships, but also a fairly slow early war design which was vulnerable to German fighters. Nevertheless the
Army did use it however as the A-24, a bit more than most people realize since it doesn't get that much press.
The Free French also used it in the Med for CAS. It was surprisingly effective but took heavy losses.
Because by 1943 it was too slow. So the USAAF also, let us not forget,
made the Allison engined P-51 into a Dive Bomber. This tends to get papered over but that was the job of that plane in the USAAF. One wonders why they didn't make it into a fighter but that's what they did - put dive brakes on it and everything. It had the speed to escape Luftwaffe fighters so it did have good characteristics for that niche..
The Brits also had the formidable Beaufighter, a fighter but really most suited for ground (and naval) attack roles, and adapted the Typhoon and Tempests largely to ground attack too. The Americans designed the excellent***
Douglas A-26 Invader as a dedicated ground attack aircraft though it came too late to see very wide scale use, it was deployed and did well particularly in Italy.
The USAAF used fighters as fighter-bombers more generally because they weren't able to make dedicated bombers that were fast and / or survivable enough (with the exception of some late arriving types like the A-26). The extra guns on the B-25 were as close as they came. The Germans of course had the He 51, Ju 87G, Hs 129 and Fw 190F series.
So the bottom line is, in my opinion, specialization for ground attack or dogfighting wasn't so rare nor was it some kind of sign of flawed policy. It was in fact fairly universal. What's more, necessary and effective. Therefore it's not a valid argument to dismiss the
Yak 3 as a great plane "because it's too much of a specialist", it
was one of the best of the war. As was the Yak 9 and the La 5FN / La 7. I think these are all pretty mainstream positions among aviation writers.
S
* I don't mean cite references like in an academic article but just cite some general examples .... if you can.
** worked better when further specialized by the British
*** Although disliked by General Kenney in the Pacific, the
9th Air Force operating in Italy specifically asked to replace all of their A-20s and Martin B-26s with Dogulas A-26s ASAP after flying successful 8 test missions with them in 1944. They were also used by the 12th Air Force against targets in Germany.