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If you want the plane that broke the back of the Luftwaffe it was the P51.
Don't forget pinsog the Spitfire did its business in the Battle of Britain and the MET, areas of strategic importance, particularly from the British point of view.
Keep in mind that fighter claims from bombers were overclaimed by as much as 60%.
With the company front approach LW units managed to make passes on heavy bombers then brak off without having to engage Lightnings at all. Only really the arrival of the P-51 and the change in US fighter doctrine really countered this.
I would not bet on that. Germany had plenty of operational aircraft right up to 1945. For instance they employed about 1,000 aircraft for Operation Baseplate on 1 January 1945. I would not care to tangle with a Fw-190A8 while flying a P-40.Even older P-40s could've had considerable success at that point.
The P38 was quite successfull in the escort role. The LW had to engage them or they were going to be blasted from the air. And while the LW was busy with the P38, they couldnt concentrate on the bomber formations. Also, untill the AAF implemented the fighter sweep strategy, the escort fighters were tethered to the bomber formations and their true effectiveness was hampered.
The P38 might have been inferior in an air-to-air role against the -109 and -190. But the P38 was far superior to the -110 and any other two engine fighter the LW had going up against bombers. And woe to any -109 or -190 pilot who didnt take the P38 seriously.
When I said the 47 broke the Luftwaffes back, I have read that more than one place. I guess if I were to define that, I would say it was in the fight when the Luftwaffe was the strongest and still had a well trained experienced group of pilots, took the fight to them(because of longer range) and caused them serious losses. By the time the Mustang arrived on the scene in numbers, the Luftwaffe had been seriously roughed up and had lost alot of experienced people that were being replaced by MUCH less experienced pilots
. But the significance for Germany lay not in the number of casualties, but in their quality. Most of the German pilots lost in 1940 were professional soldiers and airmen, with extensive pre-war training. Men of the calibre of Buerschgens, Ebbighausen, Ebeling, Henrici, and Mueller-Duehe were quite literally irreplaceable. The number and quality of fully trained, professional combat leaders available to the Jagdwaffe began a definite, if at first imperceptible decline that fall, while the British were reinforced by successive waves of highly trained pilots from the occupied countries, the Empire, and finally, America. The seeds of the total defeat of Germany's fighter force in 1944 were thus sown over the fields of Kent in 1940.
By the beginning of 1942, the Germans had lost the equivalent of two entire air
forces . The result was that the Germans had to curtail their training programs to
meet the demands of the front for new pilots . By January 1942, of the pilots
available for duty in the fighter force, only 60 percent were fully operational, while
the number in the bomber force was down to 47 percent. For the
remainder of the war, the percentage of fully operational fighter and bomber pilots
available, with few exceptions, remained below, and at many times substantially
below, the 70 percent level . Further exacerbating this situation was the fact that the
Germans were forced to lower their standards for a fully operational pilot as the war
continued . There was, one must note, no decisive moment in this decline in
expertise . Rather as Winston Churchill has suggested in another context, the
Luftwaffe had entered the descent from 1940 "incontinently, fecklessly . . . . It is a
fine broad stairway at the beginning but after a bit the carpet ends . A little further
on, there are only flagstones ; and a little further on, these break beneath your
feet".
The Luftwaffe lost 200% of it's force strength by the end of 1941. In 1942 they lost 150% of the fighter force. In the first 6 months of 1943 they lost another 120%, then another 150% in the second half of 1943.
And...?
Fighter Command lost some 50%+ of its force in a one and a half month period in May-June 1940, and then they lost some 200% of the force again in next the four months during the BoB. The Luftwaffe, in contrast, didn't loose more than the half the fighter force during the same period, nor did the losses prevented the Luftwaffe from expanding its size through the war. One of the reasons why Fighter Command largely became a non-issue for the rest of the war - apart from the lack any coherent and meaningful offensive strategy, or long range fighters - was that it lost virtually all of its highly trained pilots during the spring summer of 1940. The ranks could be filled up with hastily trained replacements, but they had neither the skill, the military background or the combat experience of the professional pre-war RAF pilots. And it showed in 1941 and 1942 over France.
Murray is simply demagogue in this case anyway. 'Lost 200% of it's force strength by the end of 1941' - yup, pick a long enough period and you will eventually come up with 100%, 200%, 300% and even higher numbers.It is meaningless the same without a context, and in this case, the context was that
a, Allied air forces suffered this kind of attrition much sooner, see RAF FC in BoB
b, the LW, despitite these losses, continued to expand
"Poor" skills is a loaded term that would tend to turn the discussion more nationalistic and less rational than it already, often, tends to be. But it's hard to escape the conclusion that LW fighters were more effective plane for plane than British in that period. Also look at North Africa where neither side was operating at the edge of range, but just a typical support/opposition of recon and bombing a/c over a land battlefront, like WWI Western front air combat (where the Germans also had large kill ratio advantage for extended periods) or that on Eastern front in WWII. The Germans had a commanding kill ratio advantage over the Western Desert (and in Tunisia later as well), despite consistently inferior numbers. A particularly large ratio against Hurricanes and P-40 types, but it not by any means reversed in '42 when Spitfires V's were used there. The German fighter arm was not declining that early in the war: combat results just don't support that thesis.RAF losses in 1941/42 were not due to poor pilots skills on the part of the RAF...
"
And I also don't think that air combat results in general support the theory that fighters escorting bombers are at a big advantage in fighter combat to fighters intercepting escorted bombers. The escorting fighters typically have to worry more about fuel (depending the fighter types and range of the operation, but the Bf109 had to worry about it a lot raiding UK from France or Malta from Siciily) and morale wise the escort pilots have to worry more what happens to them if they survive a downing: it's more difficult psychologically to fly agressively. But again for RAF v LW in 41-42 we can look at a variety of tactical situations and the result was fairly consistent, German advantage. In bigger picture terms the war had by then a reached a point where Allied (including Soviet) air arms had more potential to absorb losses, but 41-42 is way too early to talk about German fighter quality declining, not relative to their opponents anyway.
Joe
I have read in more than one place that the Luftwaffe had lost a good many of its experienced pilots by the time the Mustang was commonplace in the theater.
Anyone have any stats on that or any thoughts about that claim?
Thanks. You are always a wealth of good information Bill.