Not a bad idea, if you want to become president to be complimentary about the nations industry.
To be fair he was also the one who issued the starkest warning of any of them over the US "Military Industrial Complex"
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Not a bad idea, if you want to become president to be complimentary about the nations industry.
I never said 'over Germany', so don't misquote me. Spitfires and Thunderbolts did the heavy work wearing down the Luftwaffe over France and Benelux, the Mustangs simply cleaned up.
Not much airwar being won over France when the LW was killing VIII BC over Germany.
Maybe you missed the memo about the LW leaving LF3 as primary resource to battle over France and Benelux while the LW high command built a ring defense to take advantage of P-47s having to turn back just past the German border - and continuously transferred re-enforcements from Ost and Sud fronts to central and eastern Germany. During the six months before D-Day, the Mustangs in less than 1/3 of the sorties, shot down more LW day fighters in the air than all the 8th and 9th AF P-47 FG's combined from day 1 Ops in April 1943. Oh, and twice as many on the ground.
Maybe your definition of 'heavy work' and 'simply cleaned' up are different from mine...
So Spitfires and Thunderbolts pushed the LW defensive lines back to the borders of Germany. That sounds like a success story to me and that these two fighters wore down the LW and enabled the invasion at Normandy to take place.
But no matter where you come from, the fundamental point remains. IF the RAF had lost the Battle of Britain, there would have been No D-Day, so no defeat of the Nazis. As there would have been nowhere for the USAAF 8th Army Air Force to land and mount the bombing campaign over Germany, alongside Bomber Command, and nowhere for the thousands of GIs to land, to prepare for D-Day...But had the B-29 not existed I am sure the Americans would have been able to find some other bomber that would have done the job. I mean if necessary the Americans could have always borrowed a Lancaster and modified it since Little Boy was under the Lancaster's bomb load capacity and the British had been dropping Grand Slams and Tallboys from Lancasters for years, both of whom were bigger than the atomic bomb.
Germany would have continued to develop a nuclear weapon, and used their vastly superior delivery systems (V2, VX) to deliver them to Washington or New York...before the US had a means to deliver their certainly advanced bomb to Germany...
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If you're going to take that tac, then it would've been a device that turned the tide of the war, not so much any aircraft.I imagine it would have to be the Hurricane and Spitfire considering that the German loss in the Battle of Britain caused Hitler to turn his attention east. Had the Battle of Britain been lost then WW2 would have been very different.
I mean as good as the P51-D is, if it did not exist, sure the bomber casualties would have been higher but the end result of the war would have been the same. Had the Spitfire and Hurricane not existed the war would have been very different.
Resp:Generals Arnold, Spaatz, Doolittle, Eisenhower and Kuter disagreed strongly with your point of view. Read the autobiographies of Arnold and Spaatz and Doolittle for a refreshing difference of opinion that they held in October-December 1943. Read Schmid's recount of the LW air war in the USAF Studies. Simply stated, without a.) the arrival of the Mustang, and as a result of that 'no show', b.) stripping every P-38 FG from every theatre by November 1943 in time for ARGUMENT, the losses during Big Week and beyond would probably been so disastrous that nobody would have been 'confused' about the threat from the LW to D-Day prospects.
Eaker believed that the VIII BC was shooting down far more German fighters than actually happened (despite the Spitfire and P-47 wearing the LW down) and Allied/AAF intelligence warned in December and January that the LW was getting stronger daily.
One of the reasons that Eaker was 'promoted' out of USSTAFE and Hunter fired is because they mistakenly believed that VIII BC would win the war of attrition by trading B-17s for Fw 190s on a ludicrous scale.
But what do I know? Howza bout you telling us how P-47 groups were going to make a difference over the critical targets of Merseberg, Munich, Berlin, Regensburg, Leipzig, Posnan, Stettin, Magdeburg, Oschersleben, etc from Jan 11 through June 5th. Maybe I missed the memo.
I thought this would be interesting because it's a bit different from the usual which aircraft is best at a particular mission or in general. Alot of this had to do with factors other than performance such as oportunity( being in the right place at the right time) , numbers produced, and maybe even just plain luck.
Lots of possible good picks here. A couple obvious ones are of course the Spitfire and Hurricane. For me though I think I would have to go with the SBD, the caviaght being that it by far mostly affected the Pacific theater. The difference it made in that theater however was huge.
Would love to hear everyones picks and I'll bet there's a few good ones I haven't even thought of.
So which aircraft would you credit most for turning the tide.
If you're going to take that tac, then it would've been a device that turned the tide of the war, not so much any aircraft.
As good as the Spitfires and Hurricanes were at turning back the German opposition, they would've been sitting ducks had RADAR not been in use on the east coast of England.
It was the warnings from the Radar sites of the impending raids, that gave the fighters enough time to get up and take the fight to the enemy, rather than waiting for the enemy to bring it to the island.
Elvis
Agreed, the RN would have made Operation Sea Lion, make attempting to take Leningrad, being driven back at Odessa, or eventually taking Sevastopol after 9 months, look like 'a walk in the park'.Spitfires and Hurricanes were magnificent along with the RADAR that directed them, but even had they lost the air portion of the Battle of Britain there is no way the Germans were getting past the Royal Navy to actually invade.