The airplane that did the most to turn the tide of the war.

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MakerDude said:
BBear good data but their is a slight flaw in it. The year was added into the subtotal for the allies. I corrected it and played around with it in a spreadsheet.
View attachment 534641

Re posted with some corrections.
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Nice data and table. One typo correction: the Allied to Axis production ratio for 1940 is 2.03.

What is impressive (or depressive for the Axis) is that even without U.S. input the Allies are outproducing the Axis by 44 - 105% every year until 1944, when German and Japanese output increases drastically. Even then the U.S. output exceeds that of the Axis by 40%, and of course that includes substantial numbers of heavy bombers.
 
swampyankee said:
I really don't know why the Albacore left service before the Swordfish.
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Swordfish was kept in service after the Albacore had been retired because of the differing roles that emerged for each type as the war progressed. By 1943-4, swordfish were used primarily aboard escort carriers in the ASW role, requiring exceptional all weather handling and the ability to operate from very short and slow landing platforms. Both types could meet those criteria, but the swordfish was slightly better. In a headwind with an escort carrier travelling full stick, a Swordfish could descend at a rate of closure of less than 30 knots relative, making them wwii equivalents to a rotary airborne platform. Albacore couldn't quite match that, in addition the accident rate for the Albacore in rough weather on CVE deck spaces was worse than the Swordfish.



If you analyse it from those perspectives, which are criteria far more important than the often concentrated upon issues of performance and lift capacity, the Swordfish was the logical choice for retention.
 
Agree with Glider, in the Albacore the RN almost seemed to be hedging its bets and going with the Devil-you-know. The original specifications (M.7/36 and O.8/36) could and probably should have been met by a design without built-inobsolescence as much as the Albacore had. Both specs were combined into 41/36, from which the Albacore was built. Eric Brown was quite scathing in his criticism of the Swordfish in his book Wings Of The Navy, not so much of the aeroplane itself, but the fact that the RN persisted with such antiquated warplanes within which its young airmen should have to go to war.
 
From what you say, was the much respected Brown talking about Swordfish use ASW from difficult Escort Carriers or use against daylight heavily protected targets like Bismark from a main line Carrier like Ark Royal?

I can't see the humanitarian angle, these are very highly trained professional volunteers as crew not raw 19yr old conscripts being ordered on pain of court martial. There was a design competition for a replacement for Swordfish IIRC. Supermarine bid for it, type 312 or was it 322? The Treasury had already sprung for two different fighter development programs , Hurricane and Spitfire. A second class torpedo plane goes right along with all the partly WW1 era navy we started with. I feel much more sympathy with the ratings on some of those old nags.
 
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[QUOTE="Schweik, post: 1470806, member: 73921"
They did so under the most difficult and brutal conditions imaginable and had effectively transformed their air forces by mid 1943 into something that the once dominant Luftwaffe could no longer handle except locally and for a short duration.

Yet the Soviets were still losing 3 aircraft in combat for 1 lost Luftwaffe aircraft.

Not to take anything away from the Soviet achievements in the air war, but I do think that you are over selling it.
 

You've omitted to mention that post war analysis of RAF vs Lufwaffe victory to losses for 1941- 43 also came up with that same 1:3 ratio.
 
Kevin J said:
You've omitted to mention that post war analysis of RAF vs Lufwaffe victory to losses for 1941- 43 also came up with that same 1:3 ratio.
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Since it's about the Eastern Front, I don't think I have omitted anything. Just to be clear, that ratio of 3 Soviet to 1 LW for 1943 is for all operational losses, not just air-to-air. Also, the ratio was much the same in '41, '42 and '44.
 
Stig1207 said:
Since it's about the Eastern Front, I don't think I have omitted anything. Just to be clear, that ratio of 3 Soviet to 1 LW for 1943 is for all operational losses, not just air-to-air. Also, the ratio was much the same in '41, '42 and '44.
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3 to 1 or more?
"Official" (yet much disputed) figure of VVS losses in 1943 was 9543 in VVS RKKA (Army) and 11246 in all services, including Navy, Long Range Aviation and PVO (Anti Air Defence). This is for so-called "combat" aviation (thus excluding trainers, passenger, transport) and combat losses only. Total losses for all reasons were probably twice higher.
 

Actually, after 1943, they weren't. Admittedly most of the losses were due to aircraft lost on the ground and write offs 9mostly burnt by own crews), but that is the only way to understand the VVS operational procedures correctly. They were so intrinsically linked to the needs of the ground forces that to view the VVS as something separate creates an incorrect picture of the forces overall effectiveness
 

The British had a real problem bringing aircraft from the "requirement" stage to the production/service use stage.

The requirement/specification for the Albacore was issued in 1936. It took until Dec 1938 to get a prototype into the air and until March of 1940 to start delivering production examples to a service squadron. It didn't serve on a carrier deck until Nov 1940.

The Fairey Barracuda was built to specification S.24/37 which was issued in 1937 but the first Barracuda prototype didn't fly until Dec 1940. It was this specification that the Supermarine 322 was built to satisfy.

The treasury was springing for a host of competing programs. Perhaps too many and spreading development teams too thin. It may not have sunk in that retracting landing gear, high speed monoplanes with flaps (of different sorts) and other moving parts (bomb bay doors, etc) took just a few more hours to design than a fixed gear biplane with few other moving parts (sarcasm)

I would note as far as the Navy goes, most other major navies were in the same situation. The 1939 US Navy had a very high percentage of old ships, their 8 in gun cruisers excepted. , the French also had a fair portion of scrap yard escapees. In some cases the sailors on French or Italian "modern" ships might have been better off on WW I leftovers.

I would note again ( I have already made this argument in another thread) that in 1936-37 the British had no carriers with both the speed and flight deck lengths of the American carriers and in fact had 3 carriers that weren't much bigger than WW II escort carriers (and topped out at about 25kts) so asking for a superzoomy monoplane torpedo bomber might mean that 3 out your 7 carriers couldn't use it. Stall speed of the Albacore is given as 54mph ?
Peace time landing and take-off requirements being a bit different than war time. Please note the US had lost almost 30 Douglas Devastators out of 129 built from first issue until Dec 1941 in peace time accidents.
 


It would be operational (combat) losses and include all services, so the 11200 odd with corresponding operational LW losses of some 3120. Losses of the other smaller Axis will of cause skew the ratio a little, so 3 seems a good approximation.
 
The Soviet system did not particularly emphasize pilot safety and they continued to endure heavy losses through the end of the war. This is a separate issue from gaining the ability to enforce local air superiority as needed after the Battle of the Kuban river (this was the first and perhaps most heavily contested case where they did).

However that said, raw numbers can be misleading in many ways.

As we know, when counting operational losses, that includes a lot of basic accidents, maintenance problems, navigation errors, landing and takeoff accidents, running out of fuel and so on. This kind of thing incidentally was low for the Luftwaffe for the first half of the war but ticked up noticeably by mid 1943, probably due to changes in pilot training.

So a certain percentage of sorties result in crashes or other losses, in many cases this amounts to a large percentage of the total number number of losses. Depending on aircraft type and other factors (Winter in Russia being a particularly difficult time for flying) it can be from 30-40% of the losses.

Furthermore, certain types of missions expose the aircraft to severe risks from AAA. Perhaps highest among these are low-level CAS missions, which were notoriously dangerous especially against the Germans.

Based on what I was just looking at on this site here*, I see the following numbers:

In May 1943, for the Luftwaffe on the Russian front:

~500 fighters (454 day fighters, 52 'long range fighters', and 9 night fighters)
~500 Medium bombers
574 "Ground attack aircraft" (I assume these are Stukas, HS 123 and HS 129)
~400 recon planes

For a total of 1598 'combat aircraft' and 2,133 aircraft of all types in May 1943, down from 1,894 / 2,796 the year before. This is of course just German and doesn't include Italian, Romanian, Finnish or Bulgarian aircraft. Reduction in strength is mainly due to fighters and some bombers sent to North Africa / Italy or for air defense of Germany, with additional ground attack aircraft being brought in to Russia.

For the Soviets in 1943 I see:

6,777 fighters (up from 3,468 in may 1942)
3,505 Ground Attack (mostly Sturmovik but probably also including I-153 etc.. this is up from 331 in May 1942.)
2,667 Bombers (up from 1,170 in 1942)
540 Recon which stayed the same from 1942.

For a total of 16,657 aircraft.

Then losses show 3,128 for the Luftwaffe (not counting their Axis partners) and 11,200 for the Soviets. Hence your 1-3 ratio.

But lets compare losses to forces here. The Luftwaffe had 2,133 aircraft deployed on the Russian Front of which they lost 3,128. 146% of their aircraft were lost.
The Soviets had 16,657 of which they lost 11,200. That is a loss rate of roughly 67% of operational aircraft.

When we see 3-1 odds, the assumption is that these are all victims of the experten, shot down by fighters in desperate, heroic against the odds combat. But the reality is probably far more prosaic. The reality is that the Luftwaffe units were under heavy pressure. The VVS, PVO and Soviet Navy units were as well of course, but as a percentage of the much larger number of units deployed, they actually didn't take as many losses.

If you look at the Soviet force numbers, you can see that while fighters roughly doubled from May 1942, ground attack aircraft increased by a factor of 10 - 3,505 from 331. Ground attack aircraft had the most hazardous mission of the war barring kamikaze strikes. Heavily laden, cumbersome Il2s had a fairly high accident rate, and were very vulnerable to ground fire. I don't know the exact breakdown of Soviet losses for the year off hand, but I bet if you drill down into it you'll observe the following:
  • A high number are from operational losses - maintenance, accidents etc. probably 30-40% depending on the season.
  • Of the remainder i.e. combat losses, a high number are of ground attack aircraft.
  • And of the rest, fighter and bomber losses, a high number of those are on ground attack missions.
In 1943 the Germans were fighting on four fronts - the West facing England, Reich defense against heavy bomber raids, Italy and the Med, and the Russian Front. In the Russian front they were losing about 1/4 of their aircraft losses. But whereas a big part of the mission of Western raids and the Strategic Bombing offensive was explicitly to destroy the Luftwaffe, in Russia that was not the goal. The goal was to annihilate the German army, which they did albeit at great cost. A big proportion of this loss was by ground attack aircraft. By one estimate I read 12,000 Il-2's alone were lost by the Soviets during the war. These numbers can be debated, but there is no doubt that the 'concrete bomber', as tough as it was, paid a heavy price for the destruction of the German army. But they were quite critical in that role, of that there can be no doubt (at least not in my mind).

The Luftwaffe also emphasized the individual success rates of the pilots. They flew missions to help guarantee high air to air scores often at the expense of support of the ground forces. I know that in North Africa and the Med this caused a lot of angst and animosity both within the Luftwaffe and between the Luftwaffe and the Heer. I haven't plunged in depth to the same extent in the Russian front but I suspect you had a similar dynamic.

And yet in spite of that, a large percentage of Soviet losses were due to their flying much more aircraft in hazardous conditions and of that 3-1 ratio, probably 1.5 of it was due to flak and accidents and a heavy proportion were of ground attack aircraft.

*If you don't like this source or these numbers I can crack open some books and cite pages. This one is convenient because it's online.
 
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So a heavy numerical advantage to the Soviets actually results in 3 times as many losses as the LW suffered? Perhaps the sheer number of Soviet aircraft in the air resulted in them flying into each other, thus explaining the magnitude of their losses?

Seriously, the noted losses for both sides are those that occured on operational or combat missions, whichever you prefer to call them, to all causes, with or without enemy action. The distribution of those losses as to actual cause is not known; whether the one side lost a higher percentage to say AAA, is entirely probable; and it's entirely possible that LW fighters were accounting for fewer Soviet aircraft than other causes, as, after all there were fewer LW fighters than there had been the year before!

However, what is striking is that despite the numerical increase in aircraft, with both locally produced and Lend-Lease of superior quality compared to the types with which they opposed the LW in 1941; the ratio of Soviet losses to LW losses is not much better than in '43 than they were in '41.
 
In other words we know that a lot of the losses - on both sides- didn't even involve any enemy action at all. The Soviets had a greater number of those because they were operating 5 times as many aircraft. That accounts for some percentage of the 3-1 ratio, maybe 1/5 maybe 1/3 I don't know, again I think that partly depends on the Season and what part of the front.

Another substantial subset of the losses would be due to flak and ground fire, no enemy aircraft necessarily even encountered. With the Luftwaffe 500 short ranged fighters defending the entire ~1,500 miles of the Russian Front, and facing ~16,000 enemy aircraft including 3,500 ground attack and 2,500 bombers, plus some large number of 6,700 fighters on any given day flying CAS / FB missions as well and armed with rockets or bombs. The Luftwaffe could not actually intercept every enemy mission - far from it.

I don't know what the tactics were in this regard in Russia but in North Africa by mid 1942 they definitely did not even try to do that. They emphasized local superiority to preserve their fighters. In other words if there were 10 separate DAF support / bombing missions taking place on a given day, rather than spread their fighters out in a thin front to attack each mission with just a few fighters against each enemy mission, they would concentrate their fighters to focus on 1 or 2 of them and try to achieve a big slaughter. This was only gradually countered by the DAF by putting better escort tactics and so on. But the result was that 7 or 8 out of the 10 missions would be unmolested by enemy aircraft and had only to contend with Flak. Flak still causing casualties of course. When you listen to DAF pilot interviews they often didn't even encounter enemy fighters.

My guess (and admittedly, it's just a guess) is that the air to air combat ratio from Luftwaffe to Red Army Air Forces, while initially very high in 1941, by the middle of 1943 had declined to something closer to maybe 1.5 to 1 in favor of the Luftwaffe, and in some cases the Soviets were clearly on the winning side of local engagements.

This too, of course, would still vary enormously by district / frontal zone, and by season. Some Luftwaffe fighter units still had excellent morale and very good pilots through 1943 and were more or less openly feared by the Soviets. Conversely some Soviet units in 1943 didn't have such great aircrews or leadership, or had supply and maintenance problems, and many were still flying obsolete and / or burned out aircraft including Hurricanes, Tomahawks, LaGG-3 and older Yak fighters. The best Luftwaffe units vs. the worst Soviet units flying the oldest planes probably had much higher ratios. The best Soviet units flying their best planes vs. middling Luftwaffe units we can see could be quite deadly. This was where the Soviet fighter pilot morale started to build back up as aces assumed leadership positions in many squadrons. Many VVS squadrons received their Guards status designations in late1942 or 1943. This was based on performance per standard Soviet procedure, and these units got priority for new and better fighters.

Individual pilots like Pokryshkin (59 individual victories claimed), Kozhedub (62), Rechkalov (56), Gulayev (55), Yevtigneyev (53), Glinka (50), Koldunov (46), Lavrinenkov (36) and Sultan (30) tend not to get the credit they are really due in Western historiography of WW2 air combat. There is always a sly implication that most of their victory claims were not real or valid, because Soviet Russia was a totalitarian and evil Empire, and yet we seem assume most of the Nazi victory claims are totally valid. Of course all sides overclaimed, but there is no reason in my mind at least to assume that the above pilots didn't shoot down dozens of enemy aircraft. And I have no reason personally to assume these guys were in any way inferior to the top American or British or Commonwealth aces of the war.

The fact that of that list I mentioned above of nine high scoring Soviet pilots, at least five of them flew and got a large number of their victories flying the P-39 (Porkryshkin, Rechkalov, Gulayev, Glinka, & Sultan) and none, as far as I could determine, scored 30 or 40+ victories while flying the Spitfire, the P-40*, the Hurricane** or any other Lend-Lease aircraft suggests to me that the P-39 played a uniquely important role in Soviet aviation. It is baffling to us in the Anglophone world since US, British / Commonwealth and other allies like the Free French and Italians had very bad luck with this aircraft. The Soviets made it their own and contrary to decades of Anglo-American literature claiming they were only used for ground attack, or only used to attack slow and ungainly transports, it was clearly one of their most important Air Superiority fighters in the crucial mid-war period. To me it remains to be examined whether the P-39, the Yak 1, 7 or 9, or the La 5 were the most critical in that key period. That might in turn answer the thread question definitively.

In the list above the other stand out aircraft seems to be the La 5 / 7 series and the Yak 3.

They did also of course have quite a few P-40 Aces, including at least 5 quadruple aces and multiple HSU recipients, and they had some Hurricane aces as well, but none above the 15 or 20 kill mark.

* Glinka did fly the P-40 but got no kills on it
** Sultan scored one victory with a Hurricane vs. a Ju 88 by ramming it, before being transitioned to Yak-7
 
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The implication that the 3-1 ratio means air to air combat is both false and pervasive. Do you or do you not agree that the total number of operational non combat losses with 16,000 aircraft flying missions are going to be higher than with 2,000 aircraft, regardless of who is flying the missions?


The likelihood is in fact that most of the Soviet sorties did not even encounter Luftwaffe fighters.


Only if you look in raw numbers. The ratio of actual air to air victories was much higher for the Luftwaffe in 1941 than 1943 or later.

My point is that 3 or 4,000 aircraft crashing during takeoff in the snow, losing their way and running out of gas, and another 3 or 4000 ground attack aircraft lost shot down by flakwagons while bombing and strafing German armored columns is not as glorious as 11,000 lost to Eric Hartmann alone. But it's far more likely.
 
The accuracy of aces and ekspertens claims can vary from the from the reasonabbly accurate to the wildly inaccurate, with the majority probably somewhere in between, imo tending towards the less accurate. This then naturally also applies to the score of the fighter units and their claims to losses ratios.
Without anything more tangible than that, it's difficult to say how well the P-39 performed for the Soviets; better than what the Western Allies did with it, no doubt, but that's not really a difficult record to beat.
 
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