The accuracy of dive bombing has been greatly exaggerated. Pinpoint accuracy was not possible. Here's is what the US navy said about it. Note that a 30 feet circle is a much bigger. target than a tank.
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Even assuming that the Stuka was twice as accurate as the SB2C hundreds of bombs would be required to take out a gun emplacement let alone a tank.
I believe I posted this paper before but here it is again.
I think this is worthy of further discussion and I wouldn't call this the last word either.
The accuracy of dive bombing, and more broadly the accuracy of air strikes and overall effectiveness of close air support in WW2 (including bombing, strafing, rockets, incendiaries, and 'other') are a major subject which needs clarification. I think it's one of those things which has gone from a little too cheerful an assessment to a little too pessimistic.
There is a good thread on dive bombing accuracy in this very forum,
here. Probably one of many but this one has quite a few useful data points.
The RN Carrier HMS Illustrious was 740 feet long and 95 feet wide. On 10 January 1941, it was attacked by between 24-36 Stukas, and hit eight times (5 x 1000 lb bombs and 3 x 500 lb bombs). Amazingly that tough ship survived the attack. This is a moving target with pretty good AA defenses (apparently they shot down some of the Stukas in the attack).
If an enemy armored column is attacking your forces, or if
your armored column faces a line of fortified defensive positions, and you hit them by that number of bombs within a 100 foot wide by 750 foot long rectangle, it's a fair bet you are going to cause some serious havoc. And that is one strike mission. During large battles there were enough aircraft for multiple strikes, and the same unit sometimes attacked multiple times per day. Strikes like this, when they worked, could and did make a difference in the outcomes of battles.
With bombing in general during WW2, the accuracy was widely variant. Level bombing often failed to hit anything within hundreds of yards or sometimes even miles of the target. Later in the war using a Norden bomb sight from medium to high altitude they got it to around 400 meters. At least in testing.
The most accurate dive bombers like the Stuka had a CEP of around 25 -50 meters. That's 50% of bombs falling within the target area. Some other dive bombers that did true high angle dive bombing had close to that, others were as much as 50 -100 meters. Fighter bombers were in that same range, usually (50-100 meters). A CEP of 25 -50 meters is pretty good,
compared to about 5-30 meters for JDAM and 3-25 meters for SVP-24. One analysis of Marine Corps air strikes in 1944 showed a CEP of 175' for SBD bombers and 195' for F4U fighter bombers.
But training mattered a lot. We know that in WW2 US Navy SBD pilots hit ships much more often than USMC pilots, who did not have the same rigorous training.
The Stuka had the automatic pullout feature, making it easier to use for less trained pilots, and it could dive at a true 90 degree angle, making it more accurate. Pilot quality for the Germans and also the Japanese was generally very high in the early war. Later in the war this diminished. Improved AA defenses also made dive bombing more dangerous, and meanwhile pilot quality was declining. Ultimately Allied fighters spelled doom for the slow Stuka.
A US 500 lb bomb had 262 lbs of explosive, a 1,000 lb bomb had 530 lbs. By comparison, a 105mm artillery shell had 5 lbs of explosive. So
one 1,000 lb bomb is the equivalent of over a hundred 105mm shells. Imagine a hundred 105mm shells landing inside a 50 meter radius. That's a problem.
Destruction radius for a 500 lb bomb
is estimated at 20 meters, 45 meters for damage. For a 1,000 lb it's 33/ 72.
So if you have a CEP of say, 50 meters, and you drop 24 bombs, 12 of them probably hit within 50 meters. That doesn't leave much room to hide inside that circle.
Of course that is the optimal conditions. There was and is a major random element in war. Even today with drones and high tech sensors and satelite data and precision guided munitions, finding the right target isn't by any means guaranteed. Friendly fire is still an issue too, and that was definitely a thing in WW2. But when everything worked, and they had a little luck, I believe CAS was extremely effective. Dive bombers even more so but the life expectancy of the (probably) most effective one, the Stuka, was limited.
