Which is the better fighter, P-40F or Typhoon?

[Shortround6]

Ok haha I guess you are right mate, must have been useless in 1942 but just fine in 1943 lol.

This is part of what gets people upset with you or challenge you so often,
In effort to disprove those "tropes" you hate you take things out of context and try to force the P-40 into the roles you claim the tropes said it couldn't do.

The P-40 was useless in escorting bombers over NW Europe in 1942 (so were the Spitfire, the Hurricane and the Typhoon)
The P-40s "success" as an escort was at escorting medium bombers over shorter ranges at lower altitudes.
Gee whiz, Ha Ha, a rather different mission profile isn't it?

This tangent started with me claiming that an escort for long range bombers was not technically possible in 1939-41 due to the state of the art in those years.

So unless you can show that those "escort Missions" the P-40s were flying in 1943-44 were at 15,000ft and over (to cover even British bombers, forget B-17s) and at ranges of 300-400 miles from the home airfields ( I won't even say they need to go to Berlin but they do need to cross the Rhine) then they are immaterial to this tangent discussion.

 

[Navalwarrior]

So the conventional wisdom goes. However I don't think they went into their bombing campaign completely blind. They did know how the German bombing offensive went and why they switched to night bombing, and what happened to English daylight bombers and why the British had switched to night bombing, and then explicitly to area bombing in early (February) 1942, followed by the "Dehousing" policy memo in March of that same year. Some time between them and the first US fighter escort of a B-17s mission later in 1942, it had begun to dawn on some of them that there would be a need.

The American Army Air Force generals, and the bomber mafia specifically, still believed in their doctrines like "the bomber will always get through" and their perceived super weapons especially the B-17 and the Norden Bombsight, and they still believed in precision daylight bombing. But a nagging counter narrative was already taking shape even in 1941. The British were doing their best to talk the Yanks down from the ledge (as they saw it) and give up the idea of bombing in the daytime altogether. By mid 1942 this was becoming a rather heated argument. In theory B-17s were so extraordinary they could get the job done, but combat experience all through 1942 did not indicate any aircraft that could attack German targets alone in the daytime, except maybe Mosquitos.

The middle position between night bombing and unescorted daylight bombing is escorted daylight bombing. So they were hedging their bets a bit in supporting the development of fighters which looked like they could perform escort duties, in spite of the long and painful development cycle of both planes (P-38 and P-47). P-38s incidentally were being used to escort B-24s and B-17 in the Med from mid November 1942 and all through 1943. The first escort mission by P-38s was on 19 November 1942, they escorted a group of B-17s bombers on a raid over Tunis. I think it was already quite clear in early 1943 that B-24s in particular needed escorts over Tunisia and later Sicily and Italy etc. They were surprisingly effective at wiping out air bases - I think more German and Italian planes were destroyed on the ground by the heavy bombers in winter 1942/43 than by any other single method in that Theater. But they needed help to survive, they were taking losses even with escorts.

The proof that escorts were required over Northern Europe may not have been irrefutable until after Schweinfurt etc., but remember at the time of Schweinfurt many of the raids were already being escorted, it's just that the best targets were beyond the range of the escorts, tempting them to send the bombers out alone in the last leg of their trip. The Regensburg raid was escorted by 87 P-47s from the 353rd and 56th Fighter Groups as far as Belgium. The Schweinfurt raid had 88 P-47s and 96 Spitfires watching their backs on the way in,. They were then met in "withdrawal support" by different fighter groups (totallying 93 P-47s and 95 Spitfires for Schweinfurt) on the way back out again. The P-47s of the 56th Fighter Group were escorting bombers (so called "Ramrod" missions) from 29 April 1943. 78th Fighter Group were flying escort missions from Duxford also from April 1943.

So it's not like the notion of escorting B-17s and B-24s was new in 1944. That is just a shorthand version of a more nuanced reality. Given that they were flying heavy bomber escort missions with P-38s in the Med from November 42 and with P-47s in April 43, I think they conceived of the idea of using them in that way maybe a little earlier than that.

Resp:
You covered the "Bomber Mafia" of the USAAF (or USAAC) quite well. It was so bad that they forced Claire Chennault to resign from the service, when they caught him teaching advanced fighter tactics to young pilots. He pushed for incorporating 'drop tank' capability in fighters, but it got so heated that in 1939 the USAAC put a restriction on aircraft manufacturers from incorporating 'external fuel stores' (drop tanks) on all fighters built for AAC service! Insane! The US Navy had no such restriction. The sole exception, was the P-38, and it was because the test pilot at the time went to the chief engineers and told them to 'make them drop tank capable.' Lockheed initially declined, but the test pilot told them "this is going to be a long range war.!' So Lockheed redesigned those Lightnings on the production line for carrying external fuel stores as the P-38F! They were coming off the production line when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. These P-38s were the first USAAF fighters to England, as they flew across (w 2 drop tanks) the Atlantic via the Northern route to Europe using a B-17 for navigation.
In circa 1940, Chennault sent a full report on Japan's A6M to the Leaders of the USAAF and RAF, noting among other things, its 1,000 mile range. I can't speak for the RAF, but the USAAF simply tossed the report in a drawer when they saw Chennault's name. It was never shared with the pilots who would meat Japan's Air Force. Hap Arnold, Commander of all USAAFs . . . largely ignored the subtle reference when his staff began to use the term "ferry tanks" capability, when they were actually made as drop tanks (capable of feeding at high altitude and jettsonable by the pilot). There would have been no Yamamoto Shootdown if the P-38 (G model) was not drop tank capable.

 

[Schweik]

This is part of what gets people upset with you or challenge you so often,
In effort to disprove those "tropes" you hate you take things out of context and try to force the P-40 into the roles you claim the tropes said it couldn't do.

I'm not claiming - and never did, they were suitable for escorting B-17s over NW Europe. The issue is that the 'Trope' goes a bit too far and kind of relegates them to a tertiary status. I'm trying to explain the nuance. I wasn't trying to ding you so much as simply point out something that usually slips by unheeded.

The P-40 was useless in escorting bombers over NW Europe in 1942 (so were the Spitfire, the Hurricane and the Typhoon)

Agreed

The P-40s "success" as an escort was at escorting medium bombers over shorter ranges at lower altitudes.
Gee whiz, Ha Ha, a rather different mission profile isn't it?

Agreed again.

This tangent started with me claiming that an escort for long range bombers was not technically possible in 1939-41 due to the state of the art in those years.

Agree with that too, pretty much.

So unless you can show that those "escort Missions" the P-40s were flying in 1943-44 were at 15,000ft and over (to cover even British bombers, forget B-17s) and at ranges of 300-400 miles from the home airfields ( I won't even say they need to go to Berlin but they do need to cross the Rhine) then they are immaterial to this tangent discussion.

Well I think they did escort at about 20,000 feet and a bit more - keep in mind these were the Merlin P-40F/L, critical altitude somewhere around 19,500 ft, so some of them were flying high cover, usually one squadron out of three, and that could be as high as 25,000 or even a little higher, while they others would be down around 12 - 15,000 ft, closer to the medium bombers at 8-10,000 ft.


So I'm again, not trying to be pedantic I just want to make clear what their mission actually was - since few people are aware of it, namely escorting medium bombers at a fairly long distance (I'm not sure precisely how many miles I'd have to check where the bases were etc.) all by themselves without (necessarily) any higher cover from other fighters. The reason for this is the different characteristics of their main fighters.

They did of course also sometimes fly fighter bomber missions and low altitude sweeps with cover from Spitfires, or later from P-47s sometimes, but that wasn't their only mission despite the shorthand that you can read in dozens of books and websites that all they did in the Med was fighter bomber work from day one.

With history in general, it is in the shorthand where we tend to miss a lot of important nuance, and incidentally I kind of wonder if that is true for the Typhoon as well -for all it's faults it clearly was a dangerous weapon and if they claimed 80 or 90 Fw 190s they must have been flying some combat missions as a fighter not just a fighter bomber.

 

[Schweik]

Yes, it was a way of differentiating NW Europe from "Southern Europe"

It is 730 miles from Brussels to Rome and with France and Spain in the way the possibility of mutual support or easy transfer of forces was not practical.

For instance many of the early P-40s used in the NA Campaign based in Egypt were offloaded in central west Africa, flown across Africa to South Sudan(?) and then flown North to Egypt.

All quite reasonable but also as you know, bombing campaigns from Italy started to coincide closely with the 8th AF stuff after a while, though that had a lot more to do with P-38s and P-47s and later P-51s than P-40s which were not used for TransAlpine raids so far as I know, though they were part of raids into Yugoslavia.

 

[MIflyer]

I ma quite sure that the RAF was very happy to get rid of the Typhoon and use the Tempest. An island nation with a fighter that could not be ditched was enough reason right there.

And I think that some US pilots were not too impressed with the Ki61. Capt William L. Shomo, for one.

 

[tomo pauk]

...
And I think that some US pilots were not too impressed with the Ki61. Capt William L. Shomo, for one.

I'm not sure that P-51D vs. Ki-61 is a fair fight

 

[Navalwarrior]

I'm not claiming - and never did, they were suitable for escorting B-17s over NW Europe. The issue is that the 'Trope' goes a bit too far and kind of relegates them to a tertiary status. I'm trying to explain the nuance. I wasn't trying to ding you so much as simply point out something that usually slips by unheeded.



Agreed



Agreed again.



Agree with that too, pretty much.



Well I think they did escort at about 20,000 feet and a bit more - keep in mind these were the Merlin P-40F/L, critical altitude somewhere around 19,500 ft, so some of them were flying high cover, usually one squadron out of three, and that could be as high as 25,000 or even a little higher, while they others would be down around 12 - 15,000 ft, closer to the medium bombers at 8-10,000 ft.


So I'm again, not trying to be pedantic I just want to make clear what their mission actually was - since few people are aware of it, namely escorting medium bombers at a fairly long distance (I'm not sure precisely how many miles I'd have to check where the bases were etc.) all by themselves without (necessarily) any higher cover from other fighters. The reason for this is the different characteristics of their main fighters.

They did of course also sometimes fly fighter bomber missions and low altitude sweeps with cover from Spitfires, or later from P-47s sometimes, but that wasn't their only mission despite the shorthand that you can read in dozens of books and websites that all they did in the Med was fighter bomber work from day one.

With history in general, it is in the shorthand where we tend to miss a lot of important nuance, and incidentally I kind of wonder if that is true for the Typhoon as well -for all it's faults it clearly was a dangerous weapon and if they claimed 80 or 90 Fw 190s they must have been flying some combat missions as a fighter not just a fighter bomber.

Resp:
I know P-40s were used in the MTO as escort, as well as ground attack by USAAF groups such as the 99th. They certainly were shorter distances than the missions flown in the ETO, and if flown at or around 20,000 ft . . . were for a very short duration (my opinion only). I also suspect that the fighter pilots had more freedom inre to the term 'escort.'

 

[MIflyer]

Well, he was in an F-6D, a recon plane.

 

[Schweik]

Resp:
I know P-40s were used in the MTO as escort, as well as ground attack by USAAF groups such as the 99th. They certainly were shorter distances than the missions flown in the ETO,

99th FS did a little of both I think but other than that I agree

and if flown at or around 20,000 ft . . . were for a very short duration (my opinion only).

Why would you assume that? These were Merlin engined P-40s, 20,000 ft was the critical altitude for that aircraft... I don't get it.

I also suspect that the fighter pilots had more freedom inre to the term 'escort.'

Definitely true. 24 victory RAF Ace Billy Drake mentioned in an interview, referring to Kittyhawk escort operations : "Escort was a brand new role, weren't quite sure how to do it. The main idea was don't formate closely like Germans in the Battle of Britain but to be 'in the area'. Floating air cover."

I think this was actually pretty standard for escort flights in the Med, though it started out more rigid in Northern Europe they did also shift to that 'looser' type of escort mission there as well, right?

 

[Schweik]

Well, he was in an F-6D, a recon plane.

Wow just read that story, dude was a bad ass. I'm guessing the IJA pilots weren't too experienced in 1945 but regardless, that has to be one of the most impressive fighter actions of WW2 or for that matter, ever.

 

[Milosh]

In the BoB Luftwaffe escorts did fly 'in the area'. When bombers pilots complained the escorts were told to fly closer to the bombers.

 

[Glider]

I ma quite sure that the RAF was very happy to get rid of the Typhoon and use the Tempest. An island nation with a fighter that could not be ditched was enough reason right there.

I am afraid that is off the mark. The RAF were happy to switch to the Tempest because it was a better aircraft, arguably the best Low / Medium altitude fighter of the war. Ditching ability had nothing to do with it. The Hurricane was a dreadful plane to ditch in and we used those on land and as a carrier fighter

 

[Navalwarrior]

99th FS did a little of both I think but other than that I agree



Why would you assume that? These were Merlin engined P-40s, 20,000 ft was the critical altitude for that aircraft... I don't get it.



Definitely true. 24 victory RAF Ace Billy Drake mentioned in an interview, referring to Kittyhawk escort operations : "Escort was a brand new role, weren't quite sure how to do it. The main idea was don't formate closely like Germans in the Battle of Britain but to be 'in the area'. Floating air cover."

I think this was actually pretty standard for escort flights in the Med, though it started out more rigid in Northern Europe they did also shift to that 'looser' type of escort mission there as well, right?

Resp:
You answered your own question in that 20,000 ft was the critical altitude. Also, it takes a while to get to that altitude, and if the missions were not too distant, one would be at the maximum altitude for a very short duration. Also, just because one can, doesn't mean they did. I spoke to a B-17 pilot who flew missions in late 1944 to the end of the war from Italy, where he rarely flew above 20,000 ft. Why? There was no need.

 

[Schweik]

Resp:
You answered your own question in that 20,000 ft was the critical altitude. Also, it takes a while to get to that altitude, and if the missions were not too distant, one would be at the maximum altitude for a very short duration. Also, just because one can, doesn't mean they did. I spoke to a B-17 pilot who flew missions in late 1944 to the end of the war from Italy, where he rarely flew above 20,000 ft. Why? There was no need.

I think you are confusing critical altitude with ceiling. It only took them 8-10 minutes to climb to that altitude depending on boost setting.

 

[Navalwarrior]

I think you are confusing critical altitude with ceiling. It only took them 8-10 minutes to climb to that altitude depending on boost setting.

Follow up:
A formation of fully fueled, to include drop tank, P-40s takes how long to get to 20,000 ft?

 

[Schweik]

Made some graphs cause I can't stop myself. Most information here at: WWII Aircraft Performance

View attachment 522294

Kittyhawk II - FL220 - Merlin V16501 - 8,910 lbs
Speed: 48 inch, 3000 rpm (combat, 5 min) 54 inch, 3000 rpm (estimate by me)

My P-40 knowledge is pretty low, but it seems like the F started out with a 5 min combat limit of 48 inches, raising to 54 inches, and finally 61 inches (?). I hope to get more information and take a stab at estimating the higher boost speeds.

Another issue with your chart -

Please note this wartime document from WWIIaircraftperformance.org here

http://www.wwiiaircraftperformance.org/P-40/Kittyhawk_II_performance_9sept42.jpg

Top speed for Kittyhawk II (that is RAF designation for P-40F) is 370 mph at 20,400 ft and 347 at 30,000 feet.

You seem to be showing a top speed of 360 mph at 17000 at 54" boost and what looks like it's going to be about 320 mph at 30,000

 

[Schweik]

Follow up:
A formation of fully fueled, to include drop tank, P-40s takes how long to get to 20,000 ft?

Maybe 20-30 minutes, depending how many units? I think the climb up was often done during flight across from Tunisia to Sicily, Sicily to Sardania or in a later era, Corsica to Anzio.

Forming up over, or waiting for bombers might take longer though.

 

[Jeff Hunt]

While I agree the P-40 was an adequate aircraft in many theatres and in many air forces I have never really understood the absolute love affair that mostly Americans have for this aircraft. The only parallel I can draw is always having something special for your first girlfriend. She may not have been the prettiest or smartest or "best performer" but the first is always special.

 

[Schweik]

I think Americans are of decidedly mixed opinion on the fighter - the Flying Tigers legend is very popular but most US aviation enthusiasts don't like the P-40 very much and prefer more glorious mounts like the P-51, P-47 or the Corsair. Most Americans focus on what was going on during the final victory in 1945 and what was the fastest etc. Americans like "winners". Quite a few Americans also really prefer Luftwaffe planes if we are honest about it. There are a few die hard 'fans' of the Hawk like myself out there, people who like underdogs or have read some of the revisionist narrative and find it interesting, but most of what little you find in terms of American literature that is pro-P-40 comes from pilots who flew it, and their praise is usually at odds with the rest of the book.

Almost nobody knows about it's actual record, I didn't myself until I started posting here about a year ago.

Brits usually like the Spitfire or sometimes the Hurricane or Mosquito or some other English plane.

I think a lot of the 'love' for the P-40s, at least in terms of what you can find in books, comes from the Australians, New Zealanders and to a lesser extent (more mixed) the Russians. Some Chinese aviation guys like the P-40 too. Anzac guys like the P-40 for obvious reasons - some of their top aces flew it.

 

[Navalwarrior]

While I agree the P-40 was an adequate aircraft in many theatres and in many air forces I have never really understood the absolute love affair that mostly Americans have for this aircraft. The only parallel I can draw is always having something special for your first girlfriend. She may not have been the prettiest or smartest or "best performer" but the first is always special.

Resp:
Maybe because it brought them home. In reading about the 78th FG of the 8th AF, most of these P-47 pilots didn't want to transition to P-51s. Only later, after flying them (and often getting multiple kills in a single mission) did they change their view.