The P47 had it's guns out wide also, never heard any complaints about it.
Wildcat during the Battle of Britain
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The P47 had it's guns out wide also, never heard any complaints about it.
If you read pilot accounts the replacements could barely fly let alone hit anything, I've read one report where a young boy arrived with only 6hrs flight time in the 109, both sides were really struggling at the end.
GrauGeist
Generalfeldmarschall zur Luftschiff Abteilung
The pilot pool for the Luftwaffe was stretched so thin, that they even had Gefreiters flying the Me262 during the last months of the war.
There is not a single thing correct in that post, except that I don't own a gun. I used to, and I was taught to shoot by the British Army.
You need to look at how a Hurricane's guns were actually set up.
You might also explain how the Germans lost 1,187* aircraft during the Battle of Britain, the vast majority shot down by British fighters which, according to you, couldn't hit anything.
*Figures vary, that's from The Battle of Britain - Then and Now.
Sgt Tony Pickering experienced one of the principal shortcomings of his Hurricane at first hand and it had nothing to do with the guns, in which he had every confidence..
"I came across a lone Ju 88 somewhere over Kent, heading back to sea. I thought that it would be no problem to catch up the Hun, press the gun button and that would be it. Suddenly he just pulled away from me, just left me standing, had at least an extra 50 mph on me, and that was the last I saw of him. The Hurricane just wasn't fast enough. We even used to bend the throttle levers in flight, trying to squeeze a bit more boost out of the Merlin. A Spitfire would have caught that Ju 88."
It could be a lot worse, you could have been flying a Bf 109 with just half a Spitfire or Hurricane's armament. There were still a lot of E-1s flying in the BoB. Ulrich Steinhilper got all excited writing to his mother on 13 September, as the BoB reached a decision.
"Yesterday we received two aircraft which are fitted with the cannons in the wings. I'm taking one, and the 'Chief' is taking the other."
Eight rifle calibre machine guns was considered exceptionally heavy armament when introduced in the 1930s, and was still double that of some contemporary fighters in 1940. The reasons for its adoption are well documented and I'm not reproducing them here. It was not done on a whim. The reasons for their set up are also well documented, thoroughly researched and tried. I'm not going into that here either.
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The P47 could afford to spray the air. Its guns needed fewer hits to bring down an opponent, due to much greater impact energy at typical ranges and a rate of fire not far below the .303.
They were doing their own weave over the TBDs. They eventually got corralled by the CAP and stripped off from the Devastators.
According to some old WWII training materials I have, gunners started out with a week on the skeet range before they ever touched a machine gun. You'd think that no matter how rushed a fighter pilot's training was, they'd find time to spend at least a half hour a day for a few days on the skeet range. Does wonders for your angular velocity compensation. (At least it does for others. Ever since my lenses were changed in cataract surgery, I've been no threat to the pigeons!)
Glider
Captain
Which is why post August 1940 the RAF took the gunnery instruction out of service training and moved it to OCU training which was extended to include this additional task. It was replaced with more aircraft recognition and general observation (which I am certain about) which probably (as this bit I cannot be certain about) included estimating distances as that is an observation skill.
yulzari
Staff Sergeant
We went over harmonisation in a previous thread R.A.F. main fighters gun convergence
Yes, but the unpalatable fact remained that most pilots in ALL combatant air forces couldn't hit the metaphorical cow's arse with a banjo in air fighting. It's why the ones that could amassed large scores while those that couldn't either did not, while becoming competent enough to survive, or served as targets for the first group.
It was only the introduction of the gyro gun sights which improved this situation significantly, because it did the sums that most pilots simply could not.
All this stuff I am reading about ninety degree deflection shots at bomber cockpits is pure fantasy. It would be virtually impossible when only the better pilots could hit the bomber at all. It is significant that when the British looked at the wrecks of the aircraft they had shot down during the BoB, almost all had been hit from directly astern or very close to it, i.e. with close to zero angle off and no deflection.
On 7 September S/Ldr Kellet led the Poles of 303 Squadron into an attack on part of the huge formation of 348 bombers and 617 fighters advancing on London, described later as
"...a tidal wave of aircraft, towering above them, rank upon rank, more than a mile and a half high, covering the sky like some vast irresistible migration."
Kellet later wrote that,
"We gave them all we'd got opening fire at 450 yards and only breaking away when we could see the enemy completely filling the gunsight. That means we finished the attack at point blank range. We went in practically in one straight line, all of us blazing away."
Did they hit any of the bombers? Who knows, in the confusion it was difficult to tell. S/Ldr 'Sandy' Johnstone of No 602 Squadron recalling separate events on the same day gives us this impression.
"All we could see was row upon row of German raiders, all heading for London. I have never seen so many aircraft in the air all at the same time. The escorting fighters saw us at once and came down like a ton of bricks, when the squadron split up and the sky became a seething cauldron of aeroplanes, swooping and swerving in and out of the vapour trails and tracer smoke. A Hurricane on fire spun out of control ahead of me while, above to my right, a 110 flashed across my vision and disappeared into the fog of battle before I could draw a bead on it. Everyone was shouting and the earphones became filled with a meaningless cacophony of jumbled noises. Everything became a maelstrom of jumbled impression – a Dornier spinning with part of its port mainplane missing; black streaks of tracer ahead, when I instinctively put my arm up to shield my face; taking a breather when the haze absorbed me for a minute…"
And this is the recollection you will see repeated time and time again. F/O Frank Brinden thought that the reality of air combat made anything other than squadron tactics pretty irrelevant. He had flown as part of the Duxford Wing.
"The constraints of Bader's ponderous formation was a disaster in my opinion, a retrograde step. Nothing was achieved by arriving en masse because the Wing disintegrated almost immediately battle was joined...these observations on tactics are, of course, in retrospect but I do recall at the time feeling some unease or dissatisfaction at 19 Squadron's inability to do better."
Welcome to the real world.
Isn't there a quote somewhere saying there was about 230 aircraft destroyed by only 17 pilots?, the hit ratio for both sides was under 2% also, I'll have to find the references for both.
The figure I've seen quoted is 221 aircraft destroyed credited to the 17 top scoring pilots of the Battle of Britain pilots, so very similar indeed.
Between July and November 1940 only 900 of the 2,937 pilots credited with at least one operational sortie in a fighter claimed at all. Roughly 70% of pilots were just making up numbers.
These numbers are not unusual. The Luftwaffe was very similar and I would bet that the fighters of the various US air forces were too, particularly in the first years of their war.
Thank you. 2 others pointed out that they addressed the harmonization issue just before the battle
I said in several previous posts that 8 303's was about as good as it good for the time, especially in the Hurricane where they were grouped in 2 tight groups of 4 guns each. If bore sighted to a single point, that would be devastating to an aircraft. Others have pointed out the spread pattern was abandoned before the battle started. JU88's were fast, no surprise at times a Hurricane couldn't catch them.
What rifle did you train with in the army, FN FAL?
As I said before, Richard Bong said he received little or no gunnery training at the beginning and did much better after he got gunnery training during a break at some point in the war. He said he would have got more kills early on if he had gotten this training at the beginning. Claimed he wasn't a good shot. As I have said several times, this was not just a British issue
You train pilots to be able to do deflection shots when they can. Air to air gunnery training involves many many many different setups. The easiest is of course from 6 o'clock. You start there, when this plane fills this sight at the point then he is at this distance and you start shooting. Then you move on to more difficult shots such as head on passes, low deflection shooting from 7 and 8 o'clock positions and finally full deflection shooting. Does this mean the enemy will line up and allow you to do it? No. But in the middle of a furball if you find yourself high and in front of a formation, you have the choice of making a 90 degree pass at a bomber or fighter and some reasonable chance of scoring hits.
You said you the British army taught you to shoot. I assume you shot at large bullseye type targets at 100, 200 maybe out to 500 yards, is that somewhat accurate? Do enemy soldiers show up on the battlefield wearing bullseye targets and standing still at 100, 200 and 500 yards? Of course not. Just because bombers don't fly perfectly straight and escorts try to interfere doesn't mean that they should have taught deflection shooting.
The point is that almost no WW2 era pilots could make deflection shots.
Time and time again they showed that they under estimated angle off by large margins, guessed the speed of the enemy and under estimated range.
They were not very good at the sort of exercises in the attached manual and the only way to learn was to survive for long enough to do it for real. Unfortunately many fell victim to the few who had learned (like Marseille), or were good enough pilots to find a simpler solution (like Hartmann or Bader) before they had a chance.
It is as true for rifle training as it is for air combat that it does not simulate real fighting. In the case of rifle training it teaches you how to use and maintain the weapon and, probably more importantly, how to aim every shot. The targets are obviously not running about any more than towed drones are behaving anything like a real enemy aircraft.
Time and time again they showed that they under estimated angle off by large margins, guessed the speed of the enemy and under estimated range.
They were not very good at the sort of exercises in the attached manual and the only way to learn was to survive for long enough to do it for real. Unfortunately many fell victim to the few who had learned (like Marseille), or were good enough pilots to find a simpler solution (like Hartmann or Bader) before they had a chance.
It is as true for rifle training as it is for air combat that it does not simulate real fighting. In the case of rifle training it teaches you how to use and maintain the weapon and, probably more importantly, how to aim every shot. The targets are obviously not running about any more than towed drones are behaving anything like a real enemy aircraft.
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Precisely my point, pilots had so few hours they couldn't keep themselves alive for one or two missions, the finer points of deflection shooting were the least of the issue.
The P-47 was similar to a Hurricane, all the guns close together. The thin Spitfire wing meant the guns were spread out with one just outside the prop arc, two close together and one more towards the end of the wing. Pepper pot was a pilots description. The concentration of fire on a Hurricane was one of many reasons
it was considered a better "bomber destroyer".
