General view on Russian versus German fighters in WWII?

Excellent article camparing :
Fighter Combat in the East and in the West - A Comparison

For FW-190 lovers :
http://mig3.sovietwarplanes.com/pilots/pilots.htm

 

Just picking out a couple of points:

The Hurricane was a rough equal to the 109E - slightly slower but slightly more agile. How can it be slightly inferior to a plane that is vastly inferior to a plane that it is (at worst) slightly inferior to?


The Fw-190 weighed more than an Il-2? I have doubts...

Il-2:

Empty weight: 4,360 kg (9,610 lb)
Loaded weight: 6,160 kg (13,580 lb)

Fw-190 A-8:

Empty weight: 3,200 kg (7,060 lb)
Loaded weight: 4,417 kg (9,735 lb)

 

Sometimes Soviet aces exagerated as far as the Germans are concerned.For example Kojedub in an interview claimed 2000-3000 had german aircraft shot down by the VVS during the battle of Kursk.In fact Luftwaffe's entire strength in the area at the beginning of the battle was shlightly more than 2000 planes!

Also, in his interview Tikhomirov says about Fw-190 D9 to by a plane easy to bring down.Don't forget that most German pilots had minimal training by then.

 

This was not unique to Soviet Aces either, vast overclaiming was endemic to every air force in every theatre of the war, some were slightly more accurate at certain times than others but every airforce overclaimed.

 

Acctualy official recognition of kills in VVS was one of the more difficoult ones.
You needed confirmation of your wingman + confirmation of ground forces or partisans if kill was achived over enemy territory. If confirmation from other sources was missing it was scored as damaged. This point is made also by Tikhomirov in statment that only Il's could confirm their victories as they were flying over anemy territory. I have other interview with him that i took from one forum. This interview i linked to is compilation of several interviews. i will try to find original source:

and

BTW ricky for which version of Ilyusha do you heave weight info:
Il-2 single seat all metal (1941),
Il-2 single seat mixed construction (late 1941)
Il-2 single seat wooden construction (1942)
Il-2 2 seat wooden (1943)
Il-2 so strelkoi (2 seat, two spar i.e. arrov wing) wooden construction (1943-44)
Il-2 so strelkoi metal construction (1945)

There are significant diffrences in weight. Wooden construction was much hevier than all metal, same goes for single and two seat ( 12,7mm gun and ammo in the rear + additional armour for rear gunner...)...

 

And still they managed to shot down, by official records, 4 (iirc) times the total amount of planes in the Finnish airforces, including trainers, cargo, maritime, bombers and fighters, during the Winter War....

 

Really? I heard that it was 11 times :lol:
still, not very impressive

I think Russian air tactics (or just tactics in general) were lacking up until maybe 1941-1942? By then the Russian's battle 'experience' countered the negative effect of Stalins purges...

 

It reminds me the only bomber to become an ace(although it achieved this in Korea).It was the B-29 "Command Decision",a ww2 veteran bomber. That's how it was done;
During a mission "Command Desicion" shot down 2 enemy planes,the crew clamed 3,the USAF confirmed 4 and finally they painted 5 on the fuselage. :roll: (Forgive as it is a bit off-topic)

 

Acctualy no. there were quite a lot of bomber aces during ww2. Rudel (Ju-87) and Zub (Il-2 single seat) probably one of more famous ones but there were quite a lot of others.

 

IIRC Command Decision was the only bomber "ace" of the Korean war.

Memphis Belle sported 8 Swastikas on her nose for one, substantially earlier than Command Decision (Don't know how many were confirmed kills though).

 

Actually, "Command Decision" was the only B-29 to become an ace.

 

all pilots overclaimed but turret gunners in eto were estimated to have overclaimed by 98% or something ...by after war accounting...tiso very intresting points about luftw pilots compareing vvs and raf,aac pilot skills....bears out my theories about the hundred plus kill lw pilots of the ost front...eh simonor?...come to il2 forgotten battles and play online ,you will soon learn that a target rich enviornment is a zone of sudden death for you...even when flying against a bunch of newbies...the top 100 killers of the lw would make mincemeat of the top 100 raf,aac guys ...all other things being equal...combat experience and coolness under fire does matter....allot..the lw had it in spades,and no other air force ,then, now or ever will match that skill level...just a fact mamm....

 

maj woody:
I disagree.
Those German "cats" had used-up most of their nine-lives... and the odds were stacked heavily against them by wars' end. Most of them flew until they were killed.
I'll wager pilots of the caliber of Dick Bong, Tommy McGuire, Francis Gabreski, Bud Mahurin, George Preddy and Robert Johnson could hold their own in combat against Luftwaffe veterans...

Not to belittle the skills and experience of German aces, but we're comparing apples to coconuts here.

Tim

 

I'll wager that the most experienced American ace would go down like mincemeat to the German aces, mano y mano. Reason being most of them (such as #1 Richard Bong 'ace of aces') were used to the 'easy' kills of the japanese theatre, while the Germans in the east had lived long enough to perfect flying/killing to an art form...

I enjoy using facts to support my argument...

German aces with 100+ kills = 107
Allied aces with 100+ kills = 0
Soviet aces with 100 + kills = 0

Japanese aces with 50+ kills = 7
Soviet aces with 50+ kills = 6
Allied aces with 50+ kills = 1

oh yeah, and that one allied ace was British, Mr Marmaduke Pattle...

as far as who had the finer air aces go, the bad guys of WW2 clearly take the cake.

 

smeg:
Mincemeat?
Hardly.
Stands to reason that pilots in a target-rich enviornment would enjoy many opportunities to run-up their score. Many factors go into the making of an ace.
What about a talented pilot in a theatre with little in the way of enemy opposition. (Such as late-war allied pilots?) The luftwaffe was not such a threat at that point in time... as compared to 1941. Even at the time of the Normandy invasion--June '44--the Luftwaffe presence was what? Three or four aircraft that actually contested the landings?
The Pacific campaign had it's own unique challenges... mostly fought over wide expanses of ocean, with a smattering of Japanese-held islands. Even if you were a "hot-shot" pilot, your navigation-skills were just as important as gunnery skills in that campaign.
I wonder how Luftwaffe pilots would have fared in the Pacific? Not very well I imagine. Their Me109s and Fw190s never had much in the way of range. I expect many of those "Nazi Super-pilots" would have run-out of gas and dropped into the ocean never to be seen again.
It's difficult to compare a Pacific-theatre Allied pilot flying a 1200 mile round-trip over nothing but ocean, to a Luftwaffe pilot who scrambles, knowing he is going directly into an airspace filled with enemy planes.
Early-on in the war against Japan, we faced an air-corps filled with pilots of skill with as much flying-time and combat experience as German pilots. Skill is skill, whether you have 100 victories or 20.
Opportunity, good aircraft and a degree of luck factor heavily. Many of the German aces were shot-down multiple-times. I don't buy the arguement that German pilots had more skill, or talent than their Allied adversaries.
Sorry boys... but that dog don't hunt.

Tim

 

How many times do we have to exlain this one...

British & American pilots were rotated out of active duty after their tours were up - if they were high-scoring they were often forbidden from fighting any more. Which means that no Western pilot had the opportunity to get to 100 kills. If you look at the 'kills per sortie' ratio, then the best aces of all nations were roughly equal.

 

ricky ...in military and comercial aviation there is something called proficiency ,a certain minimum number of flying hours must be logged per month for one to be considered competent in type...now i would posit that flying proficiency is one thing and then combat flying proficiency is another ....now the inverse of too few hours would be those who live in their cockpits all day every day all year ....in combat ! (ill give u a clue ,they have black crosses on their wings ) ...they would have to be considered to be very proficient ...because lets face it ,combat weeds out the inept and the non aggressive very quickly..the cowards being weeded out back at the base....so when an allied pilot was rotated home to sell war bonds and help train cadets..he was every day getting less and less profficient at being a killer, just by being away......the lw aces could only get more and more profficient or get dead, practice makes perfect and perfecting combat skills can only really happen in the furnace of combat....the hundred top allied aces ,all other things being equal would get cut to peices by the hundred top lw men ...for anyone to think they would be equal based on long range navigation skills or some kill per sortie ratio that discounts actual skill at killing or numbers of hours in actual hot combat is i think grasping at straws a bit....smeg and i suggest by any honest criteria the lw experts were in every way superiour to the top allied aces ,that a duel between the top hundred or the top thousand could only have one result..you guys contend that allied aces were rotated out just as they started to: click" in combat (true and not their choice, ever) and though they logged a fraction of the combat time as the lw men, ,they were somehow... just as good as the lw aces who never left the front and never got rusty..never lost proficiency and never stopped killing...sure, thats logical

 

Excellent point majorwoody
Might I add that, unfortunately for the Luftwaffe it was not individual proficiency nor tactics which won the war, but rather strategy production and numbers... Also I am sure that by the end of the war, when Luftwaffe pilots were few and far between, that the extraordianary hours they were required to fly must have severely taxed their ability to operate, unlike the USAF/RAF who had relatively frequent rotations... Working long hours tends to take a terrible toll on skills of any sort

 

Agreed, the basic reason for the Allied decision to rotate pilots was simply to give them time off - reduce stress levels, etc. Another danger of continuously being in action is overconfidence, which can be just as deadly as inexperience. as an example, RAF Bomber Command crews were statisticall most likely to be shot down in either their first few missions (new & inexperienced) or their last few missions (overconfident that they had survived their tour).

 

also to bring their very recent experience back to the advanced fighter pilot schools and dont ever forget war bond drives and factory speeches to a thousand rosie the riveters....these guys were national heros and it was important for national moral that they not be killed ..in the movies the good guys dont die..and americans , like everyone else , like happy endings...these are all very sound reasons for rotating combat veterans home..and as was shown ...two thousand good pilots will beat a hundred master pilots every time ...just dont try to tell me that they were their equals...