Anti-Tank aircraft (split from 'Tank killing ratios')

in my own opinion, the tempest was a lot better that the typhoons, I can say that the tempest is a refined and bug free typhoon.and able to catch a me 262!!!

 

Here here!

 

The only improvement made was a different engine, I thought...
Skua?

 

Allthough the Typhoon and the Tempest looked very similar, they actually were very different aircraft with only a few parts in common. The Typhoon came first, and was originally designed as an interceptor. It proved to be a disappointment in this role, but became one of the best ground attack aircraft of the war instead. The Tempest grew out of the disappointment in the Typhoons intended role, and was designed from the outset to be the interceptor the Typhoon never became. The Tempest is probably best known for its success as an V-1 interceptor.

The difference between the Tempest and Typhoon layed not primarily in a change of engines. The powerful Napier Sabre IIA engine powered both the Tempest MkV and the Typhoon Mk.Ib. The Tempest had a new, and much thinner wing. It also had a lengthened fuselage. The Tempest was faster, it had a top speed of allmost 100km/h more than the Typhoon, and had a much better climb rate.

 

Ah, well thank you. I never knew anything of the class ever achieved the intended role, but apparently the Tempest was good in something else.



Get your hands on 'The Day of the Typhoon' by John Golley if you can. Nice eyewitnessing there!

 

Well done!

 

What sort of book is that ?

 

It's a story written by an ex-Typhoon pilot, about his service on an airport near Bayeux after the inasion.

 

Sounds interesting. I´ll try to get my hands on it someday.

 

how about the hellcat from USA? :-?

 

Tanks destroyed by TAC in Normandy?
http://rhino.shef.ac.uk:3001/mr-home/hobbies/rocket.txt

 

Just to give an example of how tricky it was to kill tanks from the air...

I did an exam at Uni on Tactical Air Power. I had a look through loads of books on the subject, and came across the results of an RAF test, using rockets & bombs against captured German Panther tanks.
As you may guess, they discovered that a hit tank was a dead tank, but that under ideal test conditions (calm weather, the tank in plain view, no enemy fire) only around 1 rocket in 150 actually hit the target. Bombs had an even worse hit ratio.

So, each plane has 8 rockets. Therefore 19 planes need to fire all their rockets at one tank in order to obtain a hit (statistically)

 

Small, moving targets are always hard to hit from the air. Even attacking ships requires extensive and specialized training.

 

Actually, even against a stationary tank in plain view, in training (without the stress of combat), the RAF's fighter-bombers could only manage 5% hits with rockets (one in 20). This became 0.5% (one in 200) in combat. Bombs were even less accurate...

Tony Williams: Military gun and ammunition website and discussion
forum

 

Yeah, it's never as easy as civilians tend to think it is.

 

The difficulty in hitting a small target from the air at 250+knots is one reason I can't stand listening to the pro-Germans whine about how it was Allied airpower that knocked out the German tanks, and that Shermans and T-34s were nothing more than targets for Panthers and Tigers.

 

Yes, it was tank and anti-tank guns which accounted for the great majority of German tanks knocked out. However, the fighter-bombers did make a considerable contribution by destroying the fuel tankers and other support vehicles whicn the Panzers needed to keep going. And they also scared the daylights out of less experienced crews, who would abandon their tanks at the sight of them.

Tony Williams

 

When reviewing loss records it looks like the majority of German tanks were abandoned or scuttled by their crews. Some of these must have been as a result of fuel starvation, but I wonder how many were the result of battle damage? It looks like the Germans took advantage of this category to have "plausible denial" as to how their tanks were really lost.
One of the most important contribution of tactical air to the land battle in WWII was in stopping fuel, ammo and spare parts making it to the front (okay, maybe aerial recon was more important, but that wasn't tac-air in my mind). As Tony states, the pyschological effects on men exposed to the constant threat of air attack must have been terrible, but it is amazing what the human mind can treat as "normal" with time.

 

That was the reason the Stuka pilots had those sirens put on their planes: To scare the bejeeburs out of their targets on the ground! It worked, too, until the Stukas ran into the RAF fighters over England.

 

The problem with the Stuka dive bomber was while it was great at bombing accurately once it ran into any serious fighter opposition it got creamed. Later planes like the Typhoon, once they fixed the tendancy for the tail plane to fall off and skinning on the wings to unpeel, were better because they were no push over for an enemy fighter and if things got too hot they could run away.