Italian Fighter Planes

Hmmm... a little harsh - the Regia Aeronautica usually gave a good account of themselves.

 

Generally speaking the Italians have a fairly undeserved reputation as incompetent and cowardly soldiers. I'll grant that the battelfield performance of the Italians generally left, shall we say, some room for improvement, but most of the time it was lack of mordern doctrines and equipment, not to mention the below par quality of the Italian leadership, that hampered Italian operations.

Fighter planes, and the Regia Aeronautica as such, are good examples. The Italians had good planes, very good planes actually, but the process of getting them from the drawing board into production and finally into service was long and plauged with all sorts of problems. When the planes finally arrived at the various Squadriglia (sp?) they were often out of date, or only arriving in a trickle, and when they actually got to be used the doctrines were outdated as well. I really woundn't want to go up against a box of Flying Fortresses in a plane only armed with machine guns fx.

Btw just look at those pictures, those planes are beautiful!!!

Best regards!

- B.

 

Acctualy RA ( Reggia Aeronautica) was the only arm of Italian armed forces (with few other exeptions) that gave good account of themselves. Their problem was in outdated equipment (at the beggining) and poor leadership that was responsible for such conditions. They misinterpreted lessons learned in Spain. They were not the only ones, Soviets and Germans also made some errors based on experiances from Spain.
Examples of Italian misinterpretations:
Fighter armmament was considered adequate as it was at the time ( 2x 12,7mm MG),
Biplane fighters would still be usefull (development of Cr-42),
Ba-65 is a good fighter bomber,
Defensive armmament of bombers is adequate.

One other problem to consider was also the cost in money and resources to modernize their air force and Spanish campaign was a costly affair itself. Italian airforce was one of the most modern air forces of mid 1930's, but started to lag behind after Spain.
Most of the problems were coused by wierd decisions taken at the top.
Most notible example of this is Re-2000. For its time it was a good aircraft with exceptional range (wet wing), but was produced in wery limited numbers (mostly for export to Hungary and Sweden) as its wet wing was considered as liability by air command. When long range fighters were needed in AOI (Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia), they were not send but they send dissassembled Cr-42's instead.
Ba-65 was considered as unsutible for operations in North Africa by local air command and were send to Italy but were send back at the beggining of hostilities, becouse no other airplanes were available for fighter bomber operations. Mainstay of fighter air force in north africa at the beggining of the war was Cr-32 that was completly outdated. When modern planes were finaly rushed to Africa in 1941( Fiat G-50's) they were not equiped with sand filters and were soon rendered unoperational.

Italians also concentrated ther engine production on radial air cooled engines and neglected development of inline liquid cooled engines. That is the reason that they had to licence produce DB-601 (Typhone).
The biggest error in judgment was that they went into the war with peace-time economy, resources and production. That is the reason for limited production of latter types of aircraft that were quite good ( G-55, Re-2001/2002/2005, Mc-2005).

 

There were, IIRC, several Italian aces during the war, and the RA antishipping squadrons were VERY good, better than most German units, in fact.

 

Unfortunatly they ruined it's beautiful lines after the war by putting a Merlin in it (the G.59 was the G.55 post war succsessor !)
Altough i must admit it looks even great with Merlin engine altough performance wise the DB603 would do better!)/