LUFTWAFEE 1946 (Would Have Happened if ...)

Many came from the Western Front. The top guy in the West got >200 Allied AC. All told, the Nazi pilots in the west shot down many more Allied AC than the Allies shot down German planes.
Which US WWII fighter shot down the most enemy aircraft?
Note that the Top Allied Plane was a four engine day light bomber. ( So was the 6th best on this list at shooting down EA!)

#1> 7,000 B-17s
#2= 5,944 P-51/A-36/F-6
#3= 5,229 F6F
#4= 3,785 P-38
#5= 3,662 P-47
#6 <3,000 B-24s
#7= 2,155 F4U
#8= 1,944 P-40

I do not know how many EA were shot down by P-39s, but I suspect that it was more than the F4U, P-40 and possibly B-24s? IIRC, The top two Allied pilots of the war flew P-39s? (1st and 3rd) The Reds had 70-80 aces total.

 

While the Ta-152 had great numbers, it was also very large and easy to see coming. It also had a 30 in the nose and two 20 MM guns in the wing roots. Did Willy M join the Nazi Party? Is the 190D slower, or faster than the 109K? Did they ever build a 190D with the Mk-103M cannon? I like faster, smaller with bigger guns, all things that let you win at greatly reduced risks!

 

I just parroted the comments of many German pilots who did not like the Mk-108. Plus the simple fact that the Germans built prototypes of many planes usually armed with the 108 with the longer ranged, higher MV, Mk-103 and the Mk-213 had a much different munition than either the 103, or 108!

 

Roughly 45,000 and many of them were on the Western Front, The reds simply did not build enough planes to provide the "Target Rich Environment" as the Western powers. We built ~325,000 and lost a quarter of them, the Brits ~180,000 and lost more planes than we did, and the Russians built ~130,000, but only lost 100,000 to our 150K?

 

Fair enough...each to his/her own.
But...why were the 190Ds tasked with protecting the Me262s on landing if the 109 would have done a better job?

 

The K/L ratios during the BoB were about 1.2/1 in favor of the Brits! With the Hawker Hurry shooting down ~60% and of the hardest targets to kill, while the Spits downed about 40%, mostly single engine planes. (The single largest cause of these ratios was the German requirement to RTB and thus extreme limits on their throttle usage and the requirement to guard the bomber closely!)
When the Brits were forced to do the same mission, IE "Circuses" over France and RTB back over the channel to home the Spits lost between five and seven Spitfires for every 109 they downed! A terrible beat down of the very worst sort! So the only rational argument that can reasonably be made is that the 109 was the better plane.
That the Germans were able to shoot down more of everyone else than the Allies were able to down them tells me that their main fighter planes were better than ours from a statistical stand point. No other conclusion is possible in a rational argument. The 262 lost almost 1,000 for less than 600 Victories. Does not sound like a winner to me? Granted most were at low and slow circuit speeds, but still it was not able to win more than it lost in the big scheme of things.
But we/you/them have not answered the big question, IE what criterion do we use to determine the "Best" plane?
I have and continue to argue that in a WVR fight, "He who sees first wins!" The 109 was the smallest plane and thus the hardest to see. Making it the top dog in the war of statistics!
Again I ask; What makes a great fighter plane?

 

I never stated they were. Just that in the free combat arena, the 109 was far and away the best plane of the war. But if you ask which plane I would strap on, the P-38 is far and away the best killer in the kind of duels talked of here and other places. In addition, if flown correctly, it is almost impossible to shoot down in single, 2V2, 4V4 and 4V many combats.
You fly high and fast in a four ship well over the Bombers altitude. The Contrails make it easy to see the invisible enemy coming and the -38's Combat Cruise Speed at altitude is too fast for non-jets to catch. With all that warning, it boils down to a head on pass that the P-38 is master with out peer! At altitude the maneuvering flaps, high aspect ratio and blown wing let you out turn anything! Wait out your targets and swoop down to pick off a straggler, then use the built up speed to climb back to altitude and look for an other victim. You can do that for as long as the mission lasts. One, two, or six kills per mission and pretty soon, you are 859-6-0!

 

This bloke wont disagree with you...Dick Bong. (What a great name.)

 

Not yet! But the -109 was easier to land, or take off than the Spitfire, which also suffered terrible accident rates, which were higher than the -109!

 

Why? I never minimalized anything about the Nazis and was raged on for using the term. I like to be as accurate and factual as I can, we did not fight the Germans. We did fight the Nazis.

 

I don't know about that............Great Britain, France, and many many others, declared war on Germany, not the Nazi's.....


The National Socialist German Workers Party was merely the dominant political party in Germany when war was declared.......declaring war on the Nazi's, would be like declaring war on the Republican party. The Allies fought against the German military, propaganda certainly claimed the allies were fighting against the ideals of the Nazi party, which is partly true, but that's not who they were officially fighting. In the Korean war, the U.N coalition forces fought against elements of the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army, which is actually under control and part of the Chinese communist party, so you could say the U.N was fighting the Chinese communist party, not China (As both China and Taiwan argue as to who the real China is).

 

Im with JJ on this...it seems a no brainer.

 

Hmmm...let's see?

German single-engine fighter losses on the Western Front, versus USAAF fighter combat losses against German aircraft:

1Q44 - 2,130/ 180
2Q44 - 3,057/524
3Q44 - 4,043/269

With a bit of effort I should be able to compile the British figures.

 

Which would suggest that the Me109 wasn't the best fighter of the war.

??? I don't think I've read a single source that suggested a 2 engine bomber was harder to shoot down than a single engine fighter.

Not really the same mission though was it?

Nope.

The data supplied by Rich indicates that your assumption is wrong as is your conclusion.

If your data were correct then it would be possible to suggest that conclusion. More detail would be needed though.

A number have been suggested. You seem to be good at ignoring said suggestions.

That's only looking at half the equation so any conclusion drawn from it would be questionable.

Wrong again or should I say still.

You keep asking and then ignoring the suggestions offered.

 

Sources please.

 

It is essentially impossible to parse out fighter versus fighter losses for the Battle of Britain. Fundamentally, the German escorts attempted to engage the British fighters, while the British fighters attempted to avoid them and engage the German bombers, which makes for an impossible task reconciling actual loss data. However, we do have accurate loss data by day and by type for each side. So then, the ratio of British versus German fighter losses (i.e., Hurricane and Spitfire losses to Bf 109 and Bf 110 losses) by month were:

August 1940 0.85
September 1940 0.90
Total 0.87

 

By that "logic" the P-26 was better than the Me-109 as it was smaller in all dimensions.

 

Kill claims get interesting. For the same period, the German single-engine fighter losses versus USAAF claims of all German aircraft shot down were:

1Q44 - 2,130/3,254
2Q44 - 3,057.3,142
3Q44 - 4,043/2,752

 

People:

No aircraft is better than the person piloting it! The pilot that can use the attributes of his plane against the weaknesses of his opponent will win! Pilot quality (with luck added in) is damn near everything. There are documented accounts of Brewster Buffalos shooting down much more capable a/c. If Tuck and Pattle had been flying 109s and Galland and Molders had flown Spits, all four would probably be just as successful. The horrific casualties that the LW suffered in 1944 weren't really caused by the qualitive superiority of the P-51 as much as the numerical superiority of the Americans and the qualitive superiority of their pilots!

Back to the gun issue! The only negative thing I've ever heard about the MK 108 was that you had to get close (<400ms) to get hits-well within the range of the 50 cal. Brownings. The Germans were always trying to find something better-they even put that god-awful semi-auto 50mm in a ME 262 nose. Another failure of course. Shooting at long range in that day and age wasn't going to get you very many victories. Self-computing gun sights were just coming into the picture and even then the parabolic trajectory of projectiles, dispersion of rounds, enemy evasive manuvers, etc. were going to make hitting at long range problematic. As Eric Hartman preached, "Get in close so that the enemy fills your entire windscreen! Then all your shots go home and your enemy goes down."

 

I never said it was worthless. I did say it was a crappy gun that had a low MV/BC and less effective shell than other weapons.
You have to comp weapons by Effectiveness Vs Weight.
Thus ((505^2X330)/(705^2X98))=1.32 The Mk-108 looks better on paper, but the reality is the low MV which made the very light weight cannon possible prevented the shooter from getting hits, except under the most favorable conditions. The weight of the two guns is close, so the 40%more MV OF THE 20 MM WEAPON made it much more desirable. (705/505)^2=1.949 I'll take a 95% advantage to hit any day. In reality, they found that the true "to hit" number is proportional to the (MV^2XRoF) weight of shell counts for very little and can be effectively ignored. That is why the newest and best guns are 20-27 mm.
There are really only two new guns to enter service after the war in south-east Asia, the long BBL'd Vulcan in the F/A-22 and the Mauser/Rheinmetall Bk-27. One trades weight of shell for Rate of Fire, ( Mv=1,525 M/S at 7,000R/PM RoF)/1M= 272.1
The same calculation on the new Mauser gun is ( 1,100^2X1,800)/1M= 36.3
But a lot of people think the larger caliber weapon is better for two reasons gun rate from the second shot and 260 gram very pointed shell. So, let us change the equation to include the weight of shell and gun spin-up time. It thus becomes (1,100^2X30X260)/1M= 9,438 and the Vulcan is (1,525^2X84X93.33)/1M=18,233, or almost twice as effective. In reality testing has shown that the Vulcan is 10-12 times more effective at A2A targets and the spin-up time is not important when you carry 8-10 seconds worth of ammo instead of 4. in addition, the muzzle clamp can be changed to give either a 4X8 mill shotgun pattern, or a 2.0 mill death ray. The 4X8 mill pattern has consistently shown it is much better at the A2A business.