FW-190 vs. F-6F Hellcat

I confess I have seen that simultaneous run where an American gets gunned as a Zero is being gunned. As bad as that is, it pales IMO compared to the shot I have seen several times of a B-17 bombing raid where, looking through the camera through a starboard waist gun position on a B-17, looking down at 5:00 from the bomber at another bomber. The bombers in the stack open their bomb bay doors and then release their sticks of bombs. Out of the picture, above the bomber at 5:00 is someone else. When the low bomber releases his stick, the guy above him releases his. The bombs bounce on the wing of the a/c below. About the third bomb to bounce on the wing root detonates taking off the left wing of the B-17, which quickly rolls right out of the picture frame. I seriously doubt that those 10 guys got out.

I am old enough that I knew a bunch of the guys who flew in WWII. My problem was, I was young enough that I didn’t even know what questions to ask. The guy who I knew best was a P-51 guy. He flew in Europe and then came back as an instructor. He is now gone. The last time I spoke with him was at my wedding in 1971. I was in the middle of flight school. I spoke to him as much as I could, but I did have other responsibilities.

Another guy I knew was a teacher when I was in high school. He flew P-40s. He told me he got shot down three times as I recall, and crunched in three or four more times writing off the a/c.

If you want to learn about what a horror story WWII was for the fighter guys, see “A Fighter Pilot’s Story” by Quinton Anniston. He flew P-47s. He made a video which he sold to PBS about his story. It really was a horror story. The bottom line was, about half the guys he graduated from flight school with died in the war.

As a guy who flew F-4s in the post VN era, I don’t know where we got the guys who fought WWII.

As for the P-38, its worst problem was a very high rate of engine failure, especially in Europe, at high altitudes. And the earlier ones had no provision for heating the cockpit. Some pilots literally got frostbite.


Later P-38's with dive brakes and special combat flaps to allow tighter turns worked well, but I think the engine failure rate was never overcome.

By the way, I found my copy of, "Duels in the Sky." Capt. Brown said that the FW-190D could easily defeat a Hellcat. He didn't compare a Hellcat to a earlier 190. But we know that even well-flown Wildcats scored kills on FW-190's. The Royal Navy pilots were simply better, or luckier.

T-Star

I first saw that bomber footage partially simulated in the movie Memphis Belle. In a Wally World bargain bin I found a copy of the original documentary on the Memphis Belle which was filmed in '43 or '44 and that contains the actual footage you mention. In his autobiography Cpt. Morgan, the pilot of the plane, mentions that the voice over for the film was done after they crew returned to the States and was very hard on them emotionally. During the actual missions they were too busy to notice a lot that was happening around them. Watching film footage of their last missions and seeing friends planes go down was difficult.

Anyone know what became of Ted Lawson, who wrote, "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo"? He was pretty badly injured when his B-25 crashed in China, and I think he lost a leg.

I'm guessing that he received a medical discharge?

T-Star

Tom C said:

If you want to learn about what a horror story WWII was for the fighter guys, see “A Fighter Pilot’s Story” by Quinton Anniston. He flew P-47s. He made a video which he sold to PBS about his story. It really was a horror story. The bottom line was, about half the guys he graduated from flight school with died in the war.

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On the other hand look at guys like Adolf Galland and especially Sakai Saburo. In the latter case, I'd bet that 90% of his classmates didn't survive the war... and that's on the low side.

My dad's cousin was lost as a crewman on the historic B-29 "Uncle Tom's Cabin" as it continued to fight valiantly after taking two Japanese rammings during a dayight raid over Japan.

And speaking of the Memphis Belle, one of my dad's close friends is still living here in town and piloted a B-17 out of the same home base with the Belle.

He's Jewish and flew with false I.D.

Brought one back shot to h e double ll with two engines out. He said they threw everything out of the plane that wasn't nailed down, used a frayed control cable to lash full rudder, got his altitude stabilized and instead of landing at an emergency field just over the cliffs, he flew it back to his home base.

I asked him about his altitude, and he said, "Oh, about 700 feet".

cmort666 said:

On the other hand look at guys like Adolf Galland and especially Sakai Saburo. In the latter case, I'd bet that 90% of his classmates didn't survive the war... and that's on the low side.

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My mother knew a bunch of the guys that flew in the Battle of Britain after the battle when they were sent to Canada as flight instructors. One of the guys was an Australian who told her that toward the end of the battle he got sick and was down for a week. When he came back up, the battle was winding down. He looked around and discovered he was the last guy alive from his flight school class and the two classes ahead of him and the two classes behind him, they were all dead. I have no idea how big the classes were. Anniston’s class started at 250. About 125 graduated. About half bought it. My flight school classes were more on the order of 20 or so.

You might be interested in obtaining the book: Aircraft versus Aircraft, an illustrated story of fighter pilot combat from 1914 to the present day, by Norman Franks. It has great information, diagrams, charts, photos and air tactics of such duals as the Spitfire vs. Me109, Hellcat vs. Zero, P51 vs. Me262, etc. Excellent info on the top aces. I bought it at Barnes and Noble. It's also available from Amazon.

I found the top aces (total number of confirm kills by a pilot) chart of WWll very informative. For example:

America: 40
British: 40+
French: 23
Japanese 94
German: 352

American branch top ace breakdown:

USAAF: 40 Maj. Richard Bong
USN: 34 Capt. David McCampbell
USMC: 28 Col. Gregory Boyington

I read WWII books also and that Erich "Bubi" Hartmann was an Ace and a half , Scored 352 .I don't think there will be a score like that again.
The French bit in your post confuses me,I didn't think they faught at all


Terry

Tnucu said:

I read WWII books also and that Erich "Bubi" Hartmann was an Ace and a half , Scored 352 .I don't think there will be a score like that again.
The French bit in your post confuses me,I didn't think they faught at all


Terry

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Hartmann spent something like 4 years on the Russian front. Toward the end of the war, the Russians put up an aluminum overcast for the daily 9:00 AM raid on the Germans. Hartmann and his buds got high, dived through the flight taking out one guy, then flying back to base with no effect on the war, but notching another kill and running up the score.

The Russians had a few guys who were very good, but most didn't seem to be all that good and were not that hard to shoot down.

Tom C said:

Hartmann spent something like 4 years on the Russian front. Toward the end of the war, the Russians put up an aluminum overcast for the daily 9:00 AM raid on the Germans. Hartmann and his buds got high, dived through the flight taking out one guy, then flying back to base with no effect on the war, but notching another kill and running up the score.

The Russians had a few guys who were very good, but most didn't seem to be all that good and were not that hard to shoot down.

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As in every other aspect of the Soviet military, Stalin inflicted incredible havoc on the Soviet Air Force. The leadership of the Air Force was slaughtered in the purges just like that of the Army and Navy. The most talented leaders of all of the Soviet services were wiped out three YEARS before the Germans fired a shot at them. It was a miracle that Zhukov and the other now well known generals survived. And make no mistake, the massacre wasn't confined to the upper ranks. It went down to company grade officers and below. By the time of the German invasion in 1941, there were people commanding divisions who were qualified to command a battalion at best. The best chance for survival was to be not just mediocre, but mediocre and anonymous.

I highly recommend the books "Ivan's War" and "Moscow 1941". Stalin issued orders for Soviet forces to not respond to any "provocations" by the Germans without DIRECT orders. When the Germans began bombing, the Soviet Border Troops reported the air attacks and oncoming ground forces. They were accused of lying and threatened with courts martial and execution. Those were the last communications with them as they were moments later swept away in a deluge of German armor.

The ONLY effective resistance against the Germans on the first day of the invasion was from the Soviet Navy, which had not yet received the "no provocations" order. They were immediately put out to sea, shooting down numbers of German aircraft when Soviet ground forces weren't even shooting back.

Martin Caidin has become somewhat controversial in the last few years on a few topics. He died in 1997, but recently research in the UFO community revealed that the story of a foo fighter in his book on Schweinfurt quotes an alleged memo that never seems to have existed. He also wrote the novel that eventually inspired "The Six Million Dollar Man".

Ted Lawson lived until 1992. He was sent on a quasi diplomatic liasion posting to South America after the raid and discharged late in the war.

Dick Bong had a recreation area near Milwaukee named after him. Since most people don't know who he was, and find the name humorous, pictures of the name sign sometimes show up on T-shirts. He was killed late in the war test flying P80 shooting stars.

Some modern historians now believe that the German attack on the Soviet Union really was a pre-emptive strike against Russians massing for an attack on Europe. This may have been partially responsible for their poor performance early in the war, along with large amounts of out moded equipment and sometimes dubious training. However, Russian "advisors" flew in China (Stalin didn't like Mao and though Chiang was the future of China, thus helped the Nationalists against the Japanese, as - oddly - for a time did the German government under Hitler and Mussolini's Italy). These pilots supposedly did fairly well, at least compared to the local "talent".

Some Luftwaffe pilots did rotate back to training, staff, or command assignments, but the programs were different from those in the USAAF. A lack of fuel for training played a major role in problems experienced by Japan and Germany.

GatorFarmer said:

Some modern historians now believe that the German attack on the Soviet Union really was a pre-emptive strike against Russians massing for an attack on Europe. This may have been partially responsible for their poor performance early in the war, along with large amounts of out moded equipment and sometimes dubious training.

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This thesis was promoted in Viktor Suvorov's "Icebreaker", as well as another book I've read, the title of which escapes me. The contrary position is taken by "Stumbling Colossus".

Much evidence indicates that Stalin believed that the Allies and Germans would batter each other to exhaustion, just as in the first world war. He was surprised by the rapid collapse of the Allies. No doubt he would have liked to attack an exhausted Germany and continue on to France as the Russians did during the Napoleonic Wars. Whether he was close to an attack which was preempted by the Germans seems somewhat doubtful to me. While the dismantling of the pre-war border fortifications is suspicious, the Soviet armed forces were in a state of sheer chaos after the purges. What had been the most modern armored and air forces in the world had been reduced to shaky institutions, staffed with timid nonentities and using obsolescent and worn out equipment. Of course it's entirely possible that nobody had the 'nads to tell Stalin just HOW decrepit the Soviet military was, and he really thought he COULD attack the Germans preemptively.

GatorFarmer said:

However, Russian "advisors" flew in China (Stalin didn't like Mao and though Chiang was the future of China, thus helped the Nationalists against the Japanese, as - oddly - for a time did the German government under Hitler and Mussolini's Italy). These pilots supposedly did fairly well, at least compared to the local "talent".

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Being a "volunteer" in the proxy wars between Hitler and Stalin was often fatal for the Soviet participants, even if they survived combat in the field. Large numbers of veterans of the Spanish Civil War were shot or imprisoned. In fact, Richard Sorge, the leader of the Soviet spy ring in Japan which learned of the Pearl Harbor and Barbarossa attacks, defied orders to return to the Soviet Union, which surely would have led to his death.

Until the arrival of P-40s, the Soviet supplied Polikarpov I-16s and Tupolev SB2s were the best aircraft in the Nationalist Chinese Air Force. The I-16s more than held their own against the Ki-27s and A5Ms of the Japanese during the Battle of Nomonhan.

walnutred said:

In reading first hand reports the big advantage the Corsair and the P38 had in the Pacific was that they were obviously NOT Japanese. In some areas so many other US fighters were shot down by nervous Navy AA gunners that only P38's were used.

But it wasn't only nervous AA gunners. My dad said that one trick the Japanese pilots would occasionally pull was to try and quietly slip a single plane into the back of a returning US formation. By blending in with a US flight they had a good chance of not being spotted until they made an attack, either when a plane was landing or simply strafing the field. With the US planes low on fuel and ammo it was unlikely they would be successfully pursued and the AA gunners would have been caught sleeping at the switch, so if the Japanese plane survived the initial attack they had a good chance of slipping away.

This was countered by a code word given when a US pilot suspected they had picked up a straggler. The US pilots wound then quickly veer off to the right or left and the AA gunners new the single plane still flying straight probably deserved their attention.

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My Dad, an 86 year old veteran of the Pacific Theater, witnessed a Corsair ripped to shreds by friendly 20 and 40mm AA guns off Okinawa. No time to bail out for that U.S. pilot.

conn ak said:

My Dad, an 86 year old veteran of the Pacific Theater, witnessed a Corsair ripped to shreds by friendly 20 and 40mm AA guns off Okinawa. No time to bail out for that U.S. pilot.

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There were a few friendly fire episodes during the first Gulf War. A Brit leftist in usenet started running his mouth about "trigger happy yanks" and the like. I pulled my copy of "Their Finest Hour" off of the shelf. It's a history of the Battle of Britain. I asked him for the number of friendly fire incidents committed by the RAF in the rough period of the Battle of Britain. He declined to answer. I posted the number, which I can't recall right now. It was shocking. In fact, the first sets of speed brakes for the P-38 shipped to Britain by the USAAF were on a C-54 shot down by the RAF.

cmort666 said:

There were a few friendly fire episodes during the first Gulf War. A Brit leftist in usenet started running his mouth about "trigger happy yanks" and the like. I pulled my copy of "Their Finest Hour" off of the shelf. It's a history of the Battle of Britain. I asked him for the number of friendly fire incidents committed by the RAF in the rough period of the Battle of Britain. He declined to answer. I posted the number, which I can't recall right now. It was shocking. In fact, the first sets of speed brakes for the P-38 shipped to Britain by the USAAF were on a C-54 shot down by the RAF.

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This refers to dive speed brakes for the wings of the P-38 to preclude high speed dives letting the aircraft enter compressibility. This wrested control of the plane from the pilot, and many died as a result. It was also a factor with the P-47.

It seems very shortsighted to send the entire shipment on one plane, and to make so few such parts to begin with. There were some pretty dumb people making decisions then. As now...

These brakes, and combat flaps to allow tighter turns, were later standard on production P-38L's. Maybe some P-38J's. Skilled P-38 pilots could turn inside of a Zero, which is quite impressive. Brown said that the Spitfire MK XIV was also as manueverable as a Zero, as well as being much faster and better armed.

The C-54 was evidently mistaken for a Focke-Wulf Kurier (sp?). I can't think what else the Spitfire pilot might have confused it with.

It seems obvious that Allied forces needed to be more aware of what one another's planes looked like. The number of incidents of US Navy pilots firing at P-40's in US and Australian markings seems absurd. The Japs had no planes that looked like that. Many Aussie planes even had the rear half of the fuselages painted white to avoid that, and the problem continued!

On D-Day, Gen. Doolittle flew over the invasion area in a P-38, to avoid Allied pilots and ship gunners firing on him. The P-38 did have a very distinctive outline.

Cmort, you seem well informed. It is good to have your input.

T-Star

Texas Star said:

The C-54 was evidently mistaken for a Focke-Wulf Kurier (sp?). I can't think what else the Spitfire pilot might have confused it with.

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FW-200 Condor. It started out as a high speed airliner. It was modified into a maritime reconnaissance aircraft. Things started going off the rails when they tried to turn it into a maritime bomber. The airframe just wasn't strong enough. The fuselage and wing spars had a decided tendency to fail. There are photos of FW-200s sitting on runways, some with their backs broken, others with the wing trailing edge resting on the ground and the wing at about a 45deg angle of attack. Bombs were often lying scattered around on the runway around the aircraft.

Texas Star said:

Cmort, you seem well informed. It is good to have your input.

T-Star

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Thanks. My grandmother used to take me to the bookstore in Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry and to the now defunct Krochs & Brentano's chain. I had an almost complete set of the Doubleday WWII aircraft books when I was in kindergarten.

I believe that a FW-200 was among the first, maybe THE first planes, shot down by a P-38. It was clobbered off of Iceland, and a P-39 helped, with two P-38's involved, as I recall.

The other early P-38 action was in the Aleutians. They shot down several Jap types, including the big Emily flying boats.


Cmort, like you, I was an early reader of aircraft books. Still am. I'm looking forward to reading about Jap naval aces. Have the book; haven't had the time yet.

T-Star

Texas Star said:

I'm looking forward to reading about Jap naval aces. Have the book; haven't had the time yet.

T-Star

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It's an excellent book as is the one on the Army aces. They ran those guys into the ground, even when they were suffering from vitamin deficiencies and tropical diseases and literally could barely see. And it was a good thing for us too.

Of course looked at objectively, the war was utterly pointless from the Japanese point of view. They would have been better off to cut a threeway deal with us and the Chinese to keep the communists at bay. If instead of destroying China, they'd propped up Chiang Kai Shek, the Japanese military would probably still be running Japan, they'd still have Korea and Taiwan and the Nationalists would still be running China. Their greed and arrogance destroyed Japan and put Mao in power. I suspect that had Yamamoto been of a mind to seize power when he had the chance during the last Army mutiny before the war, Japan would have sat the war out like Spain.

FWIW, A Fighter Pilot's Story is posted on You Tube.