You are certainly correct about pilot skills. A Royal Navy Wildcat shot down a FW -190 off Norway very late in the war. But the German pilot may not have seen him in time.
The account didn't say. It was a Wildcat, not a Hellcat. Probably flew off of a small carrier.
Gator, where have you been? I've missed your posts.
T-Star
There used to be a series of books by Ballantine or someone. They came out monthly or so and were the size of today's trade paperbacks and were well illustrated with line drawings, photos, etc. Anyway, my now deceased great uncle Ed (who was wounded at St. Lo and remained interested in the Army) had what must have been close to the whole set. He had shelves full of them and used to give them to me. I think they came out in the '60s. Anyway, one of them was about the Me/bf109s exclusively. It had details of even some obscure users and variants, including those used postwar by the Izzies (Czech made ones with Ju87 engines if I recall) and the E models sold to the Swiss (which shot down both American and German planes, including later model 109s), along with a great deal of information on the Spanish variants which were - at the time the book was written - still used as trainers and possibly ground attack planes.
Anyway, that book spent some time comparing the 109 to other planes, and the author seemed quite enamored of the F6 Hellcat as a dogfighter. This was the book that claimed that F6s in Royal Navy hands shot it out with 109s and 190s near Norway on several occaisions. The details of numbers are obscured in my memory since I read the book more than 20 years ago, but distinctly recall the mention of the F6s.
There was also the assertion, later backed up by some articles in specialist aviation mags, that only the later P51s (post D model) were really the ones with the bugs ironed out, hence the concentration on the F6 as the exemplar dogfighter designed and built during the war in time to see large scale service.
I was sick for a while some months ago, then had some marital problems and such. That fun was followed by a PCS move taking me from Quantico to Parris Island, though I do now have internet again as well as a laptop that doesn't randomly shut off...
Regarding guns, the most common German use of 30mm guns on the 190s were probably the add on pods that were used when attacking bombers, though certain 109s of course had a 30mm firing through the propellor shaft. There were two common 30mm models, the MK108 which had a shorter barrel and a faster rate of fire. This was used in the Me262. The trajectory wasn't the best since the velocity wasn't high, and the bugs were never worked out thus they'd sometimes jam. The longer tubed Mk103 had a higher velocity and while there was a plan to mount them in Go229s, they mostly saw use in pods. These were reliable, and had a longer range, but rate of fire was slower.
20mm cannons were more common on German fighters, starting with the E model 109s. The US seemingly felt this was the way to go, since later F4Us, the F8, Skyraiders, etc mounted 20mm cannons.
The Germans actually had Mg151s in 15mm and a variant in 20mm. Some were shipped to Japan via Uboat and armed an initial production run of their fighters.
). As I recall, he shot down both U.S. planes. In that case two great allied planes were pitted against each other. At the same time, although I'm sure the american pilots were good, I'm thinking the fight was pretty much a mismatch as Kozhedub was the top russian ace of the war.
