Kill Claims

[Barrett]

Originally posted by Shooter@Mar 5 2004, 10:27 PM
[b] Barrett be brutally frank. And if the USAS (assumption/probably) was the worst, trust that they was not the only one.


Shooter sends

Folks who've made a far closer study than I care to have reckoned that about 1/6 of all Brit aerial claims resulted in smoking holes in the ground, largely because 40% of the claims were moral victories. (I wonder if there was ever an internal discussion in the RFC/ETC ref. validity of the claims. At some point you'd think a Brass Hat would look at the figures and exclaim, "By Jove! Those Huns are dashedly good at replacing the crippling losses we're inflicting on them!")

So how's Uncle Sugar stack up? Frank's list shows 1,109 total claims including 228 OOC/driven down or 20.5% moral victories. That's half the Brit rate, which may be as good a comparison as we'll ever have, though there's a huge disparity in scale. The difference in actual versus claimed "destroyed" is likely unknowable, but my rule of thumb would be: toss out all the moral victories and reduce the "destroyed" by half for starters.

At the end of the day (or, at least, the end of the war&#33 the score mattered far less than something more tangible: who owned the sky? That question answers itself.

[Tailspin]

A linen covered wing can be quite strong. But (a few Spads to the contrary) the planes were only able to bring 1 or 2 air cooled light machine guns to bear on the target. A P47 of World War 2 had eight heavy machineguns. Some German planes carried 4 cannons and 2 or 4 machine guns. One American bomber type (B-25) had a mass battery of 12 and could add 2 more if the top turret gunner wasn't preoccupied. The weapons had improved by leaps and bounds from the first to the second war. The sights also improved. Deflection shots in 1918 were extremely difficult. And, while the targets in 1918 were more flammable, they weren't exactly flimsy. It was a strange paradow: dozens of hits could cause superficial damage, but a single hit could bring down the plane. There is no evidence, for example, that more than one bullet hit Manfred von Richthofen's plane on either of the occasions when he was shot down. Of course, both those hits struck the pilot.

[Billy_Bishop]

One other thing, while not carried by everyone, the prevalence of gun cameras went a long way toward showing how bad an enemy plane was shot up. If you got a gun camera, it makes it a lot easier to have your claims proven one way or the other.

Yes, I know they were not perfect either. But it adds one more form of verification.

Originally posted by woodrow@Mar 5 2004, 04:42 AM
[b] Dear Boss:

One of the reasons I tend to view WW I claims as being more accurate than those submitted in WW II, is that the structure of most WW I machines was FAR more susceptible to bullet damage than those of WW II. Damaged wood structure would lose virtually all its resiliency and support once it was hit by a bullet and not only holed, but also splintered. Wood would rapidly split (especially under load) along the wood grain, and would also tend to lose its ability to hold screwed in fittings. Metal, even when badly damaged, would still retain resiliency, as long as significant shards remained attached.

Woodrow

I have to agree with Shooter's fine reply.

The Mosquito during WW2 was a fabric covered wooden framed a/c and it was capable of absorbing an incredible amount of damage

Just my two bobs worth,

Andrew.

[Shooter]

Two bob? My credit has gone up. In the past, a shilling would have done the job, Andrew !

Thanks for your endorsement, mate.


Shooter sends

[stephen]

It seems that the original thesis relies heavily on the assumption that a WWI pilot could see the results of his machine gun fire on an enemy airplane in combat. I believe this to be a faulty premise and wrote a detailed analysis, complete with interviews with WWI pilots and photos of actual kills in WWI, in the following article a while back:

http://indysquadron.tripod.com/isd/id50.html

Please note that this article was originally written for the Dawn Patrol board gaming society, but the content is still pertinent to this conversation and contains a great deal of information on precisely what a pilot could and could not see during combat in WWI.

[Barrett]

Well I'll be dog-gone. Stephen, I was acquainted with Gordon Collinson and his lovely wife during the early days of CFM. They lived nearby in Scottsdale and visited the museum a few times.

C. 1985 I remember Gordon's reaction to a discussion of the absurd ROE ref bombing bridges in N Vietnam (RS McNamara often required perpendicular approaches which means the pilot had a VERY narrow target and a VERY wide one&#33 Gordon said he learned in 1918 that you attacked a bridge by angling the dive slightly across the length.

I've done just enough dive bombing to know that range errors exceed deflection, so the slightly angled approach improved chances of "overs" and "unders" scoring a hit. If Gordon knew that in 1918, what's that say of the US military establishment 50 years later?

[Shooter]

Good article, Stephen. While I am impressed, I am not amazed, having read some of your other stuff.

Barrett, I know that you know that nothing done by the US Air Force-dominated Department of Defense is beyond the limit of absurd.


Shooter sends

[R Pope]

The WW11 Mosquito was not a "Wooden framed fabric-covered" aircraft, it was stressed plywood skinned. The Wellington,now,that was a plane for taking damage. The interlinked metal framework covered with fabric allowed German cannon shells to zip right through without exploding. Much like those "fragile" WW1 buses,most hits did no damage.

Originally posted by R Pope@Mar 7 2004, 09:03 PM
[b] The WW11 Mosquito was not a "Wooden framed fabric-covered" aircraft, it was stressed plywood skinned. The Wellington,now,that was a plane for taking damage. The interlinked metal framework covered with fabric allowed German cannon shells to zip right through without exploding. Much like those "fragile" WW1 buses,most hits did no damage.

Of course it was, that will teach me to think that I know everything......that's my wifes job


Andrew.