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Re: Response to Glider and Juha.
Juha, thank you for the Il-2 loss statistics. Pretty scary stuff. We need to remember that the Russians had the relative luxury of a single front war. Could the RAF have sustained fighter losses like this in western Europe, and still have fought in the Mediterranean and the Far East?
The Russian victory in the east, and the Allied victory in the west, was in the end a result of combined air and land operations. The allocation of resources between air and land, and between competing resources within the RAF and within the Army, was decided years before D-Day (given the lag between decision to field a new weapon or tactic and its actual wide spread usage). We can always second guess these decisions knowing what we know now. The fact remains that the Allied decisions made at the time, with the information available, was good enough. Even the Germans couldn't stop the Allied advances in the West or the Russian advances in the East. All of this resulted in huge casualties on all sides. Some different mix of air and land resources may have shifted these losses around, but they still would have been huge.
Final point: one of the main opponent of both Typhoon and the Il-2 was the German Tiger series. The armour on these vehicles weighed tens of tons. Relatively speaking, both the Typhoon and the Il-2 were virtually unarmoured when facing opponents like this.
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