Quote:
Originally Posted by tcolvin
BTW, you know Rudel's withering opinion of RPs as "Quatsch". He told some Typhoon aces of 2TAF that he had tested RPs and rejected them as too inaccurate compared with guns. He did his homework while 2TAF did not.
Tony
|
This nicely summarizes the difference between the German attitude and the Allied attitude to pilots and weapons in general, as I alluded to earlier in my mention of the Luftwaffe's night fighter pilots. The Germans gave Rudel the equipment he wanted and allowed him to develop his own tactics. His personal accomplishment was, as a result, quite spectacular. If the Luftwaffe could have generated a thousand Rudels the war might have gone differently. They couldn't do this because there aren't a thousand Rudels, and because they spent so much time and money catering to a handful of super stars that they couldn't sustain large fleets. The Allies took the approach of fielding large numbers of "average" quality pilots and weapons. That meant concentrating production on a relatively small number of aircraft and weapon systems. With the luxury of hind sight we can second guess their choices in these fields, but the results were obviously good enough - unlike the results of the German approach. The Allied attitude to "special purpose" weapons like dive bombers can be seen in the remarks of Major General Davenport Johnson, Director of Military Requirements for the USAAF about the Vengeance: "a shining example of the waste of material, man-power, and time in the production of an airplane which this office has tried to eliminate for several months".
But of course he was brain washed by the evil RAF high command.