Quote:
Originally Posted by Arsenal VG-33
Ladies and Gentlemen!
 My intention was just to react on some prejudices written during cold war in the west from dumbs to dumberers!
As the Stormovik was a cumbersome, slow but heavily armored & armed, vulnerable etc...In fact, it was just not as cumbersome, not as slow and not as armored and armed as it was said before
Each plane is a compromise between speed, manoeuvrability, protection, armor, arms etc: Il-2 was a kind of compromise between all of this parameters, Typhoon another one...
No glider, i did not confuse the box (manouvrability) and it's contents; read my previous posts.
Are you sure to do not underistimate the importance to hit the target from time to time? |
German ground attack pilots were able to speak with some authority about this and some did not agree with your opinions about Russian air force tactics. One was Karl Stein, who for 18 months piloted Stukas and Focke-Wulf 190s with SG 1. This time I won't retype all the text (there is three pages) but I'll hit some of the highlights:
1) In the spring of 1945, Karl Stein found himself in a position to compare the efficiency of the VVS with the Western Allies. He insisted that British and American fighter pilots were better trained, more aggressive, and more dangerous than the Russians. Though SG 1 flew the heavily loaded fighter-bomber version of the Fw-190, they still had the confidence to dogfight with VVS fighters, but not with the RAF or USAAF. "Never!", as he put it, and Spitfires were the most feared of all enemy fighters.
2) It was obvious to Stein and his colleagues that Yaks and Lavochkins could easily out-turn and out-climb the Focke-Wulfs, but the Russian pilots seldom pressed home these advantages. "Our thought was that they had beautiful airplanes but they do not know how to fly them". The Russians "just made one pass and were gone. They always opened fire from too far away and were hopeless at deflection shooting. Almost always they would just throw on the power and pull back on the stick". The Germans believed that poor quality of Soviet pilot training was the main cause for all this.
3) From his Stuka days, Karl Stein was even more familiar with the Illyushins. The Ju-87s would often pass Il-2s going in the opposite direction. No shots were fired by either side and sometimes the Germans waved. Apparently it was a case of empathy due to shared suffering. He remembered that the Shturmovik had formidable protection against light flak guns and always posed a serious threat to German infantry, but the Russian pilots would have done far more damage if they used better tactics. For example the Shturmoviks always struck columns at right angles, preferring a single quick hit and run to the more dangerous and effective lengthwise attacks employed by the Germans. When SG 1 attacked enemy airfields, they preferred to split up the flights in two-plane elements to attack specific targets in multiple passes. The Shturmoviks bombed airfields in massed flights, dropping on cue and departing immediately. The German pilots were very dismissive of that method as a waste of resources and firepower.