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Re: Destruction of 100th BG, fiction or fact?
The story of a haevily damaged bomber shooting down 6 german fighters and escaping from above a German airfield is just too hard to believe.
As for the 100th BG, it will be interesting to know if there was a reason for their heavy losses outside bad luck. I doubt that Luftwaffe targetted a given unit especially, and I am quite sure identifying it in the air will be really hard, and almost impossible soon enough to bring all fighters together to attack it. On the other hand, 100th BG was never targetted alone when it suffered big losses.
But maybe this Group was not flying a perfect defensive formation and that was the reason it was so often attacked. Or maybe it was used in a way (for example often leader group, or tail group) that was more dangerous than the norm (and for a B-17 in 43-44 the norm was already bad).
US bombers were more dangerous flying in tight formations, so once a formation was disrupted/broken, German pilots will attack it more often, so decimating it, while letting other units nearby untouched.
Alos, for most of 8th AF raids, there were not enough German fighters to engage every US bomber group in strength, so some were hardly hit while other were untouched. This is especially true with the Strumstaffel and Sturmgruppen attacks in 1944.
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