RAF and dive-bombing.

[Juha]

Hello Tony
if not fighter-bombers, light and medium bombers knocked out the numerous Seine bridges, what did that? Freeman in his Over the Beaches p. 65 claimed that “On the eve of invasion, 74 bridges leading into the landing area were destroyed or made impassable…” I’m not sure what are the real figures but one can see from German unit histories that the interdiction campaign in Normandy was a success. IMHO LW with its Stukas didn’t do it better on Crete, it had less resources but Commonwealth troops had much less AA protection than Heer in Normandy. And if you believe that Seine bridges were not defended, why Allied AFs suffered losses over them? Fighter bombers did also great work against German radar stations before D-Day, even if ALSO those were well defended. And as you know, LW Ju-87s found radar stations very difficult to knock out during the BoB, even if they had some success.

And I’m sure that there were numerous company commanders in Heer that prefer 10,5cm field howitzer over Ju-87, because it “was accurate, reliable and always available”. After all dive-bomber was even more weather restricted than fighter-bomber because it needed much higher minimum cloud base height than the latter.

I agree that dive-bomber was an accurate weaponsystem, but IMHO not a wonder-weapon that would have solved all those difficult problems which hindered air support with WWII technology. Warfare was team work and in the end it was still the “bloody infantry” which had to occupy the contested territory.

On armour, Il-2 was interesting a/c, its armour made it almost totally invulnerable to rifle-calibre fire, even if Finns used their rifle-calibre AAmgs to kill the rear-gunners of departing Il-2s, so infantry was defenceless against it. 20mm AAA was also rather helpless at the beginning but by increasing the proportion of AP-shells that problem was mostly overcome, the price was less destructiveness when firing at other a/c types. The price of armour protection was of course its weight and so bomb-load of Il-2 was small. I know that there was a set of appliqué armour for Typhoon, but I have no idea how widely it was used.

Juha