Response to Glider and Juha.

[Bill Walker]

Tony, you are again picking and choosing quotes that suit your purposes. Here is a quote I have picked about the Il-2:

"As revealed in Rastrenin's book, it took horrendous IL-2 losses before VVS Shturmovik units developed effective ground-attack tactics. The book is replete with countless missions where poorly-trained IL-2 crews, usually without fighter escort, hurled themselves at Axis forces only to be slaughtered by flak and Luftwaffe aircrews."

From a review of the book "Il-2 Shturmovik Guards Units of World War 2" by Oleg Rastrenin.

You are also again making broad over simplified statements without any support. For example, your quote from your upcoming book "..so 2 TAF simply abandoned that most important target without mentioning their previous refusal to consider aircraft armour. It was back to 1917." I hope you realize there was no 2 TAF in 1917. I hope you realise that the Typhoon did have some armour, as did most RAF combat aircraft. Like everything else crammed into a warplane, armour must be traded off against other equipment and structure to keep the thing flyable. We can second guess the designer's decisions from our arm chairs today, but just "adding armour" to any aircraft is quite a bit more complicated than you may understand.

The questions you pose are very complex, and deserve more than the simple quotes you or I can throw at them here. I hope your upcoming book uses a wide range of sources.