Impact of Allied fighter-bombers

[tcolvin]

Originally Posted by Franek Grabowski

Well, this discussion is slightly turning into what if scheme. Frankly, we cannot make an alternative scheme, we can only make some estimates of effectiveness. This has been already done, and we can see the effects in the development process of post war weapon systems. It is obvious that Flak was extremelly effective, so it remained in use. Fighter bombers also proven their capabilities and they practically killed classic bombers. There were several attempts made to reduce the role of aviation just over the battlefield because of high losses inflicted by defences, the last idea being F-16 CAS I believe, but in the end ground attack aviation always returned in a glory. So, the one must assume Typhoons were both effective and suffered tremendous losses. The latter probably could have been reduced by a more sophisticated design, but there was neither time nor resources available.
Army is another matter, another set of people, another industry and politics. There were several problems with introducing both new designs and tactics with far more people not being able to understand what the modern warfare is.
That said, I would love to read comments of Zetterling on those documents!

I don't understand the reference to Zetterling.

But I do understand, and try to avoid, what if schemes.
Let me put my thinking in a series of statements devoid of what ifs.
1. The key to military effectiveness is all-arms. Its exponents succeeded, and those that didn't failed; Monash in WWI, Blitzkrieg in 1939/40, Zhukov in 1944/45 were successful. The allies in WWII were unsuccessful. The performance of British and American armies in WWII suffered because of shortcomings in all-arms. You in Poland, by the way, paid the price of that deficiency in blood from 1944 to 1980.
2. All-arms is the combination of infantry with artillery, armour and air.
3. Monash won by combining excellent Commonwealth infantry, the much improved MkV tank, first-rate artillery, but so-so air support. This was the one shortcoming, but the rest was enough to defeat the German army.
4. The shortcoming in WWI air support is the key to understanding the problems of 2TAF's junky Typhoons.
5. The RFC/RAF's losses of unarmoured Camels and DH5s in CAS (close air support) devastated morale and was never forgotten, especially by the top brass in the RAF in the 190s and 30s who had experienced it.
6. The German Schlachtstaffeln, however, had half-decent CAS aircraft: Halberstadt CLII and CLIV, Hannover CLIII and Junkers J-1, which was an armoured aircraft in the tradition of the HS129, IL-2 and the USAF A10.
7. The German problem in 1918 was their lack of a tank. That was fatal. It was rectified by 1939 and added to the rest of their successful all-arms tactics which they maintained.
8. The British were in the act of rectifying their CAS weakness when the war ended. The armoured Sopwith Salamander was on test and would, I suppose, have matched the J-1 and provided the RAF with some satisfactory experience to temper the unalloyed horror that stuck.
9. The British never officially examined the reasons why they won WWI. Everyone had his own idea. No lessons were learned. All-arms fragmented away, with the RAF and the Tank Corps promoted by arseholes like Liddell-Hart arguing that speed was everything and the army that was used to travelling at 3mph would never 'get it' and would never modernise its thinking which was stuck in the mud of the Somme and Passchendael.
10. The RN got its aviation back in the late 30s. The Army never did.
11. The RAF was not interested in CAS. The Tank Corps was not interested in infantry support. The result was the ineffably bad unarmoured but fast Typhoon and the bad poorly armoured but ast tanks like the Crusader and Sherman.
12. The war in the west was won at great expense of blood and material by the simple combination of the allied infantry and the artillery's FOO (forward observation officer). The guns levelled the German defences which the infantry occupied, again and again. It was slow and costly because there were no tanks (with the exception of very few Churchill VII) and no aircraft that could survive against Rheinmetall-Borsig and Krupp. The tanks were held back ready to 'exploit' the gap which the infantry were supposed to make without benefit of well-armoured tanks and CAS. These were the tactics of the lunatic asylum.
13. Tedder and Coningham waged war on the army. They said the army was 'drugged with air '. They said the army had its own weapons - rifles, artillery and tanks - and should learn to stand on their own feet like men and stop whining for air support. BC had better things to do incinerating German cities. The tanks by the way agreed with the RAF. They had the same vision. Typhoons hopped over the front line and careered about in the rear areas shooting up the German army in exactly the same way the tanks had been taught to think by Liddell Hart of exploiting.
14. I could go on and on and on, but you have enough to understand the hypothesis. The absence of an army air force equipped with armoured dive bombers and CAS - updated Sopwith Salamanders resembling the Hs129 and A10 with the pilot and vitals protected behind rolled or cast armour - and the absence of enough Churchill MkVII infantry tanks to provide the attacking infantry with a large calibre aimed weapon, condemned the allied armed forces to ineffectiveness. Compare and contrast them with the Soviet armed forces. The Soviets studied WWI, and learned and implemented its lessons. They built excellent machine pistols, tanks, artillery, and CAS aircraft. And they copied the all-arms tactics that Monash had invented at Arras on July 4, 1918.