Response to Glider and Juha.

[tcolvin]

Thanks again, Juha.
You have provided much food for thought.

Tony

[Bill Walker]

Juha, thank you for the Il-2 loss statistics. Pretty scary stuff. We need to remember that the Russians had the relative luxury of a single front war. Could the RAF have sustained fighter losses like this in western Europe, and still have fought in the Mediterranean and the Far East?

The Russian victory in the east, and the Allied victory in the west, was in the end a result of combined air and land operations. The allocation of resources between air and land, and between competing resources within the RAF and within the Army, was decided years before D-Day (given the lag between decision to field a new weapon or tactic and its actual wide spread usage). We can always second guess these decisions knowing what we know now. The fact remains that the Allied decisions made at the time, with the information available, was good enough. Even the Germans couldn't stop the Allied advances in the West or the Russian advances in the East. All of this resulted in huge casualties on all sides. Some different mix of air and land resources may have shifted these losses around, but they still would have been huge.

Final point: one of the main opponent of both Typhoon and the Il-2 was the German Tiger series. The armour on these vehicles weighed tens of tons. Relatively speaking, both the Typhoon and the Il-2 were virtually unarmoured when facing opponents like this.

[Nick Beale]

Originally Posted by tcolvin

Shortage of spares? servicing capacity? - I don't think so.

Go to Kew and start reading the 2TAF Air Staff correspondence. Spare parts for some types were a concern to DAF in the Med by late 1944 so it would be unwise to discount the possibility of analogous problems in other theatres. Another issue for Britain was declining manpower (cf. Max Hastings' writing). The British Army was disbanding divisions not long after D-day and IIRC 2 TAF was disbanding squadrons in 1945.

[glider1]

I do not doubt that the ORB states the reduction was in the, "liberal use of aircraft in support rôles owing to the shortage of both Typhoon and Spitfire aircraft and the weariness of the pilots."

Weariness means weariness i.e. tiredness, lack of sleep, need to relax some R and R. Had the reason been losses, then I have no doubt they would have said losses. There is no shame in that and a number of RAF sqadrons were withdrawn during the war from the battles in 1940 to the Battle of Britain, the far east and the RAF never hesitated to say, losses were the reason.

Aircraft wear out, they need regular maintanence, you can push an aircraft past its regular servicing schedule so far, but sooner or later it needs to be done. As mentioned in my earlier posting I gave examples of squadrons being pulled out of the front line for reequipping, retraining and even one wing that was told to hold back due to losses. This was 122 wing and they were told not to go out in groups of less than 16 for a short period of time.
With reduced resources you have to cut your cloth for what you have available and the decisions seem sensible to me. If you have artillery that can do counter battery work then let them have first go, why not, thats what they were designed to do.

You keep going on about unarmoured Typhoons and that clearly isn't the case they were well protected against mg fire, with the obvious radiator problem. Obviously they were not as well protected as the Il 2 but that doesn't mean that they were lacking protection. You have not denied that the IL 2 would have been a much easier target to hit, as well as the losses, the availability rate for the IL 2 units might make interesting reading. They may well make it home when others wouldn't but those holes need to be repaired, and that takes time.

I could be wrong about the Wresel Bridge but my understanding was that these were more akin to a viaduct with massive foundations and the actual spans being some 75 meters in the air. Should this be the case an AP bomb would simply go through it and explode below with little impact on the span. Should you hit the foundation you would need some serious explosive to do any damage, a 1000 lb wouldn't even come close.
The Seine Bridges were a lot smaller and closer to the ground/water. Also most of them were stone bridges not steel bridges. With a stone bridge the blast will do a lot of damage to the stone structure, with a steel bridge the blast will simply go past the girders doing little if any damage.

Eventually you can wear them down but the Allied forces put a lot of effort into detroying those bridge with little benefit and I cannot see how the VVS would have done any better, they didn't have the equipment.

[tcolvin]

Originally Posted by MW Giles

Mr Colvin

Have you looked at the US Air Force studies series and in particular study

175 U) The Russian Air Force in the Eyes of the German Commanders, by Walter Schwabedissen, edited by Edward P. Kennedy (1960). 434 pages.

It is interesting to read German thoughts on the Russians as presented to an American audience, but might get you further with your question about the VVS. Too much for me to summarise in a thread like this

Downloading the PDFs is free

http://www.afhra.af.mil/studies/numb...ies151-200.asp

Regards

Martin

Thank you for the reference, Martin.
I did read Schwabedissen years ago in McMaster University Library, and quoted it in an earlier posting, but never obtained a copy.
The problem is that for many, including Bill Walker, Schwabedissen is not treated as authoritative but just part of the noise.
I hope one consequence of this thread, which rarely and thankfully for those I initiate has not collapsed in acrimony, will be that someone will pick up the subject of the comparison of the VVS with the UK/US TAFs, and make sense of it. It's an important gap in our knowledge.

Tony

[Bill Walker]

Not part of the noise Tony (at least to me), but one of many different views, expressed from many different backgrounds. The truth lies somewhere in the mix. Or maybe the truth is the mix.

Schwabedissen, and others in the German high command, may have been more worried about the VVS than the RAF. And it was the Russians who got to Berlin first. But the Germans were still unable to stop the RAF in the West or the Mediterranean.

[Juha]

Hello Glider
on Soviet options to attack heavy bridges, the re were some but none optimal.
1) Pe-2s, some soviet units were very good in hitting bridges but the bomb load of Pe-2 was light, even against German AA-ship Niobe, which Soviets thought to be Finnish coastal BB Väinämöinen, the bomb load of attacking Pe-2 dive-bombers was 2 x 250kg (550lb) and 2 x 100kg (220lb) per plane.
2) Tu-2 level bombers, it was a fast plane and could carry 1000kg (2200lb) bomb, standard level bomber of VVS in 45.
3) If nothing other worked there were possibility to use Pe-8/5000kg (11000lb) combination even if I recall only night bombing ops by this combination.


On Il-2, even if its armour limited its ordnance carrying capacity it made it invulnerable against rifle calibre fire and that was good for the morale of the crews and bad for the morale of enemy infantry because it had no effective way to return fire. Il-2 was the main reason why Finns modified their obsolete 20mm A/T rifles to capable to automatic fire and distributed them to troops as an ad-hoc infantry AA weapon so that infantry would have something which would hurt Il-2 if one was able to hit one.

Juha

[glider1]

Hi Juha
As ever all good points. I have to doff my hat to the Finn's they always seemed to make something out of nothing. Can you imagine the recoil of an auto AT rifle.

[Juha]

Hello Glider
On 20mm modified A/T rifle. The idea was to chop a young tree, fix the rifle on the top of the remaining trunk and voila, you have 20mm automatic AA gun ready to fire. Soldiers could carry the weapon, 2 men job, where ever they went. If I succeed to upload a picture, You can see how it was meant to be used.

On recoil, one young lieutenant, who was once my temporary troop CO (during my compulsory military service) once told me that when he first time fired an unmodified 20mm A/T rifle it broke his collar bone. He made a mistake to fire while standing in a narrow trench without being well enough prepared to the kick.

Juha

[ian hunt]

Sorry Juha, no disrespect intended but I couldn't resist this one ...

I now have this image of two poor guys on the edge of a field, surrounded by a hail of exploding cannon shells all around them from the Sturmovik diving down on them, desperately trying to chop the top off a tree so they can tie their A/T Rifle to it and fire back!

(Joke, honest!)

Ian