Response to Glider and Juha.

[Kurfürst]

Originally Posted by Nick Beale

I suggest you take a look at the experiences of the Ju 87s sent against the Remagen bridge in daylight. They missed and they lost many aircraft to Flak.

Without doubt these attacks were unsuccessful, but I think the point is rather how what weapons system/doctrine is better suited for such task in general (rather than in single cases). A lone 109E Jabo finished off a cruiser for example at Crete in 1941, but it was a lucky hit, and would make a very exceptional case for Jabo effectiveness. They had their place of course, and planes dropping bombs were certainly better than planes dropping no bombs.

BTW there's talk in this thread of a Ju 87 with an 1800 kg bomb — can you imagine how slowly that would fly? Sonderverband Einhorn tried the same load on Fw 190 F-8s but rapidly gave up in favour of 1000 kg weapons.

The SC 1800 was one of most widely used bombs on the Eastern Front. I have a table somewhere about the number of bombs dropped, and the SC 1800 was indeed dropped in insane numbers (not only by Stukas, as 111s, 88 etc. were also well capable of carrying them). As for the speed loss, it was a big bomb for sure, but I am not sure OTOH if it had any more serious effect on speed than the other common load of three 1x500 + 2x250 kg(or2x500kg) bombs. As for the 190F, the SC 1800 was possible, but honestly a quite a bit of an (impressive) overload for such a small fighter, not only due to weight but also because of limited ground clearance with such an enormous bomb, whereas the Stuka was much bigger and could handle it well.

Secondly the Stuka was slow in cruise, no matter what it carried, generally trotting around at 250 km/h or so. The bombing runs from steep or later in the war, more gentle dives were made at high speed though.