Allied air superiority in 1944: P-47 D Razorback decided it?

[Paul Thompson]

Originally Posted by drgondog

I do feel that Colonel Bill Cummings was less aggressive than Blakeslee, Martin, Zemke, Mason, Dregne and several others of 1943 and 1944 vintage. ...

Hello Bill,

That’s a valuable sketch of Cummings’ command style. I would think it shows that he was something of a by-the-book officer and focused on the primary mission assigned to him, namely protecting the bombers. The overall statistics that you describe are a firm testament to his success, in my view, since the group still performed very well in air combat, despite his deliberately restrained tactics.

Originally Posted by drgondog

The LW could always out dive the P-38 because of the critical Mach issues arising from its fat wing - but not the P-47 or P-51, and in particular the P-51 because of the delayed drag rise of the laminar flow wing coupled with only a small movement of the Center of pressure during the Mach transition. ...

The successful adoption of the laminar flow wing on the Mustang was one of many ways in which the US exploited its overwhelming technological superiority in the closing years of the war. The RAF did use the laminar flow wing on the Spitfire XIV, but this was a compromise modification of an old design, rather than a new product like the Mustang. The biggest problem that the USAAF had, and which persists to this day, is the grotesquely extended time it took to get any version of the Mustang to the battlefield. Even the A-36 made it to the MTO only in mid-1943, which was far too long. In short, the Mustang was half a generation ahead of its contemporaries and could have had an even greater impact if it was developed more quickly.
The first Thunderbolt sub-type with the dive flaps might be the P-47D-30-RA/RE, but the sources I have are contradictory. I would point out that all late Bf 109s had even worse problems with stick forces than the Thunderbolt, so in comparative terms the USAAF was well off even with the early P-47s.

Originally Posted by drgondog

Many of the future fighter aces and flight/squadron leaders may have been taken out of the fight - thereby delaying the crushing combination of many experienced pilots - quickly- with the technical tools of parity or better in the escort aircraft.

It is difficult to assess this, it was certainly a possibility. The one thing that makes me believe that this would be unlikely is the USAAF attitude to loss rates. Apart from heavy bombers and even then in a relatively limited set of cases, the USAAF did not accept high casualties and would go far to avoid them. The Ploesti raid is an extreme example, where a single high-risk raid was only followed up when the operational conditions were completely transformed.

Originally Posted by drgondog

Paul - the Mustang equipped 52nd, 31st, 325th FG's continued at a solid pace, far outstripping the 332nd.. but the 332nd Did outscore (slightly) the P-38 equipped 1st, 14th and 82nd FG's in the same time the 332nd got Mustangs.

You are correct, the other Mustang groups of the 15th were more successful, possibly due to their superior experience. The comparison with the Lightning groups might be a little inappropriate, since they were used as dive-bombers fairly regularly after June 1944. I don’t know much about the effective strength of various fighter groups in combat, but the following tidbits from Mahoney’s book on the 15th are interesting. On 17 July, the 332nd flew escort with 46 P-51s, while the 325 flew 47 Mustangs on 5 September and 58 on 14 October. I draw the tentative conclusion that the 332nd may not have put more aircraft in the air than other groups, at least in the routine cases.

Originally Posted by drgondog

To get to the ratio of Victory Credits to Perceived Cause of Losses due to Air Combat, somebody will have to pull all the MACRs and make some judgments regarding Cause. Personally I looked at more that 13000 ETO Macrs and read every one to parse "Definitely shot down" to "Last seen in combat with enemy air" to 'Last seen in vicinity of reported enemy air" to 'Unknown". When developing my statistics for my book "Our Might Always - History of the 355th FG", I assigned each of the first three categories to "Loss to air to air combat".

The volume of information you sorted through is incredible! How long did the MACR project take you to complete?

Regards,

Paul