Daryl Hunt
Your Worst Nightmare
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- Banned
- #61
You can have a great Multirole fighter but when you have only one task left, going after bombers and their escort, it doesn´t mean anything anymore.Look it up, then.They were awaiting conversion. The fuel tank got smaller and a bomb bay was added. As I already noted. Hitler was manic about it and the involved people were forbidden to call it a fighter because it had to be a Blitzbomber.No, there wasn't. Not even close. Germany produced slightly over 1,400 262's. Less than 300 of them ever saw combat. Why do you think that is?
An absolutely laughable assertion.
In the middle of 1943 when they started the Bomber Fortress idea in daylight bombing you are right and it was even worse than that. But it ended up averaging out about what you claim. After October of 1943, the bomber losses dropped to almost zero but the new fighter escort losses went way, way up. This also made the win/loss record for the P-38 look very deceptive. The Luftwaffe changed tactics and even with the new P-51 coming on line, the bomber losses came back on line but not nearly as deadly. And by March of 1944, the bomber losses were almost zero to Luftwaffe fighters but there were still plenty of losses to AA to go around. By Jan 1945, the AA was almost silent as well. The Multi Role Fighters did their jobs and did them well.
With the P-47 and the P-38 being based out of France, there wasn't a place in Germany that was safe from them. Of course, this was after the last time that the Luftwaffe had massed their entire Fighter Force and tried to cripple the Allied Fighters stationed in France and failed miserably. And, yes, there was a lot of luck involved on the P-47s side that day that the P-47s spotted the attacking force enabling the P-51s time to launch as well as the other P-47s. And there just wasn't enough experienced Luftwaffe Pilots in those seats either. But it was a good gamble. It really was a gamble, use those fighters in battle or lose them on the ground for the Luftwaffe. I know there used to be clip from the Discovery Channel that documented this but I can't find it now. Such a grand gamble. By that late in the war, the P-38 and the P-47 were doing the greater damage to the German war effort than the P-51 since the P-38 and the P-47 could take out locomotives, tanks and just about anything they ran across. But let a Luftwaffe Fighter show up and if the P-51 didn't bag them in the air, the Mustang would follow it home and bag it either on landing or on the ground. Or maybe, the P-38 or the P-47 would have enough gas left and have empty racks and do the fighter thing as well. That's one of the advantages of a Multi Role Fighter.
The 109 was designed as a point defense fighter. And it was very good at it. Until later fighters came on line, it was the best at it. It was a one trick pony and all it's design was to do just that job. If it was only to go up against other fighters, they would have put in more than 2 12.7mm machine guns. Instead, they put in those nasty cannons for the bombers. Since it was a point defense fighter, range really wasn't that important. It did bite them in the butt for the battle of britain though when they tried to use it as a bomber escort which took it outside of it's wheelhouse.