my book is from 2004, with the most up-to date numbers. Some internet material is unreliable or outdated.
german forces in stalingrad were cut-off for 2 and half months, and continued fighting. taking weapons/supplies from the enemy. but I doubt the soviets would have to deal with such a situation.
Here goes then for every source that says that the Typhoon/Tempest etc were feared tank killers. Just for you Hosenfield:
The tank-busting Typhoon fighter also carried armour-piecing rockets which were more than a match for the Tiger’s armour
After further examination Mr.Varin concluded that the impact came from the air. The rocket hit Tiger’s rear deck (made of 25mm thick armor), penetrated the air intakes and exploded causing the explosion in the engine compartment and fighting compartment which ignited the stored ammunition. The second explosion instantly killed the entire crew and blew off the turret into the air. According to Varin, Wittmann’s Tiger was destroyed by a rocket fired from a Royal Air Force Hawker “Typhoon” MkIB - attack aircraft. Typhoons were armed with HE (High-explosive) rockets and took heavy tow of German tanks during the Normandy battles (for example on August 8th of 1944, Typhoons destroyed 135 German tanks and among those Tiger #007).
This source is talking about the destruction of Michael Wittmann’s tank
The Typhoon claim is also supported by a report from a local who said that there was damage consistent with a rocket hit to the engine deck, but can be doubted as the RAF do not seem to have been in the area at noon – although they were heavily involved later that day and may well have attacked the stationary wreck.
The Typhoon IB, affectionately known as the “Tiffy”, distinguished itself particularly in the Battle of Normandy, where it decimated a large concentration of armor ahead of Avranches, disposing of 137 tanks, and opening the way for the liberation of France and Belgium.
From the beginning of 1944 the build up of 2nd Tactical Air Force resulted in more and more Typhoon squadrons being formed and by D-Day there were no fewer than twenty-six equipped with the type. The Typhoon reached the height of its fame operating as a tank destroyer.
During his career, Rudel flew over 2530 (around 400 of his sorties were flown in a Focke-Wulf 190 fighter plane during whichhe was credit with 11 air victories) missions and destroyed around 150 various artillery pieces, 519 tanks, around 1000 various vehicles, 70 landing crafts, 2 Lavochkin La-3 fighters, Il-2 Stormovik and sunk Battleship “Marat”, 2 Cruisers and a Destroyer.
Need any more proof that large numbers of tanks were destroyed by aircraft Hosenfield? I’m bored of going through Google finding all of this that you could have found by yourself.
I know about Rudel, but Rudel is an exception. He was an ace. He fought in teh spanish civil war, and the WHole world war 2. normandy was two months.
yes, i know that the rocket can go through the top armor of a tiger. But the rockets, statiscally, almost always missed the tank.
Wittman’s death is debatable. He was more probably destroyed by the 5 shermans which included a firefly in the bunch.
yes, but around 100 panzers were destroyed by aircraft during the normandy battles.
According to Glantz’ Battle of Kursk,in the greatest of all armor battles, the losses of panzers to Soviet Sturmoviks was 3.5% of all panzers.
Point is, the loss rates of armor to aircraft is very,very low. Most tanks are destroyed by paks, other tanks, AT mines, infantry at weapons.
Why were the Germans so terrified of Allied air power then? Why are you saying that only 100 were destroyed in the whole of the Normandy campaign when 137 were destroyed in one engagement?
Wittmann’s tank was almost certainly destroyed by an aircraft, apparently the damage to his tank could only have come from an aircraft.
Rockets were inaccurate, but when you have hundreds of aircraft, all carrying eight rockets, the inaccuracy doesn’t matter.
Panthers operated with great success on both the Eastern and Western fronts. They were especially effective against U.S. Sherman tanks and British Cromwell tanks in northern France during the Normandy campaign, though they remained vulnerable to attack by Allied aircraft
Why was the Panther so vulnerable to Allied air power if their losses against aircraft were so low?
the germans were terrified of aircraft b/c
- artillery spotting
- They could straff troops and columns of “soft targets” (trucks, etc.) repeatedly.
- allies could call carpet-bombers.
rockets are inaccurate even when the whole load of 8 are fired. those firing tests included mass firing. when so many are fired, they disperse from the target, and hitting it becomes just pure luck.
the panther was not any more vulnerable then anyother german tank. in fact, less vulnerable because it could move faster. why doesn’t brittanicca mention the other tanks, particularily the slower, larger tiger being vulnerable?? I don’t think the encyclopedia piece were written by true experts. it seems like a “copy and paste” job to me.
cannon and mg fire( less then 30mm) aren’t strong enough to pierce german armor.
it may be hard to hit one speeding tank, but if you have say 50 all grouped together, they make a very big target. more then 100 tanks would have been killed throughout the operation just by lucky hits. if you have a group of 50 tanks, with 50 planes firing 8 missles apiece, then your bound to hit some of them.
Did you bother to open the link? It’s a description of all the German tanks of the war. I’m sure Encyclopedia Britannica would give you a job, since you know so much more than their current writers :roll:
The British used 40mm cannon on Hurricanes to take out tanks, the Germans used 40mm and 57mm guns on Stukas (many of Rudel’s kills were with guns), the Soviets used 37mm cannon.
To be honest, I can’t be arsed arguing this any more, believe what you like. Why should I waste my time arguing with you? I’d be better off discussing the Falklands War with Erwin.
german panzers in normandy were almost never grouped together that closely. There simply weren’t enough panzers to do that.
a lot of the 10 panzer divisions in france went to battle with less then 90 tanks, if you discount reinforcement.
and, there was no point in grouping tanks so closely. The panther and tigers could take superior enemy numbers easily w/o doing that. the tigers were generally used in numbers no more then 5 per mission.
the main time where massed german armor was present was in the blitzkreig victories of 1939-1941 and the battle of kursk. But even there,with hordes of sturmoviks, the losses remained a palsy 3.5 %.
Did you bother to open the link? It’s a description of all the German tanks of the war. I’m sure Encyclopedia Britannica would give you a job, since you know so much more than their current writers :roll:
The British used 40mm cannon on Hurricanes to take out tanks, the Germans used 40mm and 57mm guns on Stukas (many of Rudel’s kills were with guns), the Soviets used 37mm cannon.
To be honest, I can’t be arsed arguing this any more, believe what you like. Why should I waste my time arguing with you? I’d be better off discussing the Falklands War with Erwin.[/quote]
yes i did open the link. And i have books in my bookcase about german panzers, in greater detail.
the 40mm , 57mm fired quite slow. most fighter bombers have 20mm. Have you seen the size of the high -caliber cannons? they hang below the fueleage and are enormous. a heavy burden on flying characteristics.
second of all, you haven’t proved me anything except that the fighter-bombers possess weaponry capable of destroying an enemy tank stupid enough to venture out into an open field.
I would suggest that Kursk is a different scenario to Normandy. Here, the battle is open and fluid and targets will invariably be moving. Additionally, the weight of Soviet armour would be greedily eating up kills to keep the percentage killed by aircraft low.
In Normandy, I would imagine the battle is far less open and fast moving, that tanks are in confined spaces (fields, congested narrow country lanes etc), in column on road ways and possibly encircled as at Falaise.
It is widely acknowledged that aircraft such as the Typhoon and P-47 (and even Spitfires) gave even the Panzer units in Normady a thorough pasting. Were they the only units doing so? No. But in terrain such as that found in Normandy, kills were probably bound to be more biased to aerial attack than they would be at, say, Kursk. It’s fairly intuitive if you pause to give it some thought.
All the evidence seems to suggest that such aerial attack WAS significant. Just at a random lift from a simple Google…
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/535193/posts
Or http://aeroweb.brooklyn.cuny.edu/history/wwii/d-day/15.htm
Extremely bitter fighting broke out between Polish and retreating German forces, but the Poles were able to retain control until the gap closed on August 21. The countryside around the Dives and Orne rivers was generally open, with sporadic patches of forested areas. The high ground across the Dives-specifically Mont Ormel-furnished an unparalleled vista of the entire gap area. In the third week of August 1944, this vista was marred by the near-constant bursting of bombs, rockets, and artillery, the ever-present drone of fighter-bombers and small artillery spotters (the latter especially feared and loathed by German forces), the corpses of thousands of German personnel and draft animals, and the burning and shattered remains of hundreds of vehicles and tanks. It was a scene of carnage without parallel on the Western Front.
In the days before the closing of the Falaise gap, the 2 TAF averaged 1,200 sorties per day. The air war was particularly violent from August 15 through the 21st. Typhoons and Spitfires attacked the roads leading from the gap to the Seine, strafing columns of densely packed vehicles and men. Under repeated attack, some of the columns actually displayed white flags of surrender, but the RAF took “no notice” of this since Allied ground forces were not in the vicinity, and “to cease fire would merely have allowed the enemy to move unmolested to the Seine.” Typhoons typically would destroy the vehicles at the head of a road column, then leisurely shoot up the rest of the vehicles with their rockets and cannon. When they finished, Spitfires would dive down to strafe the remains.
Because the Luftwaffe was absent over the battlefield, Broadhurst directed 2 TAF wings to operate their aircraft in pairs. Thus, a “two ship” of Spitfires or Typhoons could return to the gap after being refueled and rearmed without waiting for a larger formation to be ready to return. This maximized the number of support sorties that could be flown, and, indeed, pilots of one Canadian Spitfire wing averaged six sorties per day. Nothing that moved was immune from what one Typhoon pilot recollected as “the biggest shoot-up ever experienced by a rocket Typhoon pilot.” Another recalled the flavor of attack operations:
The show starts like a well-planned ballet: the Typhoons go into echelon while turning, then dive on their prey at full throttle. Rockets whistle, guns bark, engines roar and pilots sweat without noticing it as our missiles smash the Tigers. Petrol tanks explode amid torrents of black smoke. A Typhoon skids away to avoid machine fire. Some horses frightened by the noise gallop wildly in a nearby field.
Nor was Falaise strictly a 2 TAF operation; the AAF was also heavily committed. Over the duration of the Falaise fighting, air strikes gradually moved from west of Argentan to north, to east, and finally to east of the Dives River. One strike by P47s on August 13 gives a graphic indication of the sizes of German forces open to attack
That morning 37 P-47 pilots of the 36th Group found 800 to 1,000 enemy vehicles of all types milling about in the pocket west of Argentan. They could see American and British forces racing to choke off the gap. They went to work. Within an hour the Thunderbolts had blown up or burned out between 400 and 500 enemy vehicles. The fighter-bombers kept at it until they ran out of bombs and ammunition. One pilot, with empty gun chambers and bomb shackles, dropped his belly tank on 12 trucks and left them all in flames.
All told, on 13 August, XIX TAC fighter-bombers destroyed or damaged more than 1,000 road and rail vehicles, 45 tanks and armored vehicles, and 12 locomotives. Inside the pocket they reduced 10 enemy delaying-action strong points to rubble.
Four days later another Thunderbolt squadron, below-strength, flew over a huge traffic jam, radioed for assistance, “and soon the sky was so full of British and American fighter-bombers that they had to form up in queues to make their bomb runs.” The next day, 36th Group Thunderbolts spotted another large German formation, marked out by yellow artillery smoke. Since the vehicles were in a zone designated as a British responsibility, XIX TAC sat back “disconsolately” while 2 TAF launched a series of strikes that claimed almost 3,000 vehicles damaged or destroyed. On August 19, one Spitfire wing put in a claim for 500 vehicles destroyed or damaged in a single day; that same day, another Spitfire wing claimed 700.
“destroyed or damaged 45 tanks and armored vehicles”
the germans had several hundreds of SPW 251 troop carrier armored vehicles and scores of armored recon cars in normandy
note ; 45 destroyed or damaged. the tanks are grouped with the armored cars/spws. The majority, for certain, are not tanks.
SPWs and armored cars are vulnerable to all weapons on fighter-bombers, including the fast firing 50 cal mgs and higher. they accompanied panzers to battle.
I never said air power was not important; it was devastating. It was devastingn to soft targets, armored cars, SPWs, trucks, etc. but not as big as a threat to tanks.
However this is merely the American component’s quarry on ONE DAY.
the normandy battles were around 80 days long. The germans eventually lost practically all their armored equipment. if this "biggest shootout ever " ay was repeated say, every 3 days,(grossly exaggerated estimate) there would be approx 1,200 SPWs, Tanks, Armored recon cars destroyed.
approx. spw strength (understrength estimates)
panzer lehr: 650
The other 9 divisions:300 each
approx. 3,350 spws
armored cars
10 x circa. 60 per panzer division
approx 600
armored recon companies for infantry divisions/independant KGs 20x 25=500
tanks + assault guns= 2,400
600+ 2400+ 3,350 +500=6,850 armored vehicles.
1,200 destroyed by this estimate, forsay, by air power
The action at Falaise lasted much less time than the Normandy campaign in it’s entirety, and would have presented far more concentrated targets in literal “traffic jams”. which means that your Maths is based on incorrect assumptions that hunting would always be this good.
of course, its incorrect. its way too optimistic. my point is the figure that I see in my book, which is explained by pilot over-claiming is that 100 tanks were destroyed by F-B is realistic. its a 5.5% rate, which is higher then the kursk rate 3.5%.
note, that 100 tanks are destroyed, but this figure doesn’t account for damaged armor.
Again, you are using the Kursk rate for comparison when in all truth, the comparison is flimsy. You’ve seen the tactics being used in Normandy. It wasn’t an open battle across plains at any stretch. Whole formations were easily immobilised on narrow roads and then aircraft were literally queueing up to have a crack at them. Also sheer weight of numbers of armoured vehicles and artillery ‘locking horns’ so to speak at Kursk could easily dilute the kill rate for air support. If you look at the information provided to you here, the RAF and USAAF were destroying enormous German columns on congested routes, which had no hope of being engaged with Allied land forces. That is far richer pickings than Panzer’s speeding across open terrain in tactical formations rather than traffic jams.
EDIT: I should also add that since the Allied aircraft were based “locally” as soon as possible, they could maintain quite formidable sortie rates each day. So who cares if rockets have a 3% hit rate? There’d be enough Tiffy’s flying enough sorties each day to still chew threw the German Panzer unit’s order of battle at a decent rate.
Well enlightening as this argument has been, it has showed one thing.
The soviets would have sufferred the same fate as the Germans at the hands of the Allied air fleets.
Tanks on their own, not matter how invulnarable to air strikes (yet to be conclusively proven either way here) would not have won a war between the Western Allies and Soviets.
well not entirely, because before d-day german airfields had been repeatedly bombed, and the plains had almost no fuel-so they could barely fly any planes that day. this left german targets wide open. in an invasion of the soviet union, at least in the first stages, the soviet air force would still be strong enough to battle the allies and protect their tanks.
first of all, the 100 tanks destroyed is a real figure, that is documented in my book. 100 tanks destroyed does not include damaged, tanks by straffing, which i am sure is much more. maybe another 200 damaged, but thats just a guess.
You say the figures for kursk don’t count in the “bocage” but then again you compare kursk with normandy without factual basis. You think german armor formations were always moving at kursk! Formations still need to be refueled, or halt to rest or change direction. The kurks battle was an insanely armor-rich condensed battleground for Soviet Sturmoviks.
I do agree that the germans suffered heavy material losses from airpower, but the columns that were destroyed “easily” were most likely columsn of horse-drawn wagons, trucks, and light armored vehicles, which all can be destroyed by fast-firing and easier to use machine guns.