G' day fellows.....

Have you seen this website? Aces of the Luftwaffe

Old news ...

:-) :-) :-)

Shoot! Thought that I did something good here.....lol!

Hi Jan

in case you do not know .. Rowan made me the "keeper of the holy Luftwaffe grail" so I should know the one or other Lw related site ....

if you want to know something about Luftwaffe .. just ask .. I do not know everything, but maybe we can find out what you are looking for

cheers

Steffen

I'll keep that in mind O' Keeper of the Holy Luftwaffe Grail....

Hi there O' Keeper of the Holy Luftwaffe Grail

It actually might be a really neat idea if you did a post with a round-up of your favourite Luftwaffe reference sites. I'll suggest it to the other O'Keepers (the famous Irish family ) too.

All the best

Rowan

Jan,

I'm fairly new to this site so it was a new one to me - I have bookmarked it so thanks for bringing it to my attention.

I dont really agree with everything on the website - such as how the USAF was the best air force, the P-51 the best fighter and the (worst of all) B-17/B-24 the best bombers. Granted the P-51 was a superb aircraft as was the 109e, spitfire, fw190 previous to it - perhaps the P-51 was the best at the end of the war but comparing it to the Spitfire Mk.I for example is pointless. As for the B-17......suffice to say it had 1/3rd the bomb load of the Lancaster.

Regards,

Lee

Hi Rowan and all others too

that is not so easy as I do have a collection of links but I do not follow them regularily and just look when I need something (so there may be some outdated links.. As the links section of the IPMS D site has evolved from my bookmarks it might be a good start:

scroll down from here:
http://www.ipmsdeutschland.de/IPMSlinks.html#Vorbild

Three most valuable Forums are:

12 o'clock High of Ruy Horta

LEMB by Peter Evans

and LWAG (I'm not sure who the host is, maybe Richard T. Eger)

on all three board are people of knowledge that is faaaaaar beyond mine and the boards together are god like or better like the Olympus Mons (no not on Mars) as somtimes the gods can't agree to disagree ...

HTH

cheers

Steffen

P.S. Rowan could you please convince staff_Jim to make the links more visible again .. I am observing this for some days now and they are so easy to miss

I know what you mean Lee. If I could choose a US fighter from WWII I'm not so sure that I would choose the Mustang. The Thunderbolt could take more punishment and the F4U Corsair isn't a bad fighter either. I also have to admit that I have a soft spot for the P-38 Lightning too.
As for the bombers, I don't know. The Lancaster could take a heavier load but wasn't as heavily defended as the B-17 or B-24 and then of course we have the B-29.....lol! This something that we could talk about back and forth for ages....lol!

The Lanc is one of the few RAF birds I like. But comparing it to B-17 is comparing a Hawker Hurricane to a Hawker Tempest. Clearly an apples and oranges comparison.

Bomb load isn't everything; bomb load in regards to operating doctrine is. Bad as B-17 losses were, no Lancaster would have survived in daylight missions against anything but token fighter opposition. Recall that even at night, Bomber Command suffered losses equal to and even exceeding 8th AF for most of the war.

B-17 was 6 years old when Lancaster came to be. It is estimated B-17 (and B-24) carried 6000 lbs more in gunners, guns, ammo and armor than Lancaster.

B-17 had a higher gross weight, more wing area (hence more drag) for slightly less engine power. Yet B-17 could operate over two miles higher than Lancaster.
Even the heaviest B-17, G model, was marginally faster than the Lanc.

Max ranges were (min. bomb loads) 1850 for B-17 and 2700 for Lanc.

B-17 suffered from a restrictive relatively small bomb bay. A Lanc could have carried a B-17 in its bomb bay (hyperbole).

Compare B-24 with Lancaster. Lanc is still newer, younger, but the B-25 had the same weight detriments as B-17 yet compares more favorabley with Lanc.

Out to 1500 miles the Lanc carried 7000 lbs of bombs. To the same range B-17 hauled 5000 and B-24 5800. But B-24 could carry Lancaster's 7000 lbs 60% farther, as the RAF demonstrated in the CBI.

Comparing Lancaster with B-17 is like comparing Lancaster with B-29, though that would be more equitable. Lancaster could not have flown the type of mission profile ant of the USAAF heavies flew, while any USAAF heavy could have been stripped down and done the job of Lancaster, except maybe match Avro's cavernous bomb bay.

Iconoclastically,

Fred Nighttime Area Bombing by RAF

You guys are right, these are debates that can go on forever.

But to have a subjective debate, we must consider where / how the fighter is meant to be employed. also, you have to compare the fighters that were operating at the same time. Compare a P-51H to a F4U-1, or an F4U-4 to a F4U? Not fair.

P-47D was faster than P-51D at higher altitudes. Japanese Ki-84 'Frank' was (if it had the right gas and everything was working) was faster than P-51D at 18-20000' by a few knots.

F4U-1 was faster than Bf-109G (until the G-14s or so) until they got down below about 10000. Then their performance were same, and the aerodynamics gave the edge to Messerschmitt.

I have read a comparison that below 15000 that F4U outperformed P-51D in all dog fighting skills. Then there is Corky Meyer's story about extensively testing the stock F4U against the stock F6F for a year. There was almost nothing to choose from (except Hellcat wasn't a vicious 'Ensign Eliminator').

The Luftwaffe should have defended the Reich with P-47s and tackled escorting P-51s with P-47s or Corsairs, (using only US fighters). The Soviets should have scrapped their in-line fighters and relied only on radials since they operated low. USN was smart to never use an inline engine and the Spitfire/Seafire was an awful carrier plane.

The great Eric Brown wrote in his book Duels in the Sky that if he had to duel 1 V 1 to the death using only P-51D and Spitfire XIV, he would be torn and rely on national pride and take Spitfire.

OK Fred, all fair points but as a Brit, I do tend to be rather patriotic and you cannot underestimate the ability of the Lanc to carry the huge bomb load. I mean, would we have sunk the Tirpitz without Tall Boy? Who knows, but overall the ability to carry the Tallboy and the Grand Slam were unique to the Lancaster. We could of course debate this all day long but I know you are right, you can't really compare them effectively as other than being area bombers they frequently did have different operational requirements.

An interesting link for anyone interested in Tallboy missions -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tallboy_bomb

Lee

I think that you can say (maybe I stick my head in the noose here) the same the business of strafing and low level attack....
There you have the fighterbombers.... Tempest, Typhoon, Thunderbolt and versions of the Fw 190. There the Mustang wasn't the best of choises because its V-12, a few times I've read about the P-47 bringing home its pilot where the Mustang would have hit the ground. I don't know about the Tempest and Typhoon though. I gues that could have been the same there as with the Mustang since they too had inline engines. But that's as far as I know.

hey guys if we're talking Luftwaffe sites, I'm going to plug my own here... ..

http://members.aol.com/falkeeins

not specifically modelling orientated but some exclusive material..!! I guess I'm not on Steffen's list as most of my site is translated from German language material..

I also moderate over at the LEMB - drop by sometime ...

one comment re Fred's post ....LOL
...forget the B-17 ..and the Lanc ...the US 8th AF should have bombed Germany with squadrons of Mossies!

Hi Lee,

Lancaster is one of the greatest heavy bombers ever! No denying it. Carrying bombs to target reliably, I'd say it beats B-29, which was plagued by technical problems from its rushed development. B-29 was a good and neccesary concept, but did consume huge resources for the results it got.

B-29 could carry Tallboy--the operation to bomb an earthquake fault along some city where large war plants were situated, can't recall the specifics.

B-29 with Tallboy's?

Was that in Europe or the Far East Fred?

Lee