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RE: "Air Aces" to be aired on the Mltr. Chl.

brad kaste

brad kaste

Charter Member
RE: "Air Aces" to be aired on the Mltr. Chl.

Starting this Sunday (August 4th) evening, the Military Channel will begin to air it's series 'Air Aces.' This is a continuation of the series that was first shown in 2007. I believe 'Air Aces' has already been shown in Canada and England. Anyway,...the previews on TV look pretty good. The first two 60 minute episodes focuses on George Beurling and Douglas Bader.
http://military.discovery.com/tv-shows/air-aces/about-this-show/about-air-aces.htm
 
I very much enjoyed the first two episodes. I like the focus on the pilots and their judgments and tactical choices in their operations. The episode on Bader included one pilot who criticized his tactical judgment of going low to the ground of their Rhubarb sweeps, but I think that pilot missed the point. Going in high reserved the fighters to shooting down Luftwaffe aircraft when airborne. Going in low in reality was simply the required method to beat up airfields and destroy enemy aircraft on the ground. Bader wisely knew that whether you destroyed an aircraft on the ground or in the air made little difference. In truth, a successful attack on an airfield could destroy numerous enemy aircraft. During the war, eventually, ground kills were recorded the same as aerial victories.

In what is among the more frustrating things for me is a return to this nonsensical view that aerial victories are worth more. The US Air Force reversed policy after the war and deducted all the ground victories from pilot tallies. Stupidity incarnate! It was more dangerous to attack the airbases due to the heavy concentration of flak. The RAF pilot who provided the criticism seemed to assert that he blamed Bader for being reckless and cavalier. Well, my response would be that Bader was ahead of his time in tactical brilliance. He knew how to win the air war.

Anyway, it was an excellent first two episodes and I hope to see many more to come!

Ken
 
Great stuff so far...the personal background details spoke volumes for me. Its always good to know the "warrior" inside the warrior. ;)
 
I watched the first one, on George Beurling. The show says that the RAF wouldn't award him a victory because nothing showed up on the gun camera footage, explaining that this was due to the fact that Beurling was using deflection shooting and the camera was pointed forwards. The show made it sound like Beurling invented the entire concept of deflection shooting, and that the hapless RAF pilots had never heard of such a thing, which I would think unlikely.

But. In John Lundstrom's book “The First Team”, he spends a lot of time on deflection shooting, pointing that the US Navy was unique among air forces of the world in that it trained its fighter pilots to use this more difficult technique from the earliest days of training, and to employ the technique over the much more risky practice of “parking” directly behind your target which, if it has a tail gunner, you present a nice stationary target for. These tactics were only possible, he says, because the navy used planes with short stubby noses, intended to provide visibility over the nose during carrier landings. A “side benefit” of short noses was the ability to see your target while pulling sufficient lead necessary for a 90 degree deflection shot. So, the reason land based air forces didn't train their pilots in the art of deflection shooting wasn't because they were unskilled, or had never heard of deflection shooting, but because the long noses of in-line engine planes made the technique almost impossible.

So, if Lundstrom is correct, how was it that Beurling could do it with one of the longest nosed fighters out there? Or, did the show get this aspect of the story completely wrong, and may hap there was another reason he wasn't awarded the victory? I find it impossible to believe the RAF didn't understand deflection shooting, as the show seemed to imply.
 
You can do it if you attack in the same vertical plane that the target occupies. Where the longer nose interferes is when you try to attack from the side and above. Then, it is extremely difficult to keep your alignment on the target because of not merely the nose, but also the truth that these fighters all had low wings.

The way to do it was to roll your own fighter with the wing on the side of the target a few degrees down and then use a bit of top rudder to counter the tendency for the aircraft to descend from the loss of lift plus also to counter the tendency for the plane to turn slowly in the direction of the lowered wing. Of course, this produced a slight yaw effect which complicated the gun solution even more. Further, the gun sights of the era did not compensate for any of this, so it was purely a visual maneuver where the pilot's brain worked as the targeting computer.

Overall, the prime problem was that deflection shooting was not a core part of fighter pilot training prior to the war, and overall, the state of fighter pilot training prior to the outbreak of the war was poor. Some good insights into the American problem can be found in the writings of Claire Chennault, who became an outcast in the USAAC simply because he ran counter to the mania that the "bombers will always get through," which proffered a self-convenient argument that so called pursuit aircraft were little more than toys good for airshows!

That might be a bit overly simplistic, but the cost of developing bombers like the B-17 ensured that fighter development lagged far behind bomber development in the United States.

The fact that RAF fighters entered the war with .303 machine guns proves the point further as it proved ineffective weaponry. At least the USAAC slowly moved to use of the .50 caliber but at the start of the war, the rest of its fighter technology was behind the Japanese and Germans. The British had the Spitfire but it did not morph into a true killer until it adopted the use of the 20mm cannon. Because of this anachronistic training within fighter units, pilots such as Chennault and Beurling were considered pariahs. Instead, they should have been embraced as leading thinkers. But, the allied military air forces generally suffered from overly rigid training standards long since relegated ineffective. The Luftwaffe enjoyed an edge gained from experience in Spain and had their fighers and fighter tactics honed to a better edge which they used to slaughter their way to superiority in the first year plus of the war. Only when ranges across the channel and RAF radar were placed before them (along with stupidly rigid "protect the bombers" tactics) did the Luftwaffe fighter pilots experience defeat courtesy of equally matched fighters with outgunned armaments.

Ken
 
It makes sense that you could make a 90 degree deflection run even with a long nosed Spitfire if the run was “in plane”, if I understand the concept. For example, both planes flying level, same altitude, and approaching at 90 degree angles to each other. In that situation, the Spitfire pilot could see the target during the entire run. But if the Spitfire pilot needed to adjust his aim to draw more lead, this approach would turn into one of the variations of a “side run”, and would no longer be “in-plane”, and now the target might be obscured, depending on how much lead he drew, either by the nose, or even, as you pointed out, by the wing, if you're in a fighter with the cockpit behind the wing. Lundstrom's account of US Navy training, which, by the way, was standard even pre-war, was to make side runs, high-side, low-side, whatever presented itself, and these are all “out-of-plane” maneuvers, mostly 90 degrees out of plane, if I'm correctly understanding the “in-plane”, “out-of-plane” concept. The way Lundstrom explained it, you approach the target from some bearing, preferably from the side or even ahead, but not “nose-to-nose” because you need some lateral separation, then roll your plane such that you are wings vertical, with respect to your target, and adjust lead by “pulling more or less” as necessary. To do this would require that you see your target throughout the run, and that is what wasn't possible with the typical land based in-line engine powered long nosed fighter of the day. And, oh-by-the-way, the famous Thatch Weave “assumed” this “doctrine”, since, if done correctly, the Zero would present a perfect 90 degree deflection shot to the “dash-2” pilot as the two Wildcats turned into each other... Dang, I gotta get CFS2 installed again! :icon_lol:
 
The third episode aired Sunday night here in the States. It was a good episode. I had long ago read of the episode depicted, but frankly, can a bomber crew really be called "Air Aces?"

I am aware of a small number of bombers crews who collectively were credited with five or more Luftwaffe kills in the ETO. I am not aware of any in the PTO given how infrequently Japanese Army and Navy Air Force units attacked bombers. Most of what did happen took place in the first year of the PTO war and frankly it was a mostly one-sided affair with the Japanese fighters mauling the bombers who then flew without fighter escort.

Likewise the majority of bomber crews engaged by fighters in the ETO did not survive long enough to tally five or more victories. A few did.

But, the Lancaster crew featured last night is known for a typical example of extreme heroism, something that frankly was too often ignored during and immediately after the war. It was only in 2012 that the RAF's Bomber Command received their first memorial in Great Britain! To my knowledge, they still have not received a command unit citation such as Fighter Command received, and it seems the prime reason is a rather dishonest reaction to the horrors of the bombing campaign by nations that were fully willing to benefit from the perception of "give it 'em back!" while it was happening, but horrified by the photos released after the war ended.

Returning to last night's episode, it featured the Lancaster crew who was shot down on their very last of 30 missions, that if completed, would have earned them a six month stand down that would have taken them to the point of the war where in early 1945 the Luftwaffe was getting destroyed and was losing its fighter strength against the bombers. The flight engineer volunteered to be towed out onto the left wing of the bomber while in flight to take a hand held fire extinguisher to a fire streaming out of the leading edge after a Fw-190 made a night attack on the aircraft. He put out the fire and was being drawn back into the Lancaster when the same fighter made a second attack run. My guess is the Luftwaffe pilot stood off watching the fire stream out the wing figuring the bomber would explode. But, when he saw the fire go out, likely not knowing the reason why, he attacked again to finish the job.

The second attack re-started the fire and sent the bomber spinning out of control. The crew inside saw the flight engineer swept off the wing, and assumed he was dead and released their grip on the parachute chords attached to the engineer's opened parachute pack. The chute caught on fire, but opened up long enough to see the engineer land in a field badly wounded from Fw-190 shells and the fire. But, he survived the war in a POW camp. The tail gunner was killed in the initial attack and the pilot sacrificed his life to remain at the controls to give the surviving members of his crew the chance to bailout, which they did and were all captured and survived the war as POW's also.

Like I wrote before -- a not altogether uncommon level of heroism that society should never forget.

The engineer was awarded the Victoria's Cross. His reaction was denial that he did anything worthy of it! That's pretty typical of these men also. I'm not sure about the pilot but I imagine he at least earned a DFC, perhaps higher, for his heroism also. Merely 18 VC's were awarded to Bomber Command personnel during the war as thousands of them died. Their rate of death and injury rated at the high point of casualty rates suffered during the war -- in the same category of German submarine crews and USAAF bomber crews.

It was a very worthy crew for recognition and airing of their heroism.

Ken
 
PRB,

That's why the Thatch Weave was designed to have the two Wildcats turn toward each other, vice away from each other. It allowed one of them to fly in an opposite circular direction of the Japanese fighter and have a clean look as the target flew across the vector of the Wildcat from top down so that the Wildcat pilot attacking the Zero could keep him in sight as he flew down the attack vector and the deflection shot could be effected. The way to have defeated it was for the Japanese to attack in pairs and have the pairs split the same way, turn inside both Wildcats, and shoot them each down before they could complete the defensive maneuver.

Saburo Sakai's autobiography again provided a valuable insight into why this simple solution was never implemented, at least not on a scale to be combat effective. Sakai said it was due to the lack of teamwork drilled into Japanese pilots combined with woefully inadequate radios. The radios were so bad, most fighter pilots ripped them out thinking the weight savings offset whatever tactical advantage their inferior operation could have provided. Any other author who proffered such a simple explanation I would have likely dismissed him. But, Sakai had insight that few possessed who survived the war. Sakai turned into a friend of the US after the war, but in his book he spoke about how Americans were trained at young ages in sports to be team players, while the Japanese caste system emphasized rigid adherence to orders and heirarchy.

Ken
 
Today was a special episode for me, but I know it was even more special for Ed. Tonight the show focused on the Red Tails, the Tuskegee Airmen. It wasn't about just one pilot, but really focused on multiple pilot's of the expansive multi-wing unit.

The last scene of the episode showed a restored P-51B with "Ina the Macon Belle" painted on the cowling. That was Lee Archer's bird, and it had five Nazi swastikas on the side. It was a bit sad for me because I fought a losing battle with the Air Force Association to get them to amend their annual listing of World War II air aces to include Lee Archer. Archer's story has been well documented but the AFA is very closed loop in a self-serving way on the issue. Archer was awarded for five victories but then retroactively denied half a victory for a mission where he was previously credited for multiple victories that took his tally to four. Soon after posting his fifth confirmed kill, the USAAF retroactively gave half of a previously confirmed kill for him to another pilot in his unit despite his unit providing no documentation that claimed it was a split victory.

Everyone in the unit at the time concluded it was was done to deny Archer credit -- bluntly stated an act of racism. Yet, to this day, AFA refuses to correct their record and told me that unless I had proof to change the record they would continue to go with the officially reported USAF reports. I told them what happened, but they again said that unless the Air Force amended their records, they would refuse to amend their's. I don't know what it will take any longer. I actually wrote a former commander of mine who became Chief of Staff of the USAF (Norton Schwartz) but got nothing out of that effort either. I figured going VFR direct to the CoS was about as hard and far as I could go.

I think next week's episode is on Francis Gabreski. Small world in that regard also. His son became a squadron commander in AFSOC and I knew him well.

Ken
 
Skyhawk_310R said:
I think next week's episode is on Francis Gabreski. Small world in that regard also. His son became a squadron commander in AFSOC and I knew him well.
Click to expand...
You knew Gabby himself or only his son? If it was Gabby we are definitely of similar age because I knew Hanna Reitsch well :)
 
His son. Never met his father. His son I have known for many years. In truth though, I believe I'm a few years older at 50, so age isn't the issue. I just never got to meet his dad.

Next weeks is Gabreski.

This week it was Robin Olds and an outstanding episode it was also! Again, heavy emphasis on tactics and this one showed the genius of Operation Bolo. First time I've seen a TV episode that put the entire operation in focus. Most tended to focus only on the aerial victories vice the tactics that led to them. It was a great example of breaking down your adversary, in this case the MiG-21 and understanding its strengths and weaknesses. The weakness Operation Bolo exploited was their 55 minute endurance.

They had an entire formation of F-4's stand off to cutoff escape to China. They had three formations of F-4's in line over the NVAF's MiG-21 base so that as they launched fighters they would always have an F-4 formation in their rears. Seven MiG-21's (half of the entire 14 jet fleet in the theater) was shot down on this one mission! The F-4 lost no one.

Olds got one of them. His wingman got another one trying to shoot down Olds.

As was always the case, the episode clearly depicted the terrible state of USAF fighter technology, specifically the missiles. About half the Sidewinders failed, just fell off the rails inert! With cannon and quality missiles, the carnage on the MiG-21's would have been a lot worse on them, which was the case throughout the war. The incorporation of fixed mounted cannon was finally adopted. The missiles never really got fixed. That didn't happen until solid state electronics became of age, which were finally able to consistently weather the demands of high performance jet operations.
 
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