Quote:
Originally Posted by JtD
I haven't even started insisting on anything. So leave your polemics out and try to argue the points I make, not invent some on your own and then go on to debate them with yourself. 
You made the claim that the Luftwaffe was "easily winning" the air war in the west until the appearance of the P-51. That's simply not true. You're of course free to insist, but you won't change facts. |
From Wikipedia:
A polemic /pəˈlɛmɪk/ is a contentious argument that is intended to establish the truth of a specific understanding and the falsity of the contrary position. Polemics are mostly seen in arguments about very controversial topics.
The art or practice of such argumentation is called polemics.
Along with debate, polemics are one of the most common forms of arguing. Similar to debate, a polemic is confined to a definite controversial thesis. But unlike debate, which may allow for common ground between the two disputants, a polemic is intended only to establish the truth of a point of view while refuting the opposing point of view.
I re-read the definition, to be sure that we are on the same page. I do not understand why engaging in a polemic argument is bad, if we are dealing with a situation where if one of us is right, the other must be wrong.
Your contention that the LW’s fighter arm suffered 800% casualties ignores the situation in the West or more specifically, the part of the West where the Mustang was exclusively engaged for the first six months of its combat operations, the Channel Front and specifically against the Reich Defense. You imply that 800% casualties for the jagdewaffe as a whole over a 39 month period applies evenly across all fronts, and that the Allies on the Channel were just as successful in their operational aims across the Channel and over Germany as the Soviets over Kursk or the Desert Air Force and the 12th/15th Air Forces over Italy and the Mediterranean, and that the Luftwaffe was on the run everywhere, men and machines were at the end of their ropes and they were on the verge of collapse in the face of triumphant Allied forces. Not so.
Several heavy bomber groups in the 8th Air force suffered well over 300% casualties during 1943, and when you lost a bomber over Germany or occupied Europe, you weren’t getting any of those men back, dead or alive. There were several occasions where individual bomb groups or squadrons lost more than half their strength in a single sortie that year, and there was at least one group that got hit that hard more than a couple of times. The only reason the three fighter groups in the 8th AF didn’t take similar casualties is because the German fighter command avoided them (HUGE mistake, IMHO—if I had been running the operation, the P-47 units would have been beaten like red-headed stepchildren at every opportunity to keep them in the proper frame of mind—scared and eager to avoid
me and leaving the bombers unprotected for the ZGs and JGs in Germany) through most of the summer and fall of ’43. The Army Air Forces suffered a higher loss rate than the Infantry for most of that war, and 8th Bomber Command took the lion’s share of those losses, both operational and due to enemy action (and the sheer bloody-mindedness of Ira Eaker).
It is a fact that many if not most ground based USAAF and Navy/Marine fighter units in the first two and half years of the Pacific war took higher losses than the JGs and ZGs along the Channel Front and over Germany from 1940 to 1943; they lost men to disease, operational accidents (guys who ‘safely’ ditched right next to friendly ships were still lost about a fifth of the time, never mind the ones who got lost over the ocean or some jungle) as well as to enemy action. There is hardly a single veteran of those campaigns who did not suffer from malaria the rest of his life (right off the top of my head, I can think of three top aces who were forced to leave combat at the peak of their powers because of tropical diseases).
Similarly, ground combat units in every combatant army were suffering at least as high a casualty rate.
The greatest health problem the jagdewaffe had while staying in France, Holland and Belgium was apparently venereal disease. Yes, they were taking losses from enemy action, but they were inflicting much greater losses on the RAF and the USAAF and they knew it quite well. According to Caldwell in his
Top Guns of the Luftwaffe homage to JG 26, 43/44 was not that much different than the previous winter until ‘Big Week’ in February of ’44, and morale, particularly in the German-based units who never saw enemy fighters was high.
If they were in trouble, they didn’t know it and neither did the folks on the other side. Only hindsight allows you or anyone else to suggest that it was inevitable. I don’t think that it was entirely; if the Mustang was only as successful as the P-38s in the 8th AF, we have to wait for all of the P-47s to get the improved wider props and the increased fuel capacity from the wing pylons before air superiority over Europe is established, which sets the Allies back by at least three or four months.
The injection of first, just fifty Mustangs able to reach over Germany in December ‘43, then fifty more in January, and then another hundred or so over February and March just blows all of that to hell. The P-47s and Spitfires are reaching no farther than they did in October, and the P-38 group is suffering high abort rates and scoring at a lower pace than the P-47 groups. The serious losses to the Jagdewaffe were taking place over the Franco-German border and Germany itself, where only Mustangs can reach.
Those are established historical facts. Could an aircraft as twitchy, trim sensitive and unstable as the in-game Mustang have fared as well in those conditions if the Bf 109Gs and FW 190As depicted in the game were directly comparable to their real-life counterparts?
Please note that I leave out the spurious performance of the rear gunners of the in-game Bf 110Gs and the other twins out of pure Christian charity.
cheers
horseback