I'm not sure about that...the P-38 was pretty devastating in that theater. Have to check the numbers.Originally Posted by Robinson
ETA: F6F outscored the P-38 by a lot from what I can find. P-38 (1,800), F6F (5,000+)
I'm not sure about that...the P-38 was pretty devastating in that theater. Have to check the numbers.
ETA: F6F outscored the P-38 by a lot from what I can find. P-38 (1,800), F6F (5,000+)
Last edited by Redhat; 09-21-2018 at 10:29 AM.
Google is not my friend today. What plane is this?
My granddad always talked about how, right after the war, you could buy as many Mustangs as you wanted for $1500 a piece, T-6’s for $1000, and Stearman’s for sub-$1000. Of course, back then, that much money was a fortune and he couldn’t afford it.
Last Mustang that I saw for sale was over a million dollars.
20 years ago, somebody who knew about such things told me that Mustangs cost $150,000 a year to run.
If we have to march off into the next world, let us walk there on the bodies of our enemies.
That is a North American Aviation T-6 "Texan" trainer. They were often painted up to look like Mitsubishi Zeros in a lot of 1960s & 1970s tv and movies before CGI could bring the Zero back.Google is not my friend today. What plane is this?
"If I ever needed to hunt in a tuxedo, then this would be the rifle I'd take." - okie john
"Not being able to govern events, I govern myself." - Michel De Montaigne
T-6. Great airplane and a fantastic trainer. The old joke was that you start in a Bearcat, move up to a P-51, and then you’re ready for the T-6.Google is not my friend today. What plane is this?
When I was younger, I spent a summer working for a company traveling around the country giving rides in Stearmans and T-6’s. The T-6 is a beast.
If you look really closely, in the background of this photo is a plane kinda like that one.Google is not my friend today. What plane is this?
.
-----------------------------------------
Not another dime.
If you want a great read regarding how and why different aircraft were effective in the Pacific theater, find "Fire in the Sky: The Air War in the South Pacific" by Eric Bergerud. Its long, and he gets a bit repetitive at times but he works through the effects of the environment, pilot training and experience, design philosophy, technical characteristics, manufacturing limitations, etc. of the aircraft on both sides. I've read military history since I was a kid, and still learned a lot of new things from this book.
Still are. The “Tora, Tora, Tora” air show routine uses T-6’s as Zero’s.
That's nice and all, but what use is it when a single stray 8mm Mauser round downs your plane? The P38 at least had redundancy, and the P47 had robustness.
More accurately than my first post, the P51s claim to fame was its role as a long range escort fighter. It was really the first fighter to enter service with the ability to perform at high altitudes....remember, a lot of these tactics were new at the time, and that wasn't an important feature prior to the bombing campaigns. Below 20,000 feet it wasn't the end-all be-all fighter, and given its relative fragility compared to a P47, the P51 was a much easier kill for either the 109 or 190 compared to the P47 below 20,000. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't amazing....it way okay....and that wasn't even until the D model came out. People tend to think the D was dropped on the USAAF by a bunch of fucking storks, born out of perfection.....and they forget the Mustang was in service years prior and wasn't anything to write home about.
In any case, there's lots of reasons for the P51D's fame, and not all of them revolve around its superiority. There's entire forums dedicated to that, so I won't go into it here. We're also dealing with a certain amount of normalcy bias here...the US had a capable high altitude interceptor at the beginning of the war.....or better put, we should have had one.....the P39 Airacobra. It was actually a pretty sweet fighter with great performance before generals influenced the design because of unnecessary aesthetics and design ideas not based in reality. What Bell originally presented the USAAF was actually a great ship and in accordance with the original procurement wishes, and if we hadn't fucked it up and put it into service as was then the P51 wouldn't have been a breakthrough to begin with, it would have only been a natural continuation in performance.
The F4F was not outclassed by the Zero, it was simply bad tactics at the beginning of the war. Once pilots realized that turning and burning was simply a losing proposition, they changed tactics. When the concept of diving out of a bad fight to create distance and reposition yourself (ECQC anyone?) and the Thach Weave entered mainstream tactics, the Wildcat mopped the fucking floor with Zeros. The Wildcat had a 5.9:1 kill ratio in 1942 alone, and higher for a war-long average.
The F6F was introduced because it was the natural successor, and war isn't about using less effective fighters just because. It was available, and was better, so why not use it? Using the same tactics, a Zero's fight against the F6F was almost unwinnable with the exception of pilot errors and lucky shots. It had an even higher kill ratio.
The F6F shot down almost twice as many aircraft in the PTO compared to the F6F. That's not really a useful data point though, given the nature of how the different fighters were employed and in what numbers. The numbers also take research from several different sources....it's kind of a moving target with lots of omissions that need to be accounted for and corrected. Making an accurate total kill count would be a wet dream for RevolverRob.
I'm wary of throwing out numbers like this as evidence of superiority. If we take kill ratios alone, the best fighter was the Brewster Buffalo, with the highest overall kill ratio of the war at up around 26:1. That's because it was most used by the Finnish in their war against the Russians, and the Russians were only putting outdated bi-planes up against the Fins. Obviously, it faired less well for the Dutch, and even worse for America because of how we took anything good about the design and ruined it.
Last edited by TGS; 09-21-2018 at 10:03 AM.
"Are you ready? Okay. Let's roll."- Last words of Todd Beamer
Reply With Quote