Jim D Burns -> RE: What Was The Idea ... (12/18/2004 11:53:02 PM)
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ORIGINAL: steveh11Matrix In general I agree that airpower is overrated, but this one stood on a toe... I seem to recall the Luftwaffe doing a pretty good job of Ground Support. You do remember the Stuka, don't you? I don't recall the Luftwaffe's ground support being ineffective, even in 1939. Steve. Another popular myth. The Stuka was a good terror weapon and did wonderfully when attacking exposed supply columns and tanks in the open (when they could be identified as hostile), but against deployed troops it too had little or no effect. In fact by 1940 it was relegated to a secondary role due to it being an easy kill for most any allied fighter. It earned its reputation in Spain and Poland, but there it faced very little opposition from enemy fighters. Even in those two theatres, they still weren’t used to bomb deployed troops. Forward air controllers were necessary to hit deployed troops, and no nation had them except the US later in the war (we also developed forward fire controllers for artillery and ships in conjunction with the air controllers). It was a new and evolving concept and even by the end of the war ground strikes against troops were still not very effective. Napalm helped a lot, but pilots dropped far more napalm on trees and open ground than they actually dropped on the enemy troops during WWII. People are used to the extreme accuracy of today’s weapons and they forget that a pilot couldn’t see men on the ground unless they were flying a few hundred feet in the air, which exposed them to extreme anti-aircraft fire, so it simply wasn’t done. Trying to identify them as friend or foe was simply impossible. Colored smoke was experimented with late in the war as well, but there was no standardized training, so most pilots had no idea what the different colors of smoke meant unless a forward air controller on the ground was talking to him in real time via radio. In WitP I consider hits against the airbase or port supply as hits against the exposed columns. Hits against troops are simply far too deadly for this period. Artillery was the big killer in WWII; airpower was still growing and evolving from its inception and was only really good at hitting obvious targets far behind the forward lines. Jim Edit: I'm not saying ground strikes against deployed troops weren't done by all nations, simply that it was all but ineffective. Artillery had far better results, so most nations turned to artillery and had their air power go after easier targets.
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