What is your favorite WWII Fighter Plane and Bomber? (1 Viewer)

[Max Leung]

I really like the P51. Not sure about the bomber though - B17? Lancaster? Hard to choose!

I also highly regard the Zero - simple, reliable, manueverable. Made out of wood! Okay, it wasn't the best plane performance-wise, but the veteran pilots were the best of the war - a few of the Japanese Zero aces had upwards of 150 kills. They flew over a hundred missions apiece for a few years - until Japan ran out of petro and ammunition. These same veteran pilots refused the call for kamikaze - a dreadful waste of resources and a waste of their talents.

I cannot find my book that cites the above, but if you have the inclination read the superb book found here:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg...qid=1128403360

Unfortunately, not much has been written, if at all, about the Japanese navy and the air force, so finding data to corroborate the kill count will be difficult I suspect.

 

[Philip Hamm]

I've always been strangely fascinated by the more obscure planes of the war. Planes like the Consolidated B-32 Dominator.
[url=http://www.wpafb.af.mil/museum/research/bombers/b32-7.jpg] [/url]
It was kind of a backup project in case the B-29 failed. It really sucked, most of the ones built were flown straight from the factory to the scrap yards at the end of the war.

 

[Kirk Gunn]

A friend of mine works R&D for the Navy at a local airbase. He mentioned working with a japanese WWII vet long ago who was a kamikaze pilot. Guess he wasn't very good at it....


doh !

 

[Rudi]

There is not much in english from the point of view of the Japanese. I read a book by Saburo Sakai and what was funny is the amount of American aircraft he mentions getting shot down. It always seems as if the other side is losing tons of aircraft. I guess it was true at the begining.

Also for number of missions flown, Hans Ulrich Rudel. Stuka pilot who flew more than 2500 combat missions. The German pilots flew until they were wounded or dead. Except for him. He was still flying an FW190 jabo at the end of the war with one leg in a cast and the other amputated at the knee. He was a maniac.

 

[Philip Hamm]

Here's another really great plane from WW2 that's not obscure at all, the Navy's PBY Catalina.

[url=http://www.pby.com/Photos/PBY-5/sdam5_35.jpg] [/url]

 

[Philip Hamm]

How about the Ilyushin Il-2 Stormovik. That was a hugely successful aircraft, the German pilots hated them!

 

[Paul McElligott]

If you think the German pilots hated 'em, their tank crews probably described them in terms I wouldn't use in front of my worst enemy's mother.

 

[Ray Chuang]

A bit of interesting trivia: Russian pilots loved the Bell P-39 Aircobra and P-63 Kingcobra, despite the altitude performance handicap of the Allison V-1710 engine used on these planes. There were two reasons for this: 1) the plane was quite manueverable and fast at low level (the standard Russian style of air combat during World War II) and 2) the P-39 and P-63 survived amazingly well against ground fire, given that the P-39 and P-63 were used primarily as ground attack planes.

 

[Philip Hamm]

Another thing they loved about the Bell planes, which particularly made them great at ground attack, was the cannon shooting out through the center of the propeller. According to the USAF Museum almost 10,000 were built, with a full half going to the Soviet Union!
[url=http://www.wpafb.af.mil/museum/research/p39-3.jpg] [/url]
They weren't as well armored as the Stormovik though.

 

[Paul McElligott]

There was a joke amoung early fighter pilots in the Pacific Theater:

"What's a P-400?"

"P-40 with a Zero on its tail."

The person telling the joke probably didn't know that there really was a P-400, which was the export version of the P-39 we sent to the Brits (and they promptly sent back).

 

[Jeremy Illingworth]

Douglas Bader lost both legs in a 1931 plane crash and was forced to retire from the RAF on a disability pension, even though he could still fly with his artificial legs. He re-enlisted when war broke out and began flying Hurricanes and Spitfires. He made several kills before and during the Battle Of Britain, when he originted the Big Wing concept and lated the finger four formation, which would become the standard for all allied air forces. He was shot down over France in 1941 with twenty two and a half kills and spent the rest of the war in captivity; he was eventually sent to Colditz for his constant escape attempts.

jeremy

 

[Rudi]

After Bader was captured Adolf Galland had a note dropped off at his base. His artificial legs were damaged and Galland offered to let the RAF drop new ones unmolested. However the Brits decided to drop them during a raid. Werner Moelders, the father of the fighters in the luftwaffe, pioneered the rotte(2 aircraft) and schwarm(2 rotte) during the Spanish civil war. One of the advantages the luftwaffe had in the early days of the war were the RAFs tight vee formations required the pilots concentration on keeping station. While the schwarms allowed the pilots to concentrate on searching the sky.

 

[Max Leung]

Great "trivia" guys. 2500 missions?

I really wonder about the Japanese vets' kill count - ammunition must have been incredibly scarce even at the beginning of the Pacific War - I would not be surprised if the Zeros only had a few dozen rounds each! They would have to be perfect shots...

 

[Rudi]

The start of the war for the Japanese was like the end of the war for the Americans, in that pretty much any enemy aircraft they came upon got shot down.
As for Rudel here are some of his statistics:

518+ Tanks destroyed
700 Trucks destroyed
150+ Flak and Artillery positions bombed
9 Fighter/Ground Attack Aircraft shot down
Hundreds of bridges, railway lines, bunkers, etc. bombed
Battleship October Revolution, Cruiser Marat, and 70 landing craft sunk

The 9 aircraft shot down makes him in ace in American terms.
On the attack on the battleship he was so intent on his target that he almost rammed his schwarm leader. He had to go just about fully verticle to miss him, and blacked out when he pulled up from the bomb release. The rest of the gruppe thought he was nuts. He was also shot down 32 times and landed behind enemy lines to rescue feliow stuka crews, not always with good results.

 

[Sami Kallio]

How about the outdated Brewster's?

http://hkkk.fi/~yrjola/war/faf/brewster.html

"The top scoring Brewster B-239 pilot was Hans Wind with 39 kills in B-239s. Wind scored 26 of his kills while flying B-239 designated BW-393 and Eino Luukkanen scored 7 more kills with the same plane. BW-393 is credited with 41 kills in total making it possibly the single aircraft with most air victories in the history of air warfare."

"During its combat career in Finland the Buffalo is credited with 496 enemy aircraft destroyed [Soviet & German] against the loss of nineteen Buffalos, for a victory ratio of 26:1"

http://koti.mbnet.fi/~jjuvonen/planes/bw-364.html

"Ltm. Juutilainen shot down 28 enemy planes in BW-364 and by the end of the war he had 94 1/6 kills. Lentomestari Eino Ilmari Juutilainen got twice the highest tribute in Finland, the Mannerheim Cross, only one pilot beside him got this achievement, named kapteeni Hans Henrik "Hasse" Wind. Juutilainen's achievement is unusual in the whole world, because he is the only ace in the world who didn't have any aerial combat hits in his plane. He never jumbed out of his plane. Only once he made a forced landing when enemy flak hit his Me 109 G, also then he managed to land to friendly territory and to an own airstrip."

http://www.warbirdforum.com/372.htm
http://www.warbirdforum.com/pekuri.htm

 

[Philip Hamm]

Thanks for the link Sami, that's great stuff!

 

[Sami Kallio]

Funny quote at the end of http://hkkk.fi/~yrjola/war/faf/brewkills.html

"Another story of the identification problem: this is about a RAF pilot who was telling a story about being attacked by a "Fokker". When he was told that there were no Fokkers present in the action, he said "You don't understand, this 'F**ker' was flying a Messerschmitt.""