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Film of Stuka 87G in action


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They were a large investment and did something rather than nothing, no doubt. But resource for resource, the light flak shooting them down in large numbers was probably ten times as effective, maybe a hundred times.
This argument extends to most "anti" weapons. A single torpedo can sink a ship that costs billions of Dollars and cost the lives of thousands of men. An RPG round, which costs a few Dollars, can take out a $25,000,000 tank. A Javelin rocket, which is IIRC around $80,000 a shot, can take out that $25,000,000 tank pretty much every other time, and scatter it all over the battlefield. The gunner also has a pretty darned good chance of taking out another one within a minute, and all at a range of 2000m+. A 500lb laser guided bomb can take out a multi million Dollar command and control complex and freeze communications for a whole Army in one shot. So on and so on.

But can a guy with a Javelin take out a tank 50km distant? Can the submarine kill a tank? Can the laser guided bomb get to its target by someone tossing it like a hand grenade? No, but a plane can take do all of those things and a lot more. It projects power, these other weapons can only respond to the projection of power. Same was true in WWII.

Paper, rock, scissors. If you want to cut paper you need scissors. Doesn't matter if you have an inexpensive rock... your objective will not be acheived.

Steve

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Originally posted by JasonC:

The only informative part about it, for me, was the rounds fired. 3-4 at each pass. Most unlikely to hit with so few rounds, it seems to me.

DISCLAIMER: This post contains no real-world data, nor am I claiming that in-game performance in any way relates to reality.

So then:

After reading this thread, watching the movie, and skimming a goodly part of the "Tiger" thread, I became curious as to how the Ju87G performed in the game. Since I rarely (verging on never) use AC, it would be a bit of a learning experience por moi.

I set up a little CMBB scenario with a vet Stuka G, and two platoons of T34-43's.

Imagine my suprise when the Stuka acted almost exactly like the one in the film: Made three fairly high-speed passes, (usually from side to side, occasionlly back to front), and fired four rounds each pass (looks like two, but that's only because the visual graphic of the "bullets" merge into one --- the two rounds diverge on ricochets).

After 10 run-throughs, most shots (about 75%) resulted in ricochets, with a few misses, a couple of mobility kills, and only one actual tank destroyed.

If anything, I'd say accuracy seems rather high --- but considering it rarely has an effect, overall I'd rate it's real-world grog-factor as acceptable.

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BF, no I am not comparing ammo to weapon systems. A flak gun and its ammo was an effective weapon system in the sense of being above average in its effectiveness. A fighter shooting enemy aircraft was an effective weapon system. A fighter bomber spraying ground targets inaccurately almost certainly was not.

As for u-boats (not torpedos), they were extremely effective until mastered by radar and air search, then they lost as many u-boats as they took out merchant ships and failed. Japanese subs were directed at warships and were decidedly ineffective, despite taking out a carrier or two at times - nothing like the investment put into them. US subs sent after the Japanese merchant marine were extremely effective.

Battleships and cruisers were not. They helped provide air defense, they shelled shore targets, but the average one did not come close to taking out its own value on the other side.

In other words, effectiveness does not remotely divide offensive-defensive, the offensive is not the only decisive form of warfare, or according to any other simplistic criterion. It is an empirical proposition and it depends on tactics, actual seen capabilities, countermeasures, etc.

All weapons are not remotely equal, as in paper scissors rock. Some are simply dominated by others, some require huge investment for very poor returns. Only real operations research tells us which is which, not flip ideological judgments or fantasies about best cases.

Similarly in CM, anyone who thinks they can take anything and if they just use up their points and make sensible combined arms use of what they get, they will do fine, is going to be disappointed. Some weapons are much more effective than others, point for point.

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Originally posted by Steiner14:

Andreas,

only the confirmed kills are counted.

Each one needs to be confirmed undoubtedly by another soldier and if two claimed the self hit, it wasn't counted twice.

The Germans were extremely strict about that.

As strict as they were about claiming kills from fighters in aerial combat?
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I think that there has been a obscuration of the thread to general theories of warfare and utility of weapons without looking into more detail of the case in point.

I have below a Russian link but as I do not read Russian it is a little wasted on me. It is lengthy and possibly has Russian information.

http://www.airwar.ru/enc/bww2/ju87g.html

Jason C was a little snide at my mention of flight sims as being of any assistance. I cannot help but feel he should be addressing his remarks to all those airlines and airforces who use them in training pilots. It not occur for many years but I am sure some coding will take place eventually for WW2 planes.

Now back to proving negatives. It was Jason C who said the recorde were readily available but provided no helpful links - and I suspect that the records would be in Russian but it would be a start. In the meantime I am curious that with Rudel being the highest decorated Luftwaffe pilot of the war and a staunch Nazi that the Russians , or anybody else, has not rubbished his claims. I personally do not mind if they are rubbished : ).

That the Cold War was on, or that he was giving info to the US Air Force also need consideration as to why the claims were not refuted. I am merely curious.

Now for some info from the 15 worthwhile sites visited so far.:

"Bombload

If a target was close enough the Stuka could deliver a formidable bombload.The Ju 87 could carry a 1,800 kg (3,968 lb) bomb for a short range mission : the sort of bombload carried by twin-engined aircraft through World War II and not far off that carried by American four-engine bombers during the strategic bombing of Germany.

Combat experience in Russia demonstrated that hitting a tank with a heavy bomb was next to impossible even for a Stuka.On the Russian front the standard anti-tank weapon was the SD-4-H1 a 4 kg hollow-charge bomblet.Seventy eight were carried inside a 500 kg bomb case.The bomblets could penetrate the thin top armour of any Allied tank-even the massive JS-2s used by the Red Army's in 1945.

More spectacular but fraught with danger for the aircrew was one of the final Stuka models : the Ju 87G-1. Introduced in 1943 , this carried a pair of 37-mm cannon which could also penetrate the top armour of a tank but the weight and drag further reduced the Stuka's already marginal performance.

This armament variant was tested for the first time on a modernized Ju-87 D-5 version in the summer of 1942. The trials demonstrated that the new aircraft was a more effective anti-tank weapon than many similar Luftwaffe planes such as the Henschel Hs-129 and Junkers Ju-88P. After successful trials were over, it was decided to start serial production of the Ju-87 G in two variants - the Ju-87 G-1 and the Ju-87 G-2. The Ju-87 G-1 aircraft was a remade Ju-87 D-3, and the Ju-87 G-2 was a remade Ju-87 D-5. Both variants had dismantled wing armament. However, some of the Ju-87 G-1 planes still had one wing machine-gun for aiming purposes.

Tank-destroying Ju-87 G planes were widely used on the Eastern front, especially in the battles of Kursky Duga. The Ju-87 G-2 was the aircraft flown by the famous German pilot, Heintz Ulriech Rudel - he alone destroyed 519 units of enemy armored vehicles."

Two points are interesting here. Firstly that the G was shown effective in trials. I assume this means it was able to hit tank targets.

Secondly and more intriguing is the bomblets which I had never heard of yet appear to be the standard anti-tank loadout. Have we been barking up the wrong weapon system?

In the interests of completeness I would mention that the pods could be replaced with pods carrying 6 MG81's - sounds a bit modern doesn't it.

BTW the order of battle I think January 45 showed 30+ G's alive against scores of 87D's.

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...propaganda hero...rudel's war diary a propaganda book...blahblahblah.

Rudel was that ineffective and such a braggart, that he was forbidden to fly. Hm, strange.

His kills are all confirmed? All wrong! Propaganda numbers.

Rudel was involved in the development of the 87G: bah, this plane doesn't hit tanks and therefore it was judged as highly effective just for - guess right - propaganda issues. :D

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Originally posted by Wicky:

Historically both sides tended to overclaim victories on a scale of 2:1.

How many times did the Luftwaffe destroy the RAF in the Battle of Britain!

Genuine error or Propaganda?

If propaganda is used as a basis for operational and strategic decisions, it becomes a genuine error. Much like the way the military intelligence on both sides overestimated the amount of nukes possessed by the adversary during the cold war.
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JasonC

A fighter shooting enemy aircraft was an effective weapon system. A fighter bomber spraying ground targets inaccurately almost certainly was not.
It depends on what the desired result is. If you are judging the effectiveness on how many tanks or trucks the FBs shot up vs. tanks, then tanks will most likely win if you are looking at a cost ratio. AT Guns and light infantry weapons might win over both. But that isn't necessarily relevant.

I haven't seen anybody here dispute what the FBs accomplished outside of whacking vehicles. And that is the disruption of the flow of goods, the influencing of the enemy's strategies/tactics, and lowering morale. Tried and true military axioms state that killing should not be the focus of a military force... defeating the enemy should be. Killing is just a possible means to that end, but is not necessarily the only or most important one. There are other ways to defeat an enemy alongside simply killing (ULTRA, H-Bomb, blinding ground based radar, cutting off supplies of minerals, etc.).

I look at TacAir as being in the same category as Strategic. Heavy bombers were a HUGE investment, but they probably killed very few tanks and enemy troops. Using JasonC's logic that would make them a wasteful use of resources. But a tank could not take out a tank factory hundreds of KMs away or reduce oil production to a fraction of its theoretical capacity. That means less tanks to the front for a while and more restricted fuel for those that are.

To recap... I think JasonC is understating the importance of FB impact on frontline activities. I think they destroyed more stuff than he credits them for, but more importantly they were responsible for a large and significant impact on the enemy's ability to act the way it wanted to. I mean, if you asked Rommel what he thought of the effectiveness of FBs in Normandy what do you think he would say? That they were useless things that flew around "spraying ground targets inaccurately"? I doubt it :D

Steve

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Originally posted by Steiner14:

...propaganda hero...rudel's war diary a propaganda book...blahblahblah.

Rudel was that ineffective and such a braggart, that he was forbidden to fly. Hm, strange.

His kills are all confirmed? All wrong! Propaganda numbers.

Rudel was involved in the development of the 87G: bah, this plane doesn't hit tanks and therefore it was judged as highly effective just for - guess right - propaganda issues. :D

Why don't you just answer the question? Was the confirmation procedure for Rudel's tank claims as strict as that for aerial combat kill claims? If it differed, how so?
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Originally posted by Andreas:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Sergei:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Steiner14:

...propaganda hero...rudel's war diary a propaganda book...blahblahblah.

Why don't you just be a nice little Nazi and STFU? </font>
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Originally posted by Battlefront.com:

I haven't seen anybody here dispute what the FBs accomplished outside of whacking vehicles. And that is the disruption of the flow of goods, the influencing of the enemy's strategies/tactics, and lowering morale. Tried and true military axioms state that killing should not be the focus of a military force... defeating the enemy should be. Killing is just a possible means to that end, but is not necessarily the only or most important one. There are other ways to defeat an enemy alongside simply killing (ULTRA, H-Bomb, blinding ground based radar, cutting off supplies of minerals, etc.).

I look at TacAir as being in the same category as Strategic. Heavy bombers were a HUGE investment, but they probably killed very few tanks and enemy troops. Using JasonC's logic that would make them a wasteful use of resources. But a tank could not take out a tank factory hundreds of KMs away or reduce oil production to a fraction of its theoretical capacity. That means less tanks to the front for a while and more restricted fuel for those that are.

I agree with that 100%, Steve, but then where does that leave us? FBs were certainly extemely useful in Normandy and elsewhere but what was the best use to put them to? I think it has be aptly demonstrated that they didn't kill many tanks. Was their expenditure of munitions against them justified anyway? Some would argue that since it may have provoked crews to abandon their vehicles and even to destroy them, then yes. And even if it only had an inhibiting effect on their movement and subsequent actions in combat, then yes also.

But for my money those are arguments are kind of thin in that the evidence in their favor is rather slender. Weighed against them is the argument that the FBs would have been much more effectively employed against targets of proven vulnerability. The same quantity of munitions expended against columns of soft vehicles or artillery emplacements might well have had a much greater impact on the conduct of the battle. I believe that the concentration on trying to kill tanks and other armored vehicles was an obesssion engendered by the air forces' urge to show that they could do everybody else's job better. Which may also have a lot to do with their efforts to suppress the findings of the OR groups.

Now all this is interesting in a groggish way, but it only has relevance on this board to the way that airpower and its effects are depicted in CM. I would hope that for CMx2 the issue will be seriously rethought. Without going into details in this post, I have felt—and have posted before—that in some ways the effects of airpower as depicted in CM are too powerful, and in other ways not powerful enough. I am not comfortable, in short, with the picture that CM presents of airpower. And instead of going 'round and 'round forever on how many tanks Rudel did or did not destroy, or how vulnerable the T-34 may or may not have been, I would like this discussion to focus more on those issues.

Michael

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I think that the balance is right in the sense that in the game you would be a fool not to have Ackack. If we were to play to post war statistics people would spend little or nothing on AA Assets in the game which would then be ahistorical.

As to their effectiveness in Normandy I had assumed a lot of TAF work was going out to shoot anything that moved. That pilots would like to go after the glory targets is understandable particularly if everything that should have been a target lay doggo whilst you were flying over.

We have plenty of German accounts of how they felt under air attack, and the potential at any time during daylight for attack. We can assume that the Allied ground forces felt good about seeing the attacks going in. I would agree that all the fire and fury was not as effective as one might hope,[ and the Air Forces put out]

But the overall morale effects must have been considerable --- but very difficult to work into a game : ) I think BF got it right.

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Michael,

But for my money those are arguments are kind of thin in that the evidence in their favor is rather slender.
I disagree. I think the evidence is pretty clearly the opposite. Check out any 1st hand German account of the battles in Normandy, in particular, and see how many mentions of FBs there are. Then check out what they are saying about them. They do not hold the same opinion of their effectiveness as you or JasonC. In fact, quite the opposite.

It is pretty clear to me that one of the reasons why FBs did not rack up huge kills in Normandy is because the Germans changed their behavior as a DIRECT result of the swarms of FBs. They moved at night as much as possible, for example. Militarily this is more difficult, more time consuming, more tiring, and more prone to error. If there were no FBs they could have moved around in daylight without probelms, just like the Allies. I haven't seen anybody dispute this, so I find it interesting that it keeps getting ignored. It is critically important for a fair assessment.

I think airpower in CM is about as good as we can make it. The problem we face is that players don't usually buy flak and they probably don't do anything to minimize their exposure to air attacks. In that way it is silly to blame CM because in real life if a bunch of light armored vehicles was sitting out in the open with no air defenses... they should fall victim to air attack.

Air assets are quite expensive and, like most CM players (I suspect at least), we never see them in Quick Battles and rarely in premade scenarios. I know I have never, ever purchased an air asset. The chances of it not showing up, after spending all that capital, makes it not worth it. And on top of that you aren't sure it will hit the broad side of a barn or the right barn. As far as I am concerned this is fair and accurate. At least as fair and accurate as allowing people to purchase King Tigers and flame throwing tanks!

Steve

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Originally posted by Battlefront.com:

It is pretty clear to me that one of the reasons why FBs did not rack up huge kills in Normandy is because the Germans changed their behaviour as a DIRECT result of the swarms of FBs.

Except, that doesn't hold a lot of water either. Lehr & 12th SS, for example, lost bugger all material when they moved up - during daylight - in the first days after the landing. The same thing happened with other units moving up later - eg 2nd and 17th SS. For sure, the Germans did change their behaviour, and it was because of the jabos, but an objective look at the losses inflicted wouldn't necessarily lead directly to that result.

Also, the losses that were inflicted were (IIRC - no sources handy at the moment) disproportionately amongst the soft elements (Lehr - again IIRC - lost 5 fuel trucks on D-Day, a fairly serious blow to that units operational and tactical mobility).

However, I think the fear that they would die caused more problems than the realistic chance of that happening. Every time a Jabo turns up, everyone breaks track and dismounts, causing ~30 minutes of delay and disorganisation.

The chances of it not showing up, after spending all that capital, makes it not worth it. And on top of that you aren't sure it will hit the broad side of a barn or the right barn.
Well, personally I find that they seem to be laser guided. I've had them for and against me in several battles and ops recently, and they always kill something (even if 'only' FF kills ... which I should point out I have no problem with in principle), especially with MG/cannon fire.

I've written before on my thoughts regarding how CAS in CM might be changed. I'll not repeat here.

Regards

JonS

[ August 15, 2005, 03:46 AM: Message edited by: JonS ]

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BF - sorry, just flat wrong. CM gets air attacks on ground targets wrong, vastly inflating the effectiveness of strafing in particular, against armored vehicles in particular. Demonstrably so.

German soldiers and officers were undoubtedly annoyed by allied airpower in Normandy, but it would have been slow business annoying them out of France. It took the ground forces to do that. They had to run out of sufficient infantry to hold a line, and have their armor quartered by ground combat attrition, first.

If FBs were half as effective in real life as they are in CM, German armor would have been reduced to zero in Normandy by the end of June, without the ground guys leaving their own positions.

Try sending 12000 CM western FB sorties, most of them Typhoons and P-47s, against 2200 AFVs, with flak, and see if the AFVs lose only 400 vehicles. That is the scale of Allied *claims*, which we know are high by a large factor, still.

Or try sending 17000 Russian sorties, a third of them by IL-2s, at the German AFV fleet at Kursk. See if any would be left, even if the ground forces sat it out. With the targets having Flak, I've taken out up to 4 full German tanks with a single IL-2, in CM. This is utterly false, historically.

If planes in CM were treated historically, then area fire spread out from their MGs hurting troops, and whatever near misses by their bombs and rockets did to soft targets, would be the extent of their effect. Direct strafing might KO an unarmored truck once in ten tries (thus on average roughly half per sortie, all passes included). Prices of air support could be adjusted accordingly, and support levels might be realistic pairs or fours of planes.

An air raid would feel a lot more like a sudden 8 inch fire mission - a few large HE blasts scattered about erratically - coupled with persistent but inaccurate strafing attacks spreading alerted to pinned states and occasionally knocking out a truck or two. Not half a dozen PAK vs. tank "duels" KOing or immobilizing several fully armored or light armored vehicles.

We all know you aren't going to fix such things before CMx2. But you should stop defending past errors in weapon effectiveness modeling, that have been shown to be wrong.

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