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Bigduke6

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    Bigduke6 got a reaction from Kineas in The Bouncing .50 cal - can it kill a tank?   
    Go here for an article from a Russian-language web site and forum for WW2 aviation, and a discussion on Herr Rudel.

    http://allaces.ru/cgi-bin/s2.cgi/ge/publ/05.dat

    Here are the some of the criticisms of Rudel's account of the attack on the Marat, by one Andrei Liubushkin, who purports to have read Soviet records like Baltic Front PVO, Soviet overall tank loss records,

    1. Rudel reports his bomb sank the battleship Marat, while Soviet records show two bombs - Rudel's and his wing man's - sank the battleship.

    2. Rudel says he dropped a 1000 kg bomb on the warship. The Soviets concluded the ship had been sunk by two 500 kg bombs.

    2. Rudel reports there was no Soviet interceptor effort, the Soviet record shooting down Stukas.

    3. Rudel claims he destroyed he destroyed 519 tanks - that is ten per cent of all tanks the Soviets knew they lost to air attacks, during the entire friggin' war.

    4. Rudel reports he fired on tanks at targets at 100 - 200 meters. Given the speed of a Stuka and the fact diving a Stuka at a tank requires a good deal of a pilot's attention, this begs the question, how did Rudel manage to see what the rounds did?

    5. Rudel reports at one point, his superior flying skill enabled him to avoid 20 Airacobras. Problem: 20 x P-39 is an entire fighter regiment, and the Soviets never operated an entire regiment in a single small airspace. Even if they tried, the chances of a regiment actually having 20 x P-39 functional at any one time are next to zero.

    6. Rudel was an excellent pilot but also an egotistical bastard, self-centered, and a trophy hunter. Yet his diary for all its "today I destroyed 20 x T-34s" doesn't if you count them add up to 519 tanks.

    7. Rudel's tank kills were confirmed not by people counting hulks on the ground, but by other pilots under fire like he was, and for practically all purposes under his direct command.

    8. Rudel's book doesn't just toot his own horn, but describes kills by his wingmen etc. A reasonable reading of the effectiveness of his air unit, based on his description of his own kill rate, would make it logical to conclude somewhere between 15 and 50 per cent of all tanks lost by the Soviets during WW2, were destroyed by Rudel's unit.

    9. Rudel says he was shot down 22 times - and not once by Soviet aircraft. Every time by ground fire. How reasonable is that, given that close to half of his missions took place in 43-45?

    There is plenty more but you get the idea. People on the Russian side think Rudel's claims are laughable.

    Here is the standard boilerplate, from the www.airwar.ru site:

    "We should not that the claims of German pilots about the destruction of large numbers of Soviet tanks, as well as other ground targets, were usually not supported by anything else than their own words. On the majority of aircraft there were no gun cameras, and if there were they recorded at best shell strikes, rather than actual damage. As one would expect, real losses of Soviet tanks to bombs and aerial gunnery of German aviation was dramatically more modest, than was expressed in the reports of the German pilots."

    So there you have it. Rudel says he was a stud, and the Russians say he was liar, and further that his claims don't have a leg to stand on.
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