Italian Airforce?

[Sequoia]

I was just noticing the Italians have no air to ground attack capability. I don't doubt this is true, but I was wondering why this was the case. Was it all lost in Tunisia, or in reserve on the mainland, or so ineffective it was decided not to be included?

[JonS]

CAS is a surprisingly tricky thing to create and needs - among other things - an excess of good radios. It's also dependant on a lot of good-faith and willingness to put interservice rivalries to one side. The Germans had a sort-of, slow-time system in 1940, and never really advanced much beyond that. The US and UK had a system similar to the Germans by 1942/43, and only really got theirs humming in 1944.

My guess is that the Italians simply never had a functional CAS capability, in part because the never had enough good radios. It's not hard to find examples of Italian a/c attacking targets on the ground, but trying to find examples of Italian a/c attacking ground targets in a CM context is a much trickier ask.

[womble]

Given that the Allies started with and maintained total air superiority throughout the Sicily campaign, I'm sort of surprised the Germans are allowed air support. Are the rarity values any different to BN?

[JonS]

Given that the Allies started with and maintained total air superiority throughout the Sicily campaign, I'm sort of surprised the Germans are allowed air support. Are the rarity values any different to BN?

For the first few days the air situation was a bit touch and go, and the Allies spent a disproportionate amount of their available air on securing superiority. As a result, for the first few days, the Axis (well, the Germans) had a fair bit of CAS while the Allies had none. That outcome was broadly repeated at Salerno ... and again at Anzio.

[SNAFU]

One of the big problems regarding air support for Sicily and Salerno was that Eisenhower didn't have control over the air forces. He had to basically beg for any support. He vowed not to let that happen for Normandy.

For the invasion of Salerno, Spitfires (the primary air cover) had to fly out of Sicilian airfields which was quite a hump for them. They could only loiter in the combat zone for about 10 minutes before needing to return to base. There were a couple escort carriers with Seafires at Salerno but the pilots were so over-worked that they had something like 40 deck crashes. That led to the flight-crews cutting 6 inches off the the propeller blades for more clearance.

The Germans still had a decent airpower at the time of these invasions and they were a lot closer to the front so they did quite a bit of damage. This was also when they introduced their radio controlled bombs and sank a few ships with those.