Thorn in the Tiger's side?

[sturmelon]

This picture clearly shows that the rear of the T34 would be vulnerable to any MG or Cannon directed at its rear deck area from above. The access hatch to the engine compartment is clearly non-armored and the turret access hatch would probably be thinly armored also. The rear deck seems to have air inlets also.

Rudel Discussion

Perhaps an interesting discussion focusing on Rudel.

Does anyone know what number of Stukas with 37mm were ever operational at one time? Some sources say each squadron only had 10 each. In other words, they were somewhat rare.

I think this quote sums up the technical issues...

" The ineffectiveness of air attack against tanks should have caused no surprise because the weapons available to the fighter-bombers were not suitable for destroying them. Put simply, the heavy machine guns and 20 mm cannon were capable of hitting the tanks easily enough, but insufficiently powerful to damage them, except occasionally by chance. The RPs and bombs used were certainly capable of destroying the tanks but were too inaccurate to hit them, except occasionally by chance."

Most trained ground attack pilots could hit a tank sized target with its MGs/Cannon. Other weapons were not as precise.

The Germans and the Soviets clearly made designs that focused around a flying HV gun system. This website explains it best.

TANKBUSTERS

[ August 11, 2005, 09:58 AM: Message edited by: sturmelon ]

[Michael Emrys]

Originally posted by sturmelon:

The access hatch to the engine compartment is clearly non-armored and the turret access hatch would probably be thinly armored also. The rear deck seems to have air inlets also.

That's not in dispute. Hitting a target that small from 400-500 meters while traveling at, say, 200kph while being shot at from the ground and having to keep an eye out for enemy fighters though is another kettle of fish. The average fighter pilot just wasn't that good a shot.

Michael

[Sergei]

Originally posted by Michael Emrys:

That's not in dispute. Hitting a target that small from 400-500 meters while traveling at, say, 200kph while being shot at from the ground and having to keep an eye out for enemy fighters though is another kettle of fish.

And not crashing with ground, trees or buildings. Don't forget that.

[Michael Emrys]

Boy, I'll say one thing, this thread has offered plenty of evidence as to how effective the various air forces' propaganda campaigns were. They may not have been too good at hitting tanks, but man, they sure knew how to target young minds!

Michael

[Michael Emrys]

Originally posted by Sergei:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Michael Emrys:

That's not in dispute. Hitting a target that small from 400-500 meters while traveling at, say, 200kph while being shot at from the ground and having to keep an eye out for enemy fighters though is another kettle of fish.

And not crashing with ground, trees or buildings. Don't forget that. </font>

[dieseltaylor]

"That's not in dispute. Hitting a target that small from 400-500 meters while traveling at, say, 200kph while being shot at from the ground and having to keep an eye out for enemy fighters though is another kettle of fish. The average fighter pilot just wasn't that good a shot."

So can we assume that those that were good and those that were exceptional would be those that racked up the scores then. Hmm?

The cruising speed for the D was 115mph and we know that Rudel said it was important to fly slowly so I think we can assume a speed nearer 100mph or below. Rudel also mentions that it is easy to miss seeing a tank at 400 metres so I assume that when he attacks he may well like to be a lot closer than that when he fires to make certain. His guns may have been set up for a cone at 200 metres and use a centrally mounted MG to lead him onto target.

His modus operandi then is to go low and slow and to avoid AA defended areas - seems sensible. Getting shot down 30 times shows that even with those precautions it was a risky business ... but not impossible. If you fly several times a day then a score will rack up.

And as for the young minds - its nice to be considered to have the flexibility and open-mindedness even when you are as old as me : )

BTW ME I thought you were moving from West Auatralia : )

[sturmelon]

I believe dieseltaylor has it right.

Rudel and his Stukas were more like Apache gunship support than air support. They were very much defensive and would not have created 'tons' of reports deep behind enemy lines.

The Soviets knew they were attacking over flak defended areas. They could not come in low and slow. hence the design approach they took.

In any case, I do not accept the idea that hitting vehicles with MG/autocannon is such an impossible task. Gun camera footage alone discredits this.

Ground attack is very easily trained into pilots. Much more so than fighter training. Shooting at another plane that is moving in all directions is much harder than diving in and targeting relatively slow targets constrained to two dimensions. Not crashing into the grond is also something that will come from training.

[Michael Dorosh]

Originally posted by dieseltaylor:

So can we assume that those that were good and those that were exceptional would be those that racked up the scores then. Hmm?

Can't remember the specific figures for WW I and WW II, but the majority of air to air kills were made by a minority of the pilots. So, yes.

[Battlefront.com]

It is kinda tough to say if CM has it right because there are so many facets to this issue. From the very start, however, we have emphasized that air assets in a CM battle should be a rarity. These engagements represent when the planes are involved in a ground battle, with targets that can be identified and hit (i.e. not infantry and AT guns). In such cases the air attacks should be pretty potentent. It's just that they happen quite rarely on the battlefield.

Also, if players purchased AA assets and took evasive actions, like what would happen in real life, I am sure that there would be less damage done than probably happens in a CM game.

In short... when various factors are accounted for I believe that CM has it about right.

Steve

[Guest Mike]

Originally posted by sturmelon:

This picture clearly shows that the rear of the T34 would be vulnerable to any MG or Cannon directed at its rear deck area from above. The access hatch to the engine compartment is clearly non-armored and the turret access hatch would probably be thinly armored also. The rear deck seems to have air inlets also.

Someone else said this is not in dispute - well I dispute it!!

While the screen that is raised in this picture is not armoured, there is armour covering the area - overlaping armour plates can, and did, allow air paths while still preventing any direct access to the interior. But this area is the transmission cover anyway - no air path is required!

See Construction of the T34 for some details on this area - it's the transmission cover BTW, not the engine.

Also note the armour at the aft end of the "engine" deck here:

The whole top of the tank is less armoured than the front and sides, but that big turret hatch IS armoured, and it IS very, very heavy - by all accounts it was a pig of a thing and a tank commander could get badly injured or killed if it was hit with a decent sized shot that slammed it down on him!! Hence they didnt' go into battle with it open - that and hte fact that the commander had to be inside the turret to aim his main gun!!

As for hitting lightly armoured areas - well you don't aim for them with MG's from an aircraft - yuo spray the entire area with as many bullets as possible and hope that a few find vulonerable bits!! these aren't snipers we're talking about!!

The larger calibre cannon such as 37's, 45's, 50's and 75's only had a handful of rounds - as few as 12 IIRC, so they would aim for het tank - but firing from the top meant attacking the lighter top armour and so they could be successful with a single hit anywhere - especially with the 75!!

[sturmelon]

The bottom view clearly shows the area that is 'open' (or covered by screening). It is not possible to box an engine inside without some way for air to ventilate. The best compromise is baffling of armor plates.

[JonS]

Andreas was right.

[JonS]

Originally posted by Michael Emrys:

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

Regarding the training of the TAF it seems that Rudel's concept of hunting down tanks at slow speed and the Allied's fast aircraft but ineffective results may be suggesting something.

It may suggest that the Germans had more and better light AAA than the Soviets. The Allied experience was that slow movers just didn't survive over the battlefield and fast movers had a hard enough time. It might seem at first that the small, light artillery spotters were an exception to that rule, and sometimes they were. But I am led to believe that mostly they survived by staying some distance from the enemy positions, preferably over theit own lines, and just using their superior altitude to function like normal artillery spotters. Spotting from over enemy ground was increasingly done with fast movers such as P-51s.</font>

[JonS]

Folks, bear in mind that the reports on the previous page relate to attacks on tanks and MT by fighters and FBs generally behind the frontlines. The Mortain report is somewhat muddied because all German vehs in that area were surveyed, but the LA BELINE report was of a purely air engagement. There are other reports that look specifically at the effect of CAS right on the front line, including a case where approx a company - who had been successfully holding up a battalion attack - promptly surrendered en masse when some Typhoons appeared. However, the evidence and conclusion all these reports was that accuracy and material results were absolutely dismal.

Rudel may well have been the best CAS pilot to ever put up wings, and the Stuka may have been the best CAS vehicle ever to grace gods green earth, but I personally find it hard to credit that he destroyed more than a couple of dozen proper 'tanks' in his career. Regardless of his claims. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that most CAS pilots - like most fighter pilots - never KOd a single thing.

And that, of course, is the problem of yusing Rudel. Outliers make poor arguments. We might as well take a sample of men called Armstrong, Aldrin, Conrad, Bean, Shepard, Mitchell, Scott, Irwin, Young, Duke, Cernan, and Schmitt, and conclude that everyone has been to the moon.

Regards

JonS

[Battlefront.com]

I agree with comments above about pilot training and the ability to hit things. Air to air combat is MUCH harder than air to ground. It is also much harder to hit a moving target in 3D space that is flying as fast, if not faster, than you. Not to mention the physics of aiming shots when not flying dead on at a target.

Nope, the big problem of air to ground combat is finding targets and then having the right conditions for engaging them. Lots of flak, uneven terrain, limited LOA options, etc. only come into the equation afterwards.

Steve

[sturmelon]

Not only is air-to-air combat difficult; it is also difficult to teach/learn.

Air to Ground attacks are very easily learned in training (minus the flak factor) and competant pilots can trained on simulated targets. Just learning to roll in and shoot up an old tank on a training ground ensures the pilots do not crash into the ground or miss most of the time.

There's a very good documentary regarding a US P47 pilot around the airwaves. He clearly makes it known that not only can he hit a moving vehicle (a brit armored car), but also individual germans running for thier lives. The ac attack was against a brit ac that was moving on a road. The US pilot only veered off at the last second (all ac look the same) and he said that it would have been toast. To see that documentary and then to hear some of the assumptions that wargamers have makes me wonder.

MG/autocannon fire was accurate. It was also terrifying in that, unlike artillery or tanks, the recipient knew he was being targeted and his cover/concealment was compromised. Even to a hardened vet, it was truly awful minutes.

[Michael Emrys]

Originally posted by dieseltaylor:

His guns may have been set up for a cone at 200 metres and use a centrally mounted MG to lead him onto target.

You seem to be basing your case on an awful lot of unproven assumptions. Let's take the above. Do you have any evidence that the MG would have the same ballistic properties as the cannon? If not, how much use would it be to range onto the target?

Michael

[JasonC]

People discussing auto cannons and their ability to hit things may be operating under the impression that things like 37mm Stukas are in that category. They are not. The 23mm on Sturms is an autocannon. None of the bigger calibers had a ROF remotely high enough to qualify as one.

It is quite unlikely they hit anything over an entire ammo load with even single digit percent frequency. True autocannons would get hits, but from very small numbers of shells. That means soft vehicles could be hurt by them but not fully armored ones.

As for claims of supposed "aces", I doubt they are any more accurate than claims in favor of anybody else, and it is entirely possible they are dramatically less truthful in many cases. For an obvious reason - anyone who systematically claimed vastly more than others would end up considered an "ace". It is entirely possible men like Rudel lost more planes than they KOed AFVs, indeed it is probable. Vastly more FBs were lost to light flak, than tanks were lost to FBs.

[Michael Emrys]

Originally posted by dieseltaylor:

And as for the young minds - its nice to be considered to have the flexibility and open-mindedness even when you are as old as me : )

I think gullibility combined with obstinate wrong-headedness is more along the lines of what I was associating with young minds in this case.

Michael

[Michael Emrys]

Originally posted by Battlefront.com:

Air to air combat is MUCH harder than air to ground. It is also much harder to hit a moving target in 3D space that is flying as fast, if not faster, than you. Not to mention the physics of aiming shots when not flying dead on at a target.

I think you may be forgetting something, Steve. The thing that makes aiming and shooting difficult is relative motion of the shooter to the target. The larger the closing or opening speed to the target, the harder it is to hold a bead. This is why most air to air training in most airforces never went beyond emphasizing getting into the target plane's six. In addition to that likely being in the target's blind spot, it is also the formation where the relative motion of the two is least. Of all the major air forces, I believe that US Navy Air Force was the only one that rigorously trained its pilots in deflection shooting. John Lundstrom in First Team goes into this at some length.

On the other hand, next to a head on attack with another airplane, the highest closing speed to a target will be to one on the ground. Not surprisingly, the scores of air to ground gunnery during training I recall reading about some years ago were pretty wretched, and this was by pilots who had already qualified in air to air and were firing at ground targets much bigger than a tank.

Motion in three dimensions, while not at all a negligible addition to the problem, has been somewhat overrated in this thread.

Michael

[Guest Mike]

Originally posted by sturmelon:

The bottom view clearly shows the area that is 'open' (or covered by screening).

The bottom view "clearly" shows that there's no armour on the top of the tank hull at all - which is clearly not correct!!

It is not possible to box an engine inside without some way for air to ventilate. The best compromise is baffling of armor plates.

Abnsolutely - and that's plenty to defeat light calibre ammo.

However the screen in question is NOT over the engine - it is over the TRANSMISSION, and that doesn't need airflow at all. The screen is part of the baffling in that it allows air to enter the engine compartment from the rear.

[sturmelon]

No the bottom drawing is showing the lack of armor across the space under the screen. Notice it DOES show horizontal armor to the left and right of this area.

Having ANY area where a projectile can find its way into the interior of an enclosed AFV is a recipe for disaster. The transmission is not compartmented and fuel tanks, wiring, engine, etc can all be threatened.

[JonS]

Andreas was definately right.

[Michael Emrys]

Yep.

Michael

[sturmelon]

Originally posted by JasonC:

People discussing auto cannons and their ability to hit things may be operating under the impression that things like 37mm Stukas are in that category. They are not. The 23mm on Sturms is an autocannon. None of the bigger calibers had a ROF remotely high enough to qualify as one.

I think myself and others were under the impression that the the 37mm Stuka fired semi-auto. That is, each of the 37mm fired electrically one round at the same time. Simple physics would preclude firing full-auto (the planes nose would dip down).

German 30mm Mk103 certainly fired full auto and at a somewhat quick rate. 360 rpm is 6 a second.