Hope you all enjoyed it. I wanted to tackle this 'tank kills myth' for some time. Note that I will most likely make an 'add-on' to this video where I talk about the whole 'soft-targets' matter! *Correction*: At 03:49 the visual says 900m/1000yards when it should say, in parallel to the commentary, 450m/500yards.
Please let's not discuss politics here, but I have one caveat on your remark about NATO bombings in 1999. in Serbia. Yes, "only" 26 tanks have been destroyed, and only 3 of those were more modern m84s and the rest were venerable T55 tanks that my brigade (211th armored brigade) have already been using as range targets by then and are all melted down by now. Since 2010 t55s are not in use even for training purposes. BUT. We were at the time literally reduced to hiding our hardware in preparation for land invasion. Armored maneuvers were few and far between, and main objective have been preserving our forces for the time. If it was full fledge warfare, losses would most certainly be greater.
To be honest, when I still played War Thunder I flew a lot with the Stuka G-2. I loved flying that plane, but destroying tanks with it was an art of its own. I was insanely happy if during a dive I would hit a tank. Destroying a tank was a massive celebration. Somehow getting back to the airfield to restock without getting shot down? A miracle.
@@Fidokowy Too bad you didnt try the Hs 129 B-3 with the BK75. That thing rains death onto almost any tank, and ive occasionally managed 3 kills in a single sortie in ground RB.
That tanker fella is exactly right, I used to be a Vulcan gunner in the 80's, we were trained to keep our RADAR shut off and use manual mode, aim well ahead of the attacking aircraft on it's bomb run so the burst goes in front of his nose (you're probably not going to hit it anyway), that will hopefully get him to release his weapons early and bug out in the interest of self preservation, as long as you keep him from taking out his target and don't get yourself killed in the process you've accomplished your mission as an air-defender.
I hunted a lot at a young age, birds hunted during season and you lead on birds, when I got older I could easily lead a running hog or deer. 1/2 hour at the range the first time I could easily pick out the who grew up shooting and those who had not.
@@stellakintara I don't even get what Ronald Reed is trying to say. 1/2 hour at a shooting range and he could divide people into who has experience shooting and who doesn't? I've never shot a gun in my life but I could guess whos who too.
The real damage was against supporting infantry and softskin transport. Tanks won't go far when their fuel trucks are all on fire. If you look at photos of the destroyed German convoys racing to Falaise, it's all softskins and horses.
Scuttling heavy equipement you had to leave behind was (and still is, I'd imagine) SOP in all armies. Not that troopers under some emotional distress and in a great hurry to be *anywhere else* necessarily remember the standing orders ofc, as for one fairly famous example the bogged-down Tiger IIs the Soviets recovered intact after the Ogledow ambush attest...
My grandfather flew Hurricanes in the desert in North Africa. He never really talked much about combat, just about his time in theatre and the things they did. However I do remember vividly one day I had a model of a tiger tank and I was showing it to him. He suddenly blurted out “I did not mind shooting at tanks that much, but I hated shooting at trucks because you could see everyone running and falling”
Chris LeRoux, a South African serving with 602 Squadron flying Spitfire IXs, appears to be the most likely candidate, although there are other claimants. Ironically enough the incident happened outside a village called Sainte Foy de Montgomerie.
Which they did, Not Rommel, But the Panzer command based at a Nomandy Château inside a forest, nazi's thought the British found them by radio traffic. It was pummeled. Never gathered Panzer command in a hugamug again. > Upending a Tank wouldn't destroy it, but useless to an army looking over their shoulder !
Maybe planes are not that great at killing tanks, but they are good at knocking out supporting infantry and soft skinned vehicles. Strafing a convoy of trucks and halftracks is more likely to yield damage as .50 cals and 20mm cannons can do damage to soft skinned vehicles. And near misses with bombs are much more effective against lightly armored vehicles.
air attack may not be very effective against tanks, but it absolutely wreaks havoc on infantry - and tanks as i understand it arnt very effective without infantry
Howard Blumenkopf 5 months ago Very hard to mount an armored push when your fuel truck looks, like burnt swiss cheese. And a Tiger in particular has to stay very close that truck.
About the psychological effect of straffing: if you ever experience an aircraft coming at you (or maybe better for you?) , just in training (doesn't matter if it is a helicopter or a plane) it is easier to understand the effects in real combat. In the trainingcase i had the honour to experience, it was a mixture of surprise and helplessness, because the pilots could have easily done some harm without us having any time to respond effectively. No one had seen them coming. We had just started to set up AAA guns in a new position when 4 Helis came over the treetops pointing at us and leaving again.
Another great example of the mental effects of air attacks is the fact that in every movie a plane diving/strafing makes the sound of the infamous Ju-87's Jericho sirens.
My Dad was in the Irish Guards and always claimed the Typhoon was his saviour in Holland. In later life he became a Germanophile and tried his best to learn the language!
Yes, I'm glad you've finally tackled this topic Bismarck. Very good material, nailing it hard to the point the true effectiveness of the mythologized typhoons or thunderbolts. I remember people obsessively clinging to that myth in one of your videos from a year or two back, where I had to literally pull out sources proving ineffectiveness of the air attacks onto german columns in ardennes (as well that US Air Force was operating as planned and that the famous fog & bad weather is another myth since Peiper's column was strafed resulting in de-tracking one of the king tigers at the very first day). A fun fact about ardenness is that it wasn't air power that stopped german advance. If it was something, the credit goes way more towards the amassed artillery corps that can be easily credited with more tank kills thanks to inconceivable amounts of fire those units were dishing out daily on very narrow stretches of the front (lets not forget that the area wasn't a plain that can be easily navigated). Same with normandy. The jugs didn't slaughtered german panzers, after all by the time of falaise there was a huge lot of them still in operation. But what they did was perfect interdiction in a country littered with dense hedgerows surrounding narrow roads. And since tanks move with support vehicles... Well, if I remember panzer Lehr took a long time to reach normandy thanks to air power. They didn't lost that many tanks, but they lost a crapton of vehicles putting a strain on the morale, supplies and service crews. Leading to abandonment of many due to lack of fuel or spare parts & time to fix them (I'm saying this more in general than about lehr's travel to normandy now). In short air force does not kill tanks. Not outright. But they surely defanged them and let to a quick decline of operational readiness of the units strafed by them for extended periods of time. Anyway, once more a quality upload Bis!
I didn't claimed that there were. I was talking in general, only mentioning typhoons and thunderbolts as the most iconic of the "jabos", who's popularity was only reinforced by games like war thunder. But they were first to strafe german columns in ardennes on the very first day of the battle. So?
My favourite bit of air jockey BS came from P47 pilots that claimed they could take out Panzers by richeting their .50 cals off the tarmac into the tank's belly.
"two Jagdtiger commanders failed to attack an American armored column about 1.5 km (1 mile) away in daylight for fear of attracting an air attack, even though the Jagdtigers were well camouflaged Both vehicles broke down while hurriedly withdrawing through fear of an air attack that did not come, and one was then destroyed by the crew." (Otto Carius) If you can make jagdtigers shit their pants, by word of mouth, you're good
the main reason according to my dad in the raf in ww2 was that no evidence was required for a vehicle hit wheras a shot down plane had to be verified or no kill so claims were vastly exaggerated
People commonly cite how the Germans always took weather and night in to consideration in Normandy. People use this and say that was because tanks got annihilated by planes but that's not the case. The trucks and half tracks were vulnerable and tanks are useless without the support elements. In addition, tanks can maneuver to defend against planes, but doing so expose themselves to anti-tank guns and infantry. The same people claim tanks are obsolete but fail to look in deeper.
This is something I've always wondered about. In gun camera film from WWII, you can see the rockets fired, then watch how much they drop after the motor burns out. You can often see the rockets hit on either side of the road, rarely see them actually hit a tank or vehicle. Seems like it was extremely difficult to hit anything as small as a tank with these unguided weapons.
The wreckage seen at La Baleine is a perfect example of the direct and indirect effect of TAC. A bridge was destroyed (by 500 lb bombs from Thunderbolts) and this meant 4 Panthers were abandoned by the crews when they could not cross the river. 2 in the middle of the road and near bomb craters which suggest the crews fled because of the attack. Over the bridge were the 2 RP destroyed tanks and a further 2 intact tanks abandoned by the crew.
Indeed, engaging the aircraft is intended to distract and disconcert the pilot. If someone is trying to kill me with a four dimensional maths problem (aiming/targeting a weapon in three dimensions plus time, as I’m a moving target) I really want them distracted and disconcerted.
I am so grateful that you tackled this one, because its one of the most persistent myths I've encountered and it never seems to die. It can be kind of infuriating.
Smigol Time! Because at 3.0 most tanks have exceptionally thin side or roof armor, while theres also plenty of soft skin targets, like the Puma or flak 88.
TLDR War Thunder's CAS mechanics (especially in air battles) are quite meh. (Though I do quite enjoy the A36. I take it out sometimes for low tier F84 memes, sprinting across the map at the beginning and dragging half the enemy team into diving to low alt. Gives my team time to climb... and there's not much in tier range that will catch it after she's built up some steam. Sometimes get that 2-3 people who insist on chasing me, so I lead them on a merry jaunt around the map while my team gets a free opportunity to outnumber the enemy)
Hi Military Aviation History - I fully agree with you, and as a pilot's perspective - ground support is probably the most dangerous mission. Firing "dumb rockets" or dropping "dumb bombs" against reinforced or moving hard targets is very difficult and dangerous and this is with computer-assisted aiming gun/bomb sight. You make a low-level pass and everybody is shooting at you with everything they got. Great video, air-ground support without smart weapons against protected or hard targets is difficult and very dangerous. Ciao, Veteran pilot.
Well, that explains why in IL2 Sturmovik flight sim, I couldnt hit shit with a FB. Something felt off about the ease with which air claims to kill tanks. Tiny targets and all that jazz, yeah..hitting a tank, never mind a ton of them...
Try IL-2 with cassette bombs (those tiny little bastards used in hundreds or thousands), or try the Hs-129 with can-opener 75mm gun. You will be able to take out 2 or 3 tanks of whatever type per mission (with limited supplies of ammo of course, otherwise you just kill everything :D )
In my opinion, during WW2, the Germans were frightened of Allied air attacks for ONE main reason. Propaganda newsreels. Their OWN propaganda newsreels!!! Nearly all German soldiers would have seen propaganda newreels showing the Luftwaffe in action, particularly reels from the first half of the war, in which the effect of the Luftwaffe's attacks on enemy troops, and the terror engendered in the enemy, was hugely exaggerated by the narrator. So when faced with Allied air attacks later in the war, the first thing the German soldier thought of was what the Luftwaffe had done, or what they had been told the Luftwaffe had done, to the enemy - and because of that, they vastly overestimated the deadliness of air attacks, and were terrified! The Nazis' own propaganda came back and bit them in the ass!!!
Were the Germans shown propaganda newsreels of Typhoons attacking them? Just kidding. Or do you mean German newsreels showing Stukas etc. attacking their enemies. Could be.
Neil Wilson: The Luftwaffe didn’t have Typhoons. ;) And also, the Luftwaffe generally didn’t bomb or strafe German troops (although they did sometimes, if Goering was in a bad mood. ;) The Italians, however, bombed everyone, when they weren’t flying home after jettisoning their bombs at the first sight of a few fighter planes (or of a flock of birds). ;)
Air attacks were devastating though... they just weren't effective against tanks. Vs infantry and light skinned vehicles they were devastating however. Bombs and rockets don't need to hit directly or very close and lots of heavy machine gun fire and cannons would chew up just about anything (except a tank of course).
True story. During WWII, post-war studies stated that only about 1 to 5% of total tank losses were due to air support. Most of tank losses were caused by AT guns. But it's also a fact, as you point out, that air superiority worked as a strong deterrent for German armored division on the western front, forcing them to move at night only and/or with bad weather. Nice video.
Not to mention that FB strafes against soft skinned targets *were* effective, and what carries the supplies required to keep a Panther in the field? Problem is hitting the logistics train is not what people want to hear about when they read about a war, its not interesting, tank busting is.... Despite the fact that the real killer is the effect of disrupting or even removing entirely the logistics support for the teeth arms. A tank without fuel is at best nothing more than a steel bunker position, at worse, it is a liability.
Even as ineffective as it was, ground attack operations probe their worth, but with the onset of intensely powerful ground attack platforms like the Thunderbolt 2 and Soviet Frogfoot, just how much do those kill factors change?
In the gulf war the A-10s were taking so much damage from low level attacks they were ordered to med to high altitude. Modern AAA can wreck the frogfoot and the A10, not to mention SAMs. Now many of those A10s managed to get home but the plane was more or less put out of operation.
Kirk: When you say A-10s hit by "low level" attack, sounds like your saying they were hit by planes. Do you mean ground fire? Just curious about the effectiveness of both A-10 and ground fire. Thanks
Air-headed Aviator In the first Gulf War A-10s accounted for 900 tanks, 2000 apcs/trucks, 1200 artillery pieces and 2 rotary winged aircraft. They traded that for 4 A10s shot down. The game changer was the AGM-65 and the CBU-87, as well as the GAU 8. The AGM-65 and the GAU 8 give the A10 the accuracy needed to target indivdual precision targets such as snipers, let alone AFVs and CBU-units allow a single aircraft to engage and to destroy platoon sized elements.
Kirk Gibbs Bullshit. The A10s flew nearly 9000 sorties during the 1st Gulf War losing 4 shot down and 2 damaged. The actions of the Iraqi military had no effect on the planning nor the execution of the mission.
Like at Midway. The Japanese carriers weren't hit but kept in defensive circles where they couldn't launch or retrieve plans. They were kept out of the fight. Brilliant video.
@@jean-bastienjoly5962 I know. I was referring to Midway. Every Japanese carrier that directly took part in the Pearl Harbor attack was sunk by V-J Day. Revenge!
Although you talk about the 'control' factor I think you understate the lock-down effect that fighter bombers exerted operationally. Not being able to move except at night. Knowing that if you try to attack or relocate your defence you'll get strafed. All generals complained about how much enemy fighter bombers limited their options. Some were killed by them. Also agree with the commenters who mention the soft skin casualties. Smashed up repair vehicles, fuel and ammo trucks, command and control vehicles, means no useful tanks anyways.
When the video begums I had "logistic disruption" in mind, but you covered that. Great video, mate! No petrol, no modern war. A fuel-less tank is no better than a bad fixed artillery. "The enemy that don't move, don't fight" - Muay Thai 1.01.
Just as a note to this, many years ago in my job I got to talk to a guy who was in the radio tank of his unit while pushing out from the D Day beaches. He explained how each unit had one Sherman Firefly to take out any Panthers. Unfortunately progress was slowing due to the undergrowth and hedges and they were getting pinned down by German units too. In his words "we would call up the RAF with the co ordinates of the enemy and then wait. For the first week the planes would appear in the distance and do one orbit to get their bearings and then dive to attack. He described them as Typhoons with rockets. He added by the second week that now on the initial circuit the German hatches would open and the crews scarper as they knew what was coming. In his words he said they never missed and was greatly thankful for his accurate the attacks were."
Another great video! After 50 years of the gun cam films from Normandy saying that the typhoons were great tank killers when all I saw was trees dying. I can rest now knowing I'm not the only one who thought these propaganda films were a little optimistic. Keep up the good work.
My own artillery training in the Soviet Army was focused on dealing with disposing of infantry support, disrupting armour formations and leaving armour exposed to close infantry weapons. Reports we read in Afghanistan talked of insurgents using almost defunct and antiquated tanks to draw out helicopters that they could down with American supplied missiles. Many pilots would pause to aim properly making themselves more vulnerable. The motivation for the attacks was fear of helicopter attacks. The opinion of some of my seniors was that fear of helicopters forced the insurgent command to stage real attacks instead of the hit and run.
My grandfather was drafted during the closing years of the war, he was sent to fight the Western Allies after some time spent on the flak. He never talked much about it, but my grandmother told me that once, he was forced to hide in a chicken coop from fighter bombers.
So am I, obviously^^ the pressure was really on them the time that happened, I believe he was 17 when he was drafted along with his classmates, they didn't even get to finish secondary school before being sent to war.
Lazarett is the german word for field hospital, if that's what you're looking for. The whole Bismarck thing is sort of a culmination of naval developments from several preceding decades, a new battleship sinking an old one and then being doomed by the next big thing. It's always interesting to see how those numbers and statistics break down to actual people and their stories, it's probably why history is studied as intensively as it is.
Thank you. I'm told German's not too bad, but I despair when I encounter children under 10 whose German is far better! Later, the POW and Repulse were sunk by pure air attack after the Bismarck, and the apogee was reached by kamikaze operations - essentially slow missiles. The film "Sink the Bismarck" overdid it on the Fuehrerbefehl aspect and probably distorted the situation. I mean, you're an Admiral on your flagship and you see another battleship that wants to sink you - what are you supposed to do - invite them for tea?
It isn't unheard of that people are blown out of their tanks and survive relatively unharmed if there's an explosion within. My guess from what you've told me would be that his tank was hit by artillery, which peppered his neck and shoulders with shrapnel and set something off within that blew him into the pig-pen. Did he ever learn what happened to his crew? Iirc, airburst shells were only used in an AA role by the Germans, but if that was the thing then his crew would likely have been unharmed, while an artillery hit would have left them in a bad way.
I've come back to this again a couple years later and something new occurs to me: Another factor affecting modern perceptions is likely that we have a higher level of expectation of training and doctrine employment. The media impact is obvious in exaggerating our perceptions by this point, but perhaps what is less obvious is that these days we except *excellence* from those using military hardware, as in getting the most performance possible from it, and this was both much more difficult and much less the case back then. For example, I am able to reliably score multiple direct hits per run with rockets or bombs against tanks shooting back at me, without taking hits most of the time while flying a P-47D in DCS: World. *However* I have only been able to do this after doing literally hundreds of sorties to practice my technique and to review how to improve with all the angles and footage available in 3rd person, and this is simply something that was not available or possible during the time. Now, true, I am not subject to the same control forces or stress of actual combat and that makes it much easier, but the physical ability of the aircraft to be flown in a way that scores reliable hits, even with realistic rocket or bomb dispersion, is there, but this level of practice and mastery would be unobtainable to real pilots in their situation
I've watched interviews with American pilots talking about this. A couple specifically mentioned that you can't crack a tank with.50 cals from the top. They said they concentrated on armour on roads, they would fire underneath the tank from the front and back. The goals was to skip rounds into the thinner underbelly and hopefully get a few rounds to punch through.
Just for kicks, what % of vehicles on any WWII battlefield were tanks? Wonder what the gents on an Opel Blitz felt when someone spotted an IL2? And as one WWII vet told me, bombs scare you but strafing kills you. Unless well covered indeed think of how many holes in the ground could be delivered by 8 X 50 caliber mgs fired by one fighter. (There are vivid YT videos done during 1945 showing what P47s were doing to the German countryside. Not even horse-drawn carts were safe.) I don't quite understand, however, why the Germans would have felt it necessary to travel at night if aircraft didn't hurt them. Fear, will, training and courage are always in continual tension during battle. But I'm not sure I buy the idea that during WWII the enemy was dying because of a fear of death. And downgrading the impact of a proper artillery barrage has me shaking my head too. You can have low % of hits, but if you're firing literally hundreds of thousands of rounds - or millions - the odds favor the house. I really can't think offhand of any country that believes it has had too much artillery in a major battle. (And as a footnote I'd guess that the Republican Guard wished we'd left our A-10s at home during either war.)
This video is talking about the interaction with tanks and aircraft. Not with support vehicles, light skinned or unarmored vehicles. How about staying on topic? Its obvious, that unarmored/light skinned vehicles such as trucks are going to get completely fucked, as they can be shot by .50cals, or hell, even 7.62's.
No offense, but "not as effective as most people are thinking" tells us basically nothing. I'm not expecting footnotes on YT - but a brief description of what you're citing would help. The reason I'm very skeptical of the "airpower revisionism" is that it flies in the face of German and Soviet behavior. (And, US experience too if you examine the few campaigns - like PI 1941-42 - where the enemy had air superiority.) Check the "German War Files" - the great series profiling German weaponry based on the zillion miles of film taken by Goebbels' cameramen during the war. Weapons based in the West are covered with extra camo coming from leaves, branches etc etc. What were they worried about? You might check out the photo evidence of damage done by allied air power to German units fleeing the Falaise pocket. Examine why Rommel was so certain that German efforts in France must be directed toward an immediate defeat of the landings instead of an extended battle inland. (Just a clue - he argued Rundstedt could not imagine the crippling impact allied air power would have on German troop movements - he'd seen it in the desert. Hitler got the idea - that's why he scheduled the Ardennes attacks for days that would have cloudy weather.) Or you might enjoy checking out the mountain of allied gun camera film illustrating the devastation of German ground targets of every type. Indeed, by February 1945, the Reich had so few targets left that the USAAF was considering things like "Operation JEB Stuart" which would have directed US aircraft to attack every public building in Germany - including vital places like small town libraries. Fortunately JEB Stuart was rejected because the losses incurred by airmen would have been greatly in excess of damage inflicted. Oh. you might also try to explain why the USSR built more IL-2s than any single type of warplane in history (I think the BF109 was close) and keyed their entire air effort toward ground attack. Maybe just dumb rooskies. Or maybe they were making life hell for the Wehrmacht. Read Wehrmact memoirs - they argue the later.
This explains why the A-10 was built around a 30mm auto cannon with depleted Uranium bullets. Add in Maverick missiles and the lethality goes up. Use of the Mavericks infrared camera allowed night vision. Still pilots were told to attack Scud missiles and cannons to preserve allied lives. Tanks were secondary targets.
The tanks are only vulnerable if they are out in the open, parked and immobile and the enemy don't do anything to hide or defend it. It does not matter if the attacker is an A-10 or F-35.
well, by default, they would use missiles and bombs, after all, even if they can do damage, the 30mm cannon isn't that much effective against tanks, even parts of the T-62 are "imune" to the GAU-8
Marrvyns Willames a lot of vehicles below the level of main battle ranks are not armoured against much beyond large machine gun rounds, fewer still have that sort of protection on their upper surfaces. When the sheer volume and penetrative power of the GAU-8 firing its signature depleted uranium rounds is considered alongside the unique angle from which it can make its attacks it doesn’t surprise me that according to the USAF a 1 second burst would knock out a tank. That being said, that’s 1 second of on target fire, which is no mean feat. They would indeed almost certainly use missiles and other weaponry where possible and save the cannon for softer targets - but the capacity is there to do serious, perhaps fatal damage even to MBTs. As for the aforementioned missiles - the methods of detection and guidance mean that tanks find it much harder to evade aircraft these days. Ever more sophisticated thermal and radar imaging mean that previously safe positions now don’t conceal a vehicle - and infantry or vehicle based laser designation, communication of positions and increasingly data links mean that an aircraft has ways of spotting and killing things the boys in WW2 would have boggled at.
Bis - very good work and I was wondering when you were going to put some of this information in a video. In my previous job I had the pleasure of studying American, British and Canadian Operational Research reports about the effectiveness of Air-to-Ground weapons from WW 1 to the present. You "hit" all the major points and accurately! :)
Was something that happened in April 1945. Allied soldiers spotted a few German panzers in a position and had no easy way of taking them out (hence the air strike). They called it in, but since they had nothing to indicate the German position (like smoke rounds etc.), they set up someone in a white shirt 200 paces from the Germans (obviously so that he isn't spotted by the Panzer crews). The aftermath I do not know but the attack seems to have been conducted.
The relative inaccuracy of using modified fighters to take on tanks was why we got the A-10 _Thunderbolt_ and Su-25 dedicated ground attack planes by the 1980's.
Which have generally been kinda shit at their jobs. Most of the air-to-ground vehicle kills in in the middle eastern conflicts were made by F-16s. A-10s did very little damage to enemy armor and were mostly just used to strafe infantry positions. The fart gun sounds very impressive but the reality is that it's not going to do a great deal of damage to modern tanks and the missiles they carry can also be carried by other, faster, higher altitude planes which are more capable of avoiding AA. The Su-25 has a slightly better service record but I suspect that's just because it's used more by more people.
I bet more aircraft destroyed tanks, than tanks destroyed aircraft... Joke aside, tanks are only one component of a mobile division, surely it is the steel fist, but without its support elements, mobile infantry, mobile artillery, mobile supply train, it is a clutched fist, without an arm... This is were ground attack aircraft were brutal. This was much more a problem for the Wermacht, with limited mobile resources, especially by the time of Normandy... Rommel understood this with his limited supply resources in Africa, that were decimated by allied air attacks... It was hard enough to get his supplies into Africa and then to have so much of it destroyed by allied air power...
What puzzles me is why combat memoirs written by German tankers all seem to claim the allied fighter-bombers in France were their true nemesis. They don't suggest this peril was a myth. In fact they went to great lengths, including hiding during daylight hours instead of rushing to the front, to avert aerial attack. I have read several of these memoirs and all present the fighter-bomber as their gravest threat, at least in the campaign in France. Were they mistaken? Were they dodging apparitions? Perhaps they were just cowardly but I somehow doubt it.
Small brain: planes knocked out whole columns of enemy armour Medium brain: planes didn't knock out much enemy armour but did kill lots of trucks and trains. Large brain: planes destroyed some tanks and lots of vehicles including those used for the supply of tanks meaning that many tanks had to be abandoned due to lack of supplies and fuel. Enlightened brain: planes knocked out whole columns worth of enemy armour.
Excellent! This is one reason why advocates of air power prefer to interdict in an enemy's rear area. The disruption or denial of necessary supplies, pay greater dividends than close air support, while subjecting the attacking aircraft to less risk. Where fighter-bombers appear more glamorous, it's possible that attacks from medium bombers had greater effect.
In one of the greatest book about the Typhoon (Firebirds: Flying the Typhoon in Action by Charles Demoulin) this subject is very well explained. He say, lot of tanks (or other vehicles) hit by air attacks was recover by German units for cannibalism or repair. Hence the absence of exhibits for statistics. Another thing, the review of abandoned tanks often reveals rocket impacts along with damage from artillery shells or tank. A tank imobilized by an air attack are often "ended" by tanks or artillery ... Completely destroyed tank makes it almost impossible to accurately identify the nature of the explosion. And in this case, lot of destroyed tank was awarded for the ground forces. And the last argument : Some targets were attacked by several pilots, which could skew the balance sheet without fraudulent intent ... Another good information : In Invasion 44, General Speidel (an officer of Rommel staff) give a lot of informations about Normandy loss. He say about Falaise pocket ... 84 tank destroyed by Typhoon's, 35 was seriously hit, and 21 hit with minor damages.
Well, yeah. They were also dive bombers (the whole point of which was accuracy) and dedicated ground support platforms rather than fighters drafted into ground-attack duty. Apples and oranges.
The psychological effect of rockets is depicted fictionally in one episode of the TV version of Sharpe where a rocket unit basically frightens a Naopleoinc column into retreat.
The Germans in Normandy couldn't move during the day and had heavy foliage camo. One German officer said the Allies having total air superiority was like playing chess were you had one move and your opponent had two.
How come the vastly exagerated kill claims?This is especialy glaring for the soviet air force's claims at Kursk, as those 3147 claimed kills would be almost all the 3253 tanks the germans aparently had in total (though I guess those numbers may vary a bit depending on your source). Possible explanations that come to my mind: - simple bragging- exagerating your successes out of fear or due to competition for supplys between squadrons (especialy in the soviet military)- self-deception: you see a dark cloud over a tank you fired on, you truly believe you see it burning, even if it's just dirt kicked up by your misses (seeing what you want to see)- true errors: smoke rising form a tank may simply be dry grass that caught fire, a vehicle you actualy hit may have sufferd only minor damage but did indeed emmit smoke for a while, mock-ups mistaken for real targets, destroyed lighter vehicles mistaken for tank kills, ect. edit: why does YT fuck up my simple formating?
Mostly: A) You can't really confirm whatever it's done for. Plane might've immobilized it and appear dead, but in tanker's book it's only "damaged". Also even a direct hit from a rocket might not destroy everything, but stun the crew to make it look like dead tank. But mostly I think it's B) Situational awareness. You might mistake the tank AT on the ground knocked out for your target or you simply don't bother confirming it. Don't remember any Air Force instructing planes to specifically circle around confirming kills, so that adds quite a bit to the mix. Combat is hell and keeping reliable kill count isn't your first priority. Military History Visualized has a podcast on his For Adults channel (hehe), "Kill Claims vs Losses with Tank Archives". Researched info on the subject there.
A guess; As you swoop in with your aircraft and light up the enemy your ordinance explodes around the tanks, and tracers flies everywhere. You are positive that nothing can survive such a barrage (after all, this data wasn't available at the time + confirmation bias). You claim about as many kills as you targeted (say 3). 3 minutes later your wingman strafe the exact same 3 targets as he didn't notice that they were indeed your targets from before, again he delivers such a punishing that he is utterly certain that nothing could survive what he throwed at them, he also claims 3 kills. The next day a second squadron shows up and strafe the same targets in a different position producing similar results to the first day, claiming 5 kills across 4 pilots. A total of 11 kills have been claimed, but in reality the enemy only suffered minor damage to the targets and while all three targets got disrupted in their operations, none was knocked out.
Absurd or simply wrong kill claims are a thing that happened with everyone. Even in naval warfare there are incorrect kill claims. You have cases by captains of varying nations claiming, "Our torpedoes sank a Battleship" when it was really a Cruiser. You even had airstrikes slamming a Carrier for great damage, fires billowing and everything, the aircrews claim killing a Carrier... Yet that Carrier survived to fight later on, which was what happened to Yorktown prior to Midway and Enterprise was thought destroyed a few times.
theordinarytime: I think you've hit the biggest nail in the answer, the other being that you may rarely get your assumptions validated or not validated. Even if there are a handful of dead tanks left for your sides ground troops to look over, it's unlikely that you can identify that your specific plane killed that specific tank, etc..... In tiny engagements - much better possibility of getting reliable feedback.
See a lot of good reasons here and thought i´d put my own in that might explain the exagerations of the Soviet airforce. In Soviet Russia, are you going to tell your CO and the Commisar that you just wasted fuel, 10 rockets, 6 bombs and a lot of cannon shells without scoring a single kill?
I remember reading where a German pilot was explaining how he attacked Russian tanks with the ground attack version of the FW-190. He carried a 500 kg bomb, flew at a certain low altitude and speed and dropped the bomb as the tank disappeared under the plane's nose. Then there were the Russian IL-2 and IL-10 which carried heavy guns that could penetrate tank top and side armor.
Quick question; Did the P51 Mustang posess any anti-tank armaments? I watched the end of Saving Private Ryan and the P51 (at least I thought it was) instantly blew the Tiger up with what must have been some sort of strafe, clearly no bomb or rocket hit the tank cause the explosion wasn't large enough and there was no prior sound of a bomb or missile being dropped/ launched
That's because SPR is a Hollywood movie. The Mustangs (P-51Ds) could mount rockets and bombs, but rarely did so in WW2. It was one of the things they did in Korea however.
Military Aviation History Thanks man, its always really really bothered me how it just instantly blows up a tank like it had a 75mm gun strapped to it!
Allison powered P-51C were the base of the A-36. This did make it a dedicated dive bomber that could hold its own in air to air combat; a very rare bird.
My father in law was a tanker in Patton' s army and was present at the Battle of the Bulge. He said their defense was for all tanks to point their 50 cals straight up and turn them on. They were bombed twice once by the Luftwaffe and once by the US Army Air Corp.
The thing I find most interesting, and perhaps disturbing, is the way that in the past few years people who were not involved in the real life events of WWII have stepped up to rewrite the reasons/causes/individual action results from the conflict. Of course one can say that modern technology and research allows historic evidence to be reviewed with high tech forensic equipment and that "advances in science" enable "myths" to be debunked. Basically, since those who actually did the fighting, flew the planes, operated the tanks etc. are no longer alive to report first hand what actually happened we have these so called new experts telling us that what the people who were actually there said isn't a true reflection on what happened. Rather like armchair generals being smarter than the ones that fought the battles. Being fortunate enough to have known those in the greatest generation first hand perhaps gives me a certain level of skepticism when it comes to modern self appointed historians who promote alternative facts to those that history has already recorded first hand.
These are period numbers contrasting with the perception of what happened then. The viewpoint of what happened then in public perception is created more by cinema than the reality experienced on the ground. Even then the experience of those there is not infallible.
My Grandfather flew Typhoons after D-DAY and across Europe subsequently. He also flew Hurricanes in the Battle of Britain and in North Africa. Unfortunately I can't ask him for a first hand perspective now as he passed away over 20 years ago but the more I learn about the campaigns he fought in the more I feel my own existence was such a narrow thing. Esp. as my other Grandfather was Polish and fought through the siege of Lvov.
In curious to see this same analysis applied to Hans-Ulrich Rudel who was credited with a supposed 519 tank kills, which sounds ridiculous and i suspect it was.
well, he credited even more during the war. It was after the war when the number was set to cca 500 (even then, its still possible that some of them were destroyed by his mates in stukas who followed him)
Agraviadore: Well, don’t forget that the RAF, USAAF and Soviet Air Force didn’t use dive bombers like the Ju 87. Dive bombers were far more accurate than level bombers or fighter bombers. Also, 37mm tank buster cannons with armour piercing shells are far better able to penetrate a tank’s rear or top armour than regular 20mm cannons with high explosive shells, or 0.50 inch machine guns designed for shooting at thin-skinned aluminium aircraft. Also, a lot of Rudel’s tank kills were gained in 1941-42, against light tanks with thin armour, e.g. T-26’s and BT-7’s. Light tanks with only 10-15 mm of side and rear armour were far more likely to be penetrated by bomb splinters from a very near miss than a T-34 or Sherman would be.
Tim Smith im still sceptical. 500 is an outrageous number for even a group of stukas and those 37mm guns did not carry much ammunition. They were also gun pods and unlikely to have anywhere close to the accuracy of proper fixed guns. If you believe the stories, he once flew a mission with his leg in a cast and in that single flight he destroyed 13 tanks, in 1945. Sounds far fetched in the extreme.
Agraviadore: Not when you consider Rudel flew 2,530 ground attack sorties. Although 13 tank kills in one sortie is extremely improbable, 13 in one day (during 6 or 7 sorties, flying from an advanced landing ground near the front line to reduce flying time per sortie) is conceivably possible. Flying with a leg in a cast was possible. The British fighter pilot Douglas Bader flew with two prosthetic legs and gained 22 confirmed kills doing so.
I'd be interested in knowing if there was any follow-up after the war to see if his numbers were legitimate. I've read his book "Stuka Pilot" and more than anything else I think he was really lucky. And focused and disciplined. He was shot down so often and still managed to survive the war. I suspect it will always be a mystery, but for my money he is still the greatest combat pilot of all time.
Anyone who have read, or know about, the tactics used with bren or sten guns (LMG's) knows that lethality doesnt always scare. One great aspect to an lmg nest is the fact that they can be employed to pin an enemy down or scatter their forces.
What you forget though is that successful air attacks took place mainly on columns of tanks on roads and check points, and here the kill probability is greatly increased due to the tanks being close together. In addition, hitting some tanks on the columns can immobilise the column, stall the attack, and allow anti-tank guns and defending ground forces to pick off the immobilised tanks. This is why the most successful counter attacks on tank columns have always been where air strikes have been closely coordinated with ground forces. Air attack basically takes away the mobility of tanks and supporting artillery, infantry and logistics, which makes tanks ineffective.
What we need now is an analysis of the two Gulf Wars, investigating whether the Americans had a higher hit/kill probability when attacking allied tanks or iraqi ones.
That is not true. There was 18 Abrams lost in the gulf war and 9 of them was permanent. 7 permanent was from friendly fire and 2 purposely destroyed to prevent capture after being damaged. There was no direct loss from enemy tank fire, but it is still a combat loss if your own side destroy it. If a tank is damage and cant continue to fight is is a loss even if it might be reparerad and return to combat later.
That's not how statistics work. If that were the case, every instance of a training accident where a plane crashed would be fair game for another nation to rack up to their "kill count." If a job is done by someone else the claim doesn't belong to others that did not accomplish the deed.
Unfortunately this is EXACTLY why we can never have a completely accurate WWII simulator without literally altering the minds of the players into THINKING that they are ACTUALLY in WWII.
As an example of the mad workings of chance I always recall Dmitriy Loza's account of a German strafing attack on a formation of Russian M4s stopped along a road. Most of the crews were dismounted, but the one fatality was a man sleeping in a buttoned-up tank. A bullet came down the gun barrel, and the breech was open. Whack! He never woke up.
One thing to think about is that in the context of combined arms warfare while a tank group may survive strafing by rockets and cannon fire the infantry supporting them may not be so lucky and so even if the tanks are not knocked out the psychological effect on the crew combined with the deviation of the infantry and light vehicles supporting the tanks may still cause the enemy attack to fail
When the amount of ordinance exceeds the cost of a tank or anything for that matter is a losing proposition ! In simple comparison, how many bullets are shot on average in battle to put down one combatant, it’s astronomical ! Interesting post, enjoyed watching !
@8:35 This is simple to explain because I've been there... In artillery strike over large areas or from high altitude you think "he doesn't know I'm here, can't see me, can't hit me". The low level air attack is personal... "He can see me, he knows where I'm hiding..."
Thank you for the lecture. However I think the summing up really should centre around stressing just the following 2 points: 1. Very few actual tanks were directly destroyed by aircraft attacks. BUT 2. All other non-tank vehicles, particularly tank support vehicles carrying men including mechanics, ammo and fuel etc, and supporting troops and horses close to the tanks could certainly suffer catastrophic losses by enduring such air attacks, or suffer pyschological effects rendering them unfit or degraded for any further attack.
Great points. In Vietnam our Cobras were pretty lethal because they can get right on top of the NVA as where aircraft were Hammers and did not get too close. We always used napalm on bunker complexes because bombs did not always penetrate the bunkers, I will not describe what it did, better them than us.
The Battle of Mortain was won through air power alone. I would suggest you get a copy of The Day of the Typhoon, written by a pilot who was there and afterwards went on a tour by jeep to examine the damage done by his squadron. He was sickened by the amount of carnage done to horses, men and machinery. The battle was fought at extremely close range, the German armour being less than five minutes away from the aerodrome, so close in fact that the RAF ground crews were under German sniper fire while re-arming their Typhoons. While tank kills were probably exaggerated, the German "armoured" columns were mostly horse drawn and soft-skinned vehicle support for the tanks, these troops and their equipment were the main objectives. Without them the tanks themselves are just dead metal.
My Tank Corp father saw or was attacked by Stukas (definitely in Nth Africa maybe in France and Belgium pre-Dunkirk as well). The Stuka made a screaming siren sound in the diving attack which very often induced a physical reaction in many survivors (and non) of these attacks, ie a tanker would lose control of their bowels. He (my father) also noted that the the headlong steep diving pilots were less accurate than those who came in at a shallower angle and could adjust aim more easily (although less intimidating).
There may be another explanation for the low actual kill count in the Balcan wars: The serbs are said to have welded canisters together and created other decoys, which were then destroyed.
Thanks so much for this video! I have been totally sceptical about the dramatic claims for aircraft versus tanks. What annoys me is that all the modern books I have read on such subjects perpetuate this myth.
Good video. Another point is fuel ammunition and parts are also a way to stop tanks or disrupt operations and are soft targets for air attacks but have to be moved to service tanks in front lines.
I think why so many people have psychological reactions to the air to ground attacks is because when you are getting attacked from the air, you can't really do anything about it to save yourself if something does hit. It's all up to those who are in the AA vehicles.
A lot of people actually forget that destroying something isn't always necessary, and that incapacitating or disabling is really the lowest bar for something to be considered succesful.
They were inflated; however, P-47 tactics were to bounce fifty caliber rounds from the ground, up into the tank's engine. It may not be a "kill", but now they need to send a recovery vehicle for the tank and repair the engine. The inability for fixed wing kills on tanks gave birth to the use of specialized rotary wing aircraft to fill that niche.
In his memoir, Heinz Guderian writes of an altercation he had with Rommel in early 1944, France. Guderian wanted to hold the tanks in a reserve ready to-be moved to the site of any Allied landing. Rommel already had plenty of experience in Africa operating under Allied air dominance, and Rommel argued they needed to concentrate the tanks up front at the likely potential Allied beach-heads because the Allies with air-control will know where the tanks are and attack them in transit before they ever have a chance to engage combat at the beachhead. So maybe this begs a question regarding air-effectiveness against flat-bed trains loaded with Panzers
This video is excellent and gives the perfect background as to why the A-10 Warthog's gun and plane are EFFECTIVE tank killers. Thousands of depleted uranium rounds per minute? Be afraid for a REASON!
Can't say I already knew those things. I'm now reminded of a tank battle during Ymo-Kippur war, where Israeli tanks were unable to eliminate all of the approaching Syrian tanks; the air-force (A-4 Skyhawks and F-4 Phantoms I assume) had to be called to take several advancing tanks out (I think they succeeded but suffered casualties). Previously I imagined that those tanks were dealt with quickly, but according to the video's statistics, I'm surprised that those tanks were killed to begin with.
The whole idea of 'vertical envelopment' is not just that aircraft are more accurate than artillery (which may not matter against static targets), but that they have a longer reach say 100 - 200 Km versus 10 - 30 Km. Also the air interdiction missions of allied aircraft could do more harm to soft targets like columns of supply trucks than to tanks. Air interdiction slowed the pace of supply and redeployment of forces by keeping columns off the roads, in the ultimate case causing movement to be restricted to night.
Steel Division does a pretty decent job with airforce as ground kills tend to be pretty uncommon, even for bigger bombers (exceptions include lucky direct hits, soft targets in very exposed positions, low health last-hits. Mostly, aircraft ground attacks are used to suppress units or to just stress them out (reducing accuracy and such).
Everyone did. The only reason flamethrowers (always at least half a "terror weapon", just check the psychological impact eg. Churchill Crocodiles had on dug-in defenders) fell out of use was people came up with more convenient ways to set things on fire at a distance, generally meaning grenades and rockets.
@@bruceparr1678 ...particularly if the subjects had witnessed what the next step would be. That said as I understand that was a pretty common move on part of armoured flamethrowers against fortifications - dousing the target with fuel beforehand rather amplified the effects of a following "lit" burst. (Vehicular flamethrowers were more likely to have the kinds of propellant mechanisms that allowed "cold" shots, while the simpler and much smaller infantry flamers were much too vulnerable for this kind of trick to normally be viable.)
In the F-86 Saber vs. Soviet IS-3 example it should be noted that the F-86 were using digital targeting computers which the pilots reported allowed them to make ground kills that were not possible in WW2. Despite that, their effectiveness was still unimpressive but much greater than without the computers.
It's interesting to hear about the morale effect (panic and disruption) airstrikes might have even if there were few if any tank losses from the strikes. Wikipedia mentions a tiger formation being driven off by an airstrike in it's account of Operation Bluecoat. Maybe no panzer kills but job done.
Hope you all enjoyed it. I wanted to tackle this 'tank kills myth' for some time. Note that I will most likely make an 'add-on' to this video where I talk about the whole 'soft-targets' matter!
*Correction*: At 03:49 the visual says 900m/1000yards when it should say, in parallel to the commentary, 450m/500yards.
Great video Bis, I never would have thought tanks had that good a chance of survival in real life even against modern weapons.
There are plenty of soft targets in an armored division. The enemy can still strafe your trucks and horses. Supplies have to come from somewhere.
Military Aviation History when a video henschel 129?
Yeah, but we still god scared shitless whenever heard planes overhead.
Please let's not discuss politics here, but I have one caveat on your remark about NATO bombings in 1999. in Serbia. Yes, "only" 26 tanks have been destroyed, and only 3 of those were more modern m84s and the rest were venerable T55 tanks that my brigade (211th armored brigade) have already been using as range targets by then and are all melted down by now. Since 2010 t55s are not in use even for training purposes. BUT. We were at the time literally reduced to hiding our hardware in preparation for land invasion. Armored maneuvers were few and far between, and main objective have been preserving our forces for the time. If it was full fledge warfare, losses would most certainly be greater.
I knew it, I didn't suck at War Thunder, I was just being historically accurate!
To be honest, when I still played War Thunder I flew a lot with the Stuka G-2. I loved flying that plane, but destroying tanks with it was an art of its own. I was insanely happy if during a dive I would hit a tank. Destroying a tank was a massive celebration. Somehow getting back to the airfield to restock without getting shot down? A miracle.
@@Fidokowy Too bad you didnt try the Hs 129 B-3 with the BK75. That thing rains death onto almost any tank, and ive occasionally managed 3 kills in a single sortie in ground RB.
He 112 with cannon I’ve got 4 maybe more kills. It’s amazing low tier
@@builder396 I usually get 4-6 kills when I take it out
I find that the yak 9t and su-6 are some of the best tank killers with guns, now obviously anything with a 1000kg bomb will do the job just fine.
That tanker fella is exactly right, I used to be a Vulcan gunner in the 80's, we were trained to keep our RADAR shut off and use manual mode, aim well ahead of the attacking aircraft on it's bomb run so the burst goes in front of his nose (you're probably not going to hit it anyway), that will hopefully get him to release his weapons early and bug out in the interest of self preservation, as long as you keep him from taking out his target and don't get yourself killed in the process you've accomplished your mission as an air-defender.
cool, was your Vulcan position on an APC or something like that?
I hunted a lot at a young age, birds hunted during season and you lead on birds, when I got older I could easily lead a running hog or deer.
1/2 hour at the range the first time I could easily pick out the who grew up shooting and those who had not.
Haha vulcan goes BRRRRRRR
@@ronaldreed7698 animals dont shoot back.
@@stellakintara I don't even get what Ronald Reed is trying to say.
1/2 hour at a shooting range and he could divide people into who has experience shooting and who doesn't? I've never shot a gun in my life but I could guess whos who too.
The real damage was against supporting infantry and softskin transport. Tanks won't go far when their fuel trucks are all on fire. If you look at photos of the destroyed German convoys racing to Falaise, it's all softskins and horses.
Exactly, the most damage was done on supporting targets. Especially on trains that transported the tanks to the front.
Very much this. A tank with no spare parts, fuel, lubricants, ammo, coolant etc. is going to become combat ineffective rather quickly.
More specifically the German's got real good at destroying their own tanks when they broke down or ran out of fuel.
Scuttling heavy equipement you had to leave behind was (and still is, I'd imagine) SOP in all armies. Not that troopers under some emotional distress and in a great hurry to be *anywhere else* necessarily remember the standing orders ofc, as for one fairly famous example the bogged-down Tiger IIs the Soviets recovered intact after the Ogledow ambush attest...
That _non sequitur_ is a monument to *your* stupidity.
Or inebriation, as the case may be; drink OR post mmmkay?
My grandfather flew Hurricanes in the desert in North Africa. He never really talked much about combat, just about his time in theatre and the things they did. However I do remember vividly one day I had a model of a tiger tank and I was showing it to him. He suddenly blurted out “I did not mind shooting at tanks that much, but I hated shooting at trucks because you could see everyone running and falling”
Soviet pilots: "We knocked out thousands of German tanks!"
The Germans: "Damn I wish we had that many"
hahahahahahahahaehgbwrahawhah that was very funny, thank you for that anime cat girl person!!!!!!1!
The best way to mess up a German tank is to strafe Rommel in his staff car.
in that case you messed up the whole German tank division, then the Germans then pour resources on stuff like Me262 or V2 Rocket
Chris LeRoux, a South African serving with 602 Squadron flying Spitfire IXs, appears to be the most likely candidate, although there are other claimants. Ironically enough the incident happened outside a village called Sainte Foy de Montgomerie.
yeah that will do it
Rommel was strafed and, was severely injured. As a result, he could not help/support the bomb coup against Hitler on July 20, 1944.
Which they did, Not Rommel, But the Panzer command based at a Nomandy Château inside a forest, nazi's thought the British found them by radio traffic. It was pummeled. Never gathered Panzer command in a hugamug again.
> Upending a Tank wouldn't destroy it, but useless to an army looking over their shoulder !
Maybe planes are not that great at killing tanks, but they are good at knocking out supporting infantry and soft skinned vehicles. Strafing a convoy of trucks and halftracks is more likely to yield damage as .50 cals and 20mm cannons can do damage to soft skinned vehicles. And near misses with bombs are much more effective against lightly armored vehicles.
Look at Falaise. There was two miles of dead horses, burning trucks and smashed wagons.
BREAKING NEWS: armour increases vehicle survivability, more at 10
air attack may not be very effective against tanks, but it absolutely wreaks havoc on infantry - and tanks as i understand it arnt very effective without infantry
Very hard to mount an armored push when your fuel truck looks, like burnt swiss cheese.
Howard Blumenkopf
5 months ago
Very hard to mount an armored push when your fuel truck looks, like burnt swiss cheese.
And a Tiger in particular has to stay very close that truck.
About the psychological effect of straffing: if you ever experience an aircraft coming at you (or maybe better for you?) , just in training (doesn't matter if it is a helicopter or a plane) it is easier to understand the effects in real combat. In the trainingcase i had the honour to experience, it was a mixture of surprise and helplessness, because the pilots could have easily done some harm without us having any time to respond effectively. No one had seen them coming. We had just started to set up AAA guns in a new position when 4 Helis came over the treetops pointing at us and leaving again.
WTF, war thunder lied to me?
Not necessarily, it's just that the nature of a video game makes killing tanks very easy.
Ask that Wargaming guy Chieftain about that.
Greg Bailey you should see some of the spitfire pilots in Squadron RB when it reaches that BR, you pretty much have to win that fight.
Also remember that u are most likely using dedicated tank removers like the Il2 and the Duck, not fighter bombers.
Try sim
I can't believe that I sold my tank and bought a fighter-bomber.
Bloody typical.......
Another great example of the mental effects of air attacks is the fact that in every movie a plane diving/strafing makes the sound of the infamous Ju-87's Jericho sirens.
My Dad was in the Irish Guards and always claimed the Typhoon was his saviour in Holland. In later life he became a Germanophile and tried his best to learn the language!
Excellent video from the both of you!
Thanks :)
Except, I think statistics show Artillery was (and is, eastern ukraine) actually by far numerically largest disabler of tanks (=operationally killed)
Yes, I'm glad you've finally tackled this topic Bismarck. Very good material, nailing it hard to the point the true effectiveness of the mythologized typhoons or thunderbolts. I remember people obsessively clinging to that myth in one of your videos from a year or two back, where I had to literally pull out sources proving ineffectiveness of the air attacks onto german columns in ardennes (as well that US Air Force was operating as planned and that the famous fog & bad weather is another myth since Peiper's column was strafed resulting in de-tracking one of the king tigers at the very first day). A fun fact about ardenness is that it wasn't air power that stopped german advance. If it was something, the credit goes way more towards the amassed artillery corps that can be easily credited with more tank kills thanks to inconceivable amounts of fire those units were dishing out daily on very narrow stretches of the front (lets not forget that the area wasn't a plain that can be easily navigated). Same with normandy. The jugs didn't slaughtered german panzers, after all by the time of falaise there was a huge lot of them still in operation. But what they did was perfect interdiction in a country littered with dense hedgerows surrounding narrow roads. And since tanks move with support vehicles... Well, if I remember panzer Lehr took a long time to reach normandy thanks to air power. They didn't lost that many tanks, but they lost a crapton of vehicles putting a strain on the morale, supplies and service crews. Leading to abandonment of many due to lack of fuel or spare parts & time to fix them (I'm saying this more in general than about lehr's travel to normandy now).
In short air force does not kill tanks. Not outright. But they surely defanged them and let to a quick decline of operational readiness of the units strafed by them for extended periods of time.
Anyway, once more a quality upload Bis!
I didn't claimed that there were. I was talking in general, only mentioning typhoons and thunderbolts as the most iconic of the "jabos", who's popularity was only reinforced by games like war thunder. But they were first to strafe german columns in ardennes on the very first day of the battle. So?
It would definitely have been hard for the US Air Force to destroy tanks in WW2 since it didn't exist yet.
My favourite bit of air jockey BS came from P47 pilots that claimed they could take out Panzers by richeting their .50 cals off the tarmac into the tank's belly.
"two Jagdtiger commanders failed to attack an American armored column about 1.5 km (1 mile) away in daylight for fear of attracting an air attack, even though the Jagdtigers were well camouflaged Both vehicles broke down while hurriedly withdrawing through fear of an air attack that did not come, and one was then destroyed by the crew." (Otto Carius)
If you can make jagdtigers shit their pants, by word of mouth, you're good
the main reason according to my dad in the raf in ww2 was that no evidence was required for a vehicle hit wheras a shot down plane had to be verified or no kill so claims were vastly exaggerated
People commonly cite how the Germans always took weather and night in to consideration in Normandy. People use this and say that was because tanks got annihilated by planes but that's not the case. The trucks and half tracks were vulnerable and tanks are useless without the support elements. In addition, tanks can maneuver to defend against planes, but doing so expose themselves to anti-tank guns and infantry.
The same people claim tanks are obsolete but fail to look in deeper.
Air support could strike well behind the lines and well beyond allied help, from friendly tanks or guns. This is why air superiority is so critical.
@@mwnciboo true, I see many people underestimate Air power but the most underrated branch is Navy.
as always, informative, well put together. Thanks for being awesome Bis!
This is something I've always wondered about.
In gun camera film from WWII, you can see the rockets fired, then watch how much they drop after the motor burns out. You can often see the rockets hit on either side of the road, rarely see them actually hit a tank or vehicle.
Seems like it was extremely difficult to hit anything as small as a tank with these unguided weapons.
The wreckage seen at La Baleine is a perfect example of the direct and indirect effect of TAC. A bridge was destroyed (by 500 lb bombs from Thunderbolts) and this meant 4 Panthers were abandoned by the crews when they could not cross the river. 2 in the middle of the road and near bomb craters which suggest the crews fled because of the attack. Over the bridge were the 2 RP destroyed tanks and a further 2 intact tanks abandoned by the crew.
of course, it certainly doesn't hurt that tanks have almost no luck hitting aircraft back
Sounds like the (sometimes deadly)equivalent of a schoolyard slap fight.
From Nicolas Moran’s comments, tankers don’t need to hit attacking aircraft but just throw the pilot’s aim off or cause him to bug out early.
Indeed, engaging the aircraft is intended to distract and disconcert the pilot. If someone is trying to kill me with a four dimensional maths problem (aiming/targeting a weapon in three dimensions plus time, as I’m a moving target) I really want them distracted and disconcerted.
I am so grateful that you tackled this one, because its one of the most persistent myths I've encountered and it never seems to die. It can be kind of infuriating.
Meanwhile taking out an A36 with gunpods is the best anti-tank weapon on 3.0....
Smigol Time! I think the bombs are better for reliability those 26mm pen 50 only work on some tanks
Smigol Time! Because at 3.0 most tanks have exceptionally thin side or roof armor, while theres also plenty of soft skin targets, like the Puma or flak 88.
only KV-1 cant get penned... every other tank could be easily taken out by those 10x 50cals
TLDR War Thunder's CAS mechanics (especially in air battles) are quite meh. (Though I do quite enjoy the A36. I take it out sometimes for low tier F84 memes, sprinting across the map at the beginning and dragging half the enemy team into diving to low alt. Gives my team time to climb... and there's not much in tier range that will catch it after she's built up some steam. Sometimes get that 2-3 people who insist on chasing me, so I lead them on a merry jaunt around the map while my team gets a free opportunity to outnumber the enemy)
I have read that Napalm was very effective against North Korean T-34/85 tanks
Hi Military Aviation History - I fully agree with you, and as a pilot's perspective - ground support is probably the most dangerous mission. Firing "dumb rockets" or dropping "dumb bombs" against reinforced or moving hard targets is very difficult and dangerous and this is with computer-assisted aiming gun/bomb sight. You make a low-level pass and everybody is shooting at you with everything they got. Great video, air-ground support without smart weapons against protected or hard targets is difficult and very dangerous. Ciao, Veteran pilot.
Well, that explains why in IL2 Sturmovik flight sim, I couldnt hit shit with a FB. Something felt off about the ease with which air claims to kill tanks. Tiny targets and all that jazz, yeah..hitting a tank, never mind a ton of them...
Try IL-2 with cassette bombs (those tiny little bastards used in hundreds or thousands), or try the Hs-129 with can-opener 75mm gun. You will be able to take out 2 or 3 tanks of whatever type per mission (with limited supplies of ammo of course, otherwise you just kill everything :D )
Nice vid as always. Great to debunk those kind of things.
In my opinion, during WW2, the Germans were frightened of Allied air attacks for ONE main reason.
Propaganda newsreels.
Their OWN propaganda newsreels!!!
Nearly all German soldiers would have seen propaganda newreels showing the Luftwaffe in action, particularly reels from the first half of the war, in which the effect of the Luftwaffe's attacks on enemy troops, and the terror engendered in the enemy, was hugely exaggerated by the narrator.
So when faced with Allied air attacks later in the war, the first thing the German soldier thought of was what the Luftwaffe had done, or what they had been told the Luftwaffe had done, to the enemy - and because of that, they vastly overestimated the deadliness of air attacks, and were terrified!
The Nazis' own propaganda came back and bit them in the ass!!!
interesting point
Were the Germans shown propaganda newsreels of Typhoons attacking them? Just kidding. Or do you mean German newsreels showing Stukas etc. attacking their enemies. Could be.
Neil Wilson: The Luftwaffe didn’t have Typhoons. ;) And also, the Luftwaffe generally didn’t bomb or strafe German troops (although they did sometimes, if Goering was in a bad mood. ;) The Italians, however, bombed everyone, when they weren’t flying home after jettisoning their bombs at the first sight of a few fighter planes (or of a flock of birds). ;)
Air attacks were devastating though... they just weren't effective against tanks. Vs infantry and light skinned vehicles they were devastating however. Bombs and rockets don't need to hit directly or very close and lots of heavy machine gun fire and cannons would chew up just about anything (except a tank of course).
George Mihaita: Maybe give some reasoning to your claim rather than just "nope".
True story. During WWII, post-war studies stated that only about 1 to 5% of total tank losses were due to air support. Most of tank losses were caused by AT guns. But it's also a fact, as you point out, that air superiority worked as a strong deterrent for German armored division on the western front, forcing them to move at night only and/or with bad weather. Nice video.
Not to mention that FB strafes against soft skinned targets *were* effective, and what carries the supplies required to keep a Panther in the field? Problem is hitting the logistics train is not what people want to hear about when they read about a war, its not interesting, tank busting is....
Despite the fact that the real killer is the effect of disrupting or even removing entirely the logistics support for the teeth arms. A tank without fuel is at best nothing more than a steel bunker position, at worse, it is a liability.
Even as ineffective as it was, ground attack operations probe their worth, but with the onset of intensely powerful ground attack platforms like the Thunderbolt 2 and Soviet Frogfoot, just how much do those kill factors change?
In the gulf war the A-10s were taking so much damage from low level attacks they were ordered to med to high altitude. Modern AAA can wreck the frogfoot and the A10, not to mention SAMs. Now many of those A10s managed to get home but the plane was more or less put out of operation.
Kirk: When you say A-10s hit by "low level" attack, sounds like your saying they were hit by planes. Do you mean ground fire? Just curious about the effectiveness of both A-10 and ground fire. Thanks
You should check out DCS. Flight sim, with a free low detail frogfoot, and a $40 super realistic A10
Air-headed Aviator
In the first Gulf War A-10s accounted for 900 tanks, 2000 apcs/trucks, 1200 artillery pieces and 2 rotary winged aircraft. They traded that for 4 A10s shot down.
The game changer was the AGM-65 and the CBU-87, as well as the GAU 8. The AGM-65 and the GAU 8 give the A10 the accuracy needed to target indivdual precision targets such as snipers, let alone AFVs and CBU-units allow a single aircraft to engage and to destroy platoon sized elements.
Kirk Gibbs
Bullshit. The A10s flew nearly 9000 sorties during the 1st Gulf War losing 4 shot down and 2 damaged. The actions of the Iraqi military had no effect on the planning nor the execution of the mission.
Like at Midway. The Japanese carriers weren't hit but kept in defensive circles where they couldn't launch or retrieve plans. They were kept out of the fight. Brilliant video.
Four of them were sunk by USN aircraft.
@@rimshot2270 he's talking about the attacks BEFORE that one
@@jean-bastienjoly5962 I know. I was referring to Midway. Every Japanese carrier that directly took part in the Pearl Harbor attack was sunk by V-J Day. Revenge!
Although you talk about the 'control' factor I think you understate the lock-down effect that fighter bombers exerted operationally. Not being able to move except at night. Knowing that if you try to attack or relocate your defence you'll get strafed. All generals complained about how much enemy fighter bombers limited their options. Some were killed by them.
Also agree with the commenters who mention the soft skin casualties. Smashed up repair vehicles, fuel and ammo trucks, command and control vehicles, means no useful tanks anyways.
When the video begums I had "logistic disruption" in mind, but you covered that. Great video, mate!
No petrol, no modern war. A fuel-less tank is no better than a bad fixed artillery. "The enemy that don't move, don't fight" - Muay Thai 1.01.
if war break out. I let you use tank. I will fly A-10. In WW 2 was Typhoon and P47. Your Stat was a joke. Who or what did kill the Nazi Greman Tank?
They majority of vehicles in a armoured division are soft skinned, which can be destroyed by machine guns. Without them, armour is ineffective.
In addition much of the German support columns were horse drawn. Horses do not respond well to 20mm canon fire.
M.A.H. and Chieftain, combined arms at it's best.
Just as a note to this, many years ago in my job I got to talk to a guy who was in the radio tank of his unit while pushing out from the D Day beaches. He explained how each unit had one Sherman Firefly to take out any Panthers. Unfortunately progress was slowing due to the undergrowth and hedges and they were getting pinned down by German units too. In his words "we would call up the RAF with the co ordinates of the enemy and then wait. For the first week the planes would appear in the distance and do one orbit to get their bearings and then dive to attack. He described them as Typhoons with rockets. He added by the second week that now on the initial circuit the German hatches would open and the crews scarper as they knew what was coming. In his words he said they never missed and was greatly thankful for his accurate the attacks were."
Another great video! After 50 years of the gun cam films from Normandy saying that the typhoons were great tank killers when all I saw was trees dying. I can rest now knowing I'm not the only one who thought these propaganda films were a little optimistic.
Keep up the good work.
Planes knocked out more tanks by denying them access to supplies than by direct attacks.
My own artillery training in the Soviet Army was focused on dealing with disposing of infantry support, disrupting armour formations and leaving armour exposed to close infantry weapons. Reports we read in Afghanistan talked of insurgents using almost defunct and antiquated tanks to draw out helicopters that they could down with American supplied missiles. Many pilots would pause to aim properly making themselves more vulnerable.
The motivation for the attacks was fear of helicopter attacks. The opinion of some of my seniors was that fear of helicopters forced the insurgent command to stage real attacks instead of the hit and run.
My grandfather was drafted during the closing years of the war, he was sent to fight the Western Allies after some time spent on the flak. He never talked much about it, but my grandmother told me that once, he was forced to hide in a chicken coop from fighter bombers.
@GhostRider659
He must have been frightened out of his wits - as most people would be. Glad he made it through.
So am I, obviously^^ the pressure was really on them the time that happened, I believe he was 17 when he was drafted along with his classmates, they didn't even get to finish secondary school before being sent to war.
Lazarett is the german word for field hospital, if that's what you're looking for.
The whole Bismarck thing is sort of a culmination of naval developments from several preceding decades, a new battleship sinking an old one and then being doomed by the next big thing.
It's always interesting to see how those numbers and statistics break down to actual people and their stories, it's probably why history is studied as intensively as it is.
Thank you. I'm told German's not too bad, but I despair when I encounter children under 10 whose German is far better!
Later, the POW and Repulse were sunk by pure air attack after the Bismarck, and the apogee was reached by kamikaze operations - essentially slow missiles.
The film "Sink the Bismarck" overdid it on the Fuehrerbefehl aspect and probably distorted the situation. I mean, you're an Admiral on your flagship and you see another battleship that wants to sink you - what are you supposed to do - invite them for tea?
It isn't unheard of that people are blown out of their tanks and survive relatively unharmed if there's an explosion within. My guess from what you've told me would be that his tank was hit by artillery, which peppered his neck and shoulders with shrapnel and set something off within that blew him into the pig-pen. Did he ever learn what happened to his crew? Iirc, airburst shells were only used in an AA role by the Germans, but if that was the thing then his crew would likely have been unharmed, while an artillery hit would have left them in a bad way.
I've come back to this again a couple years later and something new occurs to me: Another factor affecting modern perceptions is likely that we have a higher level of expectation of training and doctrine employment. The media impact is obvious in exaggerating our perceptions by this point, but perhaps what is less obvious is that these days we except *excellence* from those using military hardware, as in getting the most performance possible from it, and this was both much more difficult and much less the case back then.
For example, I am able to reliably score multiple direct hits per run with rockets or bombs against tanks shooting back at me, without taking hits most of the time while flying a P-47D in DCS: World. *However* I have only been able to do this after doing literally hundreds of sorties to practice my technique and to review how to improve with all the angles and footage available in 3rd person, and this is simply something that was not available or possible during the time. Now, true, I am not subject to the same control forces or stress of actual combat and that makes it much easier, but the physical ability of the aircraft to be flown in a way that scores reliable hits, even with realistic rocket or bomb dispersion, is there, but this level of practice and mastery would be unobtainable to real pilots in their situation
During the Blitzkrieg era. I wonder what the Stuka kill rate was.
Not very low, it was a dive bomber, not a fighter-bomber
I've watched interviews with American pilots talking about this. A couple specifically mentioned that you can't crack a tank with.50 cals from the top. They said they concentrated on armour on roads, they would fire underneath the tank from the front and back. The goals was to skip rounds into the thinner underbelly and hopefully get a few rounds to punch through.
Just for kicks, what % of vehicles on any WWII battlefield were tanks? Wonder what the gents on an Opel Blitz felt when someone spotted an IL2? And as one WWII vet told me, bombs scare you but strafing kills you. Unless well covered indeed think of how many holes in the ground could be delivered by 8 X 50 caliber mgs fired by one fighter. (There are vivid YT videos done during 1945 showing what P47s were doing to the German countryside. Not even horse-drawn carts were safe.) I don't quite understand, however, why the Germans would have felt it necessary to travel at night if aircraft didn't hurt them. Fear, will, training and courage are always in continual tension during battle. But I'm not sure I buy the idea that during WWII the enemy was dying because of a fear of death. And downgrading the impact of a proper artillery barrage has me shaking my head too. You can have low % of hits, but if you're firing literally hundreds of thousands of rounds - or millions - the odds favor the house. I really can't think offhand of any country that believes it has had too much artillery in a major battle. (And as a footnote I'd guess that the Republican Guard wished we'd left our A-10s at home during either war.)
This video is talking about the interaction with tanks and aircraft. Not with support vehicles, light skinned or unarmored vehicles.
How about staying on topic?
Its obvious, that unarmored/light skinned vehicles such as trucks are going to get completely fucked, as they can be shot by .50cals, or hell, even 7.62's.
Maybe they took more notice of their NCO's claims of shoot hundred of diving allied planes, so didn't want to be near the fiery crash site : -D
No offense, but "not as effective as most people are thinking" tells us basically nothing. I'm not expecting footnotes on YT - but a brief description of what you're citing would help.
The reason I'm very skeptical of the "airpower revisionism" is that it flies in the face of German and Soviet behavior. (And, US experience too if you examine the few campaigns - like PI 1941-42 - where the enemy had air superiority.) Check the "German War Files" - the great series profiling German weaponry based on the zillion miles of film taken by Goebbels' cameramen during the war. Weapons based in the West are covered with extra camo coming from leaves, branches etc etc. What were they worried about? You might check out the photo evidence of damage done by allied air power to German units fleeing the Falaise pocket.
Examine why Rommel was so certain that German efforts in France must be directed toward an immediate defeat of the landings instead of an extended battle inland. (Just a clue - he argued Rundstedt could not imagine the crippling impact allied air power would have on German troop movements - he'd seen it in the desert. Hitler got the idea - that's why he scheduled the Ardennes attacks for days that would have cloudy weather.) Or you might enjoy checking out the mountain of allied gun camera film illustrating the devastation of German ground targets of every type. Indeed, by February 1945, the Reich had so few targets left that the USAAF was considering things like "Operation JEB Stuart" which would have directed US aircraft to attack every public building in Germany - including vital places like small town libraries. Fortunately JEB Stuart was rejected because the losses incurred by airmen would have been greatly in excess of damage inflicted. Oh. you might also try to explain why the USSR built more IL-2s than any single type of warplane in history (I think the BF109 was close) and keyed their entire air effort toward ground attack. Maybe just dumb rooskies. Or maybe they were making life hell for the Wehrmacht. Read Wehrmact memoirs - they argue the later.
This explains why the A-10 was built around a 30mm auto cannon with depleted Uranium bullets.
Add in Maverick missiles and the lethality goes up. Use of the Mavericks infrared camera allowed night vision.
Still pilots were told to attack Scud missiles and cannons to preserve allied lives. Tanks were secondary targets.
Don't forget Bazooka Charlie! The absolute mad-lad.
Have you investigated the effectiveness of the modern A-10 Warthog? Just curious since all the aircraft you mentioned were 1940s and 1950s.
The tanks are only vulnerable if they are out in the open, parked and immobile and the enemy don't do anything to hide or defend it.
It does not matter if the attacker is an A-10 or F-35.
@@linusa2996 Oh? What is your source of information?
Modern aircraft find it much easier to wreck armour. The trick is finding them, as ever.
well, by default, they would use missiles and bombs, after all, even if they can do damage, the 30mm cannon isn't that much effective against tanks, even parts of the T-62 are "imune" to the GAU-8
Marrvyns Willames a lot of vehicles below the level of main battle ranks are not armoured against much beyond large machine gun rounds, fewer still have that sort of protection on their upper surfaces. When the sheer volume and penetrative power of the GAU-8 firing its signature depleted uranium rounds is considered alongside the unique angle from which it can make its attacks it doesn’t surprise me that according to the USAF a 1 second burst would knock out a tank.
That being said, that’s 1 second of on target fire, which is no mean feat. They would indeed almost certainly use missiles and other weaponry where possible and save the cannon for softer targets - but the capacity is there to do serious, perhaps fatal damage even to MBTs.
As for the aforementioned missiles - the methods of detection and guidance mean that tanks find it much harder to evade aircraft these days. Ever more sophisticated thermal and radar imaging mean that previously safe positions now don’t conceal a vehicle - and infantry or vehicle based laser designation, communication of positions and increasingly data links mean that an aircraft has ways of spotting and killing things the boys in WW2 would have boggled at.
Bis - very good work and I was wondering when you were going to put some of this information in a video. In my previous job I had the pleasure of studying American, British and Canadian Operational Research reports about the effectiveness of Air-to-Ground weapons from WW 1 to the present. You "hit" all the major points and accurately! :)
On the last bit, about the spits and the white man.
can you elaborate please?
Was something that happened in April 1945. Allied soldiers spotted a few German panzers in a position and had no easy way of taking them out (hence the air strike). They called it in, but since they had nothing to indicate the German position (like smoke rounds etc.), they set up someone in a white shirt 200 paces from the Germans (obviously so that he isn't spotted by the Panzer crews). The aftermath I do not know but the attack seems to have been conducted.
point of this is that pilots in planes cant locate them?
am i right?
Well you see my friend, Europe is a magical place where those of a lighter complexion seem to dominate in cultures, and well...
Wtf?
MavisLenya just a bit of humur sparked from saying “Spit fires and the white man”.
The relative inaccuracy of using modified fighters to take on tanks was why we got the A-10 _Thunderbolt_ and Su-25 dedicated ground attack planes by the 1980's.
Which have generally been kinda shit at their jobs. Most of the air-to-ground vehicle kills in in the middle eastern conflicts were made by F-16s. A-10s did very little damage to enemy armor and were mostly just used to strafe infantry positions.
The fart gun sounds very impressive but the reality is that it's not going to do a great deal of damage to modern tanks and the missiles they carry can also be carried by other, faster, higher altitude planes which are more capable of avoiding AA. The Su-25 has a slightly better service record but I suspect that's just because it's used more by more people.
I bet more aircraft destroyed tanks, than tanks destroyed aircraft...
Joke aside, tanks are only one component of a mobile division, surely it is the steel fist, but without its support elements, mobile infantry, mobile artillery, mobile supply train, it is a clutched fist, without an arm... This is were ground attack aircraft were brutal. This was much more a problem for the Wermacht, with limited mobile resources, especially by the time of Normandy... Rommel understood this with his limited supply resources in Africa, that were decimated by allied air attacks... It was hard enough to get his supplies into Africa and then to have so much of it destroyed by allied air power...
What puzzles me is why combat memoirs written by German tankers all seem to claim the allied fighter-bombers in France were their true nemesis. They don't suggest this peril was a myth. In fact they went to great lengths, including hiding during daylight hours instead of rushing to the front, to avert aerial attack. I have read several of these memoirs and all present the fighter-bomber as their gravest threat, at least in the campaign in France. Were they mistaken? Were they dodging apparitions? Perhaps they were just cowardly but I somehow doubt it.
Small brain: planes knocked out whole columns of enemy armour
Medium brain: planes didn't knock out much enemy armour but did kill lots of trucks and trains.
Large brain: planes destroyed some tanks and lots of vehicles including those used for the supply of tanks meaning that many tanks had to be abandoned due to lack of supplies and fuel.
Enlightened brain: planes knocked out whole columns worth of enemy armour.
Excellent! This is one reason why advocates of air power prefer to interdict in an enemy's rear area. The disruption or denial of necessary supplies, pay greater dividends than close air support, while subjecting the attacking aircraft to less risk. Where fighter-bombers appear more glamorous, it's possible that attacks from medium bombers had greater effect.
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In one of the greatest book about the Typhoon (Firebirds: Flying the Typhoon in Action by Charles Demoulin) this subject is very well explained.
He say, lot of tanks (or other vehicles) hit by air attacks was recover by German units for cannibalism or repair. Hence the absence of exhibits for statistics.
Another thing, the review of abandoned tanks often reveals rocket impacts along with damage from artillery shells or tank.
A tank imobilized by an air attack are often "ended" by tanks or artillery ...
Completely destroyed tank makes it almost impossible to accurately identify the nature of the explosion. And in this case, lot of destroyed tank was awarded for the ground forces.
And the last argument : Some targets were attacked by several pilots, which could skew the balance sheet without fraudulent intent ...
Another good information : In Invasion 44, General Speidel (an officer of Rommel staff) give a lot of informations about Normandy loss. He say about Falaise pocket ... 84 tank destroyed by Typhoon's, 35 was seriously hit, and 21 hit with minor damages.
Stukas could hit within 50 feet of a tank in 1940.
Well, yeah. They were also dive bombers (the whole point of which was accuracy) and dedicated ground support platforms rather than fighters drafted into ground-attack duty. Apples and oranges.
The psychological effect of rockets is depicted fictionally in one episode of the TV version of Sharpe where a rocket unit basically frightens a Naopleoinc column into retreat.
Those tail drager's frighted everyone, they must have stamped the guarantee on the nose cone. "Catch me if you can"
5:40 Pink Floyd Is that you?
:)
In The Flesh? Does Bismarck like Pink FLoyd?
The Germans in Normandy couldn't move during the day and had heavy foliage camo. One German officer said the Allies having total air superiority was like playing chess were you had one move and your opponent had two.
They looked like moving bushes and remember that Rommel was badly injured by a jabo.
hmm so i wont feel bad anymore in IL2 for taking out mere 2-3 tanks (on good days) in an attack :P
xXE4GLEyEXx technically not your fault ;)
Great video. Over the last few years, my opinion of air attack against tanks (especially during WW2) has drastically changed.
How come the vastly exagerated kill claims?This is especialy glaring for the soviet air force's claims at Kursk, as those 3147 claimed kills would be almost all the 3253 tanks the germans aparently had in total (though I guess those numbers may vary a bit depending on your source).
Possible explanations that come to my mind:
- simple bragging- exagerating your successes out of fear or due to competition for supplys between squadrons (especialy in the soviet military)- self-deception: you see a dark cloud over a tank you fired on, you truly believe you see it burning, even if it's just dirt kicked up by your misses (seeing what you want to see)- true errors: smoke rising form a tank may simply be dry grass that caught fire, a vehicle you actualy hit may have sufferd only minor damage but did indeed emmit smoke for a while, mock-ups mistaken for real targets, destroyed lighter vehicles mistaken for tank kills, ect.
edit: why does YT fuck up my simple formating?
Mostly: A) You can't really confirm whatever it's done for. Plane might've immobilized it and appear dead, but in tanker's book it's only "damaged". Also even a direct hit from a rocket might not destroy everything, but stun the crew to make it look like dead tank.
But mostly I think it's B) Situational awareness. You might mistake the tank AT on the ground knocked out for your target or you simply don't bother confirming it. Don't remember any Air Force instructing planes to specifically circle around confirming kills, so that adds quite a bit to the mix. Combat is hell and keeping reliable kill count isn't your first priority.
Military History Visualized has a podcast on his For Adults channel (hehe), "Kill Claims vs Losses with Tank Archives". Researched info on the subject there.
A guess; As you swoop in with your aircraft and light up the enemy your ordinance explodes around the tanks, and tracers flies everywhere. You are positive that nothing can survive such a barrage (after all, this data wasn't available at the time + confirmation bias). You claim about as many kills as you targeted (say 3).
3 minutes later your wingman strafe the exact same 3 targets as he didn't notice that they were indeed your targets from before, again he delivers such a punishing that he is utterly certain that nothing could survive what he throwed at them, he also claims 3 kills.
The next day a second squadron shows up and strafe the same targets in a different position producing similar results to the first day, claiming 5 kills across 4 pilots.
A total of 11 kills have been claimed, but in reality the enemy only suffered minor damage to the targets and while all three targets got disrupted in their operations, none was knocked out.
Absurd or simply wrong kill claims are a thing that happened with everyone. Even in naval warfare there are incorrect kill claims. You have cases by captains of varying nations claiming, "Our torpedoes sank a Battleship" when it was really a Cruiser. You even had airstrikes slamming a Carrier for great damage, fires billowing and everything, the aircrews claim killing a Carrier... Yet that Carrier survived to fight later on, which was what happened to Yorktown prior to Midway and Enterprise was thought destroyed a few times.
theordinarytime: I think you've hit the biggest nail in the answer, the other being that you may rarely get your assumptions validated or not validated. Even if there are a handful of dead tanks left for your sides ground troops to look over, it's unlikely that you can identify that your specific plane killed that specific tank, etc.....
In tiny engagements - much better possibility of getting reliable feedback.
See a lot of good reasons here and thought i´d put my own in that might explain the exagerations of the Soviet airforce.
In Soviet Russia, are you going to tell your CO and the Commisar that you just wasted fuel, 10 rockets, 6 bombs and a lot of cannon shells without scoring a single kill?
I remember reading where a German pilot was explaining how he attacked Russian tanks with the ground attack version of the FW-190. He carried a 500 kg bomb, flew at a certain low altitude and speed and dropped the bomb as the tank disappeared under the plane's nose. Then there were the Russian IL-2 and IL-10 which carried heavy guns that could penetrate tank top and side armor.
Quick question; Did the P51 Mustang posess any anti-tank armaments? I watched the end of Saving Private Ryan and the P51 (at least I thought it was) instantly blew the Tiger up with what must have been some sort of strafe, clearly no bomb or rocket hit the tank cause the explosion wasn't large enough and there was no prior sound of a bomb or missile being dropped/ launched
That's because SPR is a Hollywood movie. The Mustangs (P-51Ds) could mount rockets and bombs, but rarely did so in WW2. It was one of the things they did in Korea however.
Military Aviation History Thanks man, its always really really bothered me how it just instantly blows up a tank like it had a 75mm gun strapped to it!
In fairness, the P-51 airframe first entered service with the US Army Air Forces as a dive bomber, the A-36 Apache.
Allison powered P-51C were the base of the A-36. This did make it a dedicated dive bomber that could hold its own in air to air combat; a very rare bird.
P51 mustangs were told that any remaining ammunition on ground targets but a .50 cal will not do much to a tiger
My father in law was a tanker in Patton' s army and was present at the Battle of the Bulge. He said their defense was for all tanks to point their 50 cals straight up and turn them on. They were bombed twice once by the Luftwaffe and once by the US Army Air Corp.
The thing I find most interesting, and perhaps disturbing, is the way that in the past few years people who were not involved in the real life events of WWII have stepped up to rewrite the reasons/causes/individual action results from the conflict.
Of course one can say that modern technology and research allows historic evidence to be reviewed with high tech forensic equipment and that "advances in science" enable "myths" to be debunked.
Basically, since those who actually did the fighting, flew the planes, operated the tanks etc. are no longer alive to report first hand what actually happened we have these so called new experts telling us that what the people who were actually there said isn't a true reflection on what happened. Rather like armchair generals being smarter than the ones that fought the battles.
Being fortunate enough to have known those in the greatest generation first hand perhaps gives me a certain level of skepticism when it comes to modern self appointed historians who promote alternative facts to those that history has already recorded first hand.
These are period numbers contrasting with the perception of what happened then. The viewpoint of what happened then in public perception is created more by cinema than the reality experienced on the ground. Even then the experience of those there is not infallible.
My Grandfather flew Typhoons after D-DAY and across Europe subsequently.
He also flew Hurricanes in the Battle of Britain and in North Africa. Unfortunately I can't ask him for a first hand perspective now as he passed away over 20 years ago but the more I learn about the campaigns he fought in the more I feel my own existence was such a narrow thing. Esp. as my other Grandfather was Polish and fought through the siege of Lvov.
In curious to see this same analysis applied to Hans-Ulrich Rudel who was credited with a supposed 519 tank kills, which sounds ridiculous and i suspect it was.
well, he credited even more during the war. It was after the war when the number was set to cca 500 (even then, its still possible that some of them were destroyed by his mates in stukas who followed him)
Agraviadore: Well, don’t forget that the RAF, USAAF and Soviet Air Force didn’t use dive bombers like the Ju 87. Dive bombers were far more accurate than level bombers or fighter bombers. Also, 37mm tank buster cannons with armour piercing shells are far better able to penetrate a tank’s rear or top armour than regular 20mm cannons with high explosive shells, or 0.50 inch machine guns designed for shooting at thin-skinned aluminium aircraft.
Also, a lot of Rudel’s tank kills were gained in 1941-42, against light tanks with thin armour, e.g. T-26’s and BT-7’s. Light tanks with only 10-15 mm of side and rear armour were far more likely to be penetrated by bomb splinters from a very near miss than a T-34 or Sherman would be.
Tim Smith im still sceptical. 500 is an outrageous number for even a group of stukas and those 37mm guns did not carry much ammunition. They were also gun pods and unlikely to have anywhere close to the accuracy of proper fixed guns.
If you believe the stories, he once flew a mission with his leg in a cast and in that single flight he destroyed 13 tanks, in 1945.
Sounds far fetched in the extreme.
Agraviadore: Not when you consider Rudel flew 2,530 ground attack sorties. Although 13 tank kills in one sortie is extremely improbable, 13 in one day (during 6 or 7 sorties, flying from an advanced landing ground near the front line to reduce flying time per sortie) is conceivably possible.
Flying with a leg in a cast was possible. The British fighter pilot Douglas Bader flew with two prosthetic legs and gained 22 confirmed kills doing so.
I'd be interested in knowing if there was any follow-up after the war to see if his numbers were legitimate. I've read his book "Stuka Pilot" and more than anything else I think he was really lucky. And focused and disciplined. He was shot down so often and still managed to survive the war. I suspect it will always be a mystery, but for my money he is still the greatest combat pilot of all time.
Anyone who have read, or know about, the tactics used with bren or sten guns (LMG's) knows that lethality doesnt always scare. One great aspect to an lmg nest is the fact that they can be employed to pin an enemy down or scatter their forces.
*Hans-Ulrich Rudel Laughs in the Distance*
me: looks at claimed kills vs actual kills @ 1:44 min
"Hans, we need to talk ..."
Hans : iam not giving back my knights cross with golden oak leaves,swords and diamonds anyway
So you believe in Rudel myth?
What you forget though is that successful air attacks took place mainly on columns of tanks on roads and check points, and here the kill probability is greatly increased due to the tanks being close together. In addition, hitting some tanks on the columns can immobilise the column, stall the attack, and allow anti-tank guns and defending ground forces to pick off the immobilised tanks. This is why the most successful counter attacks on tank columns have always been where air strikes have been closely coordinated with ground forces.
Air attack basically takes away the mobility of tanks and supporting artillery, infantry and logistics, which makes tanks ineffective.
What we need now is an analysis of the two Gulf Wars, investigating whether the Americans had a higher hit/kill probability when attacking allied tanks or iraqi ones.
Ouch, i know what you're referring to, and its painful
Neither were any Abrams.
And the Bradley killed more AFVs in the Gulf War than the Abrams and the Challenger. What point are you trying to make?
That is not true. There was 18 Abrams lost in the gulf war and 9 of them was permanent. 7 permanent was from friendly fire and 2 purposely destroyed to prevent capture after being damaged. There was no direct loss from enemy tank fire, but it is still a combat loss if your own side destroy it. If a tank is damage and cant continue to fight is is a loss even if it might be reparerad and return to combat later.
That's not how statistics work. If that were the case, every instance of a training accident where a plane crashed would be fair game for another nation to rack up to their "kill count."
If a job is done by someone else the claim doesn't belong to others that did not accomplish the deed.
How so? Do you have an analytic study that proves the Bradley is a piece of junk? Or are you just taking pot-shots?
Thanks for this useful corrective to established assumptions that planes were readily taking out tanks every time they attacked.
Unfortunately this is EXACTLY why we can never have a completely accurate WWII simulator without literally altering the minds of the players into THINKING that they are ACTUALLY in WWII.
As an example of the mad workings of chance I always recall Dmitriy Loza's account of a German strafing attack on a formation of Russian M4s stopped along a road. Most of the crews were dismounted, but the one fatality was a man sleeping in a buttoned-up tank. A bullet came down the gun barrel, and the breech was open. Whack! He never woke up.
they don't say that about the A-10 :P
One thing to think about is that in the context of combined arms warfare while a tank group may survive strafing by rockets and cannon fire the infantry supporting them may not be so lucky and so even if the tanks are not knocked out the psychological effect on the crew combined with the deviation of the infantry and light vehicles supporting the tanks may still cause the enemy attack to fail
Loli and Coffee would disagree with the 5% bomb hit ratio... =)
Yeah, but they got magnets in their heads
When the amount of ordinance exceeds the cost of a tank or anything for that matter is a losing proposition ! In simple comparison, how many bullets are shot on average in battle to put down one combatant, it’s astronomical ! Interesting post, enjoyed watching !
@8:35
This is simple to explain because I've been there... In artillery strike over large areas or from high altitude you think "he doesn't know I'm here, can't see me, can't hit me". The low level air attack is personal... "He can see me, he knows where I'm hiding..."
Thank you for the lecture. However I think the summing up really should centre around stressing just the following 2 points:
1. Very few actual tanks were directly destroyed by aircraft attacks. BUT
2. All other non-tank vehicles, particularly tank support vehicles carrying men including mechanics, ammo and fuel etc, and supporting troops and horses close to the tanks could certainly suffer catastrophic losses by enduring such air attacks, or suffer pyschological effects rendering them unfit or degraded for any further attack.
Yes plenty of photos around showing the aftermath of a Typhoon (or similar) ground attack.. not a pretty sight.
Great points. In Vietnam our Cobras were pretty lethal because they can get right on top of the NVA as where aircraft were Hammers and did not get too close. We always used napalm on bunker complexes because bombs did not always penetrate the bunkers, I will not describe what it did, better them than us.
The Battle of Mortain was won through air power alone. I would suggest you get a copy of The Day of the Typhoon, written by a pilot who was there and afterwards went on a tour by jeep to examine the damage done by his squadron. He was sickened by the amount of carnage done to horses, men and machinery. The battle was fought at extremely close range, the German armour being less than five minutes away from the aerodrome, so close in fact that the RAF ground crews were under German sniper fire while re-arming their Typhoons. While tank kills were probably exaggerated, the German "armoured" columns were mostly horse drawn and soft-skinned vehicle support for the tanks, these troops and their equipment were the main objectives. Without them the tanks themselves are just dead metal.
My Tank Corp father saw or was attacked by Stukas (definitely in Nth Africa maybe in France and Belgium pre-Dunkirk as well). The Stuka made a screaming siren sound in the diving attack which very often induced a physical reaction in many survivors (and non) of these attacks, ie a tanker would lose control of their bowels. He (my father) also noted that the the headlong steep diving pilots were less accurate than those who came in at a shallower angle and could adjust aim more easily (although less intimidating).
There may be another explanation for the low actual kill count in the Balcan wars: The serbs are said to have welded canisters together and created other decoys, which were then destroyed.
Thanks so much for this video! I have been totally sceptical about the dramatic claims for aircraft versus tanks. What annoys me is that all the modern books I have read on such subjects perpetuate this myth.
Good video. Another point is fuel ammunition and parts are also a way to stop tanks or disrupt operations and are soft targets for air attacks but have to be moved to service tanks in front lines.
I think why so many people have psychological reactions to the air to ground attacks is because when you are getting attacked from the air, you can't really do anything about it to save yourself if something does hit. It's all up to those who are in the AA vehicles.
Sorry, that was a reply to a post further down. At any rate, a great "Thank You" to you and Chieftain for this one!
A B-24 and B-17 also a P-51 Mustang flew over my house a few years ago. It was glorious!
A lot of people actually forget that destroying something isn't always necessary, and that incapacitating or disabling is really the lowest bar for something to be considered succesful.
They were inflated; however, P-47 tactics were to bounce fifty caliber rounds from the ground, up into the tank's engine. It may not be a "kill", but now they need to send a recovery vehicle for the tank and repair the engine.
The inability for fixed wing kills on tanks gave birth to the use of specialized rotary wing aircraft to fill that niche.
In his memoir, Heinz Guderian writes of an altercation he had with Rommel in early 1944, France. Guderian wanted to hold the tanks in a reserve ready to-be moved to the site of any Allied landing. Rommel already had plenty of experience in Africa operating under Allied air dominance, and Rommel argued they needed to concentrate the tanks up front at the likely potential Allied beach-heads because the Allies with air-control will know where the tanks are and attack them in transit before they ever have a chance to engage combat at the beachhead.
So maybe this begs a question regarding air-effectiveness against flat-bed trains loaded with Panzers
OK; fair enough. But the devastating moral hit that air attacks inflict has great value.
This video is excellent and gives the perfect background as to why the A-10 Warthog's gun and plane are EFFECTIVE tank killers. Thousands of depleted uranium rounds per minute? Be afraid for a REASON!
Can't say I already knew those things.
I'm now reminded of a tank battle during Ymo-Kippur war, where Israeli tanks were unable to eliminate all of the approaching Syrian tanks; the air-force (A-4 Skyhawks and F-4 Phantoms I assume) had to be called to take several advancing tanks out (I think they succeeded but suffered casualties). Previously I imagined that those tanks were dealt with quickly, but according to the video's statistics, I'm surprised that those tanks were killed to begin with.
The whole idea of 'vertical envelopment' is not just that aircraft are more accurate than artillery (which may not matter against static targets), but that they have a longer reach say 100 - 200 Km versus 10 - 30 Km. Also the air interdiction missions of allied aircraft could do more harm to soft targets like columns of supply trucks than to tanks. Air interdiction slowed the pace of supply and redeployment of forces by keeping columns off the roads, in the ultimate case causing movement to be restricted to night.
Steel Division does a pretty decent job with airforce as ground kills tend to be pretty uncommon, even for bigger bombers (exceptions include lucky direct hits, soft targets in very exposed positions, low health last-hits.
Mostly, aircraft ground attacks are used to suppress units or to just stress them out (reducing accuracy and such).
"The psychological impact of guns, rockets, and especially *napalm* "
America really took this report to heart I see.
Everyone did. The only reason flamethrowers (always at least half a "terror weapon", just check the psychological impact eg. Churchill Crocodiles had on dug-in defenders) fell out of use was people came up with more convenient ways to set things on fire at a distance, generally meaning grenades and rockets.
@@broadbandislife Often the Crocodile would splash the target without using the igniter. That was usually enough to cause a surrender.
@@bruceparr1678 ...particularly if the subjects had witnessed what the next step would be. That said as I understand that was a pretty common move on part of armoured flamethrowers against fortifications - dousing the target with fuel beforehand rather amplified the effects of a following "lit" burst. (Vehicular flamethrowers were more likely to have the kinds of propellant mechanisms that allowed "cold" shots, while the simpler and much smaller infantry flamers were much too vulnerable for this kind of trick to normally be viable.)
In the F-86 Saber vs. Soviet IS-3 example it should be noted that the F-86 were using digital targeting computers which the pilots reported allowed them to make ground kills that were not possible in WW2. Despite that, their effectiveness was still unimpressive but much greater than without the computers.
It's interesting to hear about the morale effect (panic and disruption) airstrikes might have even if there were few if any tank losses from the strikes. Wikipedia mentions a tiger formation being driven off by an airstrike in it's account of Operation Bluecoat. Maybe no panzer kills but job done.