Imagine asking Bismarck what he wants for dinner and he goes into a 1hr rant about how tacos are different from burgers just to tell you he isn't hungry
It's almost like you're saying each air force chose the weapon that suited their actual operational needs and requirements... who knew such a thing could happen.
I think that the pilot with the armoured screen is Wing Commander Stanford Tuck, who advocated for 20mm cannons instead of the eight .303 machine guns. His reasoning was that only a few 20mm cannon shells would destroy a fighter whereas the machine guns usually needed many hits.
RST was an outstanding pilot, leader, and one hell of a deflection shooter. He farmed mushrooms post War. Adolf Galland used to drop by for tea & a chinwag.
@@galoon Well, yes and no. It gets a bit complicated. It seems obvious that a 50 cal would be more destructive than a .303 but testing showed that what happens when a bullet hits an aircraft is not easy to predict. When the RAF tested 0.303 AP rounds (on paper the .303 AP penetrates armour about as well as a .50 ball) against the fuselage of a redundant Blenheim bomber, less than 25% to 30% of the rounds fired even made it to the 4mm thick armour plate protecting the rear of the Blenheim's fuselage the rest either lodging in the structure or being deflected. Of those that made it to the plate "very few" (unquantified, alas, in my source) penetrated. The problem with MG bullets, even big ones, is that they have to hit something vital - fuel, engine or crew - and as the war progressed, these vital components are protected. Bullets, even big ones, tend to be deflected by structural members and they tumble when they penetrate the thin aluminium skin of an aircraft. A tumbling bullet loses a lot of penetration. The RAF did look at the .50 but their testing showed that, although it was more effective than the ,303 browning, it wasn't three times more effective while it weighed almost three times as much.
I was always fascinated by the fact that they figured out a way to fire bullets through a prop without harming prop I wonder how many props was destroyed before they got it right
I have run across many similar examples where I wonder who was the first pilot to encounter the problem and what they must have thought. One recent problem I came across was, when they fired the guns on a jet fighter, it extinguished the engines! The solution they came up with was to fire a gun on one side at a time so both engines did not go out at the same time?! How would you like to be the guy who first discovered that problem?
@bruh interesting cause as a kid I always wondered if the guns were mounted slightly above the tip of the propeller or it was some crazy movie magic i didn’t understand
There were quite a few issues with this for WWI airplanes but by the time WWII came around, the guns were timed to fire based on the engine cam timing, so ammo only fired between the prop positions. Wing mounted guns didn’t need to worry about engine timing as they were usually not in line with the prop.
My great uncle flew the P38 and P51D over Europe from mid '44 til the end of the war. Most of his time flying the Lightning was spent strafing ground targets, and he felt the airplane was an excellent platform for that due to its cannon, stability, and great payload. By the time he transferred to Mustangs it was the era of open season, and they would break off from bomber escort duties to do more strafing. He got his only aerial kill on a lone Fw190, it never saw him coming. He flew right up behind it and after a burst from his .50s it crashed in a field. He had all his gun camera footage on vhs tapes, it was pretty amazing to watch.
My dad flew the P39 training in 1942. He said he flat spun one firing the cannon in a hard bank. Almost killed him. Went to a spit MkV-Mk IX in N Africa then the P51. Flew all three in 10 days during P51 transition. Golden age of prop fighters
@@danielhemple8649 The remarkable thing when flying british spitfires he never had his own plane. They would say take #15 today. Means he had to learn each new plane every flight. Made him a good pilot. Once he got his first P51 he got to name it REX and had his own ground crew. funny the MkV had a wooden dashboard because it was built before we leaned in to help. They saved metal that way.
I believe it: action/reaction. Hard bank scrubs a lot of airspeed, and can put handling on the razors edge. I'd say power up, but... sometimes there's just no options.
There is a story about the P39 that the Russians told the USA that they would stall and they didn't believe them until they Russians sent a pilot to show them. He spun it out like he told them it would and managed to bail or correct it I don't quite remember and they fixed it by moving the gun a little back so the center of gravity was different.
@@magnusasgeirsson7244 It was a mid engine fighter and that alone made it hard to escape a stall of any type. The way to do it is point it down hill. The russians liked it over other types because it still ran well with the low octane gas they had. They disliked the spitfire because it needed high octane gas to run well. Cant run high performance engines on shitty 75 octane aviation gas.
René Fonck really was the pioneer with canon kills, his Spad XII required loading after every shot but 37mm were really nasty against the planes of the time. It never became popular since you basically need an ace to hit anything with 1 shot and reloading was a pain.
Rene' Fonck was a superlative marksman, & could pull off aerial shots that most others could not. Georges Guynemer had a SPAD XII like Fonck's for a bit, & got two kills or so with it, but he went back to using twin Vickers guns. I recall reading that a major drawback was the huge volume of powder fumes the cannon produced. It was blown into the pilot's face by the prop blast, more blew into the cockpit through the breech when it was opened, & breathing that garbage gave pilots severe nausea & headaches. A single-shot gun that gives you the heaves is something I think I'd pass on too.
@@grantmo821 Yeah, particularly since the opponents wasn't exactly armed (with a few rare ground attack planes in 1918 as exceptions) so it was overkill in power, Fonck was a bit of a weirdo (and a total jerk) but he was certainly talented. But "cockpit" is using the term very generously since it wasn't exactly roomy, more like in a motorcycle then a modern plane. Yeah, mounting a canon on a Spad was a stupid idea but it was also a pioneer project that would pay out in the future.
Interesting video. One thing wasn't mentioned, though: The key difference between a machine gun and a cannon is in the round, not the gun itself. Cannon rounds have an extra part, called a driver ring, to prevent propellant gasses from blowing past the round as it passes through the gun barrel. Machine gun rounds are usually smaller and lighter, and don't need a driver ring.
No... The KEY difference between mg rounds and cannon rounds is... Cannon rounds EXPLODE! Britain had a department for testing captured enemy aircraft and weapons, in WWII. One test of an MG 151/20, they fired a single round at a Hurricane fuselage on a test stand, the cannon round blew the back third of the fuselage OFF! There is also a famous photo of a B-17 over Germany, taken from another B-17 above and behind it. The photo shows a B-17 that had been hit by SIX 30 mm cannon rounds, the 6 rounds disintegrated the inner starboard engine, the wing on both sides of said engine, and a strip of fuselage several feet high and longer join between wing and fuselage. The remains of the starboard wing can be seen spiraling off in one direction while the rest of the B-17 spins off the other way...
.50 AP / API / API-T had massive ammount of penetration for its size, even compared to cannons (26-27mms of steel at around 100meters). 109s and 190s had only dural as armor protection behind pilot and fuel tank (this plate was often +-1in - 27mm thick but effective as +-0.3in - 7.62mm of steel, .50AP had 12-13mm of pen at 30° angle at 250meters) these plates werent thick enough to protect against these rounds even at around 500meters if shot directly from behind without hitting anything else in tail section as these rounds still had way above double the penetration of thickess of that plate. While shot from average range 100-250 meters, they had so much power that they could penetrate back plate, travel through empty part of fuel tank, penetrate pilots steel seat in 109 and kill the pilot. Brits were testing it and even much worse british ammo went through seat quite often (30%). So german pilots couldnt rely on armor in most cases, to the contrary actually. Even if that round had to travel through plane and often it didnt a lot as it struck the plate from angle due to gun placement, the rounds still had plenty of penetration to kill the pilot or pierce fuel tank like nothing. Not to mention upper 1/3 of pilot was covered by rather thin plate and insufficent armor glass in 44-45. In case of later MW-50 equiped planes, it wasnt necessary to get pilot as you had massive tank full of flamable substance installed in tail in case of 109 and with standardised incendiary belts, well. (190 had even worse armor protection for pilot) Othervise the video is very nice and good job summing up all this stuff in so short video (i know its possible to have hours long talks to this topic :D).
@@rob5944 Losses of pilots of luftwaffe tells otherwise from the moment large numbers of US planes appeared on the sky of Europe (if youre about to die in plane, you cant either get out of sheredded plane due to Gs in uncontrollable fall - good luck doing this with 50.s or youre severely infured from incomming fire = .50s job). Brits preffered 20mm due to high HE capabilities with nice incendiary and decent armor pen capabilities and because they were capable of producing really solid 20mms unlike US until late mid-end of war. But there were no major complains against 47s or D mustangs about armament during war, on the contrary, a lot of USAAF pilots actually liked .50 cals and even reported chunks of planes falling down after hits with AP / API ammo and quite a lot of fires and even ammo detonations in 190s wings (A6/8). Solo .50 is no match for 20mm but 6x.50 is better for AA combat than 2x20, let alone 1 in many german planes. Especially with average accuracy which was around 2-5%. With great box/circle convergence of .50s you were able to score many hits at decent ranges and in sharp turns, this is not easy to do with 151/20 and even worse witk mk108 which was prone to jamming under higher G-load due to crap build quality of connections in the belt (that was even bigger, more likely massive issue in 262s for example).
@@honzavasicek Thanks for your reply, but with respect I'm not really a fan of long and complicated answers. I always feel that they disguise the truth (both intentionally and unintentionally). Short answer is that 20mm is better than .50 is better than .30 Simple as. We found that out in the Battle of Britain.
@@rob5944 It depends on configurations of planes, 1x20 and 2x13 is simply worse than config of P51Ds or P47s as they simply had much more firepower as F190A6/8 had much more firepower than P51D and in case of A8 more than P47. And bigger shells than 20mm are next to useless in dogfights if youre not really close.
@@honzavasicek Yes when using single and duel armament. But four 20mm will blast anything out of the sky, with the possible exception of heavily protected four engined bombers, but even then I wouldn't of given much for their chances. For example the Beaufighter or Mosquito main guns were 4x20mm, and ground attack Hurricanes also carried this. The bigger the gun the better, (provided you can build, service and make them fit, together with a plentiful supply of ammunition). The only drawbacks would be rate of fire, weight of the weapon and poor ballistics. The Germans found with their 30mm, but when it hit....watch out! The British would of loved to be able to of used 20mm in 1940, but the limited availability of cannons and the need to standardise on the .303 made it unfeasible. This, together with fitting them in and making them work was too much of a worry when fighting for survival. The Americans, immune from attack and with it's vast resources could of introduced a cannon, strangely enough encountered production difficulties that were never resolved. Of course not being directly involved in combat starved them of first hand experience, this is also a factor which constrained development of weapons as a whole, but much less so in the case of warships. The seas and oceans is where direct contact with other nations happened and engagements occurred.
also something to note, Earlier post war jets like some F-80 varients and the F-84 and most F-86 varients used the M3 50cal, which is basically a faster firing version of the M2
I never realized how asymmetrical the cockpit glass was on some of the Heinkel he-111 variants. This video at 16:50 really shows how lopsided it's front most glass was towards the starboard. Thank you for the follow on video of the Heinkel He 111 cockpit as it explained a lot on why the glass on some variant had to be made asymmetrical.
It appears the 50 cal worked very well. This question did remind me of a comment from a work mate from back in 1976, who was in the Luftwaffe in WW2. He mentioned that they tried putting the 88 mm on one of their planes but did not work out.
Great video! I always thought about the what-if scenario of the RAF Hurricanes and Spitfires having 4 to 6 .50 cal brownings instead of the .303 brownings? I wonder if the BOB would have ended earlier with heavier Luftwaffe losses?
Unlikely any diff with 4 x 50 cal. The Brit 303s fired at over 1,000 rpm and put a lot of lead in the sky, and their testing was showing that, once a round had gone through the aluminium skin of an enemy aircraft, the round was tumbling or fragmented and it didn't matter as much as might be thought whether it was a 30 cal or 50 cal. That's why they went straight to 20mm, ending up with 4 x 20mm standard by wars end. Six 50 cal at 700-750 rpm would have been better than 8 x 30 cal at 1,000 rpm, but would have needed a severe redesign - the 50 cal is very heavy as is its ammo, and six of them would have had a negative effect on Hurricane/Spitfire performance.
The .50 guns had fast muzzle velocity and high penetrating power that would often penetrate the armor plates and kill the pilots where the .30 gun couldn't. Videos show that even strafing ships and locomotives could easily caused explosion. The P51 and P47 pilots even developed a tactic to destroy the German tanks by bank shooting the ground and hit the bottom of the tanks and caused explosion. (tanks had very thin armor plates on the bottom) I think the .50 gun was the best gun against WWII fighter planes. Most guns have 400 rounds per gun compared to 60-120 rounds in the 20mm. That is why after the dog fight, you still have ammos for ground attacks.
My first thought was the Robert Johnson story, glad you had it at the end, I think he was hit with 20 Cannon rounds and stopped counting at 200 mg hits. An amazing plane.
Consider the different roles, the Luftwaffe was primarily concerned with shooting down U.S. bombers (B-17, B-24). Their analysis suggested that 5-6 20mm rounds, 2-3 30mm rounds, were needed for a kill, but only about 2% of rounds fired hit. The U.S. fighters primary target was Luftwaffe fighters, the rate of fire and the number of guns meant 6 x 0.5 (8 in P-47) was adequate for the role.
So basically: 50 cal was better at hitting fighters and getting metal into the stomachs of the pilots of those fighters. 20mm was better at downing bombers and getting metal into the stomachs of the pilots of those bombers.
It's also important to have ammo readily available. Since everybody in the US military used 50 cal ammo, it was decided to keep using it in planes. The guns were easily available for replacements, and the ammo was easily available. Supply lines are important!!!
I love the use of the L.Dv. 4000/10 in this video! Also, there were at some time ammo drums available with a capacity of 90 rounds for the MG FF, and I know for a fact that a small number of them were converted to belt feed. I guess once the MG151/20 came along the MG FF belt feed came to an end and the FF was delegated to different roles, like Schräge Musik and flexible mountings in bombers. 43:30 The .50 M2 weighs about as much as the MG FF (and I think the FF is even a couple of kg's lighter). Let that sink in.
The design that bucked the trend in WW2 was the Mosquito, which was all wood. She had 2 Merlin engines, was faster than the fighters and carried 4 20mm cannons and carried bombs as well...... what an absolute stunner she was!!
NOPE. fully loaded with bombs they could go around 250mph. If they had half the gas and only one crewmember, the pilot, they might make 400mph in a dive, as its MAX speed was 415, which is usually determined at testing, not at a combat load. Many fighters were much faster than that, and some even approached supersonic in dives.
@uni4rm wow, you don't seem to know a lot. Mosquitos had the highest mission survival rate of any WW2 bomber to see significant service in Europe despite being completely unarmed. The top speed for each variant is readily verifiable and often faster than contemporary single engined fighters.
The Air Force continued to use 50 caliber with the F80, F84, and F86, during the Korean War. They were at a disadvantage to the Mig15, armed with two 23mm, and one 37mm cannon. The later versions of the F86, after the war, switched from six 50 caliber, to four 20mm. All Naval aircraft switched to 20mm after the FH1 Phantom1. The Naval work horses of the Korean War, the F9F Panther, F2H Banshee, A1 Sky Raider, were all armed with 20mm. While inferior in performance to the Mig15, F9F’s surprisingly shot down Migs in the few dogfights recorded between them. I know of two incidence during the early days of the Vietnam War , A1 Sky Raiders where able to shoot down Mig17’s, totally due to positioning, and being armed with four 20mm cannons.
Great job of explaining the nuances and reasons for the decisions made for these weapon choices. This is one of the reasons that just looking at statistics on paper is not the same as good research.
The problem with discussions about "is this weapon better than that weapon" is that there are multiple factors to take into consideration. Reliability, ease of manufacture, the logistics of supplying the weapon and ammo, and one I dont see enough people mention is ammo capacity. Sure a 20mm autocannon has been proven to cause more damage to aircraft, but you can't carry as much ammunition. And honestly, its not even "is it better" so much as "is it good enough" a 12.7mm round will do a good enough job to justify staying around even when "better" options exist but thats just my opinion
Then again, since the usual targets in the air were usually lightly armored bombers or fighters (armored or not, the important stuff=ammo, fuel, lube, the pilot-- was all packed in a very small area) so a good pattern of 50 cal hits usually got the job done and there was more of it being carried. When the Jet era arrived, 20 mm was found to be more effective.
Honestly, I'd love rapid fire capability over a slower cannon. Sure, a hit from a cannons is more devastating, but you're more likely to hit with a spray than a single round in the air.
You are making it sound like the 50s shoots 100 times faster with that statement. But in reality for every 10 50cal bullets nine 20mm where shot for 1 gun😂
Pilots resolved this by getting in much closer, sometime as close as 30 metres. That’s the best way of ensuring hits. After that, the weapon itself doesn’t matter very much.
The fact that so few understand that the different priorities are what resulted in the different choices is really annoying. Thank you for this balanced response!
Bombers are destroyed airmen are killed. I think you should show a little respect for what were on the whole young men. During World War II, one in three American airmen survived the air battle over Europe. The casualties suffered by the Eighth Air Force were over 47,000. “When you go home, tell them of us and say, For your tomorrow, we gave our today.” -- Kohima Epitaph
@@firstlast7052 also Americans aren’t the only one we should respect. I honestly respect anyone who every decided or was forced to suffer those battles. Unless they deliberately committed war crimes against humanity o respect them.
@@firstlast7052 No idea what the heck you are preaching about. It is common military parlance to say that you have 'killed' an enemy vehicle when you have shot it down or destroyed it.
@@Nachtsider I am no more preaching than you are. Aircraft are shot down warships are sunk. "Kill" in this context is a slang term. Aircraft that are "shot down" are not list as Killed in Action. No DOD official will state that "In an unprovoked attack one of our planes was killed along with the pilot" instead they will say "... was shot down and the pilot is missing".
War thunder 50 cals when enemies uses then: a grazing shot rips off my entire wing War thunder when I use 50 cals: 200 direct hits do absolutely nothing
Ok, so I noticed you and Karl from Military History visualized compare thing such as this (Comparison of U.S. philosophy with .50 cals with The German 20mm philosophy.) Comparison of Pz4 and M4 Sherman on his channel ect. Could y'all do a series working with other historians on picking a topic, (Armor doctrine, Grand Strategy, Infantry tactics etc) then breaking down how each military approached these issues and why?
@@MilitaryHistoryVisualized Ok thank you apologies for getting the name wrong. Thank you for answering this question. Though have you mentioned a historian or author by the name of Karl? I think I mistook the name of the author for you.
The F4F-4 only carried about 200 rounds per MG and that was changed to 4 guns with 400 rounds each in the FM-2 (technically the F4F-6). There are two things to consider, length of burst and heaviness of fire. Lots of things to consider with aircraft. How do you build a wing to take the 20mm cannon (the Spitfire had to have a bulge installed)? A 20mm gun recoil could knock the aircraft off centerline but an asymmetric fire of the .50 didn't. However, in 1945 the USN installed 4 20mm guns in the F8F Bearcat and the USAF found out that 20mm guns in the F-86 over Korea was VERY deadly.
@@Easy-Eight when you’re fighting the Japanese, four .50 cal guns is more than enough. Against nations that actually cared about their pilots lives they’re not very good.
@@soulofastro As Bismark touched on, the Zero wasn't actually super unprotected when it was first built. The issue was more than Japanese planes tended to use more Magnesium alloys in aircraft construction. These alloys are lighter for a given weight than normal Duralumin, but can be more fire prone due to Magnesium being very reactive. Since Japanese engine development struggled to keep pace with that of other nations for awhile, and since the general line of thought was that armor was planning for failure anyway, this wasn't really seen as a big problem compared to the performance gains. The Japanese weren't the only ones to use Magnesium parts, though: that's part of why the B-29s were disaster maidens early on: the Wright R-3350 engines used Magnesium in the crankcases AND ran _very_ hot. Not a great combination
@@Easy-Eight Two things, the Spit had a very thin wing. The British had trouble making them work for a good while, they tried laying it on it side and had to develop a belt feed system too. Whilst the Americans had problems with mass producing the Hispano 20mm for some reason, if truth be told that's why they stuck with .50s for so long. (they don't like having to import other peoples armaments, although I see that they are finally doing so with the new MBT gun for the Abrams tank and licenced built the Harrier).
A good thoughtful discussion of what is a surprisingly complicated subject. At the end of the war in the Pacific the. US Navy definitely wanted the heavier cannons to deal with Kamikazes.
As a result of the Korean War the US developed two new cannons the 20mm Vulcan multi barrel and the second one was a rotary revolver type cannon. The second cannon was used on the F-100, F-101, later version of the F-86 and the F-5 series fighter.
The figures in the chart you post, there is some instances of wrong numbers suspect. First the various numbers were obtained by using different techniques and standards. For instance, American guns velocity was measured at 78 feet from the muzzle, not 13.1, 0r 16.4 feet and then corrected back to zero range mathematically. Also the number given for the .50 Should be 887M/S measured at the 78 foot range, not 880 M/S, which is the standard 710 Grain "Ball" ammo, shot from a 45" Barrel M2-HB gun. The M-2 AP-I ammo shot a much lighter, 660 Grain Projectile, at 3,066 Feet Per Second, also at 78" from the muzzle from the 36" Barrel. Which if you look it up in Hatcher's Note book, or the various training and procurement manuals of the time, is easily verified. It is a very small, but significant difference! Secondly, the shape and Sectional Density meant that the .50 lost much less velocity than all of the various Cannon projectiles per unit of distance traveled than any aircraft cannon shell used in WW-II. This gave it a much longer "Point Blank" Range and perforating power than any AP Cannon shell used in WW-II. The effect of that meant it was much easier to get hits and they were much more likely to be good hits than the fewer and more difficult to aim and hit with cannons in the war. Post war, every single Nation on Earth discovered that MV, BC, Rate of Fire and time of flight were much more important than explosive content, because any hit, no matter how insignificant, is better than no hit at all! Why did the Germans go to 27 MM from 30 with less than half as much explosive if it was so effective? They were not alone either, look at the history of Project "Vulcan" which was for 70 years was the premiere A2A weapon in the gun fighter world!
Another factor in the demise of the .5 inch guns and other machine guns was the advent of the Gatling type of guns which allowed the bigger calibers to fire at very high rate, thus negating the high firing rate advantage of multiple machine guns over cannon. Also the ammo can be contained in a armored drum, in a centralized location near the CG, and the ammo can be jettisoned in a pinch.
P 39 with 37mm auto cannon. I know warthunder is only a game but the feeling of obliterating both ground and air targets with that centerline cannon is something else. I will say I love American planes and will stick with the .50 cal because the only aircraft I was effective with that had 20mm were the ones that had 4 and no less. Even the P38 with its 20mm and multiple .50 cals weren’t enough. If I’m using a “cannon” I better have 4 20mms or a 37mm with 4+ .50 cals. If i could design my own WW2 plane it would definitely have a 37mm auto cannon down the center or one in each wing with a backup .50 along side that in each wing.
The US Navy wanted to go to cannon, but the US could not produce a reliable version of the British Hispano. Due to disregard to firing pin/chamber clearances, US versions of the gun were notorious for jamming (the P-38 got one because jams could be cleared from the cockpit). So cannon were rare in US planes until late in the war. Still, the 50 cal was so ingrained in the USAF mindset, the F-86 (and other jets) went to Korea with them instead of cannon. They quickly found them lacking compared to what the MiG-15 was packing.
But the US still stuck with the .50 cal up through the Korean War in its F-86 Sabre and it still took down Mig 15's and 17's. But they went to the 20mm M-61 not long after and are still using it in today's fighters.
@Military Aviation History , as long as you're looking at airborn fifty cals, have you considered doing a video on Pappy Gunn and the B-25 gunships with all the fifties?
I kinda think its weird that WW2 Germany was pointed out. Every nation used cannons in their aircraft due to their lethality, whether they were reliable or not because of it. The US didn't for the most part due to the logistics issue it was having, as the US armed forces was spread across the world. When you start mixing armament and ammunition types it compounds this significantly so you go with what you have a ton of, and you know works well (same reason they didn't initially start arming Shermans with 76mm long guns). The US wasn't really using cannon in large numbers in their fighters until the Korean War. Here is why. That's when jets where showing up. Now, TOT, Time-on-Target becomes an huge issue. You may have a second to fire a burst into a enemy fighter before it pulls away. 50 cals may have been more reliable, but even in WW2, US and Russian fighters would pump most of their ammo into a single kill. 20mm cannon do more damage with less rounds, so it just makes sense.
Mixing machine guns in various calibers and cannon on the same air frame presents a problem except at close range. The .50 caliber, the .30 caliber and 20mm, 30mm cannon all have different ballistic flights so one type of round may strike the target and the other miss entirely. The P38 Lighting is an example. Originally it was supposed to have a 37mm cannon but that did not work well. So a 20mm cannon was used. The 37mm would mean only 15 rounds (in three 5 round magazines) while the 20mm meant 150 rounds. The .50 caliber guns also carried much more ammunition and had a higher rate of fire.. Bomber interceptors like the Mosquito equipped with radar as a night fighter had four 20mm cannon and 4 machine guns and had a devastating affect on bombers it intercepted. So aircraft were armed depending on specific uses like the anti ship capacity of the B25 bomber equipped with a 75 mm cannon in it's nose. Putting all .50 caliber guns meant more ammunition and simpler supply logistics and maintenance plus a high volume of fire.. The .50 caliber worked well enough for the general uses at that time.
Wonderful and informative video. Always wondered why the Brits used the little .303 MG and not the 50 BMG. This answered that and more. Well done. Can carry a lot of ammo for a 50 BMG, not too much for a 108.
What a excellent comparasion of the first armor and weapons of that error. Each plane, in each situation, differant, with the analyase of each in their original and evolving mode
The problem with the cannon machine gun is the difference in the ballistics of the two rounds. That is the reason they took the 20 mm cannon off the tail gunner positions of the B-29. Also, neither the cannon or machine gun is of any use if you cannot hit the target.
@@mebsrea I think by the time the Typhoon came out, Britian was already entering the phase of using Hispanos over the 7.62 brownings, so I don't think so.
@@uberschnilthegreat22 Just looked it up. Apparently the first 110 Typhoons built did carry 12x.303, then the four-cannon armament was quickly adopted.
I think there’s a Chuck Yeager interview on UA-cam where he says that .50 caliber machine guns were the only way to go for a fighter plane. I guess the thinking was that the German planes needed cannons to bring the bombers down.
I think you did a very good job Sepperating the 20mm and 50BMG weapons. Anyone who takes the time to look at History of any military branch has to agree there is NO ONE answer to any tactical question. You made very good arguments for both weapon systems and why they were chosen by their perspective branches of The Nations Armed Forces at the time. Keep up the good work.
The 20mm cannons do more damage for sure, but the .50cals, especially when you have 6-8 of them are much easier to hit considering their high fire rate and velocity.
Also, while significantly less powerful than a 20 or 30 mm, the 50 bmg is still a MASSIVE step up from the .30 cal machine gun rounds (303 or 30-06 depending on brit or us) delivering roughly 4x the kinetic energy in terms of ft lbs/muzzle energy.
That photo of a heavily damaged, but not broken of one Me109 , shows how the British machine Guns with the 303 bullet, were very underpowered. Unlike, if you are it with a 20 mm cannon sheel, even with bulletproof windscreen, your face Will disapear. Thats the reason, the British realise, that the Spitfire Mark 5,even with 8 machine Guns, was not enought, against the german fighters.(against german bombers, it was another story). So, after realising, that fact, its when they started to install, 20 mm cannons on the Spitfire, also. The punch, was complitly more poweful, that even 8 machine Guns.
The 12.7 mm machine gun was perfect for the Americans in the Pacific as most Japanese planes were flimsy. The use of cannons on Americas would be unnecessary as the 12.7 was fully capable of taking off Japanese airplane wings and would can see in American plane gun cams Japanese planes literally falling apart under 6X12.7 mm burst. In Europe, the issue becomes more complex. American targets were a bit more rugged and most of the gunfire was not on German planes but straffing operations. All in all, the 12.7 mm though not a perfect weapon gets a very good rating and extremely flexible to take on almost any target.
The USAAF and USN didn’t need cannons so badly because they didn’t have to fight much with stronger-built and more protected aircrafts like bombers or ground attack planes. At the European theatre air superiority and bomber escort were the priorities. Against fighters more heavy machine gun does the job well and in the Pacific the Japanese planes were all made of paper. Although the USN wanted cannons on their fighters, but they bought the original Hispano cannon from the french with all it's teething problems that the Brits have already overcome and seemingly unable to learn from it until the Colt Mk 12.
@Mialisus Why tiny? 20mm MG 151 rouns are roughly twice as heavy as 15mm rounds and therefore could hold more explosive and incendiary filler. Both guns have the same weight, so the 20mm gun will easily deliver twice the firepower for the same weight.
The A6M "Zero" or "Zeke" had two 20mm cannon. But the Zero really couldn't take any abuse. When Japanese pilots tried head on attacks against the F4F Wildcat, the FM2, and later the F6F Hellcat, they generally came out the loser. Those US Navy fighters I mentioned were designed by Grumman, known as "Grumman Iron Works" due to the fact that they built rugged aircraft that could take a real beating, and still get their pilots home. The A6M was born of a completely different design philosophy. Firepower (the two 20 mm) light weight, and manuverability was uppermost for this fighter, at the expense of protection for the pilot. No armor, no self sealing fuel tanks, etc., made it a poor opponent in a head on pass against most Allied fighters. Cannon or no.
You are way, way overthinking this. The question is, "what is the mission?" European fighters had to shoot down bombers, which needed cannons. American fighters- having no fear of foreign bombers- because oceans- had to shot down fighters to protect their own bombers. Six-eight .50s will shred a single seat airplane like a cheese grater. Had German or Japanese bombers appeared over the US, our planes would have carried cannons. Since they didn't, and couldn't, we built fighters to protect our bombers from fighters, which didn't require cannons.
@@Solidboat123 Had they really needed them, they could have gotten designs from allies, in the way that Packard built Merlin engines. Aircraft cannons weren't really a priority, as can be told by the fact that even second generation US jets used .50s.
@@bierce716 The US built variant of the hispano was terrible. The .50 had factories and tooling in place and thus was easier on the logistics train. The sabres in korea suffered for their lack of cannons, considerable amounts of Migs made it home because of it.
> You are way, way overthinking this. The question is, "what is the mission?" European fighters had to shoot down bombers, which needed cannons. American fighters- having no fear of foreign bombers- because oceans- had to shot down fighters to protect their own bombers. That's like part of what I said ... ?
Why is everyone trying to justify something that was not done by choice, but it was done from necessity? THE AMERICANS STUCK TO THE .50 CALS BECAUSE THEY BOTCHED THE PRODUCTION OF 20MM HISPANO CANNOS. Yes. They bought license for the guns from France and messed up the conversion to imperial. Then instead of running some testing and prototyping, they built a massive production line, straight from converted blueprints, for a weapon that mostly didn't work. That's why they stuck to the .50 cal. Unlike their failed 20mm cannon, it was reliable.
The only true conclusion one can make: The allied autocannons were rather shit compared to the German ones. The Hispano-Suiza 20mm autocannon made by the brits weighed 38kgs, compared to the 26.3 kg of the MG FF 20mm autocannon, which was lighter than even the aviation .50cals, at the cost of lower muzzle velocity. Even the later MG 151/20s were smaller in size than the Hispano's making them easy to mount in the wings compared to the Hispanos.
The opponents of American fighters in WWII were overwhelmingly enemy fighters -- fast-moving, agile, but not especially well-armored aircraft that a pilot could only hold in his sights for a matter of split seconds. Consequently, a high rate of fire was preferable to high explosive power. In the case of the P-51B, six to ten hits by six Browning 50s were more likely than one hit from four 20mm Hispano cannons, and would likely cause an equal amount of damage to a Bf-109 or an Fw-190 (the A6M2 without armor or self-sealing fuel tanks could fall to a single .50-cal hit) which partially explains why all subsequent marques of the Mustang in U. S. service carried .50-caliber MGs rather than cannons. (Among the other reasons was the poor reliability of the early Hispano M2 and the drag penalty of the cannon installation compared to the Browning MG.) Even after the Mustangs were flying more ground-attack sorties than escort missions, the .50-cals were still preferred to cannons. The P-47 had a much broader wing chord than the P-51 and could theoretically carry 20mm cannons more cleanly with larger ammo reserves, yet no production P-47 was ever flown with cannon armament. The Thunderbolt's eight Browning AN/M2s were sufficiently devastating to handle any German target, from a Bv-222 seaplane to a horse-drawn artillery gun. If the shoe were on the other foot -- if the USAAF had been tasked with defending against an enemy bomber offensive flown by an Axis equivalent of the Boeing B-17G, then the AN/M2 would have been replaced by 20mm cannons in most American fighters. Bombers are tough targets compared to the typical Axis fighter. The history of the F-86 Saber is illustrative. The Saber was North American's jet-powered successor to their Mustang and was designed for the same mission -- air superiority, denial of the skies to enemy fighters. To fill that role, NA's designers gave the Saber the Mustang's armament, six .50-caliber Browning MGs, improved M3s with a greater ROF and more rounds per gun. Its opponent in the Korean War was the MiG-15, a point-defense interceptor designed to counter the Boeing B-29. To fill that role the Mig was armed with cannons -- two 23mm guns and one 37mm giant killer. Undoubted the Mig's cannons were deadly, but the Russian pilot had only 200 shots available, 160 23mm rounds and 40 37mm rounds. In a prolonged dogfight the Mig pilot could easily run out of ammo against an F-86 carrying NINE TIMES as much ammo. Furthermore, the 23mm cannons were not ballistically matched to the slow-firing 37mm gun. The MiG-15 would have been a better fighter with the 37mm gun removed and its bay plated over. North American Aviation also produced an all-weather interceptor version of the Saber, the F-86D. Based on data gathered from Allied bomber losses during WWII, the USAF concluded that cannons were more effective against bombers than machineguns and rockets were more effective than cannons. Therefore the F-86D had no guns. Instead, it carried a battery of 24 70mm folding-fin aerial rockets in a retractable launcher installed in the belly. (Post-war studies of the similar Henschel Hs 297 antiaircraft rocket system contributed to the "Might Mouse".)
Great overview. It seems the development of the 20mm aircraft cannon rendered armor null, and thus the focus on dogfighting up to and into the missile era.
In my humble opinion all antagonists had the correct weapons mounted, well, maybe with the exception of pre 1941 RAF fighters (They needed cannons during the BoB but didn't have a working solution until after the bombers stopped coming in daylight. An air force on the defensive will need big bomber killing weapons such as 20 or 30mm cannon while an offensive air force which will primarily be faced with enemy fighters needs weapons suitable for that role, 6 or 8 .50's fits that bill perfectly.
The US intended to switch to a 20mm standard battery for *all* fighters, back in the late 1930s, and started desperately looking for an "off the shelf" 20mm cannon they could adopt. The .50 was retained as a stop-gap, but the *plan* was to cut in 20mm armament as soon as possible. Even into the very end of the war. However, the US had *major* problems with reliability in US produced Hispano-Suiza 20mm cannon. The reason was primarily that the US ordnance types *insisted* stubbornly that the chamber dimensions the original designers provided were too shallow. Even when the British (who provided the specs) and US ammunition manufacturers said, "Hey, you cut the chambers 1/16th of an inch - 2mm - too deep!" Note that the British produced guns worked fine with both US and British made ammunition, as did other Hispano-Suiza guns built elsewhere. The US produced guns with the proper chambers produced for Britain to Britian's demand that they use the chamber dimensions the British provided, worked. But US guns, built to the US altered chamber dimensions, had reliability issues with *everybody's* ammo. But US Ordnance types *never* admitted that they had created the problem they claimed was an inherent design fault.
@@victordecastro7221 Eh, not like aircraft armament was a war winning issue, in either direction. Sort of like, the US *entered* the war with the best service rifle, and Germany *ended* the war with the best rifle (not universally, but still reasonably widely fielded) and MMG, but those decisions didn't have a material impact on war's outcome. Not to say that quality of ordnance and the soundness of your armaments plan aren't important, but there are damned few places in military history where you can say, " *This one ordnance decision* won/lost the war!" But in WWII, *strategic logistics* , not individual armament choices, played an immense role in the Allied victory.
@@HappyBeezerStudios Well, yes, but the US/UK training systems were far and away the best in the world. Even when they were just gearing up they were producing more, and better (on average) pilots than Germany or Japan.
@@jamesharding3459 You’re wrong on the Japanese pilots. Japan had one of the best training programs in the world. The pilots they produced were highly skilled. They were also highly experienced with years of combat experience. What they were bad at was replacing lost pilots. By 1943 the pilots they were producing were of poor quality for multiple reasons as well as the vast majority of the veterans were now dead.
Whatever the answer is, you don’t want to be hit by a concentrated burst of either...unless you’re in a TU-2 with Gaijin’s 2014 damage model. Still salty
Germany used their flagpanzers with the 20 mm gun and think it was called a whirlwind against infantry. My dad saw a soldier take a hit directly in the chest from a 20 mm Cannon. Dad targeted the whirlwind for the 75 mm Cannon. Dad said it was horrific what the 20 mm explosive rounded to the soldier. You could always tell when something really bothered my dad when he would tell you the story because he would make a face of disgust or horror.
@@judahboyd2107 Or a B-25 with 16 times .50 cals, in the nose, plus bombs and rockets, and twin .50s in the waist, tail and turret! Then you've almost got enough guns!
Meanwhile in Britain they started using 20mm hispano on fighters in 1940, by 1941 20mm were almost standard. Most fighters carried 4 x 20mm Hispanics, spitfire had various weapons by at least 2 x 20mm hispanos. It is known that 4 x 20mm hispano had twice the firepower of 6 x .50
@@annewillis6100 While certainly true in the context of WW2 as a whole, this is a bit disingenuous when you consider that one of the pivotal parts of WW2 occurred before the Royal Air Force had any widespread move towards the use of 20mm Hispano cannons. The .30-caliber weapons were definitely observed to be inadequate, but because of logistical reasons and probably the wing design of the Hurricane and the Spitfire, it was not feasible to switch to .50-caliber machine guns. So it seems to me that the British had no choice but to use the .30-cal machine guns - and the only way to make them effective was to have a lot of them, as many as 12 in the case of Hurricane Mk.IIb. The use of .30-caliber machine guns in large numbers was a relic of interwar period fighter doctrine, and the British did not have the advantage of experience that the Germans gained in Spain - experience which told them that their 7.92mm MG17 machine guns were inadequate, which is why they started putting 20mm MG FF cannons on their Bf 109 fighters. As a result, the move towards 20mm Hispano cannons as the primary armament of RAF fighters happened after Battle of Britain. While it is technically true that in 1940 they did start to use the 20mm cannon (with the Westland Whirlwind and the Spitfire Mk.IIb), it was not initially very successful due to jamming issues and limited ammo capacity. It wasn't really until the Hispano Mk.II with belt-fed ammo that the RAF started more widespread use of these weapons. So it would be accurate to say that during Battle of Britain, the 20mm Hispano cannon did not yet have very significant impact. You do have a point, however, that the British moved to bigger, more effective weapons as soon as it was possible for them to do so.
I was in hospital with a USMC Corsair driver for a week. He had the -1C with 4 20mm canon. I asked him if they worked well. He said he only ever saw one Japanese aircraft, he was returning from patrol and it was going the other way at low level, so he let it pass then rolled over and pulled a half loop behind it. He got it lined up and opened fire and the Betty just disintegrated in a ball of flame. He said he didn't even fire ten rounds per gun. He went on to be a physics professor at several top schools, retiring from Stanford. When I met him he was 82 and was in for knee replacement surgery. The next day they wheeled him off and he came back a couple of hours later with a line of staples right down the front of his knee. A few hours later they came back with a Zimmer frame. He objected and they came back with crutches. He stood up and took one step. He looked thoughtful for a moment then handed them one of the crutches. "OK, let's go." And he walked round the whole floor. Maybe a 100 yard walk within four hours of knee replacement. He went home a few days later and I asked the teaching nurse if that was unusual, she said the aim was to get him standing on the first day, and able to walk to the wheelchair before they released him. Now that was a man and a Marine.
@@drcornelius8275 You ever heard of the Zero? That thing ruled the skies for the first half of the war in the Pacific. Just because their planes didn't have armor doesn't mean anything, your just trading durability for maneuverability.
Every time I hear about "survivor-ship bias" I think of the French leading the way with helmets in WWI. As soon as they were introduced there was an increase in head injuries! The French almost stopped using helmets until someone pointed out that the men with these injuries would have been killed if they weren't wearing helmets!
Indeed. The only reason there were less reported head injuries prior to helmet introduction was because men with head injuries weren't surviving to report their injures.
One Japanese ace on TakeLeon's channel says he would have much preferred 6 American .50 cals over the Japanese 20mm cannons (he was flying with a late-war Shiden Kai), mainly due to their slow muzzle velocity, massive bullet drop and low rate of fire. You had to get really close with them for any effective fire, which could be pretty much suicidal against a fomation of B-29s. Edit: Just double-checked, it was Minoru Honda. That interview is definitely worth a watch, as are the ones with Saburo Sakai, Tomokazu Kasai and others.
I thought that Saburo Sakai was shot by six 30-06 M1919 GPMG. The rounds blew out his left eyeball and shredded his arm causing massive blood loss. His plane was shot to hell and leaked fluids. Yet, he managed to fly hundreds of miles and land on native land. He was captured by Allied forces, recovered, and later worked for the US CIA.
@@1dirkmanchest The incident occured when his squadron went attacking some wildcats that turned out to be SBDs. Seeing as they (the SBDs) wielded two nose-mounted .50 cals and a twin .30 cal in the gunner's seat, either case is possible, although I imagine the .30 cal is more likely
@@Maple_Cadian The trouble is scoring those hits. While the German MG 151, combined with the Mienengeschoss ammo, was an excellent weapon even at mid and long ranges, and many aces, including Marseille and Hartmann, preferred to use just a single 151 in their 109s, the Japanese 20mm cannons, inlcuding the late-war Ho-5, were probably the worst of all the warring parties, even the Soviet Shvaks did a better job imo. While early in the war it was easy for the Japanese Zero pilots to sit 60-100m behind their opponents and shoot them down with one or two short bursts (the early Zero cannons had only 60 shells per gun, lets not forget), later in the war this became problematic against high-powered US fighters using boom and zoom tactics (Marianas Turkey Shoot rings the bell? Heck, even when the Americans employed the famous Thach's weave at Midway the Japs didnt know how to counter it and were losing planes in head-on attacks against on paper inferior but much sturdier Wildcats.), or against massive formations of heavy bombers. Not to mention the steep quality drop in pilot replacements as the losses mounted, the same problem Germany faced, they never rotated their pilots. The Shiden-Kai pilots from the elite 343rd squadron, for example, developed some incredibly risky and very taxing tactics against the B-29s, using steep inverted head-on diving attacks, then regularly pulling 5, 6 negative Gs, naturally a pilot could endure just a few of those. With the US .50 cals you could spray and pray a little more generously, score a couple of hits with incendiary AP and most early Japanese planes would burst into flames.
One thing that can be of note here is ammunition per gun. For the US Navy pilots in the pacific this was something they talked about. I believe in one of the USS Enterprise’s after action reports during the Guadalcanal campaign it notes that the fighter pilots were asking for 4 gun variants of the F4F over the 6 gun variants due to them running out of ammo so quickly in dogfights and interceptions. Just something to note as additional information.
The 2 additional guns on the F4F-4 were outboard of the wing fold. Their additional distance from the plane's centerline made the outboards slightly less accurate at longer ranges and the additional weight that far out negatively affected roll rate. It's worth noting that the later FM-1/FM-2 went back to 4 guns.
@@ObsydianShade Never heard of that mod. Recently finished George Loving, Woodbine Red Leader. He flew a P-51B/C (razorback) out of Italy. The B/C model mounted only 4 guns. In '44, the squadron CO offered him a D model with 6 guns. He turned it down. Said he was too close to completing his tour to switch mounts. Saw a documentary on O'Hare. The documentary reported that the Wildcat carried more rounds for the inboard guns than the outboard guns and that O'Hare made his last kill that fateful day with just his two inboard guns. Is that true about the inboard and outboard loads on the Wildcat?
COmmon complaint / observation everywhere - in the heat of the fight being frugal with supply limited to at most 10-12s of continous firing was very difficult for even experienced pilots in some situations and borderline impossible for majority of novice ones. Same was written by Polish / British pilots in Great Britain.
@@piotrd.4850 A story from the Great War. (You can read it in Frederick Libby, Horses Don't Fly.) In 1916, the Brits were still fumbling pilot and gunner training. The FE2b had just arrived and the Brits were short of gunners. So they issued an audition call. Volunteer for flying duty and we'll give you a chance and if you fail . . . well, it's back to the trenches for you. Libby went to the audition. Everyone got ground instruction in the operation of the Lewis gun (47 round magazine). Instructor taught the wannabees to fire in short bursts, like they do today. Next day, Libby went up with the squadron OC, Stephen Price. (Americans say CO, but the Brits say OC.) The audition was to hit a target on the ground as the plane flew over it. As Libby and Price closed on the target, Libby pressed the trigger to fire AND HELD IT PRESSED UNTIL THE GUN WENT 'CLICK'! He walked the bursts of bullets in the dirt into the target! Price seconded Libby to 11 Squadron immediately. Libby's 'Open 'er up and let's see what she can do' tactic worked. He scored a kill during his first flight over the lines. So, yeah, that 'Fire in short bursts to conserve your ammunition' advice never impressed the boys in the cockpit much. Many times I have seen gun camera footage of pilots walking their tracers to and through the EA.
Barely to mention: It WORKS WELL (enough), and you can CHEAPLY make MILLIONS of them in a short amount of TIME...USA: "Leave your Johnson measuring contest in the locker room; We have enemy to destroy..."
@@johncharleson8733 to be fair. Its actually more economically sound to make quite alot of smaller caliber weapons. It takes less material and due to the square cube law, weighs less aswell. Thats partially the reason Germany lost. Too many resources in too few weapons.
@@casematecardinal You are forgetting machining time/cutting tool wear. Anyhow, I agree that Germany should have produced more weapons of somewhat lessor quality.
This is an excellent example of how to tell history - by explaining conditions and influences. This helped you arrive and a good answer to the controversy: it depends. I also liked your "Ugly Truths" title. This could be a whole category of episodes dealing with controversies in military aviation history. BTW, another thing I like about your channel are your applications to war games. The games are great tools for illustrating your points - in this case, how they do not mimic the real world sometimes. Thank you for another great episode.
41:40 Yes, I always thought that the main reason the Luftwaffe needed canons on their fighters was because they had to intercept and take down Allied bombers which where easy to shoot at (that is, less misses) but took too many light machine gun rounds to shoot down while long-range Allied escort fighters needed the guns with the most ammo to take down German fighters in dog fights that could last several minutes.
That's right, and machine guns in american fighters were installed outside the propeller disc, which made two advantages: 1. No need to synchronize machine guns with propeller RPM 2. Better rate of fire, and better effectiveness in shooting to fast and maneuvring targets. The rate of fire is also important today, that's the reason why modern fighters have multi-barreled cannons like M-61A1 Vulcan,
@mandellorian Well, that's your opinion, I will stay with mine. Americans have the best combat equipment and combat experience, I believe they know what they do. Russians tested multi-barreled cannons on MiG-27 but gave up this idea since the recoil and vibrations caused damage in aircraft's fuselage.
@@jakubdabrowski3846 The Luftwaffe had electrical primers developed to replace percussion primers for the MG151 and MG131. This made synchronization relatively simple compared to mechanical and hydraulic gear. It even worked with the 30mm Mk 103 which however could could not fit into the wing roots of any fighter until the Ta 152C (on which it was tested).
@@aaronhumphrey3514 AHm another laic comment... yak-9 was fast as a 109 and almsot clibmed as a 109, and turnd better than a 109. La 5 was faster than a 109 under 4000. So?
Noooooo, you’re not allowed to give a reasonable, balanced take based on reality. You have to say one is better in every way Bismark: haha, historical context and facts go brrrrrr
@@neth7826 Of course canons aren't simply better as an anti-aircraft weapon, and that's why ground forces preferred massed batteries of ma deuces for air defense. Wait... That's not what happened. Despite "paying" much less for extra weight and "paying" more logistical cost of supplying another ammo type. Infantry actually shoots their guns, so it's not trivial. If a battery of six infantry weapons, which ma deuce actually is, was just as good as oerlicons, that's what they would use. Soviets developed much better emgees, specialized for aircraft use, namely shkas and berezin in 7.62 and 14mm respectively. They still transitioned to cannons as soon as they had them. But it's so complex, man! What is better, a couple of AA auto-canons or 6-8 infantry emgees? Who knows? Bla, bla.
There he goes again. Bismarck is breaking the rules of Internet in general and YT in particular, by using fact, logics and reason. Where's the hyperbole? Where's the exaggeregations? Where's the hints that anyone who doesn't agree with him has a dubious sexual identity?/J
I agree with the overall premise that cannons were better for armored slow bombers, and 50's for small light fast fighters. However, I also thought you'd touch on the respective gun platforms themselves. The design philosophy behind the BF-109 was to keep the weight in the fuselage and the wings light and thin. Once you've made that choice, a single cannon, firing through the prop hub makes a lot more sense. (I realized they ultimately put a pair in the wings as well but this was a later adaptation.)
Yes, in hindsight now, studying WW2 air combat, either the heavy .50 MG or 20mm cannon out of the nose cone spinner was the best arsenal in the fighter plane. The Me109 and Yak apparently had the best armament of the War, with the weapon unencumbered poking out of the cone spinner (no synchronized mechanism to prevent shells striking the screw; resulting in less aircraft weight, more projectiles exiting the tube without impediment, and more shells carried, while also not requiring deflection or convergence). It was like the shells were "coming out of the pilot's nose" . Interesting that the U.S. Airacobra had this weapon design with a 20mm cannon in the P400 variant early in the war.
Yes one of the most important firearms designer of all time no doubt. But germans had most likely a somewhat more important impact on modern military small arms design in WW2 than the US and probably from WW2 onward too (even though the AR-15 is absolutely groundbreaking in its design just not to the extent "muricans" really wanna believe).
@@Heretic123456 It's better to remove AR-15 and replace it with Eugene Stoner to make that comparison with Browning more conceptual. Eugene Stoner's AR-15 ergonomics and the operating system of the AR-18 are the basis for nearly every military small arm not named AKM made today - including the Germans. His genius is greatly understated. I agree with the pre/post WW2 influence. Europe was largely isolated in their small arm design; but there were several American WW1 designs adopted by European forces such as the Lewis gun, Hotchkiss, and Madsen. The US's small arms influence began in the 1860's with the Civil war, which was the only real significant war to take place in that time period. It served as a great curiosity to the European powers. But I would agree, the forced interaction with US weapon systems and function in WW2 had it's impact.
@C.J. "Europe was largly isolated in their small arms design" is like saying "Fog is the Channel the Continent cut off"! Particularly between 1860 and 1939 when European empires (British, Russian, and French being the large ones) probably covered half the world. "The [American] Civil war, which was the only significant war to take place in that time period". If you are in the middle of a battlefield then that war probably seems significant. However just to mention a few others: The Crimean War (1853-1856), the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), the Second Boer War (1899-1902), the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905). Not to mention most of the Great War (1914-1917) before the Americans turned up.
@@firstlast7052 forgot the spanish American war were the Mauser and Kraig Jorgensen faced off. The results of that war was the u.s adopting the Springfield 1903 which resulted in a copy right lawsuit from Germany.
*50 cal exist*
US: I think we're gonna use this for everything.
The gun should be on the $50 bill.
@@scratchy996 Well they couldn't really put a foreign gun on it.
@@scratchy996 actually it should be John Moses Browning, with a M2 50 cal in his hands on the $50 note!
This is so true
Just like f35? For everything means - mediocre for everything.
Imagine asking Bismarck what he wants for dinner and he goes into a 1hr rant about how tacos are different from burgers just to tell you he isn't hungry
Sounds like my gf, tbh.
@Chan Kideoke I'll take the girlfriend
Bismarck would want a Bismarck Brötchen
Answer the question in 5 minutes ppls
@@j.f.fisher5318 Sorry about that. But it comes with being blessed with estrogen as far as I can tell.
I support the use of Jeremy Clarksons as a unit of power.
James May as a unit of "presentation appeal"
Richard Hammond as a unit of "Crashes"
I completely agree
Lol
Or "Sliphantom" as a unit for not uploading regularly.
The biggest unit of power........IN THE WOOOOOORLD 😂
It's almost like you're saying each air force chose the weapon that suited their actual operational needs and requirements... who knew such a thing could happen.
Right!
Your saying that all three of the powers that be actually did something right 😮
Yes, it's absolute blasphemy to think that.
@@MilitaryAviationHistory
Wonders will never cease
If only people could realise this when comparing battleships
I think that the pilot with the armoured screen is Wing Commander Stanford Tuck, who advocated for 20mm cannons instead of the eight .303 machine guns. His reasoning was that only a few 20mm cannon shells would destroy a fighter whereas the machine guns usually needed many hits.
He was a fruit cake.
RST was an outstanding pilot, leader, and one hell of a deflection shooter.
He farmed mushrooms post War. Adolf Galland used to drop by for tea &
a chinwag.
He wrote an excellent book called 'Fly for your life'
Of course there was a big difference between the destructive capacity of the .50 caliber machine gun versus the smaller rifle-caliber .303.
@@galoon Well, yes and no. It gets a bit complicated. It seems obvious that a 50 cal would be more destructive than a .303 but testing showed that what happens when a bullet hits an aircraft is not easy to predict. When the RAF tested 0.303 AP rounds (on paper the .303 AP penetrates armour about as well as a .50 ball) against the fuselage of a redundant Blenheim bomber, less than 25% to 30% of the rounds fired even made it to the 4mm thick armour plate protecting the rear of the Blenheim's fuselage the rest either lodging in the structure or being deflected. Of those that made it to the plate "very few" (unquantified, alas, in my source) penetrated. The problem with MG bullets, even big ones, is that they have to hit something vital - fuel, engine or crew - and as the war progressed, these vital components are protected. Bullets, even big ones, tend to be deflected by structural members and they tumble when they penetrate the thin aluminium skin of an aircraft. A tumbling bullet loses a lot of penetration. The RAF did look at the .50 but their testing showed that, although it was more effective than the ,303 browning, it wasn't three times more effective while it weighed almost three times as much.
I was always fascinated by the fact that they figured out a way to fire bullets through a prop without harming prop I wonder how many props was destroyed before they got it right
Count the ex-pilot's graves.
Seriously, the gun was ALLOWED to fire when the gearing gave permission.
57 props were destroyed before they got it right.
I have run across many similar examples where I wonder who was the first pilot to encounter the problem and what they must have thought. One recent problem I came across was, when they fired the guns on a jet fighter, it extinguished the engines! The solution they came up with was to fire a gun on one side at a time so both engines did not go out at the same time?! How would you like to be the guy who first discovered that problem?
@bruh interesting cause as a kid I always wondered if the guns were mounted slightly above the tip of the propeller or it was some crazy movie magic i didn’t understand
There were quite a few issues with this for WWI airplanes but by the time WWII came around, the guns were timed to fire based on the engine cam timing, so ammo only fired between the prop positions. Wing mounted guns didn’t need to worry about engine timing as they were usually not in line with the prop.
My great uncle flew the P38 and P51D over Europe from mid '44 til the end of the war. Most of his time flying the Lightning was spent strafing ground targets, and he felt the airplane was an excellent platform for that due to its cannon, stability, and great payload. By the time he transferred to Mustangs it was the era of open season, and they would break off from bomber escort duties to do more strafing. He got his only aerial kill on a lone Fw190, it never saw him coming. He flew right up behind it and after a burst from his .50s it crashed in a field. He had all his gun camera footage on vhs tapes, it was pretty amazing to watch.
Interesting fact : one of France's better fighter pilots used a 20mm cannon during WW1 quite effectively. A secret he guarded jealously.
My dad flew the P39 training in 1942. He said he flat spun one firing the cannon in a hard bank. Almost killed him. Went to a spit MkV-Mk IX in N Africa then the P51. Flew all three in 10 days during P51 transition. Golden age of prop fighters
God bless your father
@@danielhemple8649 The remarkable thing when flying british spitfires he never had his own plane. They would say take #15 today. Means he had to learn each new plane every flight. Made him a good pilot. Once he got his first P51 he got to name it REX and had his own ground crew. funny the MkV had a wooden dashboard because it was built before we leaned in to help. They saved metal that way.
I believe it: action/reaction. Hard bank scrubs a lot of airspeed, and can put handling on the razors edge. I'd say power up, but... sometimes there's just no options.
There is a story about the P39 that the Russians told the USA that they would stall and they didn't believe them until they Russians sent a pilot to show them. He spun it out like he told them it would and managed to bail or correct it I don't quite remember and they fixed it by moving the gun a little back so the center of gravity was different.
@@magnusasgeirsson7244 It was a mid engine fighter and that alone made it hard to escape a stall of any type. The way to do it is point it down hill. The russians liked it over other types because it still ran well with the low octane gas they had. They disliked the spitfire because it needed high octane gas to run well. Cant run high performance engines on shitty 75 octane aviation gas.
"by looking at the Mk108"
Apparently an alternative armament for the 262 was planned to be dual nose-mounted Mk112s. That's a pair of 55mm cannons.
Every American just grabbed their hearts when this notification popped up.
Not their guns?
@@MilitaryAviationHistory bold of you to assume we didn’t already have them grabbed before we grabbed our hearts.
I grabbed my Garand
I stay strapped with my musket
You assume we we set ours guns down. #staystrapped #orgetclapped
René Fonck really was the pioneer with canon kills, his Spad XII required loading after every shot but 37mm were really nasty against the planes of the time. It never became popular since you basically need an ace to hit anything with 1 shot and reloading was a pain.
Rene' Fonck was a superlative marksman, & could pull off aerial shots that most others could not. Georges Guynemer had a SPAD XII like Fonck's for a bit, & got two kills or so with it, but he went back to using twin Vickers guns. I recall reading that a major drawback was the huge volume of powder fumes the cannon produced. It was blown into the pilot's face by the prop blast, more blew into the cockpit through the breech when it was opened, & breathing that garbage gave pilots severe nausea & headaches. A single-shot gun that gives you the heaves is something I think I'd pass on too.
@@grantmo821 Yeah, particularly since the opponents wasn't exactly armed (with a few rare ground attack planes in 1918 as exceptions) so it was overkill in power,
Fonck was a bit of a weirdo (and a total jerk) but he was certainly talented.
But "cockpit" is using the term very generously since it wasn't exactly roomy, more like in a motorcycle then a modern plane.
Yeah, mounting a canon on a Spad was a stupid idea but it was also a pioneer project that would pay out in the future.
One of the first firearms on Mars will be an M2 Browning and I will put money on that. At this point, I don't know if it will ever be retired
That's the whole point; No reason to...
rumar has it's already there
They just need to make an m3 browning that is a SAW.
You have already lost. First "firearm" will be a telemetry spike launcher - to set up perimeters for robots in high radiation enviroment.
@@burningsinner1132 he said one of the first
Interesting video. One thing wasn't mentioned, though: The key difference between a machine gun and a cannon is in the round, not the gun itself. Cannon rounds have an extra part, called a driver ring, to prevent propellant gasses from blowing past the round as it passes through the gun barrel. Machine gun rounds are usually smaller and lighter, and don't need a driver ring.
No...
The KEY difference between mg rounds and cannon rounds is... Cannon rounds EXPLODE!
Britain had a department for testing captured enemy aircraft and weapons, in WWII. One test of an MG 151/20, they fired a single round at a Hurricane fuselage on a test stand, the cannon round blew the back third of the fuselage OFF!
There is also a famous photo of a B-17 over Germany, taken from another B-17 above and behind it. The photo shows a B-17 that had been hit by SIX 30 mm cannon rounds, the 6 rounds disintegrated the inner starboard engine, the wing on both sides of said engine, and a strip of fuselage several feet high and longer join between wing and fuselage.
The remains of the starboard wing can be seen spiraling off in one direction while the rest of the B-17 spins off the other way...
.50 AP / API / API-T had massive ammount of penetration for its size, even compared to cannons (26-27mms of steel at around 100meters). 109s and 190s had only dural as armor protection behind pilot and fuel tank (this plate was often +-1in - 27mm thick but effective as +-0.3in - 7.62mm of steel, .50AP had 12-13mm of pen at 30° angle at 250meters) these plates werent thick enough to protect against these rounds even at around 500meters if shot directly from behind without hitting anything else in tail section as these rounds still had way above double the penetration of thickess of that plate. While shot from average range 100-250 meters, they had so much power that they could penetrate back plate, travel through empty part of fuel tank, penetrate pilots steel seat in 109 and kill the pilot. Brits were testing it and even much worse british ammo went through seat quite often (30%). So german pilots couldnt rely on armor in most cases, to the contrary actually. Even if that round had to travel through plane and often it didnt a lot as it struck the plate from angle due to gun placement, the rounds still had plenty of penetration to kill the pilot or pierce fuel tank like nothing. Not to mention upper 1/3 of pilot was covered by rather thin plate and insufficent armor glass in 44-45. In case of later MW-50 equiped planes, it wasnt necessary to get pilot as you had massive tank full of flamable substance installed in tail in case of 109 and with standardised incendiary belts, well. (190 had even worse armor protection for pilot) Othervise the video is very nice and good job summing up all this stuff in so short video (i know its possible to have hours long talks to this topic :D).
However, this doesn't explain why the RAF preferred 20mm, maybe figures don't always work in practice? (as mentioned several times in this video).
@@rob5944 Losses of pilots of luftwaffe tells otherwise from the moment large numbers of US planes appeared on the sky of Europe (if youre about to die in plane, you cant either get out of sheredded plane due to Gs in uncontrollable fall - good luck doing this with 50.s or youre severely infured from incomming fire = .50s job). Brits preffered 20mm due to high HE capabilities with nice incendiary and decent armor pen capabilities and because they were capable of producing really solid 20mms unlike US until late mid-end of war. But there were no major complains against 47s or D mustangs about armament during war, on the contrary, a lot of USAAF pilots actually liked .50 cals and even reported chunks of planes falling down after hits with AP / API ammo and quite a lot of fires and even ammo detonations in 190s wings (A6/8). Solo .50 is no match for 20mm but 6x.50 is better for AA combat than 2x20, let alone 1 in many german planes. Especially with average accuracy which was around 2-5%. With great box/circle convergence of .50s you were able to score many hits at decent ranges and in sharp turns, this is not easy to do with 151/20 and even worse witk mk108 which was prone to jamming under higher G-load due to crap build quality of connections in the belt (that was even bigger, more likely massive issue in 262s for example).
@@honzavasicek Thanks for your reply, but with respect I'm not really a fan of long and complicated answers. I always feel that they disguise the truth (both intentionally and unintentionally). Short answer is that 20mm is better than .50 is better than .30 Simple as. We found that out in the Battle of Britain.
@@rob5944 It depends on configurations of planes, 1x20 and 2x13 is simply worse than config of P51Ds or P47s as they simply had much more firepower as F190A6/8 had much more firepower than P51D and in case of A8 more than P47. And bigger shells than 20mm are next to useless in dogfights if youre not really close.
@@honzavasicek Yes when using single and duel armament. But four 20mm will blast anything out of the sky, with the possible exception of heavily protected four engined bombers, but even then I wouldn't of given much for their chances. For example the Beaufighter or Mosquito main guns were 4x20mm, and ground attack Hurricanes also carried this. The bigger the gun the better, (provided you can build, service and make them fit, together with a plentiful supply of ammunition). The only drawbacks would be rate of fire, weight of the weapon and poor ballistics. The Germans found with their 30mm, but when it hit....watch out! The British would of loved to be able to of used 20mm in 1940, but the limited availability of cannons and the need to standardise on the .303 made it unfeasible. This, together with fitting them in and making them work was too much of a worry when fighting for survival. The Americans, immune from attack and with it's vast resources could of introduced a cannon, strangely enough encountered production difficulties that were never resolved. Of course not being directly involved in combat starved them of first hand experience, this is also a factor which constrained development of weapons as a whole, but much less so in the case of warships. The seas and oceans is where direct contact with other nations happened and engagements occurred.
The faster you can fill the projected path of your enemy with debris the better.
@@mbrown1919a4 No, no, no!
Flak goes ahead of aircraft.
*That way you also avoid ping issues.
also something to note, Earlier post war jets like some F-80 varients and the F-84 and most F-86 varients used the M3 50cal, which is basically a faster firing version of the M2
War Thunder smooth brain detected
I never realized how asymmetrical the cockpit glass was on some of the Heinkel he-111 variants. This video at 16:50 really shows how lopsided it's front most glass was towards the starboard. Thank you for the follow on video of the Heinkel He 111 cockpit as it explained a lot on why the glass on some variant had to be made asymmetrical.
It appears the 50 cal worked very well. This question did remind me of a comment from a work mate from back in 1976, who was in the Luftwaffe in WW2. He mentioned that they tried putting the 88 mm on one of their planes but did not work out.
I read that the result of that experiment was the test aircraft immediately disintegrating due to the recoil
They loved their 88’s so much. Devastating weapon when used against ground armor. Ironically not even what is was built for
lol. 200 Clarksons at sea level. Cheers for the upload.
Great video! I always thought about the what-if scenario of the RAF Hurricanes and Spitfires having 4 to 6 .50 cal brownings instead of the .303 brownings? I wonder if the BOB would have ended earlier with heavier Luftwaffe losses?
Unlikely any diff with 4 x 50 cal. The Brit 303s fired at over 1,000 rpm and put a lot of lead in the sky, and their testing was showing that, once a round had gone through the aluminium skin of an enemy aircraft, the round was tumbling or fragmented and it didn't matter as much as might be thought whether it was a 30 cal or 50 cal. That's why they went straight to 20mm, ending up with 4 x 20mm standard by wars end. Six 50 cal at 700-750 rpm would have been better than 8 x 30 cal at 1,000 rpm, but would have needed a severe redesign - the 50 cal is very heavy as is its ammo, and six of them would have had a negative effect on Hurricane/Spitfire performance.
The .50 guns had fast muzzle velocity and high penetrating power that would often penetrate the armor plates and kill the pilots where the .30 gun couldn't. Videos show that even strafing ships and locomotives could easily caused explosion. The P51 and P47 pilots even developed a tactic to destroy the German tanks by bank shooting the ground and hit the bottom of the tanks and caused explosion. (tanks had very thin armor plates on the bottom) I think the .50 gun was the best gun against WWII fighter planes. Most guns have 400 rounds per gun compared to 60-120 rounds in the 20mm. That is why after the dog fight, you still have ammos for ground attacks.
@@HumbleBearcat That's all? 60 bullets? 60-120. Why not a couple thousand?
My first thought was the Robert Johnson story, glad you had it at the end, I think he was hit with 20 Cannon rounds and stopped counting at 200 mg hits. An amazing plane.
The Age Old question of the Ork, Moar Dakka or Bigger Shoota?
A fellow of culture here ⬆️ ladies and gentlemen!
Bigger dakka and more shoota!!
MAH: ".30 Cal"
(CC): "Vertical?"
MAH: ".30 CAL"
(CC): "Ferdikal"
MAH: "T H I R T Y C A L"
(CC): *"Verti cow"*
Consider the different roles, the Luftwaffe was primarily concerned with shooting down U.S. bombers (B-17, B-24). Their analysis suggested that 5-6 20mm rounds, 2-3 30mm rounds, were needed for a kill, but only about 2% of rounds fired hit.
The U.S. fighters primary target was Luftwaffe fighters, the rate of fire and the number of guns meant 6 x 0.5 (8 in P-47) was adequate for the role.
So basically:
50 cal was better at hitting fighters and getting metal into the stomachs of the pilots of those fighters.
20mm was better at downing bombers and getting metal into the stomachs of the pilots of those bombers.
No, 20mm was better for everything, as the last dumb holdout, the USAF found out in Korea and finally dropped the thing.
@@trauko1388 not only USAF, USN changed most of its fifties to cannons. Facts
@@trauko1388 people always sleeping on the 2nd largest air force in the world at the time
@@trauko1388 so USAF and USN are dumb?
@@ramal5708 The USAAF? Yes it was.
The USN? No, they wanted 20mm, but the industry failed to produce a reliable gun, so they were stuck with the M2.
It's also important to have ammo readily available. Since everybody in the US military used 50 cal ammo, it was decided to keep using it in planes. The guns were easily available for replacements, and the ammo was easily available. Supply lines are important!!!
I love the use of the L.Dv. 4000/10 in this video!
Also, there were at some time ammo drums available with a capacity of 90 rounds for the MG FF, and I know for a fact that a small number of them were converted to belt feed.
I guess once the MG151/20 came along the MG FF belt feed came to an end and the FF was delegated to different roles, like Schräge Musik and flexible mountings in bombers.
43:30 The .50 M2 weighs about as much as the MG FF (and I think the FF is even a couple of kg's lighter). Let that sink in.
The real question is how _many_ .50 cals.
The answer to that is yes.
The design that bucked the trend in WW2 was the Mosquito, which was all wood. She had 2 Merlin engines, was faster than the fighters and carried 4 20mm cannons and carried bombs as well...... what an absolute stunner she was!!
NOPE. fully loaded with bombs they could go around 250mph. If they had half the gas and only one crewmember, the pilot, they might make 400mph in a dive, as its MAX speed was 415, which is usually determined at testing, not at a combat load. Many fighters were much faster than that, and some even approached supersonic in dives.
Mosquito bombers were unarmed, only fighter versions were armed.
@uni4rm wow, you don't seem to know a lot.
Mosquitos had the highest mission survival rate of any WW2 bomber to see significant service in Europe despite being completely unarmed.
The top speed for each variant is readily verifiable and often faster than contemporary single engined fighters.
The Air Force continued to use 50 caliber with the F80, F84, and F86, during the Korean War. They were at a disadvantage to the Mig15, armed with two 23mm, and one 37mm cannon. The later versions of the F86, after the war, switched from six 50 caliber, to four 20mm. All Naval aircraft switched to 20mm after the FH1 Phantom1. The Naval work horses of the Korean War, the F9F Panther, F2H Banshee, A1 Sky Raider, were all armed with 20mm. While inferior in performance to the Mig15, F9F’s surprisingly shot down Migs in the few dogfights recorded between them. I know of two incidence during the early days of the Vietnam War , A1 Sky Raiders where able to shoot down Mig17’s, totally due to positioning, and being armed with four 20mm cannons.
Great job of explaining the nuances and reasons for the decisions made for these weapon choices. This is one of the reasons that just looking at statistics on paper is not the same as good research.
The problem with discussions about "is this weapon better than that weapon" is that there are multiple factors to take into consideration. Reliability, ease of manufacture, the logistics of supplying the weapon and ammo, and one I dont see enough people mention is ammo capacity. Sure a 20mm autocannon has been proven to cause more damage to aircraft, but you can't carry as much ammunition. And honestly, its not even "is it better" so much as "is it good enough" a 12.7mm round will do a good enough job to justify staying around even when "better" options exist but thats just my opinion
I think the P-38 mix was perfect.
4, I think I saw smoke and 1, yep he's on fire
Then again, since the usual targets in the air were usually lightly armored bombers or fighters (armored or not, the important stuff=ammo, fuel, lube, the pilot-- was all packed in a very small area) so a good pattern of 50 cal hits usually got the job done and there was more of it being carried. When the Jet era arrived, 20 mm was found to be more effective.
Honestly, I'd love rapid fire capability over a slower cannon. Sure, a hit from a cannons is more devastating, but you're more likely to hit with a spray than a single round in the air.
What if said enemy dosent go down because of lacking firepower? They solved this by just adding more of them
You are making it sound like the 50s shoots 100 times faster with that statement. But in reality for every 10 50cal bullets nine 20mm where shot for 1 gun😂
Pilots resolved this by getting in much closer, sometime as close as 30 metres. That’s the best way of ensuring hits. After that, the weapon itself doesn’t matter very much.
The ME-262 with the 50mm cannon : PATHETIC
Mosquito with auto loading 57mm = vicious ship hunter
Enjoy getting deleted by my m3s
Standard 262's had four 30mm cannons, where are you getting 50mm cannon from?, unless it was a VERY limited variant, Robert at 66.
@@bobmalack481 think he means the single 50mm variant, played it in Warthunder and preferred the standard 262.
The fact that so few understand that the different priorities are what resulted in the different choices is really annoying. Thank you for this balanced response!
“I think I can kill that American bomber”
Biggest mistake of my life.
Bombers are destroyed airmen are killed. I think you should show a little respect for what were on the whole young men. During World War II, one in three American airmen survived the air battle over Europe. The casualties suffered by the Eighth Air Force were over
47,000. “When you go home, tell them of us and say, For your tomorrow, we gave our today.” -- Kohima Epitaph
@@firstlast7052 I’m talking about war thunder.
@@firstlast7052 also Americans aren’t the only one we should respect. I honestly respect anyone who every decided or was forced to suffer those battles. Unless they deliberately committed war crimes against humanity o respect them.
@@firstlast7052 No idea what the heck you are preaching about. It is common military parlance to say that you have 'killed' an enemy vehicle when you have shot it down or destroyed it.
@@Nachtsider I am no more preaching than you are. Aircraft are shot down warships are sunk. "Kill" in this context is a slang term. Aircraft that are "shot down" are not list as Killed in Action. No DOD official will state that "In an unprovoked attack one of our planes was killed along with the pilot" instead they will say "... was shot down and the pilot is missing".
War thunder 50 cals when enemies uses then: a grazing shot rips off my entire wing
War thunder when I use 50 cals: 200 direct hits do absolutely nothing
Word brother
Ok, so I noticed you and Karl from Military History visualized compare thing such as this (Comparison of U.S. philosophy with .50 cals with The German 20mm philosophy.) Comparison of Pz4 and M4 Sherman on his channel ect. Could y'all do a series working with other historians on picking a topic, (Armor doctrine, Grand Strategy, Infantry tactics etc) then breaking down how each military approached these issues and why?
> Karl from Military History visualized
I guess my parents lied to me about my first name then...
about your question "can" technically yes, practically not really, because it takes a huge amount of time.
@@MilitaryHistoryVisualized Ok thank you apologies for getting the name wrong. Thank you for answering this question. Though have you mentioned a historian or author by the name of Karl? I think I mistook the name of the author for you.
@@scifidude184 nope, I can't recall any Karl mentioned by me.
I dunno in my experience, 2000 .50 cal lasts longer than 500 20mm and even let you take aim better.
I’d say it depends on the pilots preference.
The F4F-4 only carried about 200 rounds per MG and that was changed to 4 guns with 400 rounds each in the FM-2 (technically the F4F-6). There are two things to consider, length of burst and heaviness of fire. Lots of things to consider with aircraft. How do you build a wing to take the 20mm cannon (the Spitfire had to have a bulge installed)? A 20mm gun recoil could knock the aircraft off centerline but an asymmetric fire of the .50 didn't. However, in 1945 the USN installed 4 20mm guns in the F8F Bearcat and the USAF found out that 20mm guns in the F-86 over Korea was VERY deadly.
@@Easy-Eight when you’re fighting the Japanese, four .50 cal guns is more than enough. Against nations that actually cared about their pilots lives they’re not very good.
@@soulofastro As Bismark touched on, the Zero wasn't actually super unprotected when it was first built. The issue was more than Japanese planes tended to use more Magnesium alloys in aircraft construction. These alloys are lighter for a given weight than normal Duralumin, but can be more fire prone due to Magnesium being very reactive. Since Japanese engine development struggled to keep pace with that of other nations for awhile, and since the general line of thought was that armor was planning for failure anyway, this wasn't really seen as a big problem compared to the performance gains.
The Japanese weren't the only ones to use Magnesium parts, though: that's part of why the B-29s were disaster maidens early on: the Wright R-3350 engines used Magnesium in the crankcases AND ran _very_ hot. Not a great combination
@@Easy-Eight true about the f-86 part but they could only fire 2 at a time instead of the whole 4 because the fumes would choke the engine
@@Easy-Eight Two things, the Spit had a very thin wing. The British had trouble making them work for a good while, they tried laying it on it side and had to develop a belt feed system too. Whilst the Americans had problems with mass producing the Hispano 20mm for some reason, if truth be told that's why they stuck with .50s for so long. (they don't like having to import other peoples armaments, although I see that they are finally doing so with the new MBT gun for the Abrams tank and licenced built the Harrier).
A good thoughtful discussion of what is a surprisingly complicated subject. At the end of the war in the Pacific the. US Navy definitely wanted the heavier cannons to deal with Kamikazes.
Thanks very much, Michael! Happy you enjoyed it
May explain why the USN switched to cannons sooner.
As a result of the Korean War the US developed two new cannons the 20mm Vulcan multi barrel and the second one was a rotary revolver type cannon. The second cannon was used on the F-100, F-101, later version of the F-86 and the F-5 series fighter.
The figures in the chart you post, there is some instances of wrong numbers suspect. First the various numbers were obtained by using different techniques and standards. For instance, American guns velocity was measured at 78 feet from the muzzle, not 13.1, 0r 16.4 feet and then corrected back to zero range mathematically. Also the number given for the .50 Should be 887M/S measured at the 78 foot range, not 880 M/S, which is the standard 710 Grain "Ball" ammo, shot from a 45" Barrel M2-HB gun. The M-2 AP-I ammo shot a much lighter, 660 Grain Projectile, at 3,066 Feet Per Second, also at 78" from the muzzle from the 36" Barrel. Which if you look it up in Hatcher's Note book, or the various training and procurement manuals of the time, is easily verified. It is a very small, but significant difference!
Secondly, the shape and Sectional Density meant that the .50 lost much less velocity than all of the various Cannon projectiles per unit of distance traveled than any aircraft cannon shell used in WW-II. This gave it a much longer "Point Blank" Range and perforating power than any AP Cannon shell used in WW-II. The effect of that meant it was much easier to get hits and they were much more likely to be good hits than the fewer and more difficult to aim and hit with cannons in the war.
Post war, every single Nation on Earth discovered that MV, BC, Rate of Fire and time of flight were much more important than explosive content, because any hit, no matter how insignificant, is better than no hit at all! Why did the Germans go to 27 MM from 30 with less than half as much explosive if it was so effective? They were not alone either, look at the history of Project "Vulcan" which was for 70 years was the premiere A2A weapon in the gun fighter world!
A very fine detailed analysis, this vid. 👍
All these rounds seem so small to me compared to the load outs on the A-10As I worked on in the 1980s.
Nothing makes that buuuuuurrrrrrp
Another factor in the demise of the .5 inch guns and other machine guns was the advent of the Gatling type of guns which allowed the bigger calibers to fire at very high rate, thus negating the high firing rate advantage of multiple machine guns over cannon. Also the ammo can be contained in a armored drum, in a centralized location near the CG, and the ammo can be jettisoned in a pinch.
P 39 with 37mm auto cannon. I know warthunder is only a game but the feeling of obliterating both ground and air targets with that centerline cannon is something else. I will say I love American planes and will stick with the .50 cal because the only aircraft I was effective with that had 20mm were the ones that had 4 and no less. Even the P38 with its 20mm and multiple .50 cals weren’t enough. If I’m using a “cannon” I better have 4 20mms or a 37mm with 4+ .50 cals. If i could design my own WW2 plane it would definitely have a 37mm auto cannon down the center or one in each wing with a backup .50 along side that in each wing.
The US Navy wanted to go to cannon, but the US could not produce a reliable version of the British Hispano. Due to disregard to firing pin/chamber clearances, US versions of the gun were notorious for jamming (the P-38 got one because jams could be cleared from the cockpit). So cannon were rare in US planes until late in the war. Still, the 50 cal was so ingrained in the USAF mindset, the F-86 (and other jets) went to Korea with them instead of cannon. They quickly found them lacking compared to what the MiG-15 was packing.
But the US still stuck with the .50 cal up through the Korean War in its F-86 Sabre and it still took down Mig 15's and 17's. But they went to the 20mm M-61 not long after and are still using it in today's fighters.
@Military Aviation History , as long as you're looking at airborn fifty cals, have you considered doing a video on Pappy Gunn and the B-25 gunships with all the fifties?
I kinda think its weird that WW2 Germany was pointed out. Every nation used cannons in their aircraft due to their lethality, whether they were reliable or not because of it. The US didn't for the most part due to the logistics issue it was having, as the US armed forces was spread across the world. When you start mixing armament and ammunition types it compounds this significantly so you go with what you have a ton of, and you know works well (same reason they didn't initially start arming Shermans with 76mm long guns). The US wasn't really using cannon in large numbers in their fighters until the Korean War. Here is why. That's when jets where showing up. Now, TOT, Time-on-Target becomes an huge issue. You may have a second to fire a burst into a enemy fighter before it pulls away. 50 cals may have been more reliable, but even in WW2, US and Russian fighters would pump most of their ammo into a single kill. 20mm cannon do more damage with less rounds, so it just makes sense.
Mixing machine guns in various calibers and cannon on the same air frame presents a problem except at close range. The .50 caliber, the .30 caliber and 20mm, 30mm cannon all have different ballistic flights so one type of round may strike the target and the other miss entirely.
The P38 Lighting is an example. Originally it was supposed to have a 37mm cannon but that did not work well. So a 20mm cannon was used. The 37mm would mean only 15 rounds (in three 5 round magazines) while the 20mm meant 150 rounds. The .50 caliber guns also carried much more ammunition and had a higher rate of fire..
Bomber interceptors like the Mosquito equipped with radar as a night fighter had four 20mm cannon and 4 machine guns and had a devastating affect on bombers it intercepted.
So aircraft were armed depending on specific uses like the anti ship capacity of the B25 bomber equipped with a 75 mm cannon in it's nose.
Putting all .50 caliber guns meant more ammunition and simpler supply logistics and maintenance plus a high volume of fire.. The .50 caliber worked well enough for the general uses at that time.
Wonderful and informative video. Always wondered why the Brits used the little .303 MG and not the 50 BMG. This answered that and more. Well done. Can carry a lot of ammo for a 50 BMG, not too much for a 108.
What a excellent comparasion of the first armor and weapons of that error. Each plane, in each situation, differant, with the analyase of each in their original and evolving mode
The problem with the cannon machine gun is the difference in the ballistics of the two rounds. That is the reason they took the 20 mm cannon off the tail gunner positions of the B-29.
Also, neither the cannon or machine gun is of any use if you cannot hit the target.
Hawker Hurricane Mk.1 Late with 12 guns: I am the outlier of the outlier
Hurricane had 8 cal 7,7mm browning machine guns (like the mk 1 Spitfire) , many bullets but rater innefficient against bombers...
@@leneanderthalien Yes, but a late variant of the Mk.1 was equipped with an extra 4 on the outer part of the wings to bump it up to 12.
Wasn’t there also a 12-gun Typhoon variant?
@@mebsrea I think by the time the Typhoon came out, Britian was already entering the phase of using Hispanos over the 7.62 brownings, so I don't think so.
@@uberschnilthegreat22 Just looked it up. Apparently the first 110 Typhoons built did carry 12x.303, then the four-cannon armament was quickly adopted.
I think there’s a Chuck Yeager interview on UA-cam where he says that .50 caliber machine guns were the only way to go for a fighter plane. I guess the thinking was that the German planes needed cannons to bring the bombers down.
Gaijin : *im gonna pretend i didnt hear that*
What an excellent vid Bro!! amazing information, many thanks from Lima-Perú ...!!!
I think you did a very good job Sepperating the 20mm and 50BMG weapons. Anyone who takes the time to look at History of any military branch has to agree there is NO ONE answer to any tactical question. You made very good arguments for both weapon systems and why they were chosen by their perspective branches of The Nations Armed Forces at the time. Keep up the good work.
I love this guy's videos and the research he does on them
The 20mm cannons do more damage for sure, but the .50cals, especially when you have 6-8 of them are much easier to hit considering their high fire rate and velocity.
Also, while significantly less powerful than a 20 or 30 mm, the 50 bmg is still a MASSIVE step up from the .30 cal machine gun rounds (303 or 30-06 depending on brit or us) delivering roughly 4x the kinetic energy in terms of ft lbs/muzzle energy.
Most WW2 cannons have same or faster fire rate. And deal order of magnitude more damage. Especially soviet projectiles with A-IX-2.
When you are 30 - 50 metres away, it doesn’t make a lot of difference.
That photo of a heavily damaged, but not broken of one Me109 , shows how the British machine Guns with the 303 bullet, were very
underpowered.
Unlike, if you are it with a 20 mm cannon sheel, even with bulletproof windscreen, your face Will disapear.
Thats the reason, the British realise, that the Spitfire Mark 5,even with 8 machine Guns, was not enought, against the german fighters.(against german bombers, it was another story).
So, after realising, that fact, its when they started to install, 20 mm cannons on the Spitfire, also.
The punch, was complitly more poweful, that even 8 machine Guns.
The 12.7 mm machine gun was perfect for the Americans in the Pacific as most
Japanese planes were flimsy. The use of cannons on Americas would be unnecessary
as the 12.7 was fully capable of taking off Japanese airplane wings and would can see in
American plane gun cams Japanese planes literally falling apart under 6X12.7 mm burst.
In Europe, the issue becomes more complex. American targets were a bit more rugged and
most of the gunfire was not on German planes but straffing operations. All in all, the 12.7 mm
though not a perfect weapon gets a very good rating and extremely flexible to take on almost
any target.
The USAAF and USN didn’t need cannons so badly because they didn’t have to fight much with stronger-built and more protected aircrafts like bombers or ground attack planes. At the European theatre air superiority and bomber escort were the priorities. Against fighters more heavy machine gun does the job well and in the Pacific the Japanese planes were all made of paper. Although the USN wanted cannons on their fighters, but they bought the original Hispano cannon from the french with all it's teething problems that the Brits have already overcome and seemingly unable to learn from it until the Colt Mk 12.
Unpopular opinion: 15mm MG151 was good
I'm guessing it had its place.
Good velocity but the /20 delivered 3.3x as much power to the target per hit.
@Mialisus Why tiny? 20mm MG 151 rouns are roughly twice as heavy as 15mm rounds and therefore could hold more explosive and incendiary filler. Both guns have the same weight, so the 20mm gun will easily deliver twice the firepower for the same weight.
@Mialisus Explosive filling is the key. HE has an effect out of all proportion to its actual weight.
@Mialisus the 15mm didn't get the mine shell of the 20mm version
Quite simply .50 cal machine guns do not have the weight of hitting power of 20mm cannons!
The A6M "Zero" or "Zeke" had two 20mm cannon. But the Zero really couldn't take any abuse. When Japanese pilots tried head on attacks against the F4F Wildcat, the FM2, and later the F6F Hellcat, they generally came out the loser. Those US Navy fighters I mentioned were designed by Grumman, known as "Grumman Iron Works" due to the fact that they built rugged aircraft that could take a real beating, and still get their pilots home. The A6M was born of a completely different design philosophy. Firepower (the two 20 mm) light weight, and manuverability was uppermost for this fighter, at the expense of protection for the pilot. No armor, no self sealing fuel tanks, etc., made it a poor opponent in a head on pass against most Allied fighters. Cannon or no.
You are way, way overthinking this. The question is, "what is the mission?" European fighters had to shoot down bombers, which needed cannons. American fighters- having no fear of foreign bombers- because oceans- had to shot down fighters to protect their own bombers. Six-eight .50s will shred a single seat airplane like a cheese grater. Had German or Japanese bombers appeared over the US, our planes would have carried cannons. Since they didn't, and couldn't, we built fighters to protect our bombers from fighters, which didn't require cannons.
The real reason US fighters didn't have cannon sooner is that they couldn't get them to work properly, not because they didn't want them
@@Solidboat123 Had they really needed them, they could have gotten designs from allies, in the way that Packard built Merlin engines. Aircraft cannons weren't really a priority, as can be told by the fact that even second generation US jets used .50s.
@@bierce716 The US built variant of the hispano was terrible. The .50 had factories and tooling in place and thus was easier on the logistics train. The sabres in korea suffered for their lack of cannons, considerable amounts of Migs made it home because of it.
> You are way, way overthinking this. The question is, "what is the mission?" European fighters had to shoot down bombers, which needed cannons. American fighters- having no fear of foreign bombers- because oceans- had to shot down fighters to protect their own bombers.
That's like part of what I said ... ?
@@MilitaryAviationHistory You just took a long time to say it. :)
Why is everyone trying to justify something that was not done by choice, but it was done from necessity? THE AMERICANS STUCK TO THE .50 CALS BECAUSE THEY BOTCHED THE PRODUCTION OF 20MM HISPANO CANNOS.
Yes. They bought license for the guns from France and messed up the conversion to imperial. Then instead of running some testing and prototyping, they built a massive production line, straight from converted blueprints, for a weapon that mostly didn't work.
That's why they stuck to the .50 cal. Unlike their failed 20mm cannon, it was reliable.
The only true conclusion one can make: The allied autocannons were rather shit compared to the German ones. The Hispano-Suiza 20mm autocannon made by the brits weighed 38kgs, compared to the 26.3 kg of the MG FF 20mm autocannon, which was lighter than even the aviation .50cals, at the cost of lower muzzle velocity. Even the later MG 151/20s were smaller in size than the Hispano's making them easy to mount in the wings compared to the Hispanos.
The opponents of American fighters in WWII were overwhelmingly enemy fighters -- fast-moving, agile, but not especially well-armored aircraft that a pilot could only hold in his sights for a matter of split seconds. Consequently, a high rate of fire was preferable to high explosive power. In the case of the P-51B, six to ten hits by six Browning 50s were more likely than one hit from four 20mm Hispano cannons, and would likely cause an equal amount of damage to a Bf-109 or an Fw-190 (the A6M2 without armor or self-sealing fuel tanks could fall to a single .50-cal hit) which partially explains why all subsequent marques of the Mustang in U. S. service carried .50-caliber MGs rather than cannons. (Among the other reasons was the poor reliability of the early Hispano M2 and the drag penalty of the cannon installation compared to the Browning MG.) Even after the Mustangs were flying more ground-attack sorties than escort missions, the .50-cals were still preferred to cannons. The P-47 had a much broader wing chord than the P-51 and could theoretically carry 20mm cannons more cleanly with larger ammo reserves, yet no production P-47 was ever flown with cannon armament. The Thunderbolt's eight Browning AN/M2s were sufficiently devastating to handle any German target, from a Bv-222 seaplane to a horse-drawn artillery gun.
If the shoe were on the other foot -- if the USAAF had been tasked with defending against an enemy bomber offensive flown by an Axis equivalent of the Boeing B-17G, then the AN/M2 would have been replaced by 20mm cannons in most American fighters. Bombers are tough targets compared to the typical Axis fighter. The history of the F-86 Saber is illustrative. The Saber was North American's jet-powered successor to their Mustang and was designed for the same mission -- air superiority, denial of the skies to enemy fighters. To fill that role, NA's designers gave the Saber the Mustang's armament, six .50-caliber Browning MGs, improved M3s with a greater ROF and more rounds per gun. Its opponent in the Korean War was the MiG-15, a point-defense interceptor designed to counter the Boeing B-29. To fill that role the Mig was armed with cannons -- two 23mm guns and one 37mm giant killer. Undoubted the Mig's cannons were deadly, but the Russian pilot had only 200 shots available, 160 23mm rounds and 40 37mm rounds. In a prolonged dogfight the Mig pilot could easily run out of ammo against an F-86 carrying NINE TIMES as much ammo. Furthermore, the 23mm cannons were not ballistically matched to the slow-firing 37mm gun. The MiG-15 would have been a better fighter with the 37mm gun removed and its bay plated over.
North American Aviation also produced an all-weather interceptor version of the Saber, the F-86D. Based on data gathered from Allied bomber losses during WWII, the USAF concluded that cannons were more effective against bombers than machineguns and rockets were more effective than cannons. Therefore the F-86D had no guns. Instead, it carried a battery of 24 70mm folding-fin aerial rockets in a retractable launcher installed in the belly. (Post-war studies of the similar Henschel Hs 297 antiaircraft rocket system contributed to the "Might Mouse".)
Great overview. It seems the development of the 20mm aircraft cannon rendered armor null, and thus the focus on dogfighting up to and into the missile era.
I know the 110 was outclassed early on in the war, but the example shown in this video at least shows it had a purposeful look.
It's quite obvious that heavy machine guns in aviation did NOT survive the test of time: all modern fighters use cannons. So here's your answer.
He could have looked at the ultimate test of cannon vs 50. cal - Korean war
Everybody knows the best gun is a phased plasma rifle in the 40 watt range.
In my humble opinion all antagonists had the correct weapons mounted, well, maybe with the exception of pre 1941 RAF fighters (They needed cannons during the BoB but didn't have a working solution until after the bombers stopped coming in daylight.
An air force on the defensive will need big bomber killing weapons such as 20 or 30mm cannon while an offensive air force which will primarily be faced with enemy fighters needs weapons suitable for that role, 6 or 8 .50's fits that bill perfectly.
The US intended to switch to a 20mm standard battery for *all* fighters, back in the late 1930s, and started desperately looking for an "off the shelf" 20mm cannon they could adopt. The .50 was retained as a stop-gap, but the *plan* was to cut in 20mm armament as soon as possible. Even into the very end of the war.
However, the US had *major* problems with reliability in US produced Hispano-Suiza 20mm cannon. The reason was primarily that the US ordnance types *insisted* stubbornly that the chamber dimensions the original designers provided were too shallow. Even when the British (who provided the specs) and US ammunition manufacturers said, "Hey, you cut the chambers 1/16th of an inch - 2mm - too deep!"
Note that the British produced guns worked fine with both US and British made ammunition, as did other Hispano-Suiza guns built elsewhere. The US produced guns with the proper chambers produced for Britain to Britian's demand that they use the chamber dimensions the British provided, worked. But US guns, built to the US altered chamber dimensions, had reliability issues with *everybody's* ammo. But US Ordnance types *never* admitted that they had created the problem they claimed was an inherent design fault.
Great info, thanks
The U.S. Navy Ordinance Bureau never wanted to admit to the faults in the Mk. 14 torpedo, either.
Can you give a reference?
_ thank goodness Allies won, then ?!?
@@victordecastro7221 Eh, not like aircraft armament was a war winning issue, in either direction. Sort of like, the US *entered* the war with the best service rifle, and Germany *ended* the war with the best rifle (not universally, but still reasonably widely fielded) and MMG, but those decisions didn't have a material impact on war's outcome.
Not to say that quality of ordnance and the soundness of your armaments plan aren't important, but there are damned few places in military history where you can say, " *This one ordnance decision* won/lost the war!" But in WWII, *strategic logistics* , not individual armament choices, played an immense role in the Allied victory.
With a "late war" exception, a surviving pilot could get another plane faster than training a new pilot. Armor protects pilots, NOT airplanes.
Mostly.
@@BillFromTheHill100 And then there's the US spitting out thousands of pilots, each with several hundred hours of training.
@@jamesharding3459 Because they weren't in a defensive position with reduced production capabilities and manpower.
@@HappyBeezerStudios Well, yes, but the US/UK training systems were far and away the best in the world. Even when they were just gearing up they were producing more, and better (on average) pilots than Germany or Japan.
@@jamesharding3459 You’re wrong on the Japanese pilots. Japan had one of the best training programs in the world. The pilots they produced were highly skilled. They were also highly experienced with years of combat experience.
What they were bad at was replacing lost pilots. By 1943 the pilots they were producing were of poor quality for multiple reasons as well as the vast majority of the veterans were now dead.
Whatever the answer is, you don’t want to be hit by a concentrated burst of either...unless you’re in a TU-2 with Gaijin’s 2014 damage model. Still salty
Oh, memories
Germany used their flagpanzers with the 20 mm gun and think it was called a whirlwind against infantry. My dad saw a soldier take a hit directly in the chest from a 20 mm Cannon. Dad targeted the whirlwind for the 75 mm Cannon. Dad said it was horrific what the 20 mm explosive rounded to the soldier. You could always tell when something really bothered my dad when he would tell you the story because he would make a face of disgust or horror.
@@JohnRodriguesPhotographer so yeah anyways back to gaijins damage models....
@@howiethehowitzer7398 P-47 eating tank rounds one moment then dying from an MG17 the next
@@0Ploxx don’t even get me started on the arado
"The Germans didn't have a lot of guns on their planes"
FW190: Am I a joke to you?
Apparently so!
An above average number of guns sure, but then you see things like the p-38 with gun pods and realize what a lot of guns really means.
@@judahboyd2107 Or a B-25 with 16 times .50 cals, in the nose, plus bombs and rockets, and twin .50s in the waist, tail and turret! Then you've almost got enough guns!
@@judahboyd2107 Not really, the Fw-190 could use gun pods also.
@@judahboyd2107 or an f82 with gun pods
Bismark: I’m told it’s difficult to fly without the tail, but that might just be a rumor.
Horten brothers: It’s fine.
Someone got it \o/
I still can’t believe the germans made an aircraft after a dr seuss story
@@MilitaryAviationHistory Lateral Stability is just American Propaganda
Difficult, not impossible. Dunne did it before the Hortens were still playing with paper darts.
It is also not fun to become a tail Gunner especially when they can just left you behind
Meanwhile in Britain: “I sell .30 cal and .30 cal accessories.”
.303*
Meanwhile in Britain they started using 20mm hispano on fighters in 1940, by 1941 20mm were almost standard.
Most fighters carried 4 x 20mm Hispanics, spitfire had various weapons by at least 2 x 20mm hispanos.
It is known that 4 x 20mm hispano had twice the firepower of 6 x .50
@@NoNameAtAll2 .303 is 30 cal. Everything from .303 to .308 is a 30 cal.
Edit: folks should learn the dif between bore diameter and groove diameter.
@@annewillis6100 Hispanos although they were arguably the best 20mls of the time were prone to jamming they were were much better but less reliable
@@annewillis6100 While certainly true in the context of WW2 as a whole, this is a bit disingenuous when you consider that one of the pivotal parts of WW2 occurred before the Royal Air Force had any widespread move towards the use of 20mm Hispano cannons.
The .30-caliber weapons were definitely observed to be inadequate, but because of logistical reasons and probably the wing design of the Hurricane and the Spitfire, it was not feasible to switch to .50-caliber machine guns. So it seems to me that the British had no choice but to use the .30-cal machine guns - and the only way to make them effective was to have a lot of them, as many as 12 in the case of Hurricane Mk.IIb.
The use of .30-caliber machine guns in large numbers was a relic of interwar period fighter doctrine, and the British did not have the advantage of experience that the Germans gained in Spain - experience which told them that their 7.92mm MG17 machine guns were inadequate, which is why they started putting 20mm MG FF cannons on their Bf 109 fighters.
As a result, the move towards 20mm Hispano cannons as the primary armament of RAF fighters happened after Battle of Britain. While it is technically true that in 1940 they did start to use the 20mm cannon (with the Westland Whirlwind and the Spitfire Mk.IIb), it was not initially very successful due to jamming issues and limited ammo capacity. It wasn't really until the Hispano Mk.II with belt-fed ammo that the RAF started more widespread use of these weapons. So it would be accurate to say that during Battle of Britain, the 20mm Hispano cannon did not yet have very significant impact.
You do have a point, however, that the British moved to bigger, more effective weapons as soon as it was possible for them to do so.
Cannons or .50 cal?
P-38: I'm sorry, I don't understand the question.
B-25H - more please...
A-26 Invader... enough said
Beuaghfigther: Silence noobs.
The answer is yes, of course.
Spitfire XIVe: Me neither....
America is like the Engineer: "I solve problems. How do I do that? Use a gun. And if that don't work? Use more gun."
While you just use a buttplug.😀
@@lestergreen1190 uh what?
AC-130 and A-10 sez hello
That is russia comrade
We do this Texas style
53:38 "The US way of thinking of using more guns."
Yes, you have understood the US perfectly.
don't forget: Firing larger, heavier bullets at higher velocity.
it can't just be a lot of them, they have to be louder :P
muricans confirmed for orks
@@ForelliBoy Need more Dakka.
*laughs in F-82 with gunpod*
American ideology during WW2:
Any deficiencies can be compensated with more guns and more bullets.
I was in hospital with a USMC Corsair driver for a week. He had the -1C with 4 20mm canon. I asked him if they worked well. He said he only ever saw one Japanese aircraft, he was returning from patrol and it was going the other way at low level, so he let it pass then rolled over and pulled a half loop behind it. He got it lined up and opened fire and the Betty just disintegrated in a ball of flame. He said he didn't even fire ten rounds per gun. He went on to be a physics professor at several top schools, retiring from Stanford. When I met him he was 82 and was in for knee replacement surgery. The next day they wheeled him off and he came back a couple of hours later with a line of staples right down the front of his knee. A few hours later they came back with a Zimmer frame. He objected and they came back with crutches. He stood up and took one step. He looked thoughtful for a moment then handed them one of the crutches. "OK, let's go." And he walked round the whole floor. Maybe a 100 yard walk within four hours of knee replacement. He went home a few days later and I asked the teaching nurse if that was unusual, she said the aim was to get him standing on the first day, and able to walk to the wheelchair before they released him. Now that was a man and a Marine.
But Japanese aircraft were NOT armored. It was like shooting a kite out of the sky.
With that accuracy he must have studies ballistics in school. Fascinating subject. Things go up. Things go down.
@@drcornelius8275 You ever heard of the Zero? That thing ruled the skies for the first half of the war in the Pacific. Just because their planes didn't have armor doesn't mean anything, your just trading durability for maneuverability.
@@drcornelius8275 Same could be said for the Americans lol
@@builder396 Ha, I got that
"It's an apples and oranges problem"
"Cherry picking"
Which one of those fruits is it?
Banana
Du vergleichst Äpfel mit Birnen.
The 30 mm would be the Cherry the apples and oranges would be the 50 caliber and the 20 mm. Let me know if you need any other answers! 😜😆🤣
@@MilitaryAviationHistory that would be the Oldsmobile 37 mm cannon with the horse collar magazine.
@@MilitaryAviationHistory Bananas are only good for measuring length, not comparing things to one another.
Every time I hear about "survivor-ship bias" I think of the French leading the way with helmets in WWI. As soon as they were introduced there was an increase in head injuries! The French almost stopped using helmets until someone pointed out that the men with these injuries would have been killed if they weren't wearing helmets!
Indeed. The only reason there were less reported head injuries prior to helmet introduction was because men with head injuries weren't surviving to report their injures.
One Japanese ace on TakeLeon's channel says he would have much preferred 6 American .50 cals over the Japanese 20mm cannons (he was flying with a late-war Shiden Kai), mainly due to their slow muzzle velocity, massive bullet drop and low rate of fire. You had to get really close with them for any effective fire, which could be pretty much suicidal against a fomation of B-29s.
Edit: Just double-checked, it was Minoru Honda. That interview is definitely worth a watch, as are the ones with Saburo Sakai, Tomokazu Kasai and others.
Yes and you could carry a shit ton more ammo on the plane compared to 20mm
@@runtoth3abyss Nah 20mm HE just makes a couple hits to tear airplanes in half.
I thought that Saburo Sakai was shot by six 30-06 M1919 GPMG. The rounds blew out his left eyeball and shredded his arm causing massive blood loss.
His plane was shot to hell and leaked fluids. Yet, he managed to fly hundreds of miles and land on native land. He was captured by Allied forces, recovered, and later worked for the US CIA.
@@1dirkmanchest The incident occured when his squadron went attacking some wildcats that turned out to be SBDs. Seeing as they (the SBDs) wielded two nose-mounted .50 cals and a twin .30 cal in the gunner's seat, either case is possible, although I imagine the .30 cal is more likely
@@Maple_Cadian The trouble is scoring those hits. While the German MG 151, combined with the Mienengeschoss ammo, was an excellent weapon even at mid and long ranges, and many aces, including Marseille and Hartmann, preferred to use just a single 151 in their 109s, the Japanese 20mm cannons, inlcuding the late-war Ho-5, were probably the worst of all the warring parties, even the Soviet Shvaks did a better job imo. While early in the war it was easy for the Japanese Zero pilots to sit 60-100m behind their opponents and shoot them down with one or two short bursts (the early Zero cannons had only 60 shells per gun, lets not forget), later in the war this became problematic against high-powered US fighters using boom and zoom tactics (Marianas Turkey Shoot rings the bell? Heck, even when the Americans employed the famous Thach's weave at Midway the Japs didnt know how to counter it and were losing planes in head-on attacks against on paper inferior but much sturdier Wildcats.), or against massive formations of heavy bombers. Not to mention the steep quality drop in pilot replacements as the losses mounted, the same problem Germany faced, they never rotated their pilots. The Shiden-Kai pilots from the elite 343rd squadron, for example, developed some incredibly risky and very taxing tactics against the B-29s, using steep inverted head-on diving attacks, then regularly pulling 5, 6 negative Gs, naturally a pilot could endure just a few of those. With the US .50 cals you could spray and pray a little more generously, score a couple of hits with incendiary AP and most early Japanese planes would burst into flames.
One thing that can be of note here is ammunition per gun. For the US Navy pilots in the pacific this was something they talked about. I believe in one of the USS Enterprise’s after action reports during the Guadalcanal campaign it notes that the fighter pilots were asking for 4 gun variants of the F4F over the 6 gun variants due to them running out of ammo so quickly in dogfights and interceptions. Just something to note as additional information.
The 2 additional guns on the F4F-4 were outboard of the wing fold. Their additional distance from the plane's centerline made the outboards slightly less accurate at longer ranges and the additional weight that far out negatively affected roll rate. It's worth noting that the later FM-1/FM-2 went back to 4 guns.
@@ObsydianShade Never heard of that mod. Recently finished George Loving, Woodbine Red Leader. He flew a P-51B/C (razorback) out of Italy. The B/C model mounted only 4 guns. In '44, the squadron CO offered him a D model with 6 guns. He turned it down. Said he was too close to completing his tour to switch mounts.
Saw a documentary on O'Hare. The documentary reported that the Wildcat carried more rounds for the inboard guns than the outboard guns and that O'Hare made his last kill that fateful day with just his two inboard guns. Is that true about the inboard and outboard loads on the Wildcat?
@@hlynnkeith9334 I read that somewhere too.
COmmon complaint / observation everywhere - in the heat of the fight being frugal with supply limited to at most 10-12s of continous firing was very difficult for even experienced pilots in some situations and borderline impossible for majority of novice ones. Same was written by Polish / British pilots in Great Britain.
@@piotrd.4850 A story from the Great War. (You can read it in Frederick Libby, Horses Don't Fly.)
In 1916, the Brits were still fumbling pilot and gunner training. The FE2b had just arrived and the Brits were short of gunners. So they issued an audition call. Volunteer for flying duty and we'll give you a chance and if you fail . . . well, it's back to the trenches for you.
Libby went to the audition. Everyone got ground instruction in the operation of the Lewis gun (47 round magazine). Instructor taught the wannabees to fire in short bursts, like they do today.
Next day, Libby went up with the squadron OC, Stephen Price. (Americans say CO, but the Brits say OC.) The audition was to hit a target on the ground as the plane flew over it. As Libby and Price closed on the target, Libby pressed the trigger to fire AND HELD IT PRESSED UNTIL THE GUN WENT 'CLICK'! He walked the bursts of bullets in the dirt into the target! Price seconded Libby to 11 Squadron immediately. Libby's 'Open 'er up and let's see what she can do' tactic worked. He scored a kill during his first flight over the lines.
So, yeah, that 'Fire in short bursts to conserve your ammunition' advice never impressed the boys in the cockpit much. Many times I have seen gun camera footage of pilots walking their tracers to and through the EA.
Well, when you’re flying for several hours over enemy territory, it makes sense that you would want a lot of ammo.
Barely to mention: It WORKS WELL (enough), and you can CHEAPLY make MILLIONS of them in a short amount of TIME...USA: "Leave your Johnson measuring contest in the locker room; We have enemy to destroy..."
@@brentfarvors192 Which only works when you have the industrial capacity of a virtual continent, and aren't being bombed--the States won by attrition.
@@johncharleson8733 to be fair. Its actually more economically sound to make quite alot of smaller caliber weapons. It takes less material and due to the square cube law, weighs less aswell. Thats partially the reason Germany lost. Too many resources in too few weapons.
@@casematecardinal You are forgetting machining time/cutting tool wear.
Anyhow, I agree that Germany should have produced more weapons of somewhat lessor quality.
@@johncharleson8733 yeah. They probably still would have lost but maybe they wouldn't have been decimated like they were.
This is an excellent example of how to tell history - by explaining conditions and influences. This helped you arrive and a good answer to the controversy: it depends. I also liked your "Ugly Truths" title. This could be a whole category of episodes dealing with controversies in military aviation history. BTW, another thing I like about your channel are your applications to war games. The games are great tools for illustrating your points - in this case, how they do not mimic the real world sometimes. Thank you for another great episode.
His premise kind of falls apart. The U.S. put 6 .50s on F-80s, F-86s and F-84s. A-1 Skyraiders had 4 20 mm. And no gun on early F-4 Phantoms.
@@timtruman1731 not too sure on what you mean, but didnt f4s not get cannons due to the more prominent use of missiles?
@@timtruman1731 What is your point?
@@damine2264 also because the Air Force didn’t think they needed it due to said missile system.
@@timtruman1731 elaborate…
My wife: “why’s it called a furry cow?”
Me: “fifty cal, not furry cow!!”
Love it, wife needs a high five for such a good nickname
It's a cow farm THERE'S GONNA BE COWS OUTSIDE
Props to your wife for caring enough to ask.
How about the "Turdy Cow"
*Group of Highland Cattle moshing on distance*
41:40 Yes, I always thought that the main reason the Luftwaffe needed canons on their fighters was because they had to intercept and take down Allied bombers which where easy to shoot at (that is, less misses) but took too many light machine gun rounds to shoot down while long-range Allied escort fighters needed the guns with the most ammo to take down German fighters in dog fights that could last several minutes.
That's right, and machine guns in american fighters were installed outside the propeller disc, which made two advantages:
1. No need to synchronize machine guns with propeller RPM
2. Better rate of fire, and better effectiveness in shooting to fast and maneuvring targets.
The rate of fire is also important today, that's the reason why modern fighters have multi-barreled cannons like M-61A1 Vulcan,
@@jakubdabrowski3846 and the GAU 8
@mandellorian Well, that's your opinion, I will stay with mine. Americans have the best combat equipment and combat experience, I believe they know what they do. Russians tested multi-barreled cannons on MiG-27 but gave up this idea since the recoil and vibrations caused damage in aircraft's fuselage.
@@jakubdabrowski3846
In fact multi barrel M-61 Vulcan has a lower rate of fire then Mauser MK 27.
@@jakubdabrowski3846 The Luftwaffe had electrical primers developed to replace percussion primers for the MG151 and MG131. This made synchronization relatively simple compared to mechanical and hydraulic gear. It even worked with the 30mm Mk 103 which however could could not fit into the wing roots of any fighter until the Ta 152C (on which it was tested).
37:23
"Even 300 aces don't win a war as the Luftwaffe will tell you"
This sentence made me laugh so much.
It's easy to have so many Aces, when your career path was "Fly until you die". B17 Pilots thought 25 to 35 missions was a lot, LOL.
@@jager6863 "Easy to have"?
You think its an easy job to fly until the last breath?
Its the hardest thing what you can ask from a soldier/human.
@@jager6863 😅 😂Oh :)
And thank you!
God Bless You! :)
German aces didn’t mean all that much since most of their kills were against massively inferior aircraft.
@@aaronhumphrey3514 AHm another laic comment...
yak-9 was fast as a 109 and almsot clibmed as a 109, and turnd better than a 109.
La 5 was faster than a 109 under 4000.
So?
Noooooo, you’re not allowed to give a reasonable, balanced take based on reality. You have to say one is better in every way
Bismark: haha, historical context and facts go brrrrrr
"You have to say one is better in every way"
Especially when it basically is.
@@bakters bruh
@@bakters look everyone we found one of them
@@neth7826 Of course canons aren't simply better as an anti-aircraft weapon, and that's why ground forces preferred massed batteries of ma deuces for air defense.
Wait... That's not what happened.
Despite "paying" much less for extra weight and "paying" more logistical cost of supplying another ammo type. Infantry actually shoots their guns, so it's not trivial.
If a battery of six infantry weapons, which ma deuce actually is, was just as good as oerlicons, that's what they would use.
Soviets developed much better emgees, specialized for aircraft use, namely shkas and berezin in 7.62 and 14mm respectively. They still transitioned to cannons as soon as they had them.
But it's so complex, man! What is better, a couple of AA auto-canons or 6-8 infantry emgees? Who knows? Bla, bla.
There he goes again. Bismarck is breaking the rules of Internet in general and YT in particular, by using fact, logics and reason. Where's the hyperbole? Where's the exaggeregations? Where's the hints that anyone who doesn't agree with him has a dubious sexual identity?/J
I agree with the overall premise that cannons were better for armored slow bombers, and 50's for small light fast fighters. However, I also thought you'd touch on the respective gun platforms themselves. The design philosophy behind the BF-109 was to keep the weight in the fuselage and the wings light and thin. Once you've made that choice, a single cannon, firing through the prop hub makes a lot more sense. (I realized they ultimately put a pair in the wings as well but this was a later adaptation.)
Also, I'll note that the 2 US planes with fuselage mounted guns, the P-39 and P-38 both also incorporated auto cannons.
Yes, in hindsight now, studying WW2 air combat, either the heavy
.50 MG or 20mm cannon out of the nose cone spinner was the best arsenal in the fighter plane.
The Me109 and Yak apparently had the best armament of the War, with the weapon unencumbered poking out of the cone spinner
(no synchronized mechanism to prevent shells striking the screw; resulting in less aircraft weight, more projectiles exiting the tube without impediment, and more shells carried, while also not requiring deflection or convergence).
It was like the shells were "coming out of the pilot's nose" .
Interesting that the U.S. Airacobra had this weapon design with a 20mm cannon in the P400 variant early in the war.
@@chriscunningham68453rd😅 rd😊
@@SunnyIlhawerede3r😊😊4😊r😊😊 47:01
Good 😀
Regardless of what camp you fall into or are fond of, John Browning’s genius is obvious.
Yes one of the most important firearms designer of all time no doubt. But germans had most likely a somewhat more important impact on modern military small arms design in WW2 than the US and probably from WW2 onward too (even though the AR-15 is absolutely groundbreaking in its design just not to the extent "muricans" really wanna believe).
@@Heretic123456 Every essential component of the AR-15 was patented prior to WW1 other than the plastic stock.
@@Heretic123456 It's better to remove AR-15 and replace it with Eugene Stoner to make that comparison with Browning more conceptual. Eugene Stoner's AR-15 ergonomics and the operating system of the AR-18 are the basis for nearly every military small arm not named AKM made today - including the Germans. His genius is greatly understated. I agree with the pre/post WW2 influence. Europe was largely isolated in their small arm design; but there were several American WW1 designs adopted by European forces such as the Lewis gun, Hotchkiss, and Madsen. The US's small arms influence began in the 1860's with the Civil war, which was the only real significant war to take place in that time period. It served as a great curiosity to the European powers. But I would agree, the forced interaction with US weapon systems and function in WW2 had it's impact.
@C.J. "Europe was largly isolated in their small arms design" is like saying "Fog is the Channel the Continent cut off"! Particularly between 1860 and 1939 when European empires (British, Russian, and French being the large ones) probably covered half the world. "The [American] Civil war, which was the only significant war to take place in that time period". If you are in the middle of a battlefield then that war probably seems significant. However just to mention a few others: The Crimean War (1853-1856), the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), the Second Boer War (1899-1902), the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905). Not to mention most of the Great War (1914-1917) before the Americans turned up.
@@firstlast7052 forgot the spanish American war were the Mauser and Kraig Jorgensen faced off. The results of that war was the u.s adopting the Springfield 1903 which resulted in a copy right lawsuit from Germany.
Presumably a "Jeremy Clarkson" is half a horsepower.
The rear half, of course.
Or a rather plump hee haw!
@@roberthardy3090 In retrospect, I wish I had said "quarter of a horsepower - the hindquarter", but there you go. 8-)
So, a horse's ass power?
Brilliant answer. Short and to the point. We all award you extra points for the quality of your answer.
I thought he meant a petrol-head