Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by werftgh 5733 days ago
For bombers thats the main cause of aircraft losses, fighters of WWII were pretty ineffective, especially at night.

It's difficult to believe a WWII era fighter diving into a stream of bombers, at night, while the multiple gun turrets on 100s of bombers were returning fire - were making precise tactical decision about which part of the airframe to target.

The nice thing (statistically) about AA fire is that it's rather uniformly random.
2 comments
pg 5733 days ago
WW II fighters shot down a large number of aircraft. Erich Hartmann alone claimed 352.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_World_War_II_air_aces

link
werftgh 5733 days ago
Mostly against primitive fighters particularly on the Russian front. Assuming similar exaggeration of successes by each sides publicity offices you can probably divide the figures by 2 or 4.

Even if all these had been against night heavy bombers it's a tiny part of the losses

link
JshWright 5733 days ago
The RAF didn't fly in formation during night bombing attacks, rather they flew in "streams" often hundreds of miles long. So there wouldn't have been hundreds of turrets to bring to bear on a single fighter.

I think you're also overestimating how easy it would be to spot a blacked out fighter at night. A popular german night fighter tactic was often to sneak up beneath a bomber and then pitch the nose of the fighter up sharply while firing, racking the bomber's belly with cannon fire.

Many fighters were equipped with guns mounted in a vertical configuration called Schräge Musik. The guns would fire automatically when a magnetometer detected an enemy bomber was overhead.

link
kjhgbhjkl 5732 days ago
I think that was the result of Dyson's study - a gunner never saw a fighter so they could just as effectively be removed or repalced with fixed guns.

And in Wald's research a night fighter still had some difficulty finding and approaching abomber even with ground radar - so they fired at it (using proximty fuses or upward firing guns) essentially at random points - there was no statsistical bias of the fighter pilot targetting specific systems

link