I knew that the "milk jugs" could take an enormous amount of damage ...

[uwe]

... but this is incredible! Hitting a chimney, breaking a wing off and making it home? I don't think that another WW II fighter would have survived that. Just goes to show how that monstrously powerful Thunderbolt engine - once flying -  could keep anything up in the air, never mind the aerodynamics. 





Knocking out three Tiger tanks one one sortie ain't too bad either, that was a lot of damage to the Reich. In today's money, that was 4 million US-Dollars damage right then and there (in the case of the even more costly Tiger II/Königstiger - it's likely that the later models were hit given the date of the attack in early 1945 - a whopping 15 million US-$ !!!); Tiger tanks were incredibly costly to produce (and kept getting more expensive under the dearth of German wartime resouces) and required no less than 300.000 man hours per tank.

[Pilgrim]

Fantastic story!  The one-of-a-kind things that happen in battle are amazing.

[ilan]

This guy could probably hit a microphone stand with a TBird chopping off the headstock, and still finish the gig.

[uwe]

Yeah, he simply wouldn't let go of the strings and pull them to the desired notes by hand! 

[TBird1958]

It was quite the plane and engine, once it had the Hamilton=Standard variable pitch 4 blade prop on it, much better than a Mustang for ground attack, that huge radial would bring a plane even when it had cylinders missing. The US built tough planes once the war started. Re the Tiger, not only was it expensive, it was costly and time consuming to maintain, I have read that there was always considerable down time with them. 

A very aptly named '47 at Seattle's Museum of Flight.

[uwe]

All true about the TBolt and the Tiger. I only recently learned that the operational life expectancy of a T-34 was less than 24 hours (!), after that time of operation it would break down with something even without any enemy encounter! But the Soviet Union didn't repair, it replaced, and rather than keeping sophisticated tank repair teams in the field, they geared up mass production of T-34s unbelievably efficiently. Raw materials weren't the problem and the factories in the Ural were well beyond anything the Luftwaffe with its close range "flying artillery" concept could ever reach.

Raw materials were, however, a huge problem for the Third Reich - even before the war. That arms spending spree after Hitler came to power rendered the Reichsmark not convertible on international markets, sanctions did the rest. Getting raw materials was a huge issue, Germany doesn't really have a lot of them. So everything had to be repairable - call it fascist sustainability!  And bombs had to hit their target, there were not enough explosive components to go round to ever allow Germany high altitude carpet bombing as a long term strategic option, hence the obsession with dive bombers who could deliver a bomb on target with great precision and therefore not waste bombs. And its legendary technological innovation was in essence forced upon the Reich because of its prevailing shortage economy. All that couldn't prevent the quality of basic components such as armored steel steadily decreasing during the war. The Königstiger might have been an impressive monster, but its steel was already crap due to manifold wartime shortage constraints and the Reich's sphere of influence diminishing everywhere by the day.

Strafing with a Mustang and its huge, well-engineered, yet damage prone cooling scoop "belly" with crucial entrails such as oil cooler and radiator etc was asking for a stray bullet to do mortal damage to that otherwise fine plane. It's why German fighters always tried to creep underneath a P-51 from behind to deal it the death blow.

[TBird1958]

Let's have a "Fork Tailed Devil" and "The Whistling Death"

 

[uwe]

Great planes in the Pacific Theater, but the Luftwaffe was unimpressed with both (they captured an intact Corsair of the Royal Navy, one of the few units that ever had them in Europe, they were only a handful).

Spitfire and Mustang were the Luftwaffe's most respected Western Allied fighters, I guess they came closest to the Luftwaffe's definition of what an interceptor should be able do and what his handling characteristics should be. Luftwaffe pilots were never grew comfortable with the larger US fighter planes even if their performance was good to excellent. They had all grown up with the cramped Me Bf 109 and people often forget that even the FW 190 A, even though it had a larger cockpit, had a smaller wingspan than the Me 109.

A Bf 109 could - contrary to popular belief - even outmaneuver a Spitfire, but only in the hands of a skilled pilot willing to take the Bf 109 to the limit (we're talking about E and F types here, I doubt that was still the case with the overloaded Gustav which sacrificed agility for bomber-downing armament and high altitude flight capability). Unlike the FW 190, which was a good-natured plane, you had to know and fly the Bf 109 real well to realize its full potential.