(Stephen "FPilot" Bierce) wrote in message ...
"David E. Powell" wrote:

Did western antitank planes rely
more on bombs and rockets? (Outside the P-39 of course?)

DEP

Of course not. There were upgunned Hurricanes, and numerous fighters
and light and medium bombers outfitted as strafers/gunships.
The 37mm gun on the Airacobra/Kingcobra was a contraversial weapon
to the Americans (some pilots liked it and many didn't), and it was
generally thought that anything bigger than 20mm on a combat
airplane was effete.

This weapon was a fairly low velocity weapon I believe.

Perhaps it was more of a logistics
issue than anything else...since the .50 caliber machine gun seemed to be
adequate in a general-purpose sense, why upgrade?

The Western Allies seem to have had pretty rotten anti-armour weapons.
They only had small number of the 76.2mm/17 pounder AT guns and
relied on heavy and clumsy howtizers to stop a Panther or Tiger, The
Kill ratio of Sherman versus Panther was 5:1, the 66mm bazooka was so
ineffective against a German MBT and even lighter tanks that the
troops relied on captured Pazerfaust and 76.8mm Panzerschreck, The
British PIAT was as usefull as a Medieval crossbow and even harder to
load, while the rocket firing typhoons, Tempests and Thunderbolts
Generaly missed their targets as latter analysis showed. (Less than
5% of tank kills were infact tank kills)

Hans Rudel, himself detroyer of Some 350 tanks in Stukas and FW190s
had a low opinion of rocket firing aircraft for anti-tank duty.

Most German tanks simply ran out of fuel and ammo. The power of the
allied fighter bombers of Jabo's was that they seem to have destroyed
German logistics, support and supply vehicles.

If there was a breakthrough by the minimal number of German tanks it
was dealt with by simply by overwheming numbers of Allied tanks and I
expect of a tank is attcked often enough by enough aircraft the
rockets might strik home.

The 0.5 inch machine gun certainly was a powefull weapon. Firing
tungsten cored ammunition with the extra forward motion of the aicraft
it must have had good penetration. Aginst an MBT it might acheive a
mobillity kill against radiators etc of suspension components. Against
thin skined or lightly armoured vehicles it must have penetrated often
enough.



The Allies (in particular the Americans) never fielded a specifically anti-armor
airplane in spite of going through dozens of designs. Simply fitting bomb racks
and rocket rails on a day fighter--or packing extra machine guns on a medium
bomber--made more sense from a production standpoint than having a specialized
type created and put into action.

Allied wartime CAS thinking ultimately resulted in the Douglas Skyraider. We'll
never know what a plane like that would have done on the Western Front, but to
me it would have done what the Thunderbolt, Typhoon, Tempest, Beaufighter,
Mosquito and Mustang did...and more of it.

Stephen "FPilot" Bierce/IPMS #35922
{Sig Quotes Removed on Request}

It seems that allied thinking relied on modified fighter aircraft and
massive numerical superiority to overcome their lack of heavy
anti-armour performance.