In article ,
ArtKramr wrote:
Subject: P-47/51 deflection shots into the belly of the German tanks,
From: (Tony Williams)
Date: 8/7/03 11:41 PM Pacific Daylight Time

he evidence gathered by the OR teams indicated that very few tanks
were destroyed by air attack. A British War Office analysis of 223
Panther tanks destroyed in 1944 revealed that only fourteen resulted
from air attack (eleven to RPs and three to aircraft cannon). Dur

Of course these investigating teams belonged to the ground forces and had a
strong vested interest in elevating the effectiveness of ground fire vs air

Doubt it - operational analysis teams were pretty high-level affairs,
responsible (without checking Dyson, who was OA for bomber command) to
chief-of-staff level. The whole point of OA was to try to get a bias-free,
scientific look at what was actually happening which was as free as
possible from any bias. It was actually one of the effective tools which
Britain introduced which - in some cases at least, like routing atlantic
convoys - made a real difference to the way the war went.

OA would have been going well out of its way to try not to bring any
bias or baggage to the investigation. IIRc the conclusion was that
fighter-bombers were not effective at destroying tanks, but were very
effective at destroying tank formations, advances and distupting retreats
by destroying the supporting soft-skin vehicles, though I'd have to check
that to be sure. This, of course, meant that they were effective enough
to be going on with, though improved methods of attacking the tanks
themselves were (again, IIRC) recommended for research..

--
Andy Breen ~ Interplanetary Scintillation Research Group
http://users.aber.ac.uk/azb/
"Who dies with the most toys wins" (Gary Barnes)