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In article 40b4d9c9$1@bg2.,
"Matt Wiser" writes: Weren't the USN tests of the captured 190 in anticipation that the 190 had been sold to Japan and that Corsair and Hellcat pilots would encounter them in the Pacific? The 190 would have been a good carrier fighter had the Germans ever finished the Graf Zeppelin CV instead of listening to the Fat Boy and taking naval air from the Navy to the Luftwaffe. No, not partiularly. Remember that at teh time that teh tests took place, we still hadn't invaded Normandy, or Southern France, and things were still cooking along in the Med. Since one of the salient traits of the Navy is the mobility of their airbases, it would be foolish to ignore the possibily of meeting 190s. As to the 190 being a good carrier fighter. No, I don't think so at all. It's behavior in the pattern was, for a carrier fighter, dismal at best, (High stall speed, no stall warning, and a nasty tendency to snap inverted when stalled in anythi8ng but straight & level flight) with no visibility of the deck from about halfway down the base leg. (Big engine, little canopy, with the pilot seated low down in the fuselage. While the gear was somewhat better laid out than the 109, it most likely wasn't strong enough to stand up to real carrier operations. Let's not forget that the rather small size of the German single engined fighters means that there's no volume available for fuel, so range/radius is dismal, and there isn't enough space to hang a lot of stuff on the outside of the airplane. This turns out to be a real problem with a Carrier Air Group. You've only got so much space to carry and move airplanes around on, so you need teh most flexibility that you can get out of an airplane. As for the Graf Zeppelin (Seagoing version) - if the Germans had completed her, it would have had as much effect on the War as it did as a hulk tied up to the pier. Carriers don't operate in isolation - they need a lot of support - Escorts for the carrier itself, a big train of Replenishment Ships, Oilers, and other such ships following it around and requiring excort themselves, and reliable, timely intelligence about what's going on around them. The Kreigsmarine was never, ever able to supply this, even if they were able to get their heads wrapped around it. (Which is rather doubtful - look at the way they used the few ships they had, ****ing them away in ones and twos on solo missions that, while they produced a bit of a flap as they were hunted down & sunk, did nothing to further German War Aims.) After the April 1940 Norway Campaign, the Germans ended up with no useful surface Navy at all. (Norway was nasty to the German Navy. They came out of the Norway Campaign with 3 ships that weren't in the yards for extensive repairs that put them out of action for the rest of the year. They also had some very real problems with basic technology. Their high pressure/high temperature machinery was supposed to produce a more compact, lighter, adn more economical power plant. They never got them to work properly, and what they achieved as a temendous amount of skill at rigging towlines. Their Light Cruisers, which was the basis for the Graf Zeppelin's hull, were so structurally weak that they couldn't be allowed out of the Baltic. Graf Zeppelin herself was the product of a flawed concept - she combined the airgroup of an Escort Carrier (even worse than that, since the range/radius of the airplanes was so limited) with the armament of a small light cruiser. Just what was it supposed to do? -- Pete Stickney A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures. -- Daniel Webster |
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