From: waltbj1@m

To get back to the main subject - they may have thought they were
'bouncing them up into the belly' but I'll bet the effectiveness was
due to a hail of AP beating in the cooling air grilles - look at the
back end and deck of any tank and that's what you see. And that's why
the Korean War vets in my squadron taught me to shoot tanks

In May, 1944, when the Herman Goering panzer division decided to attack south
through the Liri Valley in daylight, trusting to cloud cover to conceal its
movement, B-25 strafers coming in at very low level slaughtered it. They
dropped 500 pounders and fragmentation bombs, but it was mostly the tens of
thousands of rounds of .50 fired at almost point blank range from the rear that
seems to have done most of the damage. Burned out anks, troop carriers, gun
carriers, trucks and artillery pieces--as well as hundreds of dead
Germans--littered the road for miles; your Italian Highway of Death.
During the Korean war, Tactical Air Control Parties could, with confidence,
call in P-51s to stop armor by strafing.


Chris Mark