"John Freck" wrote in message
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John Halliwell wrote in message
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In article , John Freck
writes


I have seen WWII film footage from wing cameras showing Mustang
rockets killing a moving locomotive, and causing railcars filled
with
munitions to explode. It is very obviously that fighter bombers
can
attack bridges, trucks, rail, and ships.


Have a look at the performance of the Fairey Battle during the battle
for France, perhaps the closest thing to a fighter bomber the RAF had at
the time. They went up against bridges and were almost without exception
shot out of the sky, whole squadrons were lost in minutes.



It would have been nice if the Allies had been able to surpress German
logistics riding on poontoon bridges, but as you say it was attempted
and failed badly. Germany lost more planes than the Allies during the
Fall of France.

The Luftwaffe lost around 1200 aircraft of all type
The RAF and French lost around 1600

Germany lost more planes because the planes were
vunerable. What made them vunerable was flying low on ground attack.
Flying low makes a plane vunerable to ground fire and attacking enemy
planes coming from above.

In fact the Luftwaffe predomiantly used level bombing from medium altitude


I t is hard to provide a picture of the
advantages a fighters has on anouther plane coming down from a higher
altitude, but it is similar to the advantages fighters had against the
Stuka during the BoB.

And yet you have been advocating the RAF adopt this strategy

An RAF fighters could attack a diving Stuka starting from 1-2 km away;
the RAF would go into a much softer dive which would allow for the
pilot to track the Stuka in his guns' sights. This "plane of attack"
was stable and lasted for a long march of seconds. The RAF fighters
was firing his planes guns, however, at near maxium ranges. When a
fighters is over head of an enemy plane a similar tracking takes
place. The higher attacking fighter will have a speed boost from
gravitiy, and large evasions moves by the target mean small
adjustments by the attacker. Note only are low flying bomb ladden
fighter bombers vunerable to fighter attack there is the problem of
high quality AAA. Germany's AAA during 1940 seeming proved the point
that planes shouldn't be able to operate at low levels over a properly
run battlefield.

And yet you have been advocating the RAF adopt this strategy


Well, fighter bombers today run at over 30,000
typically and drop GPS bombs because ordinary AAA would ripe them up.


This is infact untrue, the attack altitudes over Iraq and Serbia
was more like 10,000 ft

During WWII thousands of bombers, fighters, fighter bombers, and
transports were lost to fighters, fighter bombers, and AAA. All of
the above weapons can be brought down. Just pointing out that Axis
and Allied airforces took huge losses on missions isn't enough to
support the claim that the airplane was pointless.



It is if the missions failed, losing aircraft on a succesful mission
may sometimes be justified, if you lose the aircraft and dont
achieve the mission thats a real problem.

Keith