The aviation historians at UBI told me the P-51 didn't win the war.Originally posted by SeaNorris:
Megile, where is the 100% option?
I think the main problem is people are out to devalue the Mustang,
At the end of the day, it could turn circles round the Messer and Focke till they fell out of the sky from fuel shortage.
It's easy to make a dogfighter... it's pretty dam hard to make that dogfighter fly 8 hours.
The Mustang was America's great achievment of ww2, be sure.
omg why P51?
IL2
W. Liss in Aircraft profile 88: Ilyushin Il-2 mentions an engagement during the Battle of Kursk on 7 July 1943, in which 70 tanks from the German 9th Panzer Division were destroyed by Ilyushin Il-2 in just 20 minutes.
B17 and other Strategic bombers also played a moajor role hitting german industry.
the role of it is higly debated though.
some say the bombings of Köln Hamborg and other cites was worhtless
P47
Thunderbolt destroyed 86,000 railway cars, 9,000 locomotives, 6,000 armored fighting vehicles, and 68,000 trucks.
Saving private Ryan is wrong. P38 and P47 is much more tank buster than P51.
all info from Wikipedia
think about that. what did mustang do???
The Mustang assisted the war effort in that it was able to protect the B-17s better than anything else because it had the range to escort the bombers to the target and back and the performance to effectively deal with the opposition when it encountered them (of course the pilots on both sides were factors in how that all played out.) As a ground pounder it was not nearly as effective as the P-47s.
I don't thin that anyone here is willing to do the research to actuallY put a plausable number on that and Megile is fishing anyway so......![]()