Damned Air Group AAR
Operation Husky Frame 3
We were charged with the destruction of P6 down in sector 11,1,3 using a mixed group of Me-110Gs and at least 4 Ju-88As. Routing and loadout was at my discretion. Looking at the map I found no short route in which we could expect to safely get to the target from our assigned base, field A24.
The Carrier group boxes left me attempting to travel either near a CAP area or expected line of travel for an allied attack. This left me with the option of a route far to the east then south in the 0 row to hit the target. While I could expect to get to the target in relative safety there was just no way I could do it by the T+60 time limit. In my offline test it took me until T+97! But that was a worst case scenario in which I avoided the CV group area boxes completely.
So I split the group into 2 attacks. The 110s, with DFA leading, took a fairly direct route on the deck. They came in from the North in the 11 column well before the T+60 time limit thus satisfying that rule. They were able to get to the target before being located by the few Seafires that were on CAP duty there. The 110 group was able to take down all the light ack and quite a few objects before the Seafires engaged them. The Seafires took a couple but our guys gave more than they got to the allied CAP killing 4 or 5 I think(stat page not up yet). The 110s that survived exited North for A22. Those pilots opted to join the Ju-88s as gunners and then exited to join the invasion at T+90.
I led the Ju-88 section. Our route took us way East grabbing to 13K in the 5 row. Once there we throttled back to normal cruise to conserve fuel. I was keeping track of the POSREPs of the NME CVs looking for any opportunity to shave a bit off my intended route. We continued on that 090 course until we got word that C115 and its cruiser had been sunk thus removing one of the obstacles on my route. I turned to 160 in sector 14,5,4/5 and held that course until we got word that C112 had also been eliminated. WTG Stukagrupen! So we cut another corner coming to 220 in about 15,2,4. At about 13,0,2/5 we finally make a turn to 270 and opened our bomb doors. Turned on IP at about 12,0,2/5 to a course of 315. Bomb run started at 12,0,4/7 after some minor correction on that same 315 course.
Bomb run was clean. We were lined up perfectly( I’d made a practice run offline the night before). There was no CAP there at all by the time we showed up (I assumed they’d left to join the invasion). Each of our 4 formations took a “lane” to distribute bombs over the target. One dropped long. We took out ammo, radar and the vehicle hangar. Jordi dropped on the ships but got no indication any of them were destroyed. We turned right on to course 360 for field A22 and started a –1K fpm decent to put on speed as time was growing short in the frame. Dantoo called us for a BDA on the port as he had a flight of Jabo FW-190s headed in to mop up. We passed along our info and they were able to take down several more structures before being called to RTB by Sled as time grew short. They told us the ships at the port had been sunk too. Kewel!
The corners we cut saved us on fuel—good thing as we were really short on time and were able to go full throttle. We landed with about 5 minutes to go in the frame. All of our Ju-88s landed OK but it looked like our drones all went screwey flying where they liked after the main ships landed. Hopefully none of those will be counted as lost.
Was a long boring run for us in the 88s, but we were able to accomplish our mission. Shame we didn’t have a larger group as we could have used the extra bombers. With the clean run we coulda removed P6 from the map. Oh well. Shoulda, woulda, coulda!
Thanks to all that showed up. Another successful frame for the Damned! <>
Drano
