Originally posted by mooster
just for the record the germans had plenty of these planes at the end of the war what they did,nt have was gas to put in them or pilots trained to fly them. and a pilot not trained to fly the thing is just another dead pilot.
I just picked up an old used book the other day called The Pictorial History of the Luftwaffe by First Lietenant Alfred Price (1969). Anyways, here's a quote from towards the end of the book. Page 57
The lull in the fighting during the late autumn of 1944 served the Germans well, and under conditions of greatest secrecy the Luftwaffe assembled an impressively strong force of combat aircraft along the western front. This compirsed the following:
Long range bombers: 55
Jet bombers (262s): 40
Ground attack: 390
Single Eng Fighters: 1770
TWin Eng Fighters: 140
Reconnaissance: 65
And you were right about the fuel and training. To amass this large force, a lot of aircraft were taken from the training schools and the pilots that flew these planes were fresh recruits, so they were terrible. Also by the fall the synthetic fuel production had picked up slightly from the bombings of the summer. Granted the Luftwaffe had a stock pile of 500,000 tons in the winter of 1944, July saw a usage of 150,000 tons. The Allies had been hitting the refineries hard and in May 1944 production was 195,000 tons, 52,000 in June, July 35,000, August 16,000, and September was 7,000 tons. Like I said production was up since the lowest point, 18,000 in October and 39,000 in November. This was still incredibly low and the last ditch tactics saw it ok to run their planes out of fuel
The German pilots were ordered to pursue the raiders to the limit of their endurance, and once contact had been made they were to break off the action only when their fuel had almost run out...So losses due to fighters running out of fuel were risked and accepted-- this was all p7oart and parcel of the Tame Boar tactics.
