Actually, if you look at sorties flown, rather then the actual number of planes, the Luftwaffe only had a very minor advantage in terms of fighter sorties during the BoB. Something like 1.2 to 1. Pre D-Day the allies had around a 2.5 to 1 advantage in fighter sorties. After the spring and summer of '44 when the Luftwaffe was crushed, this rose to around 6 to 1. This is just fighter sorties, and doesn't count bombers. If you look at the Blitzkrieg in 1940, the germans had a 2 or 3 to 1 advantage in fighter sorties. All this just goes to show that numbers are often an important factor.
However, numbers aren't the only factor. If you look at the RAF's daylight attacks during 1941 and 1942, they would often put up hundreds of fighters, and face maybe 50-100 sorties(or often less) in response. However in these situations, the short ranged Spitfires weren't capable of inflicting the level of attrition on JG26 and JG2 that the 8th AF(and the 9th AF and 2nd TAF) were able to inflict on Luftflotte 3 and Luftflotte Reich in 1944. In fact, despite their numerical superiority, the RAF suffered a negative kill/loss ratio in their daylight campaign even with their superior numbers, and this was without counting bomber losses.
So as we can see, a daylight bomber campaign required a number of factors working together.
#1: Equality or superiority in terms of fighter capability. The LW had this in 1940, but without numbers or durable bombers they couldn't establish air superiority or maintain sustainable losses.
#2: Numerical superiority. The RAF had this in 1941 and 1942 over France, but without enough quality fighters, or durable bombers they also couldn't produce any positive results, and took heavy losses.
#3: Durable heavy bombers. Only the US possesed this quality, but even the bombers by themselves couldn't bring about a victory. Witness the Schweinfurt raids in 1943 and you will see proof of this. Without air superiority, even the most durable bombers took heavy losses.
So we can see, that in order to conduct a succesful daylight bomber campaign, all three of these factors had to be brought together. One or two of them couldn't do the trick, and only the 8th AF was able to bring this together during WWII in the face of strong opposition(well I guess you could look at the pacific, but both the IJN and IJAAF were shattered forces by the time B-29s started bombing Japan).
Sable
352nd FG
Originally posted by Nashwan:
Jochen, the Luftwaffe had all those advantages in 1944, yet they still lost. Why?
They were outnumbered no worse that the RAF was during the BoB.
