You have any examples in mind?
- oldman
Felt like picking just this one sentence from the context?
Well in addition to Macki Steinhoff's forementioned respectful comments, Here's an excerpt of a Luftwaffe experte's (Heinz Knoke, 52 kills, all in the West) description of a duel with a P-38 (from "I Flew for the Fuhrer"):
"...At once I peel off and dive into the Lightnings below. They spot us
and swing round towards us to meet the attack.... Then we are in a madly
milling dogfight...it is a case of every man for himself. I remain on the
tail of a Lightning for several minutes. It flies like the devil himself,
turning, diving, and climbing almost like a rocket. I am never able to
fire more than a few pot-shots...."
also: "On 3 Nov. 1943 P-38s escorted bombers to Wilhemshaven. While the German
fighters were, as a result of the efforts of the P-38 drivers, only able to
shoot down three bombers, German fighter losses were sufficiently heavy, II/JGS
suffering particularly badly (curiously, the 55FG pilots only claimed three
e/a destroyed), that Gen. Galland held a special meeting with I Jagdkorps'
division commanders the next day. One of the key decisions made at this
meeting was to have the "wild sow" single-engine night fighter force
transferred to day jobs to counter the P-38s. (Here we have what could be
called "escort-once-removed"--P-38s were, in a way, performing "escort duties"
for RAF's Bomber Command--drawing fighters away from them.) And it was
acknowledged that the era of the twin-engined interceptor as an significant
factor, was ended.
On Nov. 13, 45 P-38 escorted bombers to Bremen. Only two bombers were lost to
fighter interception. Throughout Nov and Dec, although the 8AF was sending
double the no. of bombers against German targets it had in the fall, losses
were never more than about 5 percent of the attacking force, and were often
only a mere handful--on the Dec. 13, 1943 mission against Hamburg, for
example, out of a force of 648 bombers, only 5 were lost. Many German fighter
formations approached the bombers on this day, but when they saw the fighter
escorts, refused to engage.
At the end of Dec. Galland and the staff of Jagdkorp I admitted that their
tactics against escorted bomber formations had failed."
http://yarchive.net/mil/p38.htmlLooks like General Galland too had to take the P-38 seriously.
