Originally posted by fdiron
Those rockets must have been horribly powerful. 40 B17s shot down in a single raid is a huge loss of material and manpower (400 men). Whats even more astounding is that the Luftwaffe could even muster 24 Fw190s in April of 1945.
24? hehe you really need to read up more.
Galland and others had requested a reserve of planes in late 1944 and it approached a thousand!
thats a reserve! so thats added to the ones in operation.
Gallands plan was to attack the Bomber raids with a thousand fighters all at once.This would have undoubtedly been very effective and a devastating attack.
Unfortunately for Galland(but not us
), Hitler decided to use this entire reserve in the ill fated boddenplatte raid on jan 1st 1945.
The pilots were all high alt flyers and Galland protested that it took much training to be proficient at ground attack but he was ignored.The attack was indeed a total failure in that most were killed or crashed.Many even killed by their own flak batteries whilst others were lost because of lack of experience at tree top navigation.
The cream of hitlers remaining experts were devastated in this attack.
From then on it wasnt the lack of aircraft,In fact if you check the figures of production they continued to rise each year as the war progressed, it was the lack of fuel and pilots as grunherz has mentioned.
24 planes? this is barely 2 staffel i think. There were many more than this.In fact more than that number flew to germany from the beseiged pocket near the baltic sea(cant remember the name).
they flew back to germany with all manner of ground crew,women even children in the last ditch evacuation before the russians captured them.They wanted to surrender to the Americans rather than the Russians.I have a picture of a ground crewman in the fuselage of a 190! it looks very strange and very cramped.theres also a mention of a pilot who had a mother in the fuselage and her 2 children in the cockpit! one on each knee.
You are very mistaken if you think LW numbers were so low.The whole of Germany was not overun. Berlin and thus Hitler fell long before the British and Americans were able to overrun all of the bases etc.
Also the veiw we have of the 2nd ardennes offensive of how the skies cleared and in came the planes to save the day.Well they did but there rarely a mention of the huge airbattles at this time.
There were loads of aerial fights but they are hardly known about.It doesnt suit the story much to discuss them when its a report to civilians.They just get told 'the airforces releived the troops' and these things stick to this day.The details are pretty much ignored.
It always amazes me how people have such a one sided veiw of the war.The more you think things were easy the more you fail to understand the difficulty we faced as the allies and the sacrifice.There were several occations after normandy where it appeared the Germans were FAR from finished.Boddenplatte was a total surprise to our forces.Propaganda claimed the LW was finished but the servicemen knew better.
