Hi David,
>You call it anecdotal, I call it a first hand account.
The "silver, no camouflage" bit is definitely suspect. Luftwaffe pilots thought the USAAF were downright foolish to fly bare metal aircraft. If you could find a photograph of a couple of Luftwaffe planes in squadron service that lacked paint, the credibility of your story would be considerably improved.
>See? The 410 was a poorly maneuvering, slow, relatively large aircarft. Now if ever an easy target presented itself to tail and ball turret gunners, this was it.
If you look at the B-17, you'll see that it isn't exactly fast or nimble either :-)
>By 1944 B17s were using the all metal Cheyenne tail gun turret, not the old canvas type.
The chin turret which was used similar technology as the Cheyenne turret still gave a dispersion of 12 mil (as did the top turret). The Me 410 had nose-mounted armament which gave a dispersion of 2 mil. That means considerably greater accuracy, combined with considerably greater firepower as the Me 410 was armed with a couple of 20 mm or 30 mm cannon. ("If the enemy is in range, so are you" ;-)
Destroyers were a proven weapon against bomber formations by the time the Me 410 came out, whch was a quite a bit faster than the Me 110 which had previously showed it was quite capable of catching the bombers. Accordingly, the Luftwaffe actually was quite reluctant to withdraw the destroyers from interception service as they were so effective - it was only the USAAF fighter cover that forced them to switch to single-engined aircraft.
Regards,
Henning (HoHun)
