Dinger, Duma and Dudule's wing (I guess that's D wing) of 109F4s taxiied to a seperate runway to try to catch the formation in a pincer movement, awaiting the scramble order.
D wing sighted the formation to the south, bombers in front... orders were to engage the fighter escort. Dinger dived towards the nearest cons, Duma in tow. Dudule had to abort mission (disconnect)
First (and only) kill by Duma was a Spitfire caught napping - no evasive maneuvers at all
Three Spitfires immediately turned on to Dinger's tail, Duma dived to intercept the closest. Despite a few machine gun hits to the fuselage...
..and right wing, the aircraft appeared unharmed.
Dinger exploded seconds after, and Duma found himself the subject of some undesirable attention.
After a few desperate evasives the first wave of Spitfires set Duma smoking..
...and the second wave finished him off, killed as he tried to jump
Back at F18 the first allied bombers were appearing on the scene, but the 109G2 buff busters were closing fast.
Bombs fell just as the 109s opened fire.
The mission successful, the allied bombers however took heavy losses..
But both sides suffered heavily in the intercept over the target airfield.
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This really surprised me. The B26s were completely seperate from the escort until the last minute! In fact, when I engaged the formation was being led by the B26s!
On the Axis side, it looks good.. but the problem is that the pincer movement is on one side 2 F4s to attack the fighter escort, and on the other G2s, sadly badly placed to engage the bombers who are leading the formation. The main body of F4s is trailing badly behind.
By the time the G2s and 2 F4s are ready to intercept, the formation has joined up (pretty impressively in the space of a minute or so). Unfortunately several Spitfires are trailing badly.
This was a bit of a shame. The G2s (bottom right) are way too far back to attack the bombers head-on, and so spend quite a while playing catch-up. The main body of F4s in the top right, however, appear to be in a great position to attack the bombers (but they're not ordered to, and so I don't think (m)any do.
(I've predicted the position of the B26s here - the radar was only showing the dots in visual range and for a time they were not in the range of any axis craft. When they did appear, there was a clear seperation between the B26s and the main body of the escort). The problem is clear though - the gondala-armed G2s ran too far south and now have the entire formation to cover before they can get to the 26s.
Unfortunately, much of the Spitfire escort fell woefully far behind the bombers. The mob mentality of many of the Spitfires (As shown above, 4 were on my tail before, and at least 6 lost altitude to intercept us - and my wing only consisted of me and Dinger when we engaged!) meant that although the bombers got through, by the time they arrived at the target it seemed from the tower that they had no escort within 20km besides a single spitfire (I think this was Rocket). The G2s finally caught up...
...and that was that.
Basically, escorts, stand by your buffs A staggered altitude might have helped, and admittedly the Spit Vs are slow, but the mass chasing of me and Dinger down to 2k altitude was just plain crazy.
Perhaps we could do with a fighter co-ordinator at the tower vectoring the fighters to intercept? It was the time it took for the buff busting G2s, unfortunately left at the back of the formation, to reach the bombers which lost the field. I can't blame that on the G2 leader as the formation pattern can only be seen in hindsight, but if the G2s had turned up at the buffs with escort dragged low, it would have been a slaughter.
Great fun, and thanks to the organisers!
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Duma
XO The Red Dragons
http://www.reddragons.de And God bless Word's replace function
[This message has been edited by -duma- (edited 03-13-2000).]
