How slow speed turn-fighting dominated hit and run in WWII

[Gaston]

  I got into this argument on another site, and thought there was enough new material in this one post, particularly on Japanese aircrafts, to be worth re-posting here:

  I have been researching the comparative maneuverability of WWII fighter aircrafts for 27 years now, and this lead to a few "discoveries" that are so counter-intuitive, they are genuinely shocking. I think the selection offered in the post below is particularly eye-opening. Here goes:


  32 victory ace Kyosti Karhila:

  "I learned to fly with the "Cannon-Mersu" (MT-461). I found that when fighter pilots got in a battle, they usually applied full power and then began to turn. In the same situation I used to decrease power, and with lower speed was able to turn equally well."
  " When the enemy decreased power, I used to throttle back even more. In a high speed the turning radius is wider, using less speed I was able to out-turn him having a shorter turning radius. Then you got the deflection. 250km/h seemed to be the optimal speed. (160 mph)"
- Kyösti Karhila

  Let that just sink in: 160 mph was "optimal" in 1944...

  Or this interesting example (P-51B vs Me-109G-6 in May 1944):

http://www.spitfireperformance.com/mustang/combat-reports/339-hanseman-24may44.jpg


  "The second Me-109 was maneuvering to get on my tail, and a dogfight developed at 500 ft. (after climbing from 150 ft. following a slow gaining attack on a landing Me-109...) At first he began to turn inside me. Then he stopped cutting me off as I cut throttle, dropped 20 degrees of flaps and increased prop pitch. Everytime I got to the edge of the [German] airdrome they opened fire with light AA guns. [Meaning was forced to turn multiple consecutive 360s continuously, even when going towards the enemy ground fire] Gradually I worked the Me-109G away from the field, and commenced to turn inside of him as I reduced throttle settings."


  A typical example from 1945:

  1945 FW-190A-8 ace commenting on a painting of his aircraft wings level: "Our wings were never level in combat. We turned continuously to one side. Outnumbered as we were by then (1945), it was the only way to survive."

  I would wager that this "continuous turning" was also not far from 160 mph... So maintaining speeds not far above 160 mph "was the only way to survive." Because curving constantly easily ruins a hit and run attack, in a way that acts like a "protection" from the attackers not sharing the circle.

  But you won't hear such practical advice from historians.

  A few other examples:
-Squadron Leader Alan Deere, (Osprey Spit MkV aces 1941-45, Ch. 3, p. 2): "Never had I seen the Hun stay and fight it out as these Focke-Wulf pilots were doing... In Me-109s the Hun tactic had always followed the same pattern- a quick pass and away, sound tactics against Spitfires and their superior turning circle. Not so these 190 pilots: They were full of confidence... We lost 8 to their one that day..."

  Except the "Superior turning circle", at least at low speeds, was more a fictional creation in the minds of Supermarine designers and engineers. SCIENCE you know... Below is a quote by top French ace Pierre Clostermann, who was, by the way, the RAF's mission record holder at 432, an 18 kill ace, as well as being a Caltech trained engineer, his technical knowledge of German aircrafts being so widely recognized he gave technical conference about them to fellow RAF pilots, while having 10 FW-190A kills himself:

  https://youtu.be/c2zdA9TcIYo
(At 12:44)

  Translation: "So there are legends on the Spitfire... Aahhh the legends... Legends are hard to kill... One of those legends is that the Spitfire turned better than the Messerschmitt 109, or the FW-190. Well that is a good joke... In fact all those who found themselves with a 109 turning inside them, at low speeds, well those in general did not come back to complain about the legend... Why? Above 280 to 300 knots, the Spitfire turned better than the Me-109. But, first and foremost, in a turning battle, the speed goes down and down and down and down, and at one point there comes a time, when the speed has gone down below 200 knots, that the Me-109 turns inside the Spitfire."

  The above quote underlines, in an indirect way, that low-speed turn fighting is what really mattered... The same pattern is visible throughout the War. Surprisingly few combat accounts fit the pattern of a hit and run attack, except for a significant proportion by the Spitfire, which was uniquely suited to hit and run, being a moderately poor turn fighter (it still had a fair rate of turn, but with a larger minimum radius at a higher speed, and, worst of all, it featured no partial flap extension in combat, since the flaps were only "full up" or "full down", a huge -and absurd- handicap. That being said, the "blow up" automatic flaps of the P-47, F6F and F4F were similar, in that the pilot had no partial deployment control (though they could be slid back slightly, increasing the wing area, on both Grummans). The Spitfire did have a kind of "crutch" to help it dogfight: It could "stall" itself with efficient 3 axis control, and briefly point its nose "across the circle" towards a smaller radius, but only briefly: This is described by many Spitfire pilots).

  In "Le Fana de l'Aviation" #496 p. 40: (This is in a Russian use context, so far away from the usual British deference to non-combat test pilots)

  Première citation : " Dans la journée du 29 avril, le régiment effectua 28 sorties pour escorter des bombardiers et des avions d'attaque au sol et 23 en protection de troupes, avec quatre combats aériens. Les premiers jours furent marqués par des échecs dus à une tactique de combat périmée dans le plan horizontal, alors que le Spitfire était particulièrement adapté au combat dans le plan vertical."

  [Abbreviated translation: "The Spitfire failed in horizontal fighting, but was particularly adapted to vertical fighting."]


  FW-190D-9 pilot Eric Brunotte, when asked about MW-50, said: "We never used it. Only maybe to go towards something or get away. There was a notch to go past and it engaged, but in combat we pulled back even from that."

  No great interest in the significant extra speed, apparently...

  By late 1944, all that MW-50 plumbing was being taken out of the majority of German fighters. It seemed almost as if German pilots liked fighters that went slower... The reality is that the extra speed was not very useful, particularly in a defensive context where the enemy typically started higher.
 
  Hartmann himself, in late 1944, was flying a G-14 that had its MW-50 removed, even though he is the only pilot I ever found quoted as liking MW-50... He was a dedicated "hit and runner", so that could explain his own predilection for speed.

  You might wonder, then, why Japanese aircrafts did not dominate, since they were famous for using turn fighting? The key problem I think was their mismatched and weak firepower, particularly on the Ki-43 Oscar. (Which did not prevent the Ki-43 from having more kills than all the other Japanese Army fighters combined...)

  And Japanese Army front line officers often much preferred the Ki-43 to the Ki-84, and not for reliability reasons:  Osprey "Ki-43 aces of WWII" p.50: Sgt. Toshimi Ikezawa, Ki-43 ace:

   "I heard Major Eto had refused delivery of the Ki-84. They could not avoid an attack if it came from above, because of the Ki-84's poor rate of turn. I think we owe our survival to the Ki-43, as the Ki-84 would have left you in a tight spot if attacked from above...  Skilled Spitfire [Mk VIII] pilots would pull out of their dives when they realized we had seen them. New [Spitfire] pilots would continue to dive straight down on us, leaving them vulnerable in a turning fight..."

  Perhaps you begin to see just how important was slow-speed turn fighting in WWII, compared to what historians usually make of it?: Experienced pilots would pull out of their dives (!), when they realized they could not catch the target unaware... Quite extraordinary.
 
  And the Ki-43 did not have that poor an air-to-air kill-loss ratio versus Allied aircrafts, if only going by the large number of aces it had. Even the F4U was demonstrated to have achieved no better than a 1:1 air to air kill ratio for the entire first year of its introduction (Osprey Duel #119, F4U vs A6M, p.73-75, "Statistics and Analysis")... There was not much of a lopsided air-to-air kill ratio in many cases: It was merely attrition (mostly against ground targets) throughout.

  A story I read of the Ki-43 had a single one pitted against 16 P-38s for half an hour: It just kept making circles at slow speed, loafing at reduced power with the canopy open, while 16 P-38s tried hit and run attacks for 30 minutes, before running out of both ammo and fuel, leaving behind the Ki-43 unharmed. It was a real story in a serious history magazine, narrated by a US pilot who was actually there, but unfortunately too far back to now be sourced precisely... By itself, it pretty much says it all.

  You might then wonder; why did the Zero fare so poorly (aside its mismatched armament, apparently so hard to get to converge it is claimed, by Saburo Sakai, that most of its kills were achieved from the nose 7.7 mms guns alone)? The reason it did poorly is likely very different: Turn fighting was not an integral part of Imperial Japanese Navy doctrine.

  If you read actual detailed accounts of the Zero in combat, and not just vague hearsay, you will find it was used almost exclusively in hit and run tactics. This sounds quite astonishing, but it is apparently confirmed (the discovery is based on scouring original Allied intelligence archives). It is an entirely new perspective, opened recently by Pacific War historians, particularly the one being interviewed in the video below, and in my opinion it has completely turned on its head our entire understanding of the Japanese Zero:

  https://youtu.be/ApOfbxpL4Dg

   57:55: Useful intro to the discovery.

  At 59:07  "Intelligence reports assumed that these tactics indicated the Zero lacked maneuverability."
       59:22  "Judging from their apparently long fuselage, these planes do not have a small turning circle, and are not very maneuverable."
       59:33  "The Chinese report in question noted the reluctance of the Japanese Navy pilots to dogfight."
     1:00:05  "Chinese pilots report that the Japanese will not engage in a turning duel."
      1:01:32   "Accounts of Japanese hit and run tactics against the Allies are so numerous, we'd be here for days..."

  And, finally, my favourite of all of the quotes in this video, from a US Navy pilot on September 27, 1942:

  1:01:45  "Japanese Zero pilots have generally poor fighter tactics. Zeroes could not be shaken by us if they would chop their throttles and sit on our tails."

  Hit and run ("Chung-Ching" method), remained Japanese Navy doctrine for the entire War, not to mention that the Zero got its wingtips shortened in late 1942, which likely made its hit and run tactics even more prominent. Later models were less turn-fighting capable than the early full-span A6M2/3s, and were in fact nearly matched by the F6F, and probably out-turned by the FM-2.
   
   But if you still want to believe speed, and hit and run, were the kings of the WWII prop era, well...


   G.

 

[Gaston]

  P.S. And what about the P-47? At least for the Razorback version, that is probably the funniest question of them all. In the nearly 1000 8th Air Force combat reports I have read on the Mike Williams "WWII Aircraft Performance" site, the P-47D Razorback emerges as literally the most turn-fighting obsessed aircraft of WWII... It virtually does nothing else (not surprising, given it climbed so poorly, even with the paddle-blade prop), and it does seem to out-turn the Me-109G to the left by quite a margin, even at low altitudes. I think the real margin was actually much smaller, and maybe non-existent, if the Me-109G pilot knew enough to reduce the throttle (as Kyosti Karhila describes doing above). Remember, however, that reducing the throttle to turn better in combat was NOT part of the known physics of these things (it still isn't), and so it was not part of the training of fighter pilots. They were on their own to figure that one out. (I think the needle-tip prop of the P-47 Razorback might have had the same effect as down-throttling, because this slow-speed turn advantage -to the left- seems to disappear on the Bubbletop versions.) 

[GasTeddy]

Interesting. This Karhila's case was familiar for me and I have read Saburo Sakai's "Samurai', where he describes his flights and fights.

[FLS]

Hi Gaston,

Welcome back. 

You can study pilot accounts to learn what pilots believed.

You can study aerodynamics to learn how aircraft turn.

If you are over 'corner speed' you turn better when you slow down. It's not a mystery.

[Tig]

Oh my gosh, not this guy again...... 

Gaston, there's a saying on the internet for people like you- go touch some grass. If you clearly have nothing better to do than to type up page upon page of pointless conjecture on game forums, then I don't even know anymore.

Have fun losing all your energy in a dogfight. 

[Devil 505]

Is there a point to all this?

[Tig]

Is there a point to all this?

I guess it makes him less bored, he clearly has nothing else to do.

[morfiend]

Is there a point to all this?

Yes,a P51 turning at 160km will out turn a P51 at 320km…..now I didn’t mention the direction of turn cause well….

[Gaston]

  Another post I thought was worth sharing:

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  [q="Stiglr"]In the prop era, a "high speed dogfight" is a contradiction in terms.

And, when you do a different kind of research, you find that a very goodly percentage of kills came unseen by the victims. A VERY low chance that any of these kills were scored by guys trying to maintain corner velocity... no, they came from "boom and zoomers" and high speed passes from the clouds or out of the sun.

And finally in the European theatre, where the Germans had to defend against huge bomber boxes, speed was a HUGE weapon for them. You could not crawl up the back of a big formation of B-17s and survive. You HAD to make fast, slashing gun passes and/or head-on passes to try to thin the herd. You didn't try to "dogfight" bombers.[/q]

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  Maybe so, but the bombers still crawled at 170 mph for the B-17G, and the B-24 at 180-190 mph... The best approach was found to be a curving attack from the side, more so than high speed frontal attacks. Again, gun time on target was critical, so the "curve of pursuit" proved the best. My mother observed a B-17G being shot down at very low altitude over Ukraine (then Poland) in the Summer of 1944 (one of the shuttle raids participants that was headed for Russia), and it was being attacked from the sides, clearly in the "curve of pursuit" mode.

  As to the idea that the majority of victims never saw the attacker coming (in broad daylight), this largely emanates from a quote by Eric Hartmann who, from what I could gather, studiously avoided furballs whenever possible, and basically stalked damaged stragglers going home on their own, out of formation. This is how he could boast never to have lost a wingman. Like many high scoring aces (but not all), the point of the game appeared similar to those who loaf near the net in hockey, and happen to be just there to chuck it in...

  He did say he was not paid "to play" and turn-fight with the opposition, but there is a sense that a lot of his kills were done by waiting for the hard work to be done by less well-known pilots, then swooping in on smoking stragglers.

  The fact he was shot down 17 times, many, if not most of them from being hit by the debris of his targets, does not speak well to the ease of doing fatal kills on a fast-growing target... Again, the lack of "gun time" is very evident when the speeds are mismatching.

  From the thousands of combat reports I have read, only a small minority were fighter targets caught unaware... To take Pierre Clostermann and his "Le Grand Cirque" as an example, he does mention one or two fighters caught unaware, out of his 18 air to air kills.

  In those thousands of 8thAF P-47 and P-51 combat reports, the Me-109G appeared to have better situational awareness than the FW-190A, and seemed to almost never be caught unaware. My theory about that is that the Me-109's seating position was further back from its quite small windscreen, which encouraged looking out the sides rather than the front, and I think this actually caused the pilot to have broader and more frequent lateral sweep views through undistorting flat glass on its sides. On the P-51D and FW-190A, the pilots were scrunched up nearer to taller windscreens, whose sleek backward angle actually created a periscopic effect that gave a better, deeper forward view: This would have encouraged spending more time looking forward, and I think on the Me-109 the less forward pilot position helped to widen the angles and frequency of the lateral views... Another theory of mine is that the Me-109G had lower engine noise/vibration level compared to the FW-190A: The FW-190A was noisier and had more vibrations than most other WWII fighter types (widely commented on by Allied test pilots, but also some Germans), and this must have proved more distracting to the outward vision of new pilots... This is how much better visibility, in theory sitting on the ground, translate to a whole different world in actual practice...

  The P-51D was also pretty noisy, given the exhaust pipes high on the nose, and the continuously curved canopy always had reflections, sometimes "exploding" into a canopy-wide myriad of polishing swipe marks, when the sunlight hit just right... Again practice sometimes gave different results than theory.

  In many of the cases were the pilot is caught unaware, he was often busy shooting at a another target.

  Reading thousands of Western Front combat reports, you quickly realize the "caught unaware" situation is actually fairly uncommon, especially at high altitudes, where the visibility and condensation trails make this very unlikely... I would say 10-20% of kills overall, regardless of sides, would be exceedingly generous.

  I do not think Hartmann lied, but you have to be wary of the very peculiar Eastern Front context: Russian Lavochkin fighters had such poor canopy quality that up to the La-5FN (by far the majority of the production), they were always flown canopy open (also to let engine gases out)...

  Another incredible aspect of Russian fighters also contributed to the "legend" of "most kills" being "unaware": Most Russian fighters were equipped with radios that were only receivers(!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!).

  The flight leader had a radio that could both transmit and receive, and he ordered around up to 8 or 10 fighters which were all only equipped to receive!!! One of the more astounding facts of WWII... This was the rule in the VVS, not the exception.

  As one German pilot described: "It was like fighting an apparatus: You took out the tip of a V formation, and the rest flew about in confusion."

  You took out the leader, and all of a sudden the entire wing was without radio.... This amazing doctrine also held true for Soviet tank platoons, and for Soviet tanks this remained true all the way to the end of the Soviet Union in 1991: I spoke to a young Canadian tank crew in 2000 who told me this was still standard Soviet doctrine when he was serving in the early 90s.

  So that is how the "caught unaware" legend grew its wings...

  G

[FLS]

When you compare early war aircraft to late war aircraft by combat report you're also comparing early war pilots to late war pilots.

Russian pilots still fly by ground control with limited fuel. Not a high trust society.

[TequilaChaser]

Just learn  BFM, ACM AND all the aspects of Situational Awareness SA ......Then Train and train and train and never stop....even in the ma, you are basically practicing for All of the special events! Where all that training you've been doing really counts!

Train like you Fight, Fight like you Train! WORD!

[TequilaChaser]

I guess it makes him less bored, he clearly has nothing else to do.

Just wondering here,  but are you not the  new young 16 year old that just recently started playing and posting on this forum?

Gaston has not done anything wrong...just overlook his post, if you don't have a legitimate reason to reply 🙄

[Gaston]

This from another forum:

-------------------------------------------
Phil:
I think the bottom line is that you used whatever advantage the tactical scenario presented.   But at the end of the day, the best way to intercept anything is with an altitude advantage.  Boom and Zoom until you ran out of energy.  The USN in the pacific eschewed dogfighting as doctrine: Use Altitude, Us High Side or Overhead Runs on bombers and if in a dogfight, rely on deflection shooting and mutual beam defense.   I would hazard a guess that most fighter to fighter shoot downs in WWII were bounces, or from head on passes, or ambush. At least in the West/Pacific theater.   Not sure the Eastern Front, with a lot of lower altitude fighting is indicative of any broad based conclusions.  Sure if, your flying against inexperienced pilots then anything goes.  At the end of Guadacanal Campaign, "Indian Joe" Bauer I believe was said to say "When You See Zeros dogfight 'em!" as he noticed a decline in the quality of their adversaries. 

My 2 cents.

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  I saw that Joe Bauer quote too, and he is quoted saying that in the Osprey's "A6M2 Zero vs F4F Wildcat".

  The quote is from the very early F4F period... Later on, the Zero pilots probably finally learned to turn, but by then they had shorter wings... Same with Luftwaffe pilots, who by late 1944 turned a lot more, and yet lasted about the same with 10 times greater odds against them.

   As to the idea most WWII shootdowns were clean bounce kills, without at least two full circles of continuous turning, the whole point of my post was that this rarely happened, not much more than 10% of the time, if that, and this is after reading thousands of encounter reports.

   Even in the cases where kills happened without turning, it often took multiple passes to bring down a fighter, so the idea of an "unaware" target is rather unlikely. This is why hit and run was less efficient than turn fighting, because coming around from a distance, for multiple high speed passes, took more time than "sticking with it" for 3-8 circles, which is roughly 60 to 240 seconds.

  I know of at least two continuous turning, always to the same side, turn-fights that lasted 30 minutes (between a P-51D and Me-109G in both cases), inconclusive in both cases, and that works out to around 90-100 consecutive circles...

  6-10 circles dogfights (always without reversal) were much more common than Dive and Zoom passes, which were far too easy to break by turning, as the Ki-43 pilot describes.

  If you combine fighter targets caught unaware, and slowly crept up to from behind and below, with Dive and Zoom tactics from a higher speed, maybe you would get 20% of cases at best, and creeping up slowly from below would likely outnumber Dive and Zoom.

  In fact, repeated (or single) head-on attacks would probably match either.

[Gaston]

(continued)

  If I were to guess a breakdown for fighter to fighter WWII encounters, it would go as follows:

  1-Hit and run after diving from a higher altitude, multiple or single passes: 10%
 
  2-Creeping up slowly from behind and below: 10%

  3-Head-on or high angle opportunity passes, multiple or single: 20%

  4-Erratic maneuvers while both are diving after a near-mutual split-S (deep spirals included, often from one circle): 30%

  5-Multiple full circles horizontal turn fighting (including moderate spirals): 30%

  Hit and run may have had more attempts, but I am counting only the successes. If you add up all the spirals, it could easily be 60% turn fighting, but I wanted a more nuanced picture. With a few deeper spirals mixed in, 40% turn fighting would not be out of line. Much of the turn fighting starts with spirals and then ends up flat, but the majority of that 30% pure turn fighting would actually start fairly flat, as pilots were reluctant to go under the opponent, for obvious reasons.

  I wish I had rigorously tallied all the accounts as I read them (a tiresome eye-warering task), but, as you can see, the traditional bounce is a rare opportunity that pilots were unduly salivating over. Its actual effectiveness was largely a myth. Unless you were a Hans Joachim Marseille, a Douglas Bader, or you fired at nearly point-blank range (and then collided with pieces, as Eric Hartman), the guns were simply not good enough, although the actual engines were quite sensitive to direct hits, being under reciprocal stress.

  Unless directly hitting the engine, or the wing spar under turning stress, the guns were surprisingly weak, as the airframe had a lot of surface, and especially a lot redundant strength for fighters.

  G.

[nopoop]

Good info. Thanks