a lightweight discussion of WW2 aerial ops and the like

this is a long , boring and probably senseless thread by r16 . Consider yourself warned .


edit on 23/01/2012: well known that ı can royally clutter threads , ı thought ı would be better to bump my thread only to save space on other places . There is probably some vanity as well . Today's posts are about early development of some WW2 fighter types .

to avoid excessive clutter of the mother thread .

ı chanced upon a PDF file on the Lend Lease fighters and their service in Russia . One thing that gets repeated for every type is the clear vision provided by the Western canopies . Meaning the Lend Lease fighters could be flown with the hood closed ; considering Russians are humans just like all of us and they get cold too this is something in the comfort scales . As Russian engines were behind compared to world standarts in many cases the aircraft designers had to to cut down fuselage size and the bigger Western cockpits are second on the comfort list , which would have been an even greater concern had Russians been flying long range missions .

then of course it is the radios , of excellent quality and in every fighter , compared to one in third in Russian production . An experienced pilot remarked a radio was a second set of eyes for a pilot and in the confused fighting of the WW2 the capability of giving and receiving warnings about the enemy was of paramount importance . One must again remark the optically superior Western canopies would have been really important in visual searches .

of the types Hurricanes get knocked a lot . There have been pilots who would favour the I-16 over the British type , while it is said to be better than the Lagg-3 . P-40 pilots on the hand rated their mounts differently : in mathematical terms it was P-40 > Lagg-3 > Hurricane > I-16. The Hawks had "outstanding" range and were immensely strong , one pilot rammed a Me-110 and a 109 on the same sortie . Though the P-40 apparently was not a cold weather friend . In the winter of 1941 Russian mechanics are reported to be searching for silver spoons in local villages to repair cracked radiators . Now that English is a second language to me and ı had always assumed silver spoons were a sign of real affluent life , those Russians in the search must have had a hard time . Indeed all those thousands of Lend Lease aircraft seem to be poorly supplied spares wise .

then it is the turn of the P-39 , and it is a jaw dropping moment for this poster to read that they were first line fighter equipment in 1945 , Pokryshkin the Russain ace flying from an autobahn in Germany and it is the same machine he has since 1943 . But wait he has been offered never Russian planes and he has enough clout to refuse it . Remember the Russian airfields are supposed to be poor grass strips and nothing else .While P-39 was the first fighter in the world to have the now standart tricycle landing gear . And one also reads P-39 could fly the Alaska route for delivery , something the P-40 was advised not to . This adaptability to harsh life on the steppes must a reason for the longevity of the P-39 . Western accounts of it are unanimiously horrible as far as ı have seen . Considering the Russians took 3000 meters as an acceptable ceiling it would perform creditably enough and obviously did not develop the hiccups it would in a Western setting . Washington emasculating anything that stood in the way of the P-38 has long been a pet theory of mine and disregarded as long . It is not a sinister move , a kick below the belt , against the F-35 . Lockmart should have never got it in the first place 'cause of what they did with the forked tail .

regarding the P-63 it seems ı have been disproven as no P-63 made it to the front with deliveries starting in June 44 as the transit route took sooo long . Whatever . Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof , ı have learned on my sojourns on the net .

though American intel jumped up and down with black 63s in Korea , how they did see 'em as Russians certainly didn't is yet another Cold War mystery .

with these 4 major types we see Lend Lease types were a major part in the Red Air Force . Though what extent is indeed debateable . Indeed with maybe 100 in the firing line in 1945 out of 2400 the P-63 should be discounted from the war with Germany . Maybe for the duration . So from approximately 14000 fighter aircraft 16 % missed part of the war under discussion . As 70% of the Spitfires were in existance in PVO regiments at the end of the war one can surmise they weren't that much active . As the corresponding Hurricane ratio was 25% and it was 37% for the P-40s . All the types were rapidly taken out of service at the end of the war . A major point for the essentiatility of the Lend Lease planes has been the higher proportion of their use in the PVO , explained as they were more capable bomber destroyers and the drawdown would indicate a problem . ı would hazard He-111s and B-29 were quite different animals . With Yak-9U / P in improved subversions on the way in the Lend Lease types would be a drag on the resources . As every anti-Communist knows "the war" didn't end in 1945 .

there were of course more worthy contenders in the Lend Lease contingent . That could have survived post war . The Spitfire as already mentioned and the Thunderbolt but they definately didn't cut the grade in Russian eyes . Russians had actually wanted the Spits instead of Hurris . They got MkVs in 1943 when the 109F that was outclassing the British mark in 1941 had already disappeared from the Luftwaffe ranks and MkIXs had to compete with more modern Russian types . Thunderbolt was on the hand was a political liability , designed by Alexander Kartveli an escapee from the clutches of the Bolshevik revolution . It was totally disparaged from the start . A test report had it that " the P-47 is not a fighter . It is bigger and heavier than our standart frontal bomber [the Pe-2] and has a longer range. It carries more bombs and is more heavily armed ." Designers were involved as well . Yakovlev added the Hellcat to the pot and declared the R-2800 powered duo were not fighters . Strangely enough ı haven't seen anything bad from Russian sources against the Corsair , likewise engined and designed by Igor Sikorsky . The guys probably needed new contracts after the war , as the P-47 would have made a hell of a threat for the B-29s with some tweaking after reverse engineered like the trio of B-29s that strayed into Siberia .

so if we remove the Lend Lease planes do the Russians loose air superiority on the front ? And the war ?

the point seems to be Luftwaffe was still active in the East to the end . Russian reports are so fulsome of the Fw-190Fs that outran anybody in the air at zero altitude . Some German posters on other forums have talked of how Jagdwaffe would clear the skies of Reds whenever they wanted . ı would doubt it as ı remember reading somewhere how the 30 to 40 strong escort to Hanna Reich on her way to Berlin dwindled to 10 or so in so many minutes . So how ? First thing would be altitude advantage for the Germans in the East as preferences from the very beginning ensured that would be so . Meaning the German pilot on the East could choose easier pickings , meanwhile in the West he would be the picking . Not enough has been said on the failure of German aeroengine companies .

since Russians did not have the Enigma Germans could succesfully concentrate at times . In this context the promised German air cover for the Mortain assault in August 1944 was intercepted by the Allies 300 kilometers from the battle area . That the West could send 14 000 aircraft to the Russians also show they had aircraft to spare . And as the majority of Wehrmacht was fighting in the East , those units assigned to Army support would be also in the East and Russian columns poorly defended flakwise gave more chance to be effective . That Russians were far more successful in operations actually meant their troops would outrun airdefence units and aircover itself more often .

so we might , just might say air superiority on the Eastern European front was not that clearcut .

air superiority in the West would have meant a lot for the opportunities for the Germans to achieve it in the East . That they were trounced in the West is beyond dispute . "How ?" is the thing to discuss .

first step is the high grade fuel . Bill Gunston an iconic aviation writer famous for his attitude that if something was not invented by the British then it was not invented concedes it was pioneered by the Americans into service . But then the flow of the thread leads to a suggestion that the Allied air offensive was a coherent attempt to fight Germans instead of a glorified cover for outright murder of civilians in the name of the new religion of air power . You know the prolonged resistance against a statue of Bomber Harris was also because he practically had his men murdered too .

it is beyond dispute that the Bomber Offensive did hurt Germans militarily , it is below dignity and honesty to deny there were nearly equal ratios of men with honour on every side of the battlelines that would fight as men and not as murderers .

also undeniable there was an acute shortage of fuel , especially to the end . A German fighter pilot was sitting on alert and he was so bored that he didn't pay enough attention . So when a green flare was mistakenly fired from the nearby unit , he thought it was a real scramble and immediately took off with his wingman . They stayed in the air for 5 minutes . And for this waste of 10 minutes worth of fuel he was court martialled . By a judge who flew in a Ju-52 . Probably burning six times the fuel in the process . The crushing Soviet attacks of January 1945 are kinda dismissed by German generals who survived it , their claim being they didn't have fuel for their 1000 tanks and Russians simply conducted the operation as if it was a peacetime maneouvre.

( am an idiot as it is well known , couldn't use an external host so had to divide the post to have the picture in the middle )

the picture here shows II/JG 301 in action in early 1945 , the plane is a two seater 190 trainer . The unit is mentioned in the Ellis book on page 208 with the remark that "... getting fuel 'was not so much a logistics operation , more an Intelligence battle" . The officer responsible "would send his tankers on circuitous journeys , picking up 200 gallons in one place , 500 gallons at another ; sometimes it might take as long as a week to merely collect the twenty tons of fuel needed for a single operation by the Gruppe . The unit made the most stringent efforts to save fuel , using teams of horses or oxen to drag the fighters from their scattered dispersal points to the take off point "

still ı would take issue with the notion that it was not attrition . The bomber boxes of USAAF were meant to attrite the enemy interceptor force as much as they were meant to deliver precision attacks . While the need the keep the formation would have dispersed the bombs to decrease the overall accuracy the claimed capability of the "supersecret" Norden bombsight to hit solitary barrels would have allowed one bomber to hit the vitals . Daylight attacks by bomber boxes in the age of radar was an open invitation to the defence to come up and fight . Because if not the said daylight and the resulting accuracy from it would have meant eventual sapping and destruction of the defence , and final damnation of the civilian population from the air . Defence had to react . In the case of US versus Germany it meant 15 Flying Fortresses delivered daily had to be destroyed daily by the Germans .

the clay pigeon aspect of the American bombers is a notion that ı owe to the Brute Force by John Ellis . ı understand he was singled out on the net for being anti-American for his books that implied the US Army didn't measure up to the Germans . The one book , the thick tome ı mention right here says nothing of the sort though , sparing nobody . It was spectacular for me when ı read it first in the early 90s . It still is , to a degree , only because ı been through it lots of time , am truly accustomed to it . Now on page 200 it says "For precision bombing began to be used in a rather odd way , not as a direct attempt to disrupt some vital component of the German war machine but as a threat of such disruption , to which the Germans would have to respond . " [Emphasis by the Author]

americans were outproducing the Germans .Combined with RAF city busting they would eventually tie 500 000 Germans to Flak defences . And they were attacking here and there without any specific concentration which dispersed German defences , attracting more and more German fighters to the defence of the homeland . Of course there are periods of concentration later in the war when there were enough escort fighters meaning 1944 and on . Although then the things had changed by the presence of the said escorts . The idea was now attracting the German fighter force to the bombers so that they could be shot down by the escorts . Since they could hit things by the sheer number of bombs they were dropping they had to be countered . And since the bombers had to be destroyed no matter what , Germans banned fighting the USAAF escorts so that less steely German pilots could not avoid running the gauntlet of defensive .50 caliber fire from the bomber train by getting "entangled with the American fighters" . Yes , this was an order that was in effect for a while . "So strictly was it enforced , in fact , that American fighters were granted virtual immunity from attack . [ A German fighter unit commander that was captured in the summer of 1944 ] commented bitterly that ' the safest flying that was ever possible was that of an American fighter over Germany' " The sentence is supposed to be on Page 14 of the Strategic Bomber Survey , The Defeat of the German Air Force , 1947 .

and while ı am not questioning the valour or the skills of the American fighter pilots , actually they did not break the Germans in the air with dogfights . It was rather the airfield attacks that debiliated the Jagdwaffe . Americans were destroying thousands of German planes on the ground .One factory is reported on page 199 to have lost 908 out of the 1000 planes it produced in a given period on the company airstrip . Sure it was hard on the American fighters flying through all the light flak the Germans could throw up and USAAF High Command solved this through the vanity of the fighter pilot . It was only in the 8th Air Force that ranged deep into Germany in escort of the Heavies that ground victories were counted ; people would do anything to prove they were not lesser compared to the next guy . One must remember those were 20 to 25 year old captains and majors in the fighter cockpits , they would want their deeds noticed . Americans could absorb the losses , Germans did not .

this post argues a major reason for German defeat in the WW2 is that they failed to match the US Fighter Offensive . With numbers and tech . Considering they had experienced the Battle of Britain where their own fighter force failed to do what was expected of it , it becomes an even greater surprise they lost a year in fielding the Long Nose 190 . The Jumo 213 has been reported as ready from 1941 , 190Ds could be in widespread service easily in 1943 , but then Kurt Tank could not dare to challenge the establishment with moving against Daimler Benz and its agreed monopoly on fighter engines . Again . Considering the reputation the Dora has in the fighting of the late war period , it becomes quite a counter factual to see what would have happened if the Germans had managed to hold the fort with it until the jets were available . With pilots . You know it is said jet fuel was never in jeopardy in real life , there wasn't fuel for fuel tankers to deliver the jet fuel to the airfields . The most modern aviation products of the day were towed to and from the runways with teams of oxen for conservation . As already shown with older planes .

disregarding that Germans could have still done better . If they had pilots . Oil difficulties enter the picture in a big way as there was a war going on and training facilities suffered with supplies diverted to operational units , though the point for the mother thread it was so long before Allied bombs started to fall on oil targets . Training was always a weak spot of Luftwaffe right from its inception as an instrument of bluff . And the wastage of combat pilots meant the training had to be rushed cutting the quality and resulting in a vicious circle . Lesser training meant more losses in combat and more accidents that knocked out planes and pilots .All increasing the pressure on training units to deliver still more unprepared pilots .

the records say in June 1944 about 3000 planes were destroyed or seriously damaged in accidents compared to 1476 lost in action . It is said it was a good time for safety officers as the accident rate went down compared to preceeding period . The reason seemed to be "that Allied fighters were shooting down German aircraft faster than their pilots could crash them."

and it is the unprepared pilots that hobbled the spectacular performance of the experten , those hardened pilots with vast experience . Though it does not prove the superiority of the Aryan warrior , afterall had there been any sensible pilot training programme on part of the Germans , those experten would have no need for that much fighting and gain that "much" experience . Whatever it is Germans needed thousands of fighters to match the thousands of fighters the Americans were throwing into the battle . The vaunted production increase in 1944 didn't mean that much when 25% of the planes crashed on their delivery flights to the fronts . And it is seriously late in the game to have such spectacular feats . It was proposed to produce 1000 fighters a month at the end of 1941 . And it was declined as ı understand 360 would be totally enough to cover the the losses and the expansion as only 170 crews per month could be trained .

the WW2 was a team effort . When a German fighter Geschwader celebrated its thousandth kill on the Russian Air Force , at a glorious exchange ratio of say ten to one , it also meant it had been in effect completely shot down in the process . It was a contribution to the success of the B-17s and Mustangs as much as the USAAF efforts to help the Reds . Or when Hitler told another Adolf , Galland the General of the Fighters that he would disband 50 army divisions for the benefit of the Luftwaffe and the aviation industry once Stalingrad campaign was rounded up and Russians were immobilized due lack of fuel or whatever to face the inevitable American air raids it certainly didn't help the German cause that the Russians did the disbanding themselves . It is indeed foolish to suggest that Germans lost 36% of their fighter pilots in the first 4 months of Barbarossa and that could somehow influence the battle over Germany in any way . Even weirder than French claims on how they won the Battle of Britain by getting invaded and dive bombed into bits . Foolish just like the British claims that they shot down so many German aircraft in the glorious sunshine of 1940 that Germans failed to conquer the primitive helpless vastness that was Russia . Opps , wait , the last one is established history .

This will turn into a diatribe against " industry" everywhere. This is part one on the tanks .

so how did all those countries starting with the same tank tech end up so different in 1940 - 45 ?

the inventors, the British had the best of muck-ups , as it seems . The tank was either a career opportunity or a career threat ; all the debates were conducted under this guiding light . Everybody had his vision and worked real hard to torpedo others' . In the end the highly influential Fuller resigned to lead a fascist party ; if not the army then the country. The rest had to compromise , to the benefit of every career .

as they had long championed the superiority of machine over muscle in a very "clear" manner , the champions of armour could not bring themselves to cooperate with infantry . Meaning ? To be viable against the "vermin" who would rise up from ambush positions to attack His Majesty's tanks with hand grenades and Molotovs , the early British tanks had far too many machine guns whose operators took so much space in the limited volume of the tank . And this was just the beginning . Even more serious armament-wise was the explicit need to avoid entangling with the artillery branch , resulting in the tiniest practicable gun on nearly the entire prewar British production , the otherwise excellent 2 pounder . Which was never supplied with HE , even in the dark days of 1941-42 with Rommel at the gates of Suez ...

if this is not a misspelling of the word , the aristocracy also needed a kow tow . In the end the overriding need for acknowledging the higher classes was realized with three seperate tank classes in British service . Light tanks for reconnaissance was a fixture everywhere , Cavalry would reform on the cruisers when they decided to reform ! Cruisers were meant to be fast and suitable for independent action , away from the plodding infantry who were also given their own special class . Which indirectly led to futher fails . Infantry tanks were specifically designed to be no faster than a marching man , they didn't demand high powered engines . Since light tanks were cars on tracks in practical terms , this meant industrial concerns left the cruisers on a limb.
little production runs mean less profits for industry . And high powered tank engine development programmes would not exactly find favour , considering the derated Liberty was already in existance . For all the rest commercial engines would have to make do .

result : The British could easily have had 6 pounder armed , 50mm and over armoured Cromwells in action in May 1940 , and plenty of them too . As the lineal ancestor , Crusader dates back from 1937 as a heavy cruiser . ( And the first thing it needed was a better engine .)

scoff much do not . ı know life is not a Civ game when you start rushing out tanks immediately after discovering Automobiles ( I ) or Motorized Transport ( III ) . The second case would also require iron and oil in the resource box afterall . The Crusader had lots mechanical problems , but with experience they were solved . To gain experience one can test and to test you need test articles . And who is to blame for that ? How about Neville Chamberlain who as the treasury guy refused to pay for tank development as it would have hastened a Continental deployment for the British Army which in the end might have deterred the Nazi Germany from adventures somewhere to the East ? Forget this as soon as practicable , it is random r16 gibberish .

cromwell or Crusader as it would be more historic in this juncture is a cousin of the T-34 and might have been as good / effective had it a proper engine ; might have even saved France .

because one of the biggest French failures in the prewar period was presuming the WW1 deal whereby they would concentrate on light tanks for quantity and the British would produce the heavies as quality was still in effect . The "colossal blunder" , the Maginot Line , would realise its mission of blocking the Southern approaches and freeing the French Army to advance from environs of Köln to Hannover to Berlin , arm in arm with the British Army . As soon as Germans started the West Wall that 1921 relic , Char B1 , was put in production to breach it and the French actually came up with panzer divisions of their own and equipped them with the Somua which happens to be the best balanced tank of the fighting of 1940 . The Allies of that campaign are always presented as myopic idiots ; can't understand it . Maybe because ı have been diagnosed as heavily myopic for the last 32 years and am an established idiot .

what the British is supposed to do here is what they did in Arras , giving a bloody nose to Rommel and the SS merrily running around Had there been ,say, ten times the number of Matilda IIs instead of the puny 23 , they could keep on doing it too . Yet the presence of those 23 in France is a success story in itself . There was a monopoly situation in tank development in the UK and the designers had to use cast armour for being proofed against the 50/60 [ Pak38 or KwK 39 ] some Germans were earnestly working to deploy . Because there wasn't much industrial capacity and big firms had priority , the work had to be taken to inexperienced civilian companies .

indeed the demonstrated French production of thousands of light tanks was not matched with open or secret development of heavy tanks across the Channel . Or at least deployment . Since Matilda II can be proven to date back to 1932 .

result : well , the ways of Anglosaxons surely benefit Anglosaxons in the end , for partners the results are always debateable

americans didn't need tanks until the British told them they could need tanks now .

the celebrated American factories were desireable though , especially to cut down the greed of the home producers . To cut the expense Americans were offered licence production of Western European wares which they refused . Despite the fact that they didn't have much to offer at the time . The important thing was mass production methods were now to be employed , a huge fact that turned the WW2 around . The production line concept cut the costs , increased production and increased the delivery speed . One thing was that you weren't supposed to mess with it when it was on . The M3 Grant / Lee had a tall structure because there wasn't much time to come up with a larger turret ring considering the British Army had to leave Europe in a hurry and American industry needed to use the French 75 for some obscure reason whereever remotely practicable . It was then replaced with the M4 Sherman and mass production meant it had to remain tall . Since overseas transport requirements had already placed a limit on weight the higher volume of the Sherman was protected by comparatively thinner armour and the finely balanced warmachine of 1942 was not a particularly desirable vehicle to be in when the second generation German tanks , tempered by the shocks of the steppes of Russia, were prowling around .

ı can say with unprovable accuracy that one Char B1 was penetrated left to right or vice versa in 1940 yet it seems quite unprobable to me but it is in the books that Tank Commander Sergeant Harold S. Rathburn described the Sherman's lack of effective armor protection in a wartime report: In one tank battle, our M4 was hit in the front by an AP shell from a Mark VI." [Tiger I] It went in the front and came out the rear. " Unless he is talking about the turret . Or "This has been denied, explained away and hushed up, but the men who are fighting our tanks against much heavier, better-armored and more powerfully armed German monsters know the truth. It is high time that Congress got to the bottom of a situation that does no credit to the War Department. This does not mean that our tanks are bad. They are not; they are good. They are the best tanks in the world—next to the Germans'." as declared by the New York Times in January 1945 .

american experience of WW2 has been described in business terms . Because it had worked at the Great War , Americans had confidence in the system that called for a surge of effort to crush the opposition . Yet since the American industry failed to keep up with the expansion of the American Army in 1917 the new situation asked for the satisfaction of the supply question . It is clear that Americans started building up their factories first so that when the demand came they would be ready . This Lend Lease thing is something very useful to justify -even finance - all those factories that were built up from ground up . Pearl Harbour is an accident ; not the thing ı generally say but let's keep this amicable . And many historians will suggest the end user was not much cared about

"The Americans were brave enough , their welfare arrangements and military equipment excellent , but they had a far more 'industrialized' attitude towards war [than the British] , demanding maximum output and treating their troops as if they were a labour force ... [They] had no tactics as such at all , but bashed and battered their way along , using their splendid technology to provide fire-power in a manner reminiscent of the British in 1916 and 1917 " says a British staff officer who was over there as a liaison . He also noted that there were problems . Quoting from one of two books ı have in hardcopy on armour :

"Even the excellence of American equipment ... suffered from the need for mass production on such a scale . [He] was alarmed a the reluctance to make small changes in tanks to make them easier and safer to use in battle :

Ordnance diffidence in the face of these demands appeared to be motivated by the fact that any modification would upset the output of complete vehicles . The new Chief of Ordnance , General Levin Campbell , had presumably given a promise to get out tanks in the number asked by the President and had impressed on his underlings that it was do or die . The impression was that their very promotion depended on turning out the promised tanks ."


the "incredible" thing here would be the lack of tactics allegation , as if the Americans were in some sort Red Army that sent wave after wave of troops and tanks to crush to opposition . And the line coming from an Englishman is also something , as if Montgomery was , again , some unimaginative Red Army general .

result : there wouldn't be much love between me and the US industry or what ?

would the allies act to save Poland?

the Allies had no intention of harassing the Germans seriously in 1939 . A discussion of their capability to do so might follow but let's keep to intentions . The Western superiority in Economics is impossible to deny , they had far higher potential to conduct a prolonged campaign and they had every intention of doing so . ı have read the French planned to conduct a general offensive in 1942 after a suitable industrial build up with funds divided into 4 parts , each to be allocated to a particular year . Until then there was no need to get into hasty scrapes . Even the Allied invasion of Norway , as it really/seriously is , was meant to surround Germany on one more direction and limit its buildup until the decisive fight , who knew even Sweden could be induced to joın the fight as Baltic would provide a barrier against the no doubt proficient German land power . If not Swedish iron ore could be still be effectively interdicted from bases in Norway ; in case they had a viable alternative to Narvik . In any case the U-bootwaffe , the one risk to Britain and to a limited extent France would be suffocated in the limited area of North Sea , no doubt by the help of a Roosevelt type mine belt to be established .

one should not attribute too much wisdom to this , it is rather economic motives . America was once again expected to come to the rescue and now that they had given much trouble after the First World War there were some careful considerations . American manpower was not exactly necessary as they would demand some more economic compensation in the end though finance was targeted . America was to be the arsenal of democracy yet not of its own produce . French and British tanks were supposed to be built in the States , aviation was iffy since Americans were already ahead in a few key areas . Allies chose their what they would import from the States carefuly so that they could build up their friends in the to be booming American industry . That their efforts paid off in later years , in a fashion , to crush the Germans in a deluge of industrial output is of course undeniable ; but the point is the Western Europeans were off the mark in their bid to design the post war American industry , it failed . Of course they had their friends profiting massively , they still have .

case in point : The P-51 was the fighter plane nobody wanted , though North American made a conclusive case of being a big name in the industry by producing it , instead of licence building the P-40 from Curtiss . RAF bigwigs definitely had no desire for it , a very questionable r16 statement , until Wehrmacht kicked them out of Europe . In the USAAC / USAAF it was first pushed to become a dive bomber , a line of duty American Army Air bigwigs shunned by all means . Only when it became clear that unescorted bombers were in danger of real casualties ( and the choice as the P-38 was about to get its bottoms really kicked by the capable Luftwaffe) the Mustang was called to the colours to do its thing , even before Schweinfurth and all .

in such things one finds the roots for the betrayal of the Poles , Germans had crushed far too many WW1 attacks . They had to be starved first . Even when the majority of the Wehrmacht was busy in Poland the only effort was , how to put it , miniscule . This was once conveyed to the Poles when they themselves betrayed the Czechs , their retort was that even when facing Germany alone their cavalry would be in Berlin in a month . It was then a history lesson of how the winged hussars had saved Vienna and some serious enjoyment at the answer of "Godspeed" , harshness of which was attributed to jealousy or whatever . Don't look for it in history , it is simply an r16 thing.

allies as of May 9th didn't care much about the war , theirs was a business plan .

a short examination of Panzers part 1

uninterrupted strategic vision is a nice thing and Germans claim much of it by their invention of the Blitzkrieg . Without much credibility if one has ever granted any kind of credibility to r16 .

it is true that they combined their long standing operational concepts with passable equipment to win some outstanding success , of which one or two definitely changed the world . Yet theirs was business too . There is this conception that especially the early Panzers were the product of a refined thinking process , where people like Guderian foresaw anything but they were let down in the end by the whims of Hitler . Not exactly so .

the PzKW I , regularly presented as a training tank pressed into combat duty due to production bottlenecks for larger vehicles , is a then fashionable tankette and falls rather short in armament if compared to some of its equivalents . Yet it was effectively used where and when anti-tank means were lacking . The PzKw II was a good recon machine and large enough to be modified into platforms for high caliber weapons , though its place in the German Army was more as a tankette killer .

things get a bit complicated here . Field guns were a dire direct-fire threat against armoured vehicles from day one and Germans having invented the use of field artillery as anti tank batteries were right to demand a mobile 360 degree HE capability , a field gun on tracks , to engage enemy artillery . Also useful against purpose designed anti-tank guns . The PzKw IV was exactly this , throwing Daimler Benz the to be builders of the PzKw III into a dilemma . If they built their battletank as wanted by the Wehrmacht , they would be cut out from further contracts when "something" happened . So they enlarged the vehicle to PzKw IV size , and the III in its N subtype actually fielded the same specified 75/24 cannon to replace the IV as the fire support vehicle in Tiger battalions from 1943 . Otherwise the III was "too much " tank for the job ; PzKw 38(t) did what the early IIIs did at half the weight , and cost .

yes , this post is building up as an anti-Guderian memo . Since his post-war publications make quite an unrefutable claim that everything in the Panzerwaffe was developed logically , with typical German efficiency and farsight . Until Hitler came up and messed up everything . Yeah , whatever . The 360 degree HE mission required spotting of low lying anti-tank guns and various weapons waiting in ambush . Tests in Russia showed the tank commander was better of with uninterrupted visibility and as high as possible , meaning the IV got its 3 man turret , the commander's position newly added .

since "something" would happen , the Daimler Benz engineers added the said large turret to their design , so that they could remain in tank production . "Business" tends to be bad , though in this case it wasn't as clearcut as in many other examples . Germany fielded two seperate vehicles which were quite the same ; there was a mid-war attempt to rationalize industrial output and spares situation by producing a hybrid chassis to be used as the SPG platform . On the other hand the PzKw III won the victories that took the Germans from the shores of Atlantic to within sight of Moscow , helped greatly by the 3 man turret . And the chassis stayed in action until the very end as the basis of assault gun series . Russians copied the concept to turn , ı hear , up to 1200 Panzers they captured in battle into 76mm armed assault guns of their own .

the IV already mentioned a few times in this post was slightly larger than the III it influenced , which enabled it to become the battletank when its size allowed to carry long barreled 75mm guns to deal with the new Russian tanks . As such it was gainfully employed by the Germans until the end of the war , you can read many positive things about this tank . Tough by 1945 its main asset was probably its thin bazooka plates which made it to look like a Tiger from a distance . The latter's reputation was great and it was handled with care . Might have saved a few IV crews .

yet the PzKw VI started as a IV , 50 percent heavier with about 100 percent thicker armour .in rough terms . Designed to withstand heavy fire in breakthrough battles it wasn't as important as the first four types discussed here . And why ? Politics ...

a short examination of Panzers part 2

ı won't be exactly original to claim the primary reason for the early successes of Germans in WW2 tank fighting compared to anybody else is the Treaty of Versailles ; there wasn't much of a German Army for tank propagandists to steal . Which meant as the new forces were being build up the new generation and the traditionalists could comprimise on a clean paper , with a comparatively clear conscience . Allied theorists on the other hand shot themselves in the foot by claiming too many things for mechanized warfare . Class differences exist in military mind . The majority of Allied soldiers in 1940 were conditioned to ignore the tank as a war winning weapon , because their trainers saw the discussions on such matters as a threat to their careers . In such conditions the Panzers were a mental shock .

and it is not exactly limited to that year . A decade later in Korea American Army soldiers were in awe of the Russian build tanks of the North Koreans , since they believed their bazookas were useless . Never minding the said weapons had easily knocked out Tigers and Panthers , even more impressive beasts compared to T-34/85 and JS-2s . It reached such proportions that a high ranking Army General wrote a letter to USMC to "learn" how they were killing the enemy tanks with their presumably ineffective weapons . The funny thing is of course that General Collins had proposed to abolish the Marines in 1947 .

it has been noted those French troops in Dunquerke fought better , presumably because the mighty Royal Navy would save them . Rather it was the restricted size of the area that prohibited German maneouvring , troops that saw their puny anti-tank guns could defeat the equally puny Panzers were quickly transformed . It wasn't as quick for the far more "dependable Jock" . The British now kind of idolized tanks and went to North Africa with the conviction of the newly converted . No doubt aided by the easy victory of O'Connor over the Italians , they were to be much abused by Rommel's AfricaKorps who fought as an all arms team . It took a long time and quite a few reverses for the British to appoint Montgomery to command who was such a thick headed individual that he ignored the new religion immediately and completely ; hencefort he fought the WW1 again . It doesn't come odd to me that the image that represents the British accomplishment in North Africa in my mind is the picture where bayonet armed troops make prisoners of German tank crews .

returning to Panzers the all arms concept was the centerpiece of the German comprimise . Infantry would make the breakthrough , the Panzer divisions would do the exploitation . Meaning a breakthrough tank would not be so popular as it was about to marginalize the infantry . Though when there were enough panzer divisions , a critical mass if you will , things would change . By 1940 the Panzer commanders had already managed to corner all armour under their command , leaving nothing for the support of infantry . They got to kinda regret it as the artillery branch saw an opening and invented the assault guns . The chosen chassis , as it shouldn't come as a surprise , was the PzKw III .

students of WW2 will remember one of the priorities of Guderian when he was reinstated was to abolish the artillery use of "tanks" . He seems to this poster as a much gifted politician of military affairs on the same level as he was a general on the battlefield . And there is much reference around to the deal he made with Liddle Hart , an equally famous theorician on the British side . Guderian implied the German experts had taken much interest in the writings of British Young Turks as exemplified by Liddle Hart while developing Blitzkrieg and got some serious support against charges of war crimes in return . He was also the first to go into print postwar where he could serve the new realities of the Iron Curtain . Mighty German warmachine designed by genius and hobbled by Hitler so that it lost to the hordes of Asians .

it doesn't much serve the interests of such vision then that PzKw VI followed IV into action and preceded the V . Yeah the Panther we all love , loathe or don't care at all for has a lower number than the boxy Tiger . Could it because the brilliant vision of a multiturret panzer that could do it all , capable of defending itself from all angles so that there would be no need for the PanzerGrenadiers - an invention of formation that make the Germans justifiably proud - that actually saw combat or at least was deployed to Norway was in the cards and quickly shown to be ineffective ? This V for Fünf is a "mystery" , the "something" of the preceding post , that causes much interest to mentally unstable of my kind . What was it before it became the SdKfz 171 with MAN's proposal beating Daimler Benz offer of 75/70 on a T-34 chassis ? Surely the signal for the beginning of an all-tank German Army , eh ?

naturally odd that Civ III honours the T-34 as the "Panzer" ...

one could probably refer to Wikipedia , it probably has the numbers but ı gather on the 10th of May 1940 , 2750 Luftwaffe planes faced 2200 Allied . If the quite spectacular defensive RAF assets had been used , the Allies would probably have numerical superiority . Will base this post on the fighters and sources ı have say there were 860 Bf-109s and 350 of '110s . Will omit Dutch and Belgian airforces as destroyed on the ground . Meaning there were about 100 RAF fighters and 850 French types of which 580 were serviceable . Bombers are of course very important , as the modern saying goes Fighter pilots make movies , bombers make history . Yet even in 1940 the modern fighters of the day would overhelm their bomber opponents in short order , if they weren't engaged and distracted by enemy fighters .

time to add some more numbers . Naturally the numbers did not remain steady war entailing loss and a lot if yet the factories were working ; by frantic effort the French actually increased the number of their modern fighter types by the end of fighting . And American production had gone into "high gear" , French ordering thousands of combat planes . Something weird then ... These new numbers are from an official USAF study in 1971 , at a time they had clearly failed to defeat the Vietnamese . Rosy memories of defeating the Luftwaffe , crushing the Japanese and the glorious successes against the MiGs over Korea were so fresh , yet the fabulous Phantoms were quite ineffective against the newer MiGs , of which the 17 was just a rehashed version of the Korean veterans and the 21 , a poor weapons platform . Kill ratios had dropped considerably from the highs of WW2 and Korea , it was all gloom and doom for future . So the experts delved into history and came up with a polished version of it , the Air force had actually shot down 7 MiGs for each Sabre in air combat between 1950-53 , not 14 , so critics better quit bugging 'em .

anyhow they also examined other battles and found out that in the early part of the fighting until the clashes over Dunquerke 262 Allied fighters were shot down by the Germans against a loss of 128 of their own in air to air combat . The number of "fighter only" sorties flown : 21000 Luftwaffe to 4480 Allied . Over 15 days which should mean every Luftwaffe fighter plane averaged 1.15 sorties daily to 0.44 Allied . Seems hardly a devastating tempo ...

yeah , the Allies were losing their airfields as the Wehrmacht advanced and had to relocate , to retreat . Though that fact also means the Germans were also relocating their landing grounds to remain relevant to the battle , Luftwaffe was advancing on the ground .

working with the self invented sorties divided to plane number in the beginning result divided to lenght of campaign thingy and arbitrary choices for the Battle of Britain give a German ratio of 0.29 to a neat RAF result of 0.37 . For fighters only as there were many Luftwaffe bombers in the air , it probably shows defence is supposed to exert itself .

it would be a shame to suggest that France was not defended . Afterall the casualties from all causes to Luftwaffe Bf-109s by the time France was knocked out of war amount to 35% of the numbers that started the war . It turns out be 53% for the 110s , 43% for dive bombers and fully 58% for bombers . Yet ...

fully a quarter of all German losses in May-June 1940 happened over the beaches of Dunquerke when RAF fully equal in tech , and kind of numbers went in for real . Anglosaxons this , Anglosaxons that , but they fight real good , when they run out of Allies to fight and take the brunt for them . Meaning 240 German planes went down over that single port city and a dive bomber / bomber unit recorded more losses in a single day that it had taken in the previous 10 days manhandling the Allied armies from here to there .

when war plans are overshadowed by business plans such things happen , with frightening regularity , that nobody ever notices

the British view of fighters was par the course for Douhetian theses , not really relevant to the conduct of the war planned , which was to be mass murder of civilians , but as fun machines to be thrown around in beautiful acrobatics in sports clubs , no sorry , fighter squadrons . Which existed solely because the army and navies needed some means to deter or destroy enemy observation planes and enemy fighters so that their own observation machines could spot for them in basically World War I settings .

then sometime in early 1930s there was the Death Ray scare or scam , where some ground installation could vaporize E , as in enemy , bombers coming into bomb own cities . Probably some Anglosaxon trick that combined the ongoing disarmament talks to steal the march on rivals , first by inducing them to give up new designs that would be useless in merciless beams that would never miss the E bombers . Then as soon as the Great Depression wore off , using the superior economic power to have massive fleets to deter the enemies from reply in kind , or even building their own E fleets . Anyhow it seemed real enough that the British Goverment asked around what the fuss was all about and an expert declared it wasn't possible to do such thing . At the end of his report though he proposed that radio waves could be used for early detection . It was then the British decided to develop an actual air defence .

the mostly likely opponent , Germany , was in different waters . They had lost a two front war with dire consequences , had to avoid another . By decisively closing one front , before the second front could mobilise fully . Wars happen all the time , there was no reason for Germans to presume that they would live in peace forever . Am not forgetting they were eager to redraw their borders . All this meant there was no time for Germans to burn enemy cities and wait for the enemy leadership to give up . They had to act quickly , though there was no set of rules for tactical application of airpower . Actually , Spain where Luftwaffe gained very valuable combat experience , saw German desires to act in the Douhet ways prevented by Franco who needed strafing on the front , not city busting in the rear . Germans did not invent the tactical intervention model they were famous for in the WW2 , it was forced on them by circumstances . There were to be large manouvres in 1939 to test it all , but Poland happened , testing took place under actual combat and the results were impressive enough .

germans could have been similarly into city-busting like the RAF and those 6 decades have seen much "accusations" against the Luftwaffe heads for they concentrated on tactical twins instead of strategic 4 engine bombers , lolled for reminding how the Fuehrer would ask them that how many bombers the Luftwaffe had , not how big those bombers were . Sort of forgetting the Luftwaffe had Risikoflotten in 1938 , that West European cities would have been at risk from indiscriminate German bombing if they ever tried to "save" Czechoslovakia . Even kind of omitting that those tactical twins coventrized Coventry . Incidentally that's the place where RAF saw that their city busting techniques were ineffective and they copied the Luftwaffe tactics to burn Germany from one end to the other .

the development of an actual air defence system on the part of the British did not exactly mean all was clear for it to proceed . Politics in military can be lots of fun if you are not one of warring sides . In our case in this post the bomber barons of the early Thirties were quick to point that they could nearly always surprise the defence and used their weight to squash any other idea . Americans will be familiar with the story of Mr. Chennault who was the fighter guy who rose up to oppose the supremacy of bombers and found himself in China . Real quick , too . Would have never happened had Chennault had some bomber wing to command ...

knowing this the British were fortunate enough to have one total nutcase at hand , Air Marshall Dowding who liked to talk to the dead . He was kept at his post for an uncharacteriscally long time , because lesser people could not stand up to the bomber barons and the barons conceded only because a shield of fighters to protect the UK from depradations of an aerial onslaught could be gainfully used to get His Majesties' Goverment permission to unleash a British aerial onslaught on any likely enemy .

it doesn't mean the development of the interceptors were without interence . Radar was accepted in September 1935 . The next RAF fighter to enter service , in February 1937 , was the Gloster Gladiator . A biplane , it was the first British single seater fighter plane to have 4 machine guns . When the fighter was tasked against the artillery spotter , 2 machine guns were perfectly enough . To stay close to the land forces headquarter it was supporting the army cooperation plane was to be capable of operating from short strips , which forced the spotter to be light . And draggy from the large wing area , hence slow . The fighter then needed to be slow . At such slow speeds it was "easy" to keep the guns on their target . So that by keeping the weapon package to a minimum , the fighter designer could keep his charge light , hence capable of fighting at even slower speeds . Which neatly covered for fighter to fighter combat for the period .

future bombers though would be faster , and the engine power that enabled higher speeds also demanded higher structural strength . Two machine guns would not suffice . RAF experts understood this and asked for heavier armament in 1930 . It took them 4 and a half years to choose a plane from those offered and of course there were further delays until 1937 . One must never forget the bomber barons in those matters , they always hated the proposition that fighters could stop bombers , it wouldn't be beneath them to delay any fighter that could threaten their bombers ... ı am r16 , ı say such things ...

one of the planes that Gladiator had defeated in the competition was the earliest form of the Spitfire a gull winged , spatted affair that resembles the famous shape that regularly gets listed among the best looking planes ever . It was a monoplane among biplanes and RAF had sort of banned monoplanes in about 1923 or so after a spate of accidents . As such there were no official desire for a fast fighter when the Hawker company started work on a monoplane version of their elegant Fury biplane in 1934 . It was a private venture , that could compete with advanced planes coming from foreign countries on the export market . RAF showed interest , read Dowding here . It led to further proposals from other companies and Vickers Supermarine quickly cleaned up their failed contender into the Spitfire .

to prevent any "accidents" of any kind , the Supermarine director Sir Robert McClean had this to say :

After unfruitful discussions with the Air Ministry, my opposite number in Rolls-Royce, the late A.F.Sidgreaves, and I decided that the two companies together should themselves finance the building of such an aircraft. The Air Ministry was informed of this decision, and were told that in no circumstances would any technical member of the Air Ministry be consulted or allowed to interfere with the designer.

would still not be any kind of solid guarantee until something else happened . With the first flight of the Spitfire near , fires were lit under the Hawker management , Spit was more modern than the biplane tech Hurri and RAF being RAF their 8 machine guns was likely to be a negative compared to the 4 on the Spitfire ; they were better to act quick if they didn't want all RAF monoplane contracts going to Supermarine . So Hawkers prepared for the production of a thousand Hurricanes before the British Goverment had offered any contracts of any kind . Good thing , the early lead meant there were some 400 to 600 extra Hurricanes available for Britain in August 1940 , right in time for the Battle . (That makes 52 to 78% of the actual inventory on August 2. ) Bad thing (?) , for when the thousand plane decision happened , hearts were broken in Berlin , for they were counting on London to remain on the sidelines when they would make Hitler's Kampf Germany's fight . Risikoflotten needed skies devoid of interceptors , kinda . Did much to poison Berlin against London .

the designer of the Spitfire , Mitchell was dying of cancer , and no consideration remained in him for himself . As such the Spitfire was stressed to 2000 hp , at a time the engine planned for it was barely capable of 1000 and Mitchell's replacement Joe Smith also died young . Spitfire happens to be the fastest piston engined propeller plane ever - so far - when one was dived to above Mach 0.90 . And it was capable of doing bad things to bombers .

what of the opposition ? German views of fighters in mid Thirties would just naturally approximate what was the fad at that moment . A further complication for the eventual winner of German competition was the antagonism between the designer , Willy Messerschmitt , and the customer , in the form of Erhard Milch . Milch was a director of Lufthansa before siding with the Nazis and offering much logistic help to Adolf in the Twenties when a Messerschmitt designed plane crashed to kill a close friend . When Nazis took over and made Milch responsible for military aviation industry , he fell hard on the person he saw responsible to drive him under . No contracts for Messerschmitt , who in return was probably vocal , very vocal about Milch being a Jew . Finally Milch got an opening when it was found out the Bayerische Flugzeugwerke , where Messerschmitt was the chief designer , was building a plane for Romania . Milch charged unpatriotism , Messerschmitt charged injustice as he couldn't work for Germany anyhow and Goering who didn't exactly like Milch found the middle ground . The next fighter competition where Messerschmitt couldn't win and he could be kicked out out for poor performance .

enter Ernst Udet . The highest scoring German fighter pilot who survived the Great War , he was a figure that suited the Nazis and he indulged in the public glory reinforced by the PR machinery of the Party . He was made responsible for the technical aspects of the new Luftwaffe , no doubt helped by the fact that he had found a way to buy some Curtiss divebombers , USN being the leading authority in divebombing those days . And thanks to Wikipedia , he had also some shares in the Bf company when the competition took place .

messerschmitt's entry was a monoplane built for speed and everybody expected the rival monoplane from Heinkel to win . Until of course , Udet flew "his" entry to undeniable perfection . In Spain , where the Bf-109 was the official Luftwaffe fighter and Milch-Heinkel combination had arranged to have a large contingent of He-112s in combat tests flown by civilian pilots , the Messerschmitt showed it was really superior .


the '109 cleared the path for the company to great success , the twin engine twin seater 110 following quickly on the heels of its smaller stablemate to win an even more prestigious contract . The times had a remarkable fashion of large long ranging multiseat fighters , in effect fighting bombers that were to escort pure bombers into action , now that bomber barons had to concede to reality and accept a ground based "modern" fighter could be scrambled and quickly climb up to the cruise altitude of attacking bombers to effect an interception . This wasn't the period of Great War when climbs to altitude took hours . Udet again ... When he dogfighted with a prototype 110 in a prototype 109 and failed to win . The 110 famous as a failure in the Battle of Britain , yet did yeoman service throughout the war , did not have any right to win , because it didn't follow the specifications , that called for flexible frontal firepower to cope with the more maneouvrable defending interceptors . For those who say the Luftwaffe was a tactical air arm the 110 was supposed to outnumber the 109 greatly , to realize the Douhetian visions in German language . The war and the reality intervened .

so which one was better in 1940 ? Now the current joke says me in the Starfleet , which makes it certain that ı live by the canon , as seen on TV and not by cannon . Yeah , you have guessed it right , Spitfire in space by courtesy of Dr. Who . Though true fans will remember Bf-109s tried to open fire on a couple of Galactica fighters ...

taking the deservedly famous British duo , Spitfire was easily better in performance and , shall we call it , sexiness . It remained on the top of the line for the entire duration of the war , developed accordingly . Combining maneouvre with performance it was generally a tough proposition to take on one , unless you were an Fw-190 pilot between 1941 and 42 before Mk.IX arrived to rearrange the balance .

hurricane was a better weapon platform , and turned better with its thick wing though it remained slower , by even 1941 it was out of the premier league of fighter game . Its developers were not asleep though , finally bringing out the Tempest and that process was quite delayed by the "desperate" need for more Hurricanes in 1940 . One weird aspect of the RAF in WW2 was the "high esteem" they held for their home island . The intensive fighting of the sunniest summer in a century in 1940 was a fluke yet all the Spitfires were hoarded and Hurricanes sent out to various fronts abroad as required . Rommel's success in desert owes much to that Bf-109 had Hurricane's number .

the French fighters in 1940 were hobbled by relative lack of power and the leading example the '520 tried a lot to remain the traditional fighter mould , lightweight turner . It is reported to have done good , though the plane in French service with the best exchange ratio was the American built P-36 . The German single seater overcame their opposition with comparative ease .

a decisive contributor to Germany's good fortune until the Russian Winter , 109 did extremely well and would have devastated the RAF had they kept to their outmoded tactics or had fewer resources or had there been a serious long planned German desire to occupy England instead of an opportunistic attempt to bring a cease-fire in the shape of the Battle of Britain . As it is it remained in the frontlines until the end and was a great contributor to Germany's bad fortune later on . The 109 was about the D variant . The E with its higher performance and firepower crushed all opposition in situations it had a chance to win , and blinded Luftwaffe to its degrading aspects . There was not nothing else for Germans to replace it on the production lines , even the superlative 190 failed to perform at high altitude , meaning every new subtype lost something for increased performance to stay competitive . The 109G had no business existing , especially over the Reich in 1943-44, and K merely corrected the comparative lack of performance of G with horrible handling . The Messerschmitt survived until 1945 only because the safety limits for the D were so generous ...

the best fighter of 1940 was the A6M . It so quickly made a name that the opposing Chinese fighter arm refused to take off , which finally led to a couple of Zero pilots landing on a Chinese airfield to blow up parked planes . This from a publication of 1970s . Don't know it is a fabrication of Japanese wartime propaganda or the truth currently surpressed because the Chinese are a capitalist powerhouse with a reputation of being careful for their reputation ...

while lacking thread-wide coherence:


the flow of times have taken me to think somewhat the defeat of France in WW2 and have some r16 type misgivings about the established narrative of how the old guard , mentally static and utterly unflexible , led a great country to humiliation while one visionary could have still saved the day but for the defeatism of his once-mentor . Guess it is time to have a comparative thing .

de Gaulle was used to command , coming from a line of aristocrats on his father's side , and rich merchants on his mother's , read some belief in class superiority with wealth stressing the distinctions even more in those days . That's must be the reason why he was a poor soldier for one year, as ordered by the regulations of the times , and improved appreciably when he was among his equals in the military school . Not that it would stop him arguing with his commanders when the opportunity presented itself . Petain was a farmer's son and the connections of his great uncle , a Catholic priest and one-time soldier of Napoleon , could have taken him only to a limited level , in 1914 he knew he would never make general . De Gaulle -on the other hand- knew he had a future , connections define who have a future and who do not since time immemorial , he was busy . Petain spent his days womanising , a sharp contrast to his later railings against moral decadence .

they were also similar . Based on the mainland France , facing the Bosche who had proved that he could be a terrible enemy , hence lacking all those "false" experience and assurances of the colonial expeditions . Against poorly unarmed "coloured people" the battlefield success was practically guaranteed , the trouble would be maintaining control in the face of hit and run attacks , pinpricks , the little cuts . Not so against the Germans , who could fill the air with the thunder of artillery and incessant buzz of bullets . In the fight against the Germans there was no place for close order drill , red pantaloons and bugles . Not that the duo in question would flinch from the fight as described by the regulations . They had abundant amounts of courage , both physical and moral . They could find much in each other , Wikipedia says de Gaulle named his first son after Petain , until this row about writing a book erupted in 1925 . One thing that goes underreported for behind the scenes machinazations is that they do not stay calm , despite all the rhetoric about centuries old plans and designs not for mere mortals , they are as turbulent as normal , "out in the open" politics . Mentor and protege simply chose different colours , and yes , ı will readily admit de Gaulle was not easy to boss around , even in an obvious case of writing something to draw the course of the French strategy of coming decades .

the Great War had already seperated them for a while . Petain didn't need to do much to shine among his compatriots in the command ranks , his ability when needed in a life and death struggle opened the way for him to the top , while de Gaulle had enough opportunity to make closer examinations on the Germans as a prisoner of war . Even collecting enough material to write a book on the subject . ı hear a summary of this "the enemy and the true enemy" could be around . His lack of "glory" was immediately corrected by a mission to Poland of 1920 , no doubt with some arrangement by Petain . Le systeme worked for those who worked it .