There are some fascinating (if incomplete) bits of news from the Warbird world this month. The first one really made me sit up at my curry chicken, and it wasn’t because of the spices: a Ju-87 Stuka has been added to the UK civil register! It is another Russian front recovery.
There is very little other information about this as yet. It could be corroded parts at the start of a ten year restoration or it could be in the paint shop and weeks from rollout. Your call.
The other item was quite as stunning, not because of uniqueness, but due to the amazing state of the newly recovered airframe. An Me-109e-7 (upgraded from a -1) has been pulled out of a Russian lake where it landed on the ice 60 years ago. The airframe is in such incredibly good condition that the yellow nose is not only visibly yellow… it is Yellow. I’ve never seen the like of it.
This Emil has been returned in carefuly packed bits to the UK and is now on sale. The project is a real steal for any warbird fan with a million or so burning a hole in their pocket.
A Bf-109g-6 Gustav at NASM
Photo: Copyright D.Amon all rights reserved
The sheer number of WWII airframes sourced from Russian crash sites over the last decade is nothing short of astounding. It also humbles one. The air battles on the Western Front pale to insignificance when set against the hordes thrown into the aerial meatgrinder of the East.
The Spitfire Ace programmes on Channel 4 have been quite good – if somewhat repetitive between weekly instalments (they spend the first third of each broadcast recapping the last one).
Dale,
Soviet combat losses were, perhaps not surprisingly, never released by the Soviet government. However, John Ellis’ World War Two Data Book shows 106,652 aircraft lost to combat, accident or scrapped. By comparison, German combat losses in the East totalled
49,091.
Germany’s all-theatres combat losses are estimated at 95,000, and the all-causes total is 116,584.
Combat losses for the other participants were:-
Japan 49,485
Italy 4,000 estimate
USA 59,296
UK 33,090
Australia 7,160
Canada 2,389
New Zealand 684
France 2100 estimate
Others where figures available: 953
The NZ figure includes 193 bombers from my fathers’ squadron, which suffered the second highest highest rate of loss in Bomber Command. Knowing something of the war-will of the RAF boys I don’t hesitate to correct you about the “hordes thrown into the aerial meatgrinder of the East.” I know it’s usual to see Stalin’s monstrously wasteful war machine rolling on without regard for the lives of its own men. It’s also tempting to assign victimhood to Soviet aircrew because of their huge disparity in the air, especially in the early phase of Barbarossa. There is truth in these things. But it is only a part of the story. The important part is that young men in wartime burn with the desire to get at the invader, and I’m quite sure that’s how those mostly Russian flyers felt every time they walked to the cockpit. Anyway, may they rest in pace.
Some of the magnitude of the Eastern front air war shows up in other numbers. For example, the all time top fighter pilot is Erich Hartmann who shot down 352 aircraft, mostly on the Russian front. Most of the top German aces were well over 100 victories. I don’t think *any* allied pilot makes it even into the top 20 high scorers of the war, although I have not doubled checked that assertion.
Another notable number is that the Russian built about 36,000 Sturmovik fighter bombers. The statistics of the air war on the front are all just mind-boggling. The only thing which comes close are the 1000 bomber raids on the West, but even those loss rates, while horrific (especially some smaller daylight raids like Regensberg) come nowhere near the daily carnage of the East.
Btw Guessedworker… I hope you’ve taken the opportunity to attend the “Warbirds over Wanaka” shows, which appear to be simply magnificent from the pictorials I’ve seen.
They had several Rata’s and the like a couple years ago.
Dale,
I am going out on a bit of a limb here as most of what follows is memory.
It should be noted that all German victories are “confirmed victories”….. there was no sharing of victories or probarbles. Erich also was shot down, captured by and escaped from the Russians some 13 times !! All his victories were on the Eastern Front in which he also got 8 USAAC P-51Ds !! The Germans considered the Yaks to be ‘flying tanks’ as they were so damned hard to shoot out of the air.
Major Bong from the US got 40 and he was the highest amongst the Western allies, and that was in the South West Pacific…. and about a dozen Russians got above 40 with their highest around 60 (?).
On the German side, close to 1,000 scored above 20, some 90 odd scored between 100 and 200, 15 scored over 200 and only 2 scored over 300. amongst this mix is the highest scoring night fighter with 120 (?)…Schnafuer (?). By Allied ace scoring standards there were well over 4000 German Aces.
Put into the modern day context, I don’t think there are 10 Air Forces in the world that would have 352 ‘Airworthy machines’ let alone combat aircraft !!
There was a story in the German press a few months back that a newly-opened Stasi (East German secret police) archive revealed that there might be an underground bunker full of fully armed and fuelled Fw 190s from 1945 underneath one of Berlin’s still in use airports. This was regarded as something of a potential safety hazard, to say the least – but I didn’t hear anything about the airport subsequently being closed, so maybe it didn’t come to anything. Pity.
The air battles on the Western Front pale to insignificance when set against the hordes thrown into the aerial meatgrinder of the East.
I think the term “meatgrinder” does the battles on the Eastern Front a disservice. Though the Russians initially were pretty good at human wave attacks, both sides were actually quite skilled tactically. Dismissing it as a meatgrinder also allows us to disregard that side of the war as if it were some meaningless WW I trench fight. It also allows you to miss the complexities of the situation – where two basically decent peoples fought and lived like animals for several years, yet did noble and heroic and odious things too, in service of two highly evil governments, toward both good and bad ends.
It also occurred to me a while ago that if you study the battle for Stalingrad, or any other East Front campaign, you will wonder if one side of the history was written by Tolkien, and the other side written by his mirror image.
I think meatgrinder well describes the monstrous casualties of the Eastern front on both land and air. It has nothing to do with tactics. The Russians and Germans churned out aircraft and pilots in huge numbers and threw them into combat across a front that ran from Asia to Scandinavia. In the air war it was strategically battle of attrition, a matter of who could kill men and destroy materiel on the air and ground faster than the other could feed in replacements.
So, yes, the Eastern front was a meatgrinder, fed by large populations and industrial economies. This is a key difference between the Eastern and Western fronts at the beginning of the War. The Germans won a war of pure maneuver in the West; when the they doublecrossed Stalin they initially fought a war of pure maneuver in the East too… but Stalin slowed them down and turned it into a attritive war and eventually won because of it.
Perry should drop in on this one… he’s rather expert on the strategies and politics of WWII.
The interesting thing about “Aces” be they fighter jocks, or tank crews, is that they exist.
Certain people/crews somehow seem to get the “edge” and become VASTLY better than their compatriots (much less their inexperienced opponents whom they annihilhate.)
Klosterman the Free French Ace of WWII has a passage where his flight of 5 experienced allied pilots in modern planes, meets/gets jumped by one german Me-109 in late 1944.
In *one* pass the German shot down 3 planes, his second got another, and IIRC Klosterman ran like hell and barely got away.
“Le Grand Fauve” – “the great raptor” Klosterman called that one.
Rudel, the Stuka pilot(that’s the ground attack diesel engined thing) was credited with something like 500 tanks, an russian cruiser (he dropped a 500 kg bomb down the stack ), several other smaller ships & stuff, and ALSO took on russian aircraft and (again with a ground attack A/C!) regulary shot them down and send the russian fighter planes packing.
Very scary pilot.
In fairness to Allied pilots “aces” where often pulled fromthe front line and sent to train new pilots, rather than the german practice of leaving the high scorers “in the game” and trying to make sure they got whatever they wanted. i.e. Top pilots had first dibs on squadron planes, fuel, ammo.
To amplify what Fred said: Folk in the US Army have noticed this tendency of soldiers to divide into three groups, killer, filler and fodder. In, for example, a tank company you will usually find 2-3 crews that can be counted on to do the majority of the killing, 2-3 crews that can be counted on to do the majority of the being killed (in exercises) and all the rest that’ll have good days and bad days in more or less equal number. So the question then becomes how can you figure out ahead of time who’s going to be which, and can we stack the deck to raise filler to killer, fodder to filler? The phenomenon was first identified in Army literature back in the early ’80’s. There have been some good ideas on how to approach this, but it’s still an open question in a lot of ways.
I’m glad to see warbirds being dug out of Russia and seeing the light of day again. Hopefully some Red AF a/c will pop up on the market for restoration. The Air & Space Smithsonian has a nice picture on the cover of Glacier Girl, the early model P-38 dug out of a glacier in Greenland and rebuilt. Hopefully it avoids the A&SS Cover Curse that caught the replica H-1 a few months ago.
Alan: I know the item you are talking about and I would absolutely swear I blogged it, but search as I might I cannot find it.
As I remember, a number of aircraft, perhaps some Me262’s and He111’s or maybe it was some Arados’, were bombed up and ready to go at the end of the war. There was so much ordinance around that they just bulldozed the rubble over top (probably were underground hangers is my guess but don’t quote me) and built the runway over top. According to records they are still there.
That is all from memory. I cannot find any clipped article; I cannot find the article I was certain I wrote on this… if anyone else has the link or reference either to my item or the original, I’d appreciate the information.
JSAllison: If you want to keep up with the warbird scene, there are only two magazines worth the subscription: Fly Past and Aeroplane, both British publications. You’ll get the news on new finds and photographs of them there first.
One of the two did a centerfold of ‘Glacier Girl’ within the last couple months. She’s gorgeous.
Ah, aren’t we aviation nuts a bunch of silly bastards? 🙂
The big difference here is that the Germans (and Japanese) operated a ‘fly until you die’ policy whilst the allies rotated people out after 30 or 40 missions (typically, depending on the time/airforce) and gave them training jobs.
This meant that the very best German pilots has years more experience than the very best Allied pilots… many flew several hundreds combat missions whilst those allied flyers like the amazing Leonard Cheshire were regarded as having a charmed life because he survived 100 combat missions (he kept refusing to stop flying combat missions until finally forced to give it a rest!).
As a practicle matter, this created a huge pool of experienced combat vets in the RAF and USAAF churning out vast numbers of fairly well trained aircrews… whereas in the Luftwaffe the average level of training as the war dragged on tended to decline. If you ran into one of the German ‘experten’, you were in deep trouble, but by the end of the war, most of the experten were dead and the Luftwaffe just a hollowed out shell of its former institutional and organisational glory… viewed from a average vs. average contest, if anything by the mid-to-late war, it was the Allies who were actually winning the air attrition battle not just from a point of view of industrial production but also from the point of view of have better average pilots and aircrews.
Perry’s point is also consistent with German and Japanese practice more generally. They both had an “elite” mentality with regard to aviation aircrews, where the allies tried to produce large numbers of adequately trained aircrew at enormous training facilities. The Axis similarly had a hand-craft attitude toward weapon production. The Japanese were incapable of true mass-production, and the Germans consciously rejected it. Richard Overy, in his book Why The Allies Won, has an excellent discussion of this. The Allies would come up with a decent design, make a lot of them, get feedback on defects or potential improvements, and then the next iteration would be much, much better. The Russians tried to adopt “Fordism” after the Bolshevik revolution, but did not have the economic base to support it. Under Stalin, they forcibly constructed a tractor industry, and an arms industry on a mass-production basis. Also, the allies, including the Russians, managed to combine high quality with mass production, primarily by having good design in the first place, see e.g. the P-51 or the T-34-85 tank. The British never made the full-transition to mass production. Corelli Barnett’s book the Audit of War covers this well. Of course the allies also had the problem of occasionally mass producing a dud, like the Sherman tank. Peter Drucker’s old book from the 1940s, the Concept of the Corporation, uses llots of examples drawn from war era mass production, especially the mass-production of sophisticated equipment. So, somewhat paradoxically, the Germans and the Japanese, had a much more “individualistic” approach both to war-fighting and war-production than did the Americans and Russians, with the British somewhere in between.
One other terrific book on airplanes I must mention is the Picture History of World War II American Aircraft Production. Looking at these vast plants with rows of partially built planes receding into the dim distance, of women (with makeup on!) putting the finishing touches on P-38s under floodlights working third shift outside in California, is to grasp the heroic magnitude of the “war for production” and to see the doom of Germany and Japan being written out inevitably, one rivit at a time.
OK, that should be “rivet”.