There is or at least were at least 2 good sites that gave translations of Russian Ace's accounts of the war that shed a lot of light on how things went. It was by far more than just a simple matching of performance figures like war buffs so often play with copies of Jane's books.
Find the story of the creation of USAAF Fighter Command and the change that made for USAAF fighter pilots. Germany had no Fighter Command and I don't know about Russia. Galland had stated post-war that the lack of a dedicated Fighter Command type structure is one of the reasons Germany lost the Air War. That bit of doctrine, and who had it, made a big difference.
Fly low over your side's flak or low over the other side's. IRL it made a difference, in game we don't get such concentrations as there were.
There were many factors that good mission design can begin to simulate.
I was watching a documentary made in 1945 that told how the USAAF fighter relay system worked. On long runs only 10% of the fighters covered the bombers at any one time if they made the connection which sometimes weather did not permit. People who only go by relative numbers sortied have been telling for years how the USAAF escorts outnumbered the LW for so long, it was only true near the end when the LW became unable to achieve the local superiority which they had been used to. Even when the USAAF did get superiority their pilots were often 3+ hours flying to get to the combat while the LW pilots were fresh. Again, raw numbers and performance comparisons don't tell much of the real story.
As a pilot/bombardier of that war used to say at the Delphi FSF, he didn't feel sorry because "they started it".
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09-16-2013, 07:29 PM
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