A poster at Amren reveals the truth of the situation. Airmen story is a lot of hype and little else.
[url]http://www.amren.com/mtnews/archives/2006/12/records_said_to .php[/url]
An interesting-but conveniently ommitted fact; during 1942-1943, there were less than 150 American fighter pilots TOTAL, over all of Western Europe on any given day. You think maybe those particular (all-white) guys had an especially hard (impossible ) job? You bet. When the Tuskegee Airmen hit Germany, Germany was spent, and her skies were black (no pun intended ) with Allied aircraft.
For the majority of their service, the Tuskegee Group flew in the Mediteranian theater, where, without a doubt, the allies had OVERWHELMING AIR SUPERIORITY. The Luftwaffe could never hope to put up enough fighters to counter the US there.
No, the Germans put up a SAVAGE fight on the ground in North Africa, and especially Italy, but their air presence was terribly weak...they could not allocate the aircraft from Russia or Germany. Flak accounted for the greatest danger to Allied aircraft there. Granted, the Tuskegee airmen did fly over Ploesti, but again, the flak there was incredible.
Another point about the relative conditions facing Mediteranean vs. German-Theater airmen;
The Mediteranean bomber raids were more often at medium to low altitude. They were less vulnerable to all kinds of threats for that reason...hardly safe, though, and those conditions imposed their own terrible burdens.
More importantly, as the war dragged on, and the Tuskegee Group started flying over Germany, the actual groundspace of Germany was SHRINKING. As we rolled up the borders and occupied more land, the ammount of antiaircraft guns (flak guns) actually grew in density in the remaining space.
Follow me? They packed more AA guns into a tighter space around the dwindling targets. Thus, the ratio of flak-to- fighter kills increased even higher. Less fighters and pilots to defend Germany, more flak guns packed tighter around less targets.
Then, add in that the American 8th AirForce had a HUGE number of bombers and fighters literally covering the German targets. Our superiority was complete.
In the last weeks of the war, the air offensive was called OFF, because there simply was nothing left to bomb, and we'd be dropping bombs on our own troops, anyway!
These were the conditions coming into play as the mythically perfect Tuskegee Airmen flew into Germany.
Sorry folks, it just isn't that glorious a picture. They were fighter pilots. That's it.
Now, at the same time, the "all-white" fighter pilots were facing much higher numbers of vastly more experienced and deadly German pilots, over Germany itself. While the Luftwaffe's numbers were already spread thin accross europe and Russia, there still were a lot more experienced pilots-and viable aircraft, fuel, munitions and ground support in 1942, 1943, and 1944, than in late 1944 or 1945.
By the time the Tuskegee Group flew over Germany, the vaunted Luftwaffe was a skeleton, composed of a very few experienced pilots, and a trickling stream of complete greenhorns who had NO experience.
They were also flying aircraft (by-and large) that were world class in 1939 and 1940, but were outmatched in late 1944 by up-to-date versions of the P-51 Mustang, and the venerable, huge, fast, if ungainly looking P-47 Thunderbolt. But the Tuskegee Airmen all had P-51s over Germany, so they had the best.
I know the Bf109 and various models of the FW 190 (German fighters) were still great aircraft in the hands of experienced pilots, but for a nineteen year old with ten hours solo flight time, they were coffins. That's right, the average flight experience of a German fighter pilot in 1944-45 was about 100 hours-compared to nearly 500 for an American. And there were indeed many Germans in 1944-45 who climbed into their flying coffins with ten hours solo time. Not exactly aces.
Yes, there were indeed a few ME-262 Swallows (the awesome new jet fighters) taking off to meet bombers, but every half-experienced historian knows they were desperately short in numbers, and they appeared at the very end of the war, when even German airfields were dissapearing, there was no fuel, and almost as little pilots. They were largely shot down as they had to perform their very long glide-path down to landing (which left them totally, totally vulnerable-especially as they were OUT OF FUEL...they guzzled that up while they spun circles around US aircraft, blasting them out of the sky.
So an allied fighter jumps an out <DEL>of</DEL> fuel ME-262 as it helplessly glides around in descending circles to land, and that's a big score. NOT. Just another encounter in war. Some accounts brag about Tuskegee Airmen shooting down the ME-262s. Well, they may well have done this in even combat, but in most cases across the board, the ME-262 was blown up on the ground (parked there), or as it landed, out of fuel.
But I digress a bit. The Tuskegee airmen may well have been superb. They certainly did their job, and God bless them. They are a point of historical and social value. I salute them...not for being BLACK airmen, but for being airmen. They fought and did their part. They were not supermen. They were not perfect. In fact, their mythic record is likey just that...a myth. There are lots of MYTHS in war history. Add the issue of racial insanity we have today in the West, and look out. The claim of never losing a bomber to enemy fighters always sounded absurd, even when one figured in that a) the Tuskegee group never faced the number or quality of German fighter pilots as did their white counterparts, and b) Flak was the most deadly weapon, even in Germany.
But, whatever. We have so many silly MYTHS about blacks vs. whites. This is just another.
Posted by Orion</A>
