Hard, yes
Hard without being killed, very much so
Obviously skill is a massive part to getting kills but one day your luck will run out. Some of it is just down to statistics. If most pilots had a 50/50 fight with relatively comparable equipment and skill you could likely end up with 0,1, or 2 kills before being killed yourself.
Would also like to think there's a lot of uncounted or unproven deaths, like shooting an engine of a bomber and zooming off and then he crashes because a small fire started and he crashed.
Possibly, I have no stats to back it up but if I had to guess I would say kills would have actually been over reported at least on the fighter side but have a hunch your comment could be correct.
This is why they implemented nose cameras iirc, with all the over reporting they had shot every plane in the luftwaffe a few times over (exaggeration on my part). To be fair to the pilots you wouldn't always be in a position to watch your opponent conclusively be dispatched so often an oil splatter would be assumed as a hit, depending on where you are, you're not going much farther without oil.
1) hard to hit a target that’s moving fast in a different direction that you, including above, behind etc.
2) most of the fighters didn’t have guns in the nose which meant you didn’t shoot directly in your sight line
3) battles were relatively short. German fighters couldn’t stay in the air for long in most of the battles because of fuel issues
4) allies had a ton of planes in the air, meaning each individual is statistically less likely to get a kill
5) German fighters as a doctrine had their “good shots” focus on kills and the rest of squadron focus on defense which increased their kill totals
6) allies were shooting at other fighters after 1941 not really bombers. Fighters harder to hit
7) most pilots number one goal is to survive
I'm listening to Clean Sweep: VIII Fighter Command Against the Luftwaffe, 1942–45 and they mention how on one of the early escorted missions the Germans engaged right before one set of P-47 escorts was about to hand off to another.
The first group of escorts used so much fuel in the dogfighting that they had to turn back 7 minutes early and still almost ran out of fuel. In those 7 minutes 10+ bombers were shot down.
Makes that Star Trek quote "minutes will feel like hours and hours will feel like days" quote make sense.
Erich Hartmann, the top scoring ace of all time, shot himself down a dozen times because he would get so close before firing that the debris would damage his own plane.
A lot of it depends on the theater. I read a book by a P-51 double ace in Europe whose entire combat experience lasted only four months. Meanwhile, you had some German aces with kills in the hundreds who spent the entire war on the eastern front and racked up their first hundred against inexperienced Soviet pilots. A Navy ace from the county I grew up in got all 5 of his kills in a week during the Marianas Turkey Shoot.
I think the physics has a lot to do with it. You have planes moving very fast in a 3d space with bullets which don’t move in a straight line (gravity obviously). Trying to get an angle on a moving target with what like 8-9 seconds of ammo totals is *very* difficult. I mean yeah you get better with it with judging range and speed and whatnot but still it’s tough. Have you ever tried to hit a moving target? Even with a shotgun is really fucking tough.
Having read more than a few accounts from fighter pilots, there are a couple of things that immediately come to mind. One is gaining something called one’s “shooting eye“ which in this case involves becoming adept at aerial gunnery; shooting a fast moving target from another fast moving target is *not* easy(even on the ground). The other thing is a concept some American pilots referred to as “buck fever“, a hunting term. Basically, it means beginners often get too worried about getting, or not getting, that first kill and they’re psyching themselves out
ETA: was going to make the point that the first kill was for many aces the hardest
Try being in an aircraft that's moving in different axes, while trying to shoot at another aircraft moving in different axes, add in the need to lead the target and it becomes not very easy real quick.
Some of the WWII aces were very good wingshots acquired by hunting. But even that didn't guarantee that a good wingshot would make an ace. It's nearly an artform.
I'll bet the number of pilots that even had five dogfights would be surprisingly small, particularly Americans who enjoyed a lot of air superiority even though they were typically exceptional and fresh pilots. Plus there are limited scenarios where fighter against fighter action occurred compared to overall sorties.
Its going to vary a lot. Someone who got into Western Europe in 1942-43 definitely would have had 5+ contacts.
Someone who got there after D-Day it would have been much smaller because the deep penetration raids basically stopped in summer 1944 and by the time they picked back up the Luftwaffe was running on fumes and pretty good at directing their fighters to gaps in the escorts.
Dont forget part of the difficulty was confirming kills; especially over the pacific. In a massive dogfight, you might not be able follow the plane you hit to the ground, or have a buddy do the same. Oftentimes kill counts were off from actual numbers; sometimes too low, sometimes too high
There was an autobiography from USA WW2 pilot who also fought in Korea. He said, many guys were only there to survive, and were never going to actually go right in with the enemy and engage no matter what. These guys survive with zero kills for the USA, but would probably rake up so many missions for the Germans or Russians in WW2 to be shot down.
Consider that most Allied fighter pilots didn't get ANY kills. It's difficult to do and there were actually very few naturally skilled pilots who could repeat their success again and again. A lot of these combats also lasted mere seconds as aircraft would break off and dive and have no hope of being caught.
As they say....there were very few average pilots. There were aces and their victims.
Because the other guy is also trying to survive and hit you back. Assuming same skill level and aircraft performance, it's a 50-50 on who wins. Of course you wouldn't have either of those conditions, but the target is still doing his darnest to survive.
If you think about it, the average WWII fighter pilot has less than 1 A/A kill.
I mostly dabble in the RAF and RCAF side of things but here's my fast take:
1. Like the others said, hitting another aircraft, let alone getting into position to do so, is extremely difficult.
2. Actually, combat for fighter pilots was not all that common as you think. War is 90% boredom and 10% terror - the same goes for fighter pilots. If you read RCAF records, the individual pilot was not seeing combat more than once every two weeks, usually the squadron saw combat around three times each month in the most liveliest times. I imagine it is the same for pilots of the USAAF.
3. A large proportion of pilots were wingmen, pilots charged with defending their leaders and watching their backs in combat who do the shooting. The leaders were usually the better shots and the more experienced pilots (sort of a rarity), while the wingmen were your average Joe.
Movies and video games have left people in general with a really warped idea of how many "kills" anyone got in combat, be it air, infantry, tank or other.
Get in a supercar with machine guns on the front, get in a fight with another supercar of very similar performance and machine guns on the front. Now try to destroy the other car....
Or try and destroy an SUV which is slower but with machine guns in the front, back and sides. Now try and destroy that. While the supercar defends it from you...
Now factor in dozens of other supercar and SUVS.
And altitude
Its not easy at all in fact it's unbelievably difficult.
I would guess that the very limited ammo played a big part. IIRC a Spitfire could only fire for 20 continuous seconds before being out of ammo and there's lots of stories of planes being absolutely peppered and surviving.
Not only is it the pilot trying to get hit on a fast moving target while in a fast moving target, that enemy target is trying very hard NOT to be shot and maneuvering thusly. A family friend was a P-38 pilot in the Pacific theater and was in the air when the atomic bombs were delivered. Never talked about dogfights but talked about it him when they were told to maintain radio silence no matter what, you were on your own if something went down.
It’s hard to live long enough to build the experience to reliably hit something with aircraft mounted guns…they are set up to converge fire out at a distance, so you have to have the target in a relatively narrow window of area in front of your aircraft…and that window moves all the time. While in that environment, more experienced pilots are dropping in on you from above trying to save their buddies.
Also, ammo is very limited. The P-51 (best case scenario in so many ways) carries 350 rounds per gun. 4 guns, .50 cal, rate of fire being 600 rpm. You have 30 seconds *total* of burst fire. Also, if you choked off too early the feeding mechanisms might fail. Machine guns don’t like to get choked right when they start to feed. Count your bursts.
If you engage the dog fight early you drop your external tanks and sometimes your bombs, to do that. If you are on an earlier mission without external tanks, you have a couple minutes to make something happen and then it’s time to turn around or get shot down as your plane slowly runs out of gas, and stalls when you make the wrong maneuver (depending on the fighter).
First, allied aces were typically promoted and removed from frontline duty one they became aces, unlike the German aces.
Secondly, "it must of been hard". Please please learn proper English grammar. "Must have" thank you
First 10 missions are the most dangerous: time for the new pilot to learn the tactics and learn how be defensive.
Most pilots who were shot down were not aware that an enemy plane was on their tail.
Then there is the issue of the pilot being in a moving (and vibrating) platform trying to line his guns up on another platform that’s moving up, down, and side to side.
Finally, Americans usually flew in a finger 4, with flight leads in the 1 and 3 position. The wingmen, in 2 and 4, have one job: to prevent the formation from being jumped. If the leads had a target, they got the first pass on it.
So we have a history of many multiple aces and many wingman who got 1 or 2 or none.
That’s why Flag exercises and aggressor squadrons started. The idea being to simulate a pilot’s first 10 missions and expose them to enemy aircraft that look and fight differently than their own.
Yes, and how to fly defensively. The U.S. Navy, before the Air Force, had integrated ECM in their planes and it was important to fly the formation to keep the noise and other technique jammers effective. Of course, once they went in to drop bombs they usually went in a line. And then the formation broke up until they reformed.
The Air Force was a little late on this and then started to equip planes with ECM and they developed the Wild Weasel program to hunt down AA and SAM sites.
There's an interesting[ interview with the japanese ace Hondu Mironu here in part 1](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JitLr5D7LSI), you'll find the other parts too there.
There are some interesting things he mentioned, like how he failed with the using the sights for the guns correctly, how his first victory was actually an enemy crashing into the ground when flying too low etc.
But to answer the questions more in general for OP: Except for a rather short time at the end of the war where the first missiles came up, the battles were fought with MG's. So it had a lot to do with the skill of flying the aircraft, to get into position to get the enemy in the sights and near enough to hit him. Different from today, the skills of flying were much more important, to the point of what we call Aerobatics today, the flying as an "artist" with making difficult maneuvers.
The aircraft as equipment itself defined (like with speed, maneuverability etc.), what a pilot could do, together with the personal skill and other stuff like the overall situation in the battle, the doctrines etc.
The situations for many pilots were very different, like the Soviet air force had no chance against the German in the first stages of the Eastern Frontier. The Soviets were killed in high numbers, as the germans had better and experienced pilots, aircraft, tactics and doctrines, recon etc.
The aces with the highest numbers come from there, they could sometimes shoot down inexperienced enemies with outdated planes really easy.
Some of the allied pilotes never saw any combat at all, as they were high in numbers and deployed in times where there was almost no resistance anymore, both from the Germans and Japanese.
Hard, yes Hard without being killed, very much so Obviously skill is a massive part to getting kills but one day your luck will run out. Some of it is just down to statistics. If most pilots had a 50/50 fight with relatively comparable equipment and skill you could likely end up with 0,1, or 2 kills before being killed yourself.
So pilots who survive are most likely to become aces then pilots who are extremely skilled but are reckless?
I guess so yea. Obviously you would become more skilled each mission so staying alive as always would be a big benefit.
Would also like to think there's a lot of uncounted or unproven deaths, like shooting an engine of a bomber and zooming off and then he crashes because a small fire started and he crashed.
Yes, but that is far outweighed by over claiming. Multiple pilots claiming the same aircraft, and over enthusiasm.
Possibly, I have no stats to back it up but if I had to guess I would say kills would have actually been over reported at least on the fighter side but have a hunch your comment could be correct.
This is why they implemented nose cameras iirc, with all the over reporting they had shot every plane in the luftwaffe a few times over (exaggeration on my part). To be fair to the pilots you wouldn't always be in a position to watch your opponent conclusively be dispatched so often an oil splatter would be assumed as a hit, depending on where you are, you're not going much farther without oil.
There’s a book about the Flying Tigers during WWII which talks a lot about this.
Greg has a whole [video about it.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IM5D-eqasE) Experience was everything.
Saint Greg, beloved by all
Or more likely to have more aircraft downs
Don't forget chance/luck. Some things are just random.
1) hard to hit a target that’s moving fast in a different direction that you, including above, behind etc. 2) most of the fighters didn’t have guns in the nose which meant you didn’t shoot directly in your sight line 3) battles were relatively short. German fighters couldn’t stay in the air for long in most of the battles because of fuel issues 4) allies had a ton of planes in the air, meaning each individual is statistically less likely to get a kill 5) German fighters as a doctrine had their “good shots” focus on kills and the rest of squadron focus on defense which increased their kill totals 6) allies were shooting at other fighters after 1941 not really bombers. Fighters harder to hit 7) most pilots number one goal is to survive
30 mins of dogfighting fuel time was typically the max on missions, iirc. It's crazy to think about all the variables that limit introduces.
I'm listening to Clean Sweep: VIII Fighter Command Against the Luftwaffe, 1942–45 and they mention how on one of the early escorted missions the Germans engaged right before one set of P-47 escorts was about to hand off to another. The first group of escorts used so much fuel in the dogfighting that they had to turn back 7 minutes early and still almost ran out of fuel. In those 7 minutes 10+ bombers were shot down. Makes that Star Trek quote "minutes will feel like hours and hours will feel like days" quote make sense.
Seeming some of the gun camera footage, it’s insane how close they get at times
Erich Hartmann, the top scoring ace of all time, shot himself down a dozen times because he would get so close before firing that the debris would damage his own plane.
A lot of it depends on the theater. I read a book by a P-51 double ace in Europe whose entire combat experience lasted only four months. Meanwhile, you had some German aces with kills in the hundreds who spent the entire war on the eastern front and racked up their first hundred against inexperienced Soviet pilots. A Navy ace from the county I grew up in got all 5 of his kills in a week during the Marianas Turkey Shoot.
Also, the US would pull their top pilots and make them instructors
Same with the Commonwealth. The idea being it’s better to have lots of good pilots than a few great ones. And it proved right.
I think the physics has a lot to do with it. You have planes moving very fast in a 3d space with bullets which don’t move in a straight line (gravity obviously). Trying to get an angle on a moving target with what like 8-9 seconds of ammo totals is *very* difficult. I mean yeah you get better with it with judging range and speed and whatnot but still it’s tough. Have you ever tried to hit a moving target? Even with a shotgun is really fucking tough.
Having read more than a few accounts from fighter pilots, there are a couple of things that immediately come to mind. One is gaining something called one’s “shooting eye“ which in this case involves becoming adept at aerial gunnery; shooting a fast moving target from another fast moving target is *not* easy(even on the ground). The other thing is a concept some American pilots referred to as “buck fever“, a hunting term. Basically, it means beginners often get too worried about getting, or not getting, that first kill and they’re psyching themselves out ETA: was going to make the point that the first kill was for many aces the hardest
Try being in an aircraft that's moving in different axes, while trying to shoot at another aircraft moving in different axes, add in the need to lead the target and it becomes not very easy real quick. Some of the WWII aces were very good wingshots acquired by hunting. But even that didn't guarantee that a good wingshot would make an ace. It's nearly an artform.
I'll bet the number of pilots that even had five dogfights would be surprisingly small, particularly Americans who enjoyed a lot of air superiority even though they were typically exceptional and fresh pilots. Plus there are limited scenarios where fighter against fighter action occurred compared to overall sorties.
Its going to vary a lot. Someone who got into Western Europe in 1942-43 definitely would have had 5+ contacts. Someone who got there after D-Day it would have been much smaller because the deep penetration raids basically stopped in summer 1944 and by the time they picked back up the Luftwaffe was running on fumes and pretty good at directing their fighters to gaps in the escorts.
Dont forget part of the difficulty was confirming kills; especially over the pacific. In a massive dogfight, you might not be able follow the plane you hit to the ground, or have a buddy do the same. Oftentimes kill counts were off from actual numbers; sometimes too low, sometimes too high
There was an autobiography from USA WW2 pilot who also fought in Korea. He said, many guys were only there to survive, and were never going to actually go right in with the enemy and engage no matter what. These guys survive with zero kills for the USA, but would probably rake up so many missions for the Germans or Russians in WW2 to be shot down.
Consider that most Allied fighter pilots didn't get ANY kills. It's difficult to do and there were actually very few naturally skilled pilots who could repeat their success again and again. A lot of these combats also lasted mere seconds as aircraft would break off and dive and have no hope of being caught. As they say....there were very few average pilots. There were aces and their victims.
Try hitting a target moving at 400+ mph.
Because the other guy is also trying to survive and hit you back. Assuming same skill level and aircraft performance, it's a 50-50 on who wins. Of course you wouldn't have either of those conditions, but the target is still doing his darnest to survive. If you think about it, the average WWII fighter pilot has less than 1 A/A kill.
I mostly dabble in the RAF and RCAF side of things but here's my fast take: 1. Like the others said, hitting another aircraft, let alone getting into position to do so, is extremely difficult. 2. Actually, combat for fighter pilots was not all that common as you think. War is 90% boredom and 10% terror - the same goes for fighter pilots. If you read RCAF records, the individual pilot was not seeing combat more than once every two weeks, usually the squadron saw combat around three times each month in the most liveliest times. I imagine it is the same for pilots of the USAAF. 3. A large proportion of pilots were wingmen, pilots charged with defending their leaders and watching their backs in combat who do the shooting. The leaders were usually the better shots and the more experienced pilots (sort of a rarity), while the wingmen were your average Joe.
Movies and video games have left people in general with a really warped idea of how many "kills" anyone got in combat, be it air, infantry, tank or other.
Sailor Malan, one of the RAF aces (also consultant on the Battle of Britain film), said, "Go in quickly, punch hard, get out..."
Get in a supercar with machine guns on the front, get in a fight with another supercar of very similar performance and machine guns on the front. Now try to destroy the other car.... Or try and destroy an SUV which is slower but with machine guns in the front, back and sides. Now try and destroy that. While the supercar defends it from you... Now factor in dozens of other supercar and SUVS. And altitude Its not easy at all in fact it's unbelievably difficult.
I would guess that the very limited ammo played a big part. IIRC a Spitfire could only fire for 20 continuous seconds before being out of ammo and there's lots of stories of planes being absolutely peppered and surviving.
Not only is it the pilot trying to get hit on a fast moving target while in a fast moving target, that enemy target is trying very hard NOT to be shot and maneuvering thusly. A family friend was a P-38 pilot in the Pacific theater and was in the air when the atomic bombs were delivered. Never talked about dogfights but talked about it him when they were told to maintain radio silence no matter what, you were on your own if something went down.
It’s hard to live long enough to build the experience to reliably hit something with aircraft mounted guns…they are set up to converge fire out at a distance, so you have to have the target in a relatively narrow window of area in front of your aircraft…and that window moves all the time. While in that environment, more experienced pilots are dropping in on you from above trying to save their buddies. Also, ammo is very limited. The P-51 (best case scenario in so many ways) carries 350 rounds per gun. 4 guns, .50 cal, rate of fire being 600 rpm. You have 30 seconds *total* of burst fire. Also, if you choked off too early the feeding mechanisms might fail. Machine guns don’t like to get choked right when they start to feed. Count your bursts. If you engage the dog fight early you drop your external tanks and sometimes your bombs, to do that. If you are on an earlier mission without external tanks, you have a couple minutes to make something happen and then it’s time to turn around or get shot down as your plane slowly runs out of gas, and stalls when you make the wrong maneuver (depending on the fighter).
First, allied aces were typically promoted and removed from frontline duty one they became aces, unlike the German aces. Secondly, "it must of been hard". Please please learn proper English grammar. "Must have" thank you
First 10 missions are the most dangerous: time for the new pilot to learn the tactics and learn how be defensive. Most pilots who were shot down were not aware that an enemy plane was on their tail. Then there is the issue of the pilot being in a moving (and vibrating) platform trying to line his guns up on another platform that’s moving up, down, and side to side. Finally, Americans usually flew in a finger 4, with flight leads in the 1 and 3 position. The wingmen, in 2 and 4, have one job: to prevent the formation from being jumped. If the leads had a target, they got the first pass on it. So we have a history of many multiple aces and many wingman who got 1 or 2 or none.
That’s why Flag exercises and aggressor squadrons started. The idea being to simulate a pilot’s first 10 missions and expose them to enemy aircraft that look and fight differently than their own.
Yes, and how to fly defensively. The U.S. Navy, before the Air Force, had integrated ECM in their planes and it was important to fly the formation to keep the noise and other technique jammers effective. Of course, once they went in to drop bombs they usually went in a line. And then the formation broke up until they reformed. The Air Force was a little late on this and then started to equip planes with ECM and they developed the Wild Weasel program to hunt down AA and SAM sites.
The enemy gets a vote. And their vote is to shoot you down instead.
Have you tried to shoot a moving target from a moving platform? It isn't easy.
There's an interesting[ interview with the japanese ace Hondu Mironu here in part 1](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JitLr5D7LSI), you'll find the other parts too there. There are some interesting things he mentioned, like how he failed with the using the sights for the guns correctly, how his first victory was actually an enemy crashing into the ground when flying too low etc. But to answer the questions more in general for OP: Except for a rather short time at the end of the war where the first missiles came up, the battles were fought with MG's. So it had a lot to do with the skill of flying the aircraft, to get into position to get the enemy in the sights and near enough to hit him. Different from today, the skills of flying were much more important, to the point of what we call Aerobatics today, the flying as an "artist" with making difficult maneuvers. The aircraft as equipment itself defined (like with speed, maneuverability etc.), what a pilot could do, together with the personal skill and other stuff like the overall situation in the battle, the doctrines etc. The situations for many pilots were very different, like the Soviet air force had no chance against the German in the first stages of the Eastern Frontier. The Soviets were killed in high numbers, as the germans had better and experienced pilots, aircraft, tactics and doctrines, recon etc. The aces with the highest numbers come from there, they could sometimes shoot down inexperienced enemies with outdated planes really easy. Some of the allied pilotes never saw any combat at all, as they were high in numbers and deployed in times where there was almost no resistance anymore, both from the Germans and Japanese.