U.S. Army Air Corps Operations
The U.S. Army Air Corps' precision strategic bombing campaign against German industries was only possible during the day. At first this was not seen as an issue; the Corps' newest bombers, the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress and Consolidated B-24 Liberator, were the most heavily-armed in history. Close formations of them were planned, creating a crossfire of .50 caliber machine-guns that would fend off the enemy.
The plan was quickly undermined. Hitting a fast-moving fighter with guns in a turret proved extremely difficult; hitting a slow-moving bomber from a fighter with a gunsight was much easier. USAAF bomber losses gradually increased, and experimental "gunships" like the YB-40 did nothing to reduce them.
It was not until the introduction of the Lockheed P-38 Lightning and Republic P-47 Thunderbolt that the bombing raids could claim a measure of success. Able to carry large Lockheed-designed drop tanks, the fighters were able to escort the bombers for much of their missions. The first Allied fighters over Berlin were 55th Fighter Group P-38s on March 3, 1944. When the Merlin-powered North American P-51 Mustang was introduced, with a laminar-flow wing for efficiency, the final escort fighter development of the war was complete.
Read more about this topic: Escort Fighter
Famous quotes containing the words army, air, corps and/or operations:
“Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.”
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“Ce corps qui s’appelait et qui s’appelle encore le saint empire romain n’était en aucune manière ni saint, ni romain, ni empire. This agglomeration which called itself and still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire was in no way holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.”
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