COMBAT AND COMPETITION.pdf - Lakes Gliding Club

COMBAT AND COMPETITION
confronted by Pinkie, who had been told to deal with him, he
announced that he was a qualified pilot on FW 190s - and he wanted
to fly a Typhoon! The sheer effrontery. But he was an aviator and an
enthusiast - and Pinkie likewise. Only it wasn't Pinkie's decision, even
if his comment said it all:
"If we ever did agree - I would escort you. My cannons would be
loaded. The slightest sign of any nonsense and I would shoot you
down!"
In the end he worked at Wunsdorf as a labourer. His world was
aviation and he could not bring himself to give it up. Besides which he
needed a meal ticket.
To invite him in, to sit and talk amongst us, was forbidden during
the period of no fraternisation which existed immediately after the
war. But Johnny Baldwin looked at it from a different angle. It was an
opportunity not to be missed. To get an enemy view on our operations
and tactics at first hand. While memories were still fresh.
The results were instructive. The German pilot had a fixation
about our failure, in his opinion, to operate in much larger formations.
The fact that they might have been forced into this themselves - once
the Luftwaffe had lost overall air superiority - was something that had
not occurred to him. And he seemed unwilling to accept the idea that
large formations were essentially inflexible.
Against ground targets there was no disagreement. Speed and
surprise were the name of the game. Attacks which were pressed
home, before the enemy had time to take cover or retaliate, were the
most effective and suffered the lowest casualties. Our Luftwaffe major
had seen it again and again. As he had also seen the opposite.
They had thought our ground troops arrogant in their neglect of
camouflage. The anti-aircraft fire generally ineffective - and believed
that the Luftwaffe could have caused enormous damage, given more
fuel and better trained replacements. As for the Typhoons, in the
ground attack role they were greatly feared by the Wehrmacht, but the
Luftwaffe considered that we were often easy to bounce. However, as
soon as they mixed it with us, the less experienced German pilots were
usually outclassed.
In the final stages of the war this had become a vicious circle with
high pilot attrition rates and replacements, who had done their primary
training on gliders, frequently going on ops with no more than 100
hours of power flying. As for the information from RAE 7 that the FW
190 could outclimb a Typhoon. It may have happened on 130 octane
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