Quote:
Originally Posted by TheWiseWino
I don't recall reading that German air-defense weapons had the capability of tracking specific aircraft. What I do recall is that they would use passive radar to detect flights and then simply throw up a massive field of exploding shells saturating an area of fie around a target that planes would just have to fly through.
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Exactly, and they wouldn't be able to do that against a modern air force. They didn't even have radar proximity fuses on their anti-aircraft shells - the radar would tell them the altitude of the incoming bomber force, they'd dial in the altitude on each individual shell, and then start firing. That wouldn't work in our scenario, because they wouldn't have any radar - that'd be taken out before the ground attack force came in. So they'd have to wait until they had visual on the planes, but by that time they'd already be dead.
Have you ever seen a flight of A-10s or F-16s on a ground attack mission? I've seen both on practice exercises, and it makes a lasting impression.
They come in low and fast, just a couple of hundred feet off the ground and 600+ miles per hour. You don't see them at all. They use the terrain to mask their approach; in a wooded area like Europe, they'll design the mission profile to bring them over the target from just above the trees. They won't come straight in, either - they'll feint in toward an area a mile away from the target, and when they're a couple of miles out they'll bank hard right, cover that extra mile in 5 or 6 seconds, then bank hard left to come right on top of the target. They don't need to see the target until they're on top of it, because our airborne radar reconnaissance planes can track armored units on the ground and vector the planes in right on top of them.
If you're sitting there, stationary, you probably know there are jets in the area, because you'll hear the grumbling growl of their engines, but it's very hard to tell where it's coming from. The sound reverberates around, and sounds as though it's somehow coming from the whole sky all at once, and to make it even harder it fades in and out so that just when you think you know where they are, you lose them for a few seconds.
And that's if you're sitting still, with no motorized vehicles or tanks running their engines around you. For an armored column on the move, there's no chance they'll hear the jets at all. The first indication they'll have that they're under attack is when their vehicles start to explode in giant orange fireballs. The jets come in so fast and so low, they're only visible for 5 or 6 seconds, and they're shooting or dropping ordinance the entire time. More often than not, you hear the bombs and shells exploding all around you before you hear the jets, and by the time you turn your head enough to get a visual, you're already on fire - if you're even still alive.
There's no way that the large, cumbersome German anti-aircraft guns of that era could track a target moving that fast, in that amount of time. By the time they swing around to engage, the target has already disappeared. The only way they'd score a hit is if a 20mm was just lucky enough to be pointing in the right direction, and the crew was quick enough to press the firing switch in time to light off a few rounds before the jet was gone. The chances of that are pretty slim, and our pilots would have very little to fear from ground fire. Of course there's always a chance they'll fly into a stray bullet, but it would be sheer luck. Infantry accompanying the armored units would be able to swing their rifles and light machine guns around much more quickly, but again, even they would have to react extremely quickly to get a shot off in that 5 second window, and that's not easy to do when you suddenly have hundreds of cluster bombs exploding like mortar shells all around you. And an A-10 (or even an F-16 or -18) wouldn't have much to worry about from 1 or 2 .30 caliber bullets.
And to top it all off, everything I just described is only applicable if we're attacking in daylight. Which we probably would not do, because we don't need to. Our pilots can see just as well at night as they can during the day, but the Germans would have had no night-vision equipment at all. So we'd be attacking targets that are completely blind.
In a campaign of 3 or 4 weeks, I'd be surprised if we lost more than 2 or 3 planes to ground fire. But then again, I doubt it would take 3 or 4 weeks for the resistance to completely collapse. Think of it from their point of view - to them, being attacked by supersonic jets with cluster bombs and night vision, guided by radar, and armed with cannon that fire hundreds of exploding shells per second, would be akin to us being attacked by alien invaders. They'd be stunned, and completely terrified. Once word got around to the troops about what had happened to other units, morale would quickly evaporate, and most enemy soldiers would figure out pretty fast that their only chance of getting home alive was to get as far away as possible from anything even remotely resembling an organized military unit. By the end of the first week, most of them would have only one thought on their minds - "how do I find someone to surrender to?"
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