Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!bellcore!att!cbnews!military
From: welty@lewis.crd.ge.com (richard welty)
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Re: dogfighting
Message-ID: <7450@cbnews.ATT.COM>
Date: 14 Jun 89 03:26:52 GMT
References: <7022@cbnews.ATT.COM> <7210@cbnews.ATT.COM> <7250@cbnews.ATT.COM> <7395@cbnews.ATT.COM>
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Organization: New York State Institute for Sebastian Cabot Studies
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From: welty@lewis.crd.ge.com (richard welty)

In article <7395@cbnews.ATT.COM>, Yngve Larsson writes: 
=In article <7250@cbnews.ATT.COM> fiddler@Sun.COM (Steve Hix) writes:
=>One reason that the German scores got to be so high (as were some
=>Japanese, such as Nishizawa with 102) was that they were =not=
=>rotated out from the front periodically as were nearly all allied
=>pilots.  They stayed in combat (excepting R&R leave) until they
=>were either killed or the war ended.

=Question: did this practice have a known detrimental effect on the overall
=capacity of the German and Japanese forces?

definitely on the Japanese; they lost 2/3 of their Pearl Harbor
veterans at Midway, many more of them near Guadalcanal (along with
many of their best Army pilots.)  their carrier forces became largely
inactive until they trained more pilots (but the new ones were not as
good as the ones they lost at Midway), and then they lost most of
the newly-trained ones at The Battle of the Phillipine Sea (aka
the Marianas Turky Shoot.)  except for kamikaze attacks, Japanese
aviation ceased to be a major force in the pacific war at that point.

= I assume that the rotated
=pilots of the US and British forces were used for something like flight
=schools or higher staff duties, were they could make good use of their
=talents and experience.

yes, in fact.  Dick Bong, for example, served two tours.  between them,
he was rotated stateside to go to school (both to learn and to teach
-- he actually wasn't a very good shooter on his first tour, but he
managed to become ace-of-aces anyway on sheer bravado.  reportedly
he came back for his second tour a fairly good deflection shooter.)
on his second trip home, he tested jets (and died when an early P-80
crashed.)

= In not using their experienced pilots to educate
=the fresh ones, they might have ended up with a few _very_ capable fighters,
=and a horde of nearly-useless ones.

=[mod.note:  This has often been attributed to the collapse of Japanese
=naval aviation; toward the end of the war, they had a decided lack of
=trained pilots, which contributed to the adoption of kamikaze tactics.
=I'm unaware of similar allegations for the Luftwaffe, though. - Bill ]

as far as i know, this is not considered a factor in the decline
of the Luftwaffe.  the Luftwaffe was hurt mostly by the loss of
fuel sources and by Hitler's insistence on offense over defense.
many many aircraft and pilots were grounded by lack of fuel at the
end of wwii.

richard
-- 
richard welty         welty@lewis.crd.ge.com         welty@algol.crd.ge.com
           518-387-6346, GE R&D, K1-5C39, Niskayuna, New York
``but officer, i was only speeding so i'd get home before i ran out of gas''