BBerguson
Official Pennsyltuckian
The US was mainly hunting fighters.....and the 50 was plenty. The German's were shooting down bombers and wanted the canon to bust them up at extreme range and avoid some of those 50's on the "Flying Fortress. The RAF spent the Battle of Britain with rifle caliber machine guns and had to get right on top of whatever they were shooting at. The Japanese Zero had an odd arrangement of two rifle caliber machine guns and two 20mm canon. They usually tried to use the MG's when engaging fighters, much to the allies good fortune. The canon had very limited ammo capacity. The Oscars were initially armed with two rifle caliber MG's only, then one 7.7mm and one 50.....late in the war 2 50's.
The AVG (Flying Tigers) did good work against Japanese fighters with P-40's that were considered weak obsolete NON front line fighters by everyone but the Japanese. Those P-40's racked up a 40-1 kill ratio. Not too shabby! Once they learned slash and run tactics and stopped trying to dogfight the more nimble but fragile Japanese aircraft they did very well.
If the Japanese had not adopted the "fight to the last man" attitude the war would have ended a year and a half earlier. After Midway, Guadalcanal, and the destruction of Truk they were done......they could not win the war, could only prolong it.
I had a Jr HS teacher who flew P-51's in the second WW. He hated the plane, said it was an oil guzzling piece of .....(you get the idea). One hit in the oil tank and you ended up a POW or worse ditched at sea. It performed well but he thought it was a mechanical disaster. It is just my guess that he had to jump out of one of them and it left a permanent impression on him.
Yes, the axis powers had, compared to the allies, small and fragile bombers and didn’t put them up 1000 at a time like we did. Thinking about this, I would compare Germany and Japan as a small, nimble fighter with a big chip on their shoulder. They could make small damaging strikes but didn’t have the stamina (or resources) to fight the wars they started. So, with that said, I think our 50’s were more than adequate against their bombers when we needed them as they weren’t the behemoths we were flying. The RAF fighters started with 303 British machine guns (up to 8 if I remember correctly). I have to wonder how much better they may have been had they been armed with 50 bmg’s during the Battle of Britain.
I had to think about your comment about “the war would have ended a year and half earlier”. I’m guessing you mean that they would have surrendered quicker and we wouldn’t have had to kill every one of them like the battle on Guadalcanal, Peleliu, Okinawa, and Iwo Jima. I don’t mean to leave other brutal island battles out, these are the ones I’m familiar with and readily come to mind. It’s an interesting discussion.
I haven’t read much about the P-40’s. 40-1! I had no idea!!! Sakai writes about battling them, and I do remember the P-40’s, like the Wildcats, were better diving down through the formations and slashing them with their 50’s and staying out of the dog fights. And all of the J planes were easy to set on fire so these attacks were very effective.
The only negative I’ve ever read about the P-51 was the guns in the early models had a habit of jamming. Never read anything otherwise. Guess I’ll have to start digging into that...