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machine guns were replaced by four 20 mm cannon; also as an option, 30 mm cannon could be ﬁtted to underwing mounts. With weight creep due to heavier armor protecting the pilot and larger caliber weapons, a new lighter wing was introduced with the Fw 190 A-6; to increase endurance, an 80 gallon fuel drop tank could be ﬁtted under the cockpit center line. The ground attack version could carry a 500 kg (1,100 lbs) bomb in place of the drop tank, or more commonly a 250 kg bomb with under-wing drop fuel tanks. Their favorite targets were the South coast towns, such as mine, where the Allied armies were training for the upcoming invasion of occupied Europe. The tactic was to come in at wave-top height, up over the seafront hotels crammed with troops and Australian airmen, then go for bridges, the locomotive works and factories by skidding the bomb along a road; it had a short delay fuse to avoid blowing up the plane.

How Did it Stand Up Against US and RAF Interceptors?
In late 1941 the RAF started to ﬁnd the standard Spitﬁre Mk V outmatched by the new Luftwaffe ﬁghter which regained air supremacy over the English Channel, dealing Allied air forces relatively heavy losses. The climax was on August 19, 1942, when several thousand Canadian troops with their tanks from Brighton

landed on the beach at Dieppe to test the defenses; it was a disaster. By the end of the day, the 115 Fw 190s had downed 61 of the 106 Allied aircraft lost out of 300 of all types, including Allison powered P51 Mustangs and Spitﬁre Mk IXBs. The RAF lost 81 pilots killed or captured against the Luftwaffe’s 20 pilots killed. The leaﬂets dropped two nights later over Brighton had photographs of dead soldiers littering the beach, a landing craft that took a direct hit as it ground ashore, and Churchill tanks with their turrets and tracks blown off. Less than half the landing force returned home. It was Sir Stanley Hooker, then in charge of supercharger design at RollsRoyce, who made a major contribution to the superiority of the Merlin 61 engine in the new Spitﬁre IXB. Using his renown mathematical skills, the new two-stage, two-speed supercharger had perfectly matched impellers; the result was the Merlin equaled the Fw 190 A-8’s BMW 801 D-2 engine in power at altitude with less than two-thirds the installed weight. The Spitﬁre could always out-turn the Fw 190, now it could out-climb it as well. Prior to the advent of the long-range escort ﬁghters, the USAAF suffered heavy losses from Fw 190 attacks, their most effective tactic being to ﬂy head on into the bomber formation; at that altitude their speed was inferior to the turbocharged P-47 Thunderbolt. In a maximum velocity dive, the Fw 190 was dead meat to a following Thunderbolt which had the fastest dive of all ﬁghters, both Allied and Luftwaffe. To offset the USAAF daylight raids against aircraft factories, the Fw 190 was designed in sections like today’s commercial aircraft; parts were made in small factories scattered all over the eastern part
Spitﬁre Mk IX

of Germany, as well as in occupied territories. By 1945 though, Allied raids against the rail system disrupted the supply of parts to the ﬁnal assembly halls of reinforced concrete, salt mines and tunnels. Furthermore, slave labor worked 80 hours and more weekly on minimal food fabricating parts and were skillful in subtle sabotage of structural sections. It is recorded that BMW employed 12,000 inmates at the Dachau concentration camp. Hitler was so convinced of victory that unlike the UK, total war effort and conscription of women at 18 years of age was not instituted until 1944. This shows in the German RLM (air ministry) military aircraft production records when compared to that of Britain and the United States.

1940
UK ................ 15,049 (during Battle of Britain and Blitz) U.S. .............. 6,019 Germany........ 10,826

1944
UK ................ 24,461 U.S. .............. 96,318 Germany........ 39,807 (while being bombed day and night) By 1945, ﬂying by the Luftwaffe was severely restricted due to a lack of fuel, material and trained pilots. All variants of the Fw 190 built total 20,001 aircraft and was the only FockeWulf design to be massed produced. The Fw Condor four engine airliner turned bomber, used against Atlantic shipping, were few in number. There was a large number of prototypes, including a twinengine ﬁghter-bomber.

References:
German Aircraft Industry and Production; 1933-1945: Ferenc Vajda & Peter Dancey, SAE Intl. 1998 Inside the Third Reich, Memoirs by Albert Speer: Macmillan & Company; 1970 Not Much of an Engineer: Sir Stanley Hooker; SAE; 1991 The Airplane, a History of its Technology: John D. Anderson Jr. AIAA: 2002 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FockeWulf_Fw_190_operational_history www.vectorsite.net/avfw190

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focke-Wulf_Fw_190_operational_history http://www.vectorsite.net/avfw190.html

Jetrader - July/August 2010

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