Flex 297,
You hit the nail on the head! One on One all pilots in similar aircraft are essnetially equal…So what gives one nation the edge? Better technology or more numbers. Look at History, the Battle of Britain, Early Pacifac War, The Zero far outclassed anything the US had, If you looked at these battles as many on this forum do, By comparing aircraft, ranges, bomb load etc, the outcomes would have been much different. The key to victory (the ultimate objective) in the Battle of Britain, was the use of Radar, and the “fighting spirit” of the RAF!!
The Luftwaffe at the Battle of Britain fought with two glaring equipment problems in a bombing campaign and then a fatal change in strategy.
And it was still a near-run thing. The two equipment problems were the horrendous shortleggedness of its escorting fighter force and the lack of a heavy bomber needed to put as much bombs as possible on each dangerous trip.
The consequences were these:
1) Amount of bombs on target was low which 2) necessitated more trips by light bombers which 3) were escorted by Me109 with barely 15 minutes of flight time over Britain, almsot always leaving the bombers unescorted exactly when the fighters were needed.
The Luftwaffe ended up losing one-third of their air force, 1,100 out of 3,200. Still, they were on the verge of defeating the Brits by bombing the RAF air fields before Hitler changed his mind after a RAF nighttime raid on Berlin (now that was a nice long range raid by adequate bombers :D)
By changing from the RAF air base to bombing cities, the Germans went from a clear strategy (which was to kill the RAF by destroying its bases) to hoping on the Brits to give up under bombing of their civilians. Bombing civilians only reinforced resistance.
Radar had a great effect in warning the RAF to get off the ground early in the war before the German bombers could hit them on the ground but it wasn’t the deciding factor.
Improper equipment and a wobbly commitment to a sound strategy doomed the Luftwaffe.
If the Germans had operated the Betty bomber/Zero fighter tandem at the BoB, the fighters would have escorted bombers from one end of England to the other like the P-51Ds did with the B-17s in the end of the war. The Luftwaffe in reverse were attrited to nothing by US fighters.
In the Pacifac war it was the fact that within 2 years the US had designed and built in huge quantities better fighters to take on the Zero..These one on one comparisons don’t hold alot of weight.
The early Pacific war was the only time that US fighters took a beating in kill-ratio. Head-to-head fighter fights in the Philipines and Midway were something like 10 to 1 in favor of the IJN air force.
Guadacanal was the place where US fighters first held their own (the Flying Tigers held their own much earlier on but they fought under a foreign flag.) A big part of that was the Japanese, because they lost the air base at Guadalcanal, were flying at extreme long range while the Americans fought directly from the island.
So what have we learned? Distance and location were as decisive as equipment.
By the way, US equipment, even at that time, were vastly superior to Russian 🙂 The Brewster Buffalo, which was slaughtered by the Japanese Zero and quickly dropped by the US, killed Russian planes to the tune of 489 to 16 (30:1 kill ratio) in the tiny Finnish air force.
So the kill ratio of US aircraft against Russian was ALWAYS horrendously high. The Cold War years were no exception. Historic precedence has shown us that the surest way to a massacre is placing a Russian warplane against an American one.
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