Oh goody. A brawl. I use different tactics when I'm in a target rich environment. Tally ho!
Says the troll quoting from the blahblahblah
Wilkerson has already dealt with that.
You done exactly what your doing here. Expressed alot of opinions dressed up as facts.
You and I both know that your claim is incorrect. I've done the complete referenced argument on this at least three times now. Originally in the GGPW threads almost five years ago, at which time the same general engagement was fought.
Careful Mr. Diehl....you are now writing untrue and unkind statements about me. Personal attacks are not allowed on this web-board. The Gods are watching.
No personal attacks have been made by me and nothing untrue has been written by me. At last not consciously. If we didn't have this little engagement at least three times before then you have a doppleganger. In each of the past discussions I've provided the complete cites.
No. It doesn't. If you played WitP, you'd know that. The AVG for one are not poor or inexperienced and do quite well and player results vary depending alot on their skill sets.
I don't think you understood my point. Again, apart from the AVG, the Darwin Raid, the PH raid, there are a handful of engagements during the Indonesia campaign, and a handful of engagements in the PM - Buna exchanges. For P-40s vs Zekes that is all you get. I don't think anyone can rationally claim that the Darwin Raid, Clark, or PH strikes represent situations where pilots and planes met on anything like equal terms where doctrine and training and experience and machines could make a difference. That doesn't leave alot of room for all this "Japanese superiority Allies catching up on the learning curve" mythmaking, and it sure doesn't support a statistically strong bias favoring the Japanese.
Depending on the circumstances, the Japanese planes were better.
Sure. Stated another way, "depending on the circumstances, Allied planes were better."
Because it was easier for the men to think they'd been beaten by a machine vs a man..or men whom they'd been indoctronated to discount.
In which assessment I think he is somewhat correct. The Allies had anticipated a substantial clean sweep. What they got, by their own official estimates, was something in the range of a 2-3:1 favorable kill ratio. Thach wrote as much in his summary in (IIRC) September 1942 -- that superior Allied training allowed Allies to maintain a favorable attrition rate despite poor acceleration in the F4F. The Japanese likewise figured themselves to be winning, with "confirmed kills" typically resulting in 300-1000% overclaims. The difference was that the Allies looked at a 3:1 favorable loss ratio (by their estimates) and concluded that was not acceptable. The Japanese looked at their estimates and assessed that no changes needed to be made -- the Allies were sure to throw in the towel any day now.
And the Oscar was not a POS....it often had much of it's credit stolen because it was often mis-identified as a Zero.
The Oscar was a POS. The AVG fought Oscars and lesser material. The AVG weren't aces, or even a particularly cohesive bunch as compared with regular army aviators or USN ones. Even discounting overclaims, their kill ratio was on the order of 20:1 (lower than the 60:1 ballpark estimates that you get from some official unit histories).
You've said your piece.
Guadalcanal....you mean the place where the Japanese had to fight beyond their operational limit and with Aux fuel tanks attached?
No. I mean Guadalcanal, the place where Japanese fighters had something like 15 minutes of "safe" flight time within operational limits in a war in which most combats were won and lost in three minutes. In any case your argument is a straw man argument. The overwhelming majority of Zekes lost in that campaign were lost during engagements, not to battle damage on return flights, dry tanks, or other considerations that might apply if the "operational radius limit" had been a serious problem.
I also mean the Guadalcanal where Allied pilots were bombarded night and day by light mortars, field artillery, and IJN guns. Tell me exactly how many battleship rounds hit the Rabaul airfields in 1942? How many mortar rounds? How many nights did Japanese pilots listen to the sound of pitched battles hundreds of yards from their bivoacs -- when they weren't worrying about snipers or infiltrators actually taking the war to them *personally*? The claim that the Japanese suffered particularly disadvantageous positional circumstances in the Solomons campaign has no merit. 1
Japanese high energy tactics were successful against anyone who tried to follow suit.
Errm. No. High energy tactics rely on mintaining high airspeed. At high airspeed the Allied planes were substantially superior to the Japanese ones, and the disparity increased as the Allies introduced yet faster types as the war progressed. At high airspeeds, in an A6M vs F4F or P-40 debate, the allied types had an advantage. When the Japanese tried to fight high energy vs high energy, they tended to be outmaneuvered, or forced into accepting head to head engagements. And in the latter, allied firepower and Japanese vulnerability tended to favor the Allies.
Of course, mdiehl still hasn't purchased the game
Non sequitur, ad hominem.
nor has he played more than a few turns on a "borrowed" install as he stated in a previous thread.
Through roughly May 1942. Turns enough to know that the model was consistently producing results that absurdly favored the Japanese and good enough to dismiss the model as critically flawed.
The real problem of course is that mdiehl wants to say that the "Zero bonus" is unwarranted because of actions at Coral Sea, Midway and Guadalcanal.
The problem is that the ONLY actions in which the Zeros fought F4Fs are ones from April onward. It is illogical to conclude that the fact that the only data is from April and onward implies that for the period in which there is no data one would expect something statistically different than from the period for which we have data.
According to mdiehl that one point of maneuverability afforded by the Zero Bonus in April 42 must be the cause of everything that's wrong with the game. How can it not be otherwise?
Stick to representing your own opinions. You're not qualified to represent mine. According to mdiehl, whom I personally know, the Zero Bonus is a contributing factor to a broken air combat model. Mdiehl assures me that the existence of the Zero Bonus as a contributing factor does not preclude any inferences that there may be other flaws as well.
He wants to also turn it into a "the Zero and Oscar were pieces of crap" debate and couldn't possibly have achieved what they did in real life.
What? I believe I said that the Oscar was inferior to most Allied planes and couldn't hold its own in a campaign unless the enemy was isolated from their supply lines. Since that is exactly what happned "in real life" you would seem to be arguing against yourself. The Zero was a better plane. Again, not a superior one. And its pilots not particularly superior to any Allied pilots.
He claims that surprise, tactical advantage, prewar planning, logisitics, and better airfields (of course he forgets that those "better" airfields were the same ones the allies flew from just a few days/weeks earlier) were all responsible for what few successes he claims they had...
How many Allied pilots flew from Saigon? From Pnom Penh? Tainan? Truk? Rabaul? prior to March 1942. The only decent Allied airbases that the Japanese *ever* operated from were Clark Field and Singapore. And these only after the campaigns were over. The Allied tenure at these bases is best characterized as one of logistical isolation. Japanese pilots did not face that sort of challenge until the New Guinea campaign began to heat up.