Naval History Forums

hey

another szenario
a morelike Midway szenario, but in the Atlantic:

the german graf zeppelin against the british ark royal and victorious

i put two ships on the british side because the airplanes of the graf zeppelin were superior (Bf 109 vs Swordfishes)

kk

miro

Wouldn't Graf Zeppelin vs. Yorktown be a better proposition?

Two on one complicates matters.

hey...
yes, but i was focusing on the air superiority of the Bf vs. the Swordfish...

wouldn't the combination of Bf, Ju be a better attack force, than just Swordfishes on the British carriers...


miro

Graf Zeppelin vs Ark Royal alone is a losing proposition for the Germans.

Tiornu:

Graf Zeppelin vs Ark Royal alone is a losing proposition for the Germans.

Of course! The Germans are such incompetent fellows and lousy sailors. In every scenario potrayed here, in your opinion, there is a nil chance for the Germans to accomplish more than to be easily defeated. Being that the case I don´t understand how they did to conquer all of Europe, quite "easily" as a matter of fact, and give a hard four year fight to the combined forces of the three superpowers and empires of the time: USA, GB and URSS. For a country smaller than Texas is quite a feat to accomplished that.
And for being a non-naval country with a minimun fleet in comparison with Great Britain or the US their few surface units and their U-Boats almost put the allies out of combat in more than one ocassion.
Returning to the thread, I wonder how in God´s name a Swordfish would outmanouver and shoot down a BF-109 E? Only for the fact that the Bf is German and germans must lose against a WWI Spad.

The Swordfish has no chance against a Bf109, less with an 800 kg torpedo hanging below. But the British had fighters onboard, not just torpedo planes.

marcelo_malara wrote:But the British had fighters onboard, not just torpedo planes.

Fulmars? Or perhaps you are thinking of Hurricanes?

If anyone would like to post an intelligent inquiry, I will be happy to explain why I think the carrier with sixty planes, operating for a service with twenty years' experience in carrier operations, might have the advantage over the carrier with forty planes, operating for a service (or in this case, two services as the navy lacked its own air arm) with no experience.

That´s planly true. Putting an effective naval air arm into service is not a few years task. Japan, UK and USA had for then 20 years perfecting the techniques.

Carrier aircraft are normally designed that way from scratch, because of the tremendous stress on the aircraft when landing. The whole aircraft needs to be stronger. I don't think the US used any carrier aircraft in WWII that weren't specifically designed for that purpose, and they don't do so today either.

And don't anyone point to the Doolittle raid. :) That was an exception and they couldn't land there.

That's right, no USN carrier aircraft were navalized land planes. Apart from Col Doolittle's band, there were some occasions when army planes were ferried and, I think, delivered by rolling take-off. The Japanese had a couple ships designed specifically for that sort of ferry operation.
Navalizing isn't easy. The British did it with the Hurricane and the early Spitfire types. One previously undamaged Seafire got snapped in half by the jolt of an arrested landing.

True. Don´t know in the first times, but from 1935 onwards all the fighters of the Navy were specially designed for them. Moreover, companies like Grumman, MacDonnell and Chance-Vought never designed an aircraft for the Army Air Corps or the USAF.

marcelo_malara wrote:True. Don´t know in the first times, but from 1935 onwards all the fighters of the Navy were specially designed for them. Moreover, companies like Grumman, MacDonnell and Chance-Vought never designed an aircraft for the Army Air Corps or the USAF.

McDonnell Aircraft here in St Louis did indeed design several aircraft for the USAF:

F-88 Voodoo (not a success)
F-101 Voodoo (marginal success)
USAF version of the F4 Phantom II (great success)
F-15 Eagle (huge success)
MATS version of the DC9/MD80 - (success)
C-17 (great success)

I'm sure there are a few other examples - like the little jet fighter that was to be carried along in a B-29/B-36. Don't remember its designation.

Derf

There aren't a lot of wartime examples of USA planes marketed by traditional USN aircraft makers. Boeing had pretty much given up on naval planes. Grumman actually did push army analogs of the navy F5F and F7F, known as the XP-50 and XP-65 respectively. Neither advanced far enough to drop their X's. In fact, the XP-50 never completed a single flight.
Douglas, of course, had several army combat planes in production. The P-70 was a night-fighter conversion of the A-20. There was also an XP-48 lightweight fighter whose specifications looked suspiciously optimistic and thus died early. I'm not sure what the relationship was between Douglass and Northrup.
Curtiss was the company with perhaps the largest ties on both sides of the army-navy fence: Helldiver and Warhawk, among other designs.
I think the parasite fighter you're thinking of was the McDonnell XF-85 Goblin.

hey...

ok to go to back to the initial question...

lets get specific...
Graf Zeppelin with 20 Ju-87 and 20 Bf109

vs.

HMS Ark Royal with 40 Swordfishes and 20 Fulmars

lets say that the Graf Zepplin gets the well trained pilots, which have practised landing and starting from an carrier for quite some time...
(lets say this is all happening after 1943, as initially planned by Raeder)

so then who would win.

I honestly think those 20 more swordfishes could not overcome the superiority of a Bf 109...and at that time (the start of the war) the fear caused by the diving Junkers...

adios
miro