German fighter careers and ground-attack

[csThor]

I've not had much ... well, to be honest I had no time for playing Il-2 over the last few months, mostly due to my new job and the many needs of real life outside of it, but after installing the latest patch I've done a few rounds in the QMB in between my chores at home and even tried to start a career on Kuban just to see how it is.

 

To be frank I never managed to start a mission due to real life interference but something that had bugged me already when the career mode was introduced really jumped out again: In a fighter career for III./JG 52 the very first mission I was to fly was a ground attack against a soviet artillery battery. With bombs. To cut a long story short:

 

I do not think that german fighter careers should ever include ground attack missions using bombs. There were a few exceptions (in JG 51 during late 1941 and early 1942 when one Staffel per Gruppe was earmarked for jabo missions or the specialized Jabo unit within JG 54 in early 1943) but in general german fighter pilots weren't even trained to use bombs and their units generally had neither bombs nor the equipment to load and carry them. I skimmed various biographies I own - Düttmann, Petermann, Ewald, Meimberg ... none of them ever included a deliberate Jabo mission with a bombload. Sure, ground attacks were flown, some even deliberately ... but those were strafing missions. I remember Meimberg ranting about the lunacy of an order to fly bomb attacks in the very last days of the war given that he had never trained any of that (let alone his subordinates) and he went through pre-war flight training. This will be especially important for the BoBP career given the dramatic drop in pilot quality on the german side. These kids (and many of them were but kids) were barely trained to get the aircraft off the ground and back again to begin with.

 

In my opinion ground attack operations using bombs should be limited in the career mode to the ground-attack units, these had the equipment for them and the pilots were trained to do so. Maybe, to preserve choice, a checkbox "disable ground attacks" could be an additional setting which  would remove "bomb this" missions from careers (but not strafing runs for these are realistic and historical).

Edited October 2, 2019 by csThor

[LukeFF]

2 hours ago, csThor said:

In my opinion ground attack operations using bombs should be limited in the career mode to the ground-attack units, these had the equipment for them and the pilots were trained to do so. Maybe, to preserve choice, a checkbox "disable ground attacks" could be an additional setting which  would remove "bomb this" missions from careers (but not strafing runs for these are realistic and historical).

 

For the most part, that sounds good, but what about Fw 190 D-9 units in the West that started flying fighter-bomber missions in / around February 1945? ISTR from reading Axel Urbanke's book on III./JG 54 that's when these sorts of missions started being flown.

[csThor]

That's another exception, yes, but an exception nonetheless. And given the "less specific" nature of a career compared to a static campaign I'd say the norm should be the baseline, not an exception.