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1littleaction78
เข้าร่วมเมื่อ 4 มิ.ย. 2011
วีดีโอ
P 38 Lightning Strafing Ground Targets WWII
มุมมอง 506K7 ปีที่แล้ว
P-38 Lightning nose camera film footage gives pilot's perspective while strafing ground targets in March 1945. Pilots were part of 15th Air Force, 14th Fighter Group, 37th Squadron which was assigned to airfield in Triolo, Foggia Provence, Italy. Names of pilots in footage: Lt. Col. Chitty, Lt. Wiggins, Lt. Bahnson, Lt. Dewater, Lt. G.A. Smith, Lt. Foreman, Lt. Little, Lt. Laughlin, Lt. Maroney...
Clydesdales in Evansville
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AB Clydesdales visited W. Franklin St. in Evansville, Indiana on November 21, 2014.
The P-38 is my favorite fighter of WW2, absolute beast of a fighter.
The sad part of these straffing runs is the pilots tended to pull up before they stop firing and they ended up hitting homes near by. Collateral damage no diubt😏
I wonder how much the "end of the war is close" made the pilots more cautious. None of these shots are attacking the trains directly head on or from behind. My guess is that kind of attack, though an easier shot, was more susceptible to AA ground fire.
I've heard many times,what they say,that P-38 Lightning lacks maneuverability,but,hey, they're forgetting,what purpose this birds was created for!Their main purpose is intercepting hostile bombers,at high speed,and high altitude,about 11,5 km.Correct me,if I'm wrong,but i think,that even P-51 Mustang doesn't fly that high.P-38's primary weapon was designed for the same purpose-effectively destroying hostile bombers,that oftenly had the armour protection.As for fighting japanese A6M "Reisen",here P-38's pilots have found a way to bypass the lack of maneuverability,they used pretty effective tactic "hit-and-run",using against japs their higher maximal speed,and much higher maximal altitude of flight,as the advantage.
what kind of stuff were the trains carrying
This guy did all this with NO AUTORELOAD checked. Look at the lag he had to deal with. right after attach run, bam, frame skip and you are lined up again. Rinse, repeat. Ok got that out of the way. These guys were almost all under 21 flying these missions. Can not imagine.... We don't have that many left anymore. If you see a vet, tell him thanks. I bet they went through more than you think.
Uncle flew B-17s from Kimbolton England with the 379th Bomb Group. 31 as command pilot and 6 as a copilot
Too bad the 5th AF didn't confirm Japanese planes blown up on the ground by strafing P-38s and P-47s. Task Force 58 could've made Hellcat and Corsair pilots aces alone just by counting aircraft destroyed as kills during strafing.
Strafing was dangerous in WW2. A lot of good fighter aces were KIA or POW strafing German air fields. Gabby Gabreski was a Pow because of his strafing an air field
Too bad we didn't have better video back then. Thanks!
too much lead in with info panel. Also, spend a little money and have films "computer enhanced". These are data and hard to see shots.
No convergence or felt engine torque issues
Two things I like best about World War II One is, honoring the men and women that won it. Two is, watching a steam locomotive get hit from strafing and blow its steam out.
You forget how much fun it was shooting farmers and their families and helpers in the fields. They oftentimes turned around 3-4 times to make shure that granny has been hit too. True heroes.
No volume
Thank you gentlemen for doing your part to assure I was not forcibly taught Der Fürher's approved German.
Why did these guys shoot up towns and villages where there were nothing but civilians? That's messed up!
@Who cries for Biden Not me I've talked to many escort pilots and they said that if they still had ammo, they would strafe "targets of opportunity."
@Who cries for Biden Not me Ok, whatever you say.
This looks like the funnest job on the planet. Flying all over with a powerful engine on each side of you divebombing and shooting railcars to shit. I'm so jealous.
Wie einfach ....ohne Gegner
I feel like the p38 was the a10 before the a10, the amount of fire power it posses with just the guns are insane
Oh no doubt, that aircraft was a beast. The P-47 was no slouch either with 8 .50's. I wouldn't want be on the business end of either one!
The predecessor.
Those guys were great pilots..pulling out of the run right at treetop level. Would have sucked to be the train engineer.
this is the reason Air superiority was key to victory in WW2 the germans did have supplies but it you cant move them about you may as well just give up. it's sad to think that many of the railway/ train engineers were civilians, there was military personal operating them but the majority were civilains
There are few people in history who can say they flew around Italy and shot up a lot of expensive railroad equipment with impunity.
These guys are part of a nation who mobilized like never before in history, otherwise we’d be speaking German today.
it would be great if this type of footage was cleaned up like they do with other vintage film.
Must be nice murdering innocent civilians and getting away with it because you're "the good guys". PS: You weren't.
Be quiet cry-baby.
There’s a reason the Nazi’s feared the P-38 Lightning. Heroes like Lt. Little bringing the pain in a great plane! I have the upmost respect for all veterans, especially for the ones in WW2.
Some of those pilots were almost in the tree tops. Gotta get close to make these count. Get em guys.
Definitely going down close to the deck.
Lt. Colonel Chitty, is this where Chitty Chitty Bang Bang came from?🤔
My father flew P-38s out of Africa into Italy. On August 25, 1943, he was in a mission that helped to secure the Foggia airfield complex in southern Italy. In one of his letters home (many of which I was able to find and save in his biography, Wings Forever) he wrote, "After dive-bombing, we would stay down and strafe the convoys from end to end, setting trucks on fire and trying to put them all out of commission…. We also shot up a lot of trains. I enjoyed that." He was shot down on his 40th mission on August 31, 1943, so he was a POW when the raids in this video took place.
I just read the narrative about your father’s book on Barnes and Noble. Looks like a fascinating story. I’ll have to buy that very soon. That’s how I got into aviation myself was from being around World War II aircraft that had been restored and riding along when I was a child. Thank you for that information.
Awesome.
I don't know if anyone else has noticed... but the P-38 seems much more accurate/precise
Yes, it's gun configuration made it so all the firepower squirted straight ahead without the need to converge the guns. This made for quite a precise hammer punch that was devastating.
I'd bet 1 locomotive going down mid route would be a huge headache. Now imagine 90% in an 500km range in one day....not an easy recovery
How were there any operational locomotives left by the end of the war? So many depicted being destroyed in many of these guncam videos.
Holy cow, the accuracy of the P-38 seems to be much better than other ground attack videos.
Its has nose mounted guns, p-47 and p-51 had wing mounted guns
I wonder why they attacked across the train instead of along the train
Note: Most of the vehicles and trains are filled with prisoners.
Wrong. POWs in the late war were on forced death marches. Do you think the Germans would waste precious rail capacity for useless mouths. Especially when German logistics was still mostly horse drawn.
Imagine what an A10 wort hog could do with these opportunities.
You can really see the difference between the 20mm Cannon and the 50 cal here 😳
1000 yard range on those guns.........
Zooming in does not make this 16:9.
*Thomas never recovered mentally from seeing his friends blown to bits that day*
That footage badly needs restoration.
Not a good time to be a locomotive engineer.
P-38 guns seem to be much more accurate than the P-51 strafing video's i've seen.
"P-38 guns seem to be much more accurate than the P-51 strafing video's i've seen." My thoughts exactly. Everybody here is saying the same thing. The difference is noticeable.
Really accurate statement. The arsenal was clustered and the impact of the projectiles concentrated.
I wonder if P-51's which were tasked with ground-attack missions had their machine guns aligned directly forward? Obviously that wasn't an issue with the P-38 which mounted all its guns in the nose -- they would always be aligned directly forward. But fighters with wing-mounted guns like the P-51 has their guns aligned slightly inward so that the aiming point from both wings would converge at an optimal range for air-to-air combat. I would think though that this would make ground attack accuracy a little more difficult because the bullets aren't all going directly forward. Assuming the ground target was farther away than the optimal air-to-air range the bullets would actually already have crossed paths and would be diverging.
@@arkwill14 I agree. For ground attack the P-51 guns would need very little inward angle since the P-51 isn't that wide to begin with. Even if they were pointed straight ahead the P-51 could hit anything that was about as wide as itself. That would include most military targets. Trucks, tanks, etc.
@@rael5469 Yeah, I've learned a little about "Gun Harmonization" since I wrote that. Apparently it was up to pilots, or more often squadron commanders, to decide how much angle they wanted their plane's guns adjusted to. Some planes used no adjustment at all, even for air-to-air and just fired straight ahead. I would imagine that if you knew you were going hunting for ground targets you probably would want no adjustment either. I agree with you - if you're going after equipment like that you probably just want to spray an area as large as the plane itself.
These pilots were incredibly skilled. They guided the bullet stream with their planes while diving.
In a plane infamous for loss of rudder authority in a dive. These guys were master technicians of their craft. They did all this stuff while minding a set of instruments and keeping track of navigation and fuel endurance by doing math in their heads.
Hamlet. This footage is from March '45. So these are probably late J or L models with automatic dive brakes and power controls that made the Lightning a much more potent and controllable warplane. It's just too bad most were scrapped right after the war.
@@Alitheia777 - Yeah, but it sounds more dramatic my way. It's the internet. I think the main thing is that these machines weren't the perfected end product of a long mechanical evolution. They were steps in that evolution, and every new innovation or improvement had its share of "Never though of what would happen if you did that to it" moments. The pilots had to know, allow for, and plan around the peculiarities, weaknesses, and strengths of their particular machine while maintaining situational awareness and monitoring mechanical functions, and then they had to perform ground attack missions with a fighter. That's some next-level human performance right there.
Imagine sitting in one of those trains and getting lit up like that. 😬
Life expectancy for train engineers in the later stages of the war had to be pretty short.
What is that black thing that appears in the upper left corner after every shot. That’s in every one of these old videos here on youtube?
Indicators on the gun cameras. The cameras were designed to follow the tracks of the guns.
I wonder what the life expectancy of a train engineer in occupied Europe was?
imagine all those POW's getting shredded by 50 cal in those box cars , like fish in da barrel
P38 Lightening in the air, move rail cargo at your own peril.