Many, many of the stories you read about insight turn out to be quite exaggerated, with everybody at the time understanding something which after many retellings turns into an amazing breakthrough by one person. Hell, it happens all the time at work, with a bunch of people screaming, "We need to do X, we need to do X," for months on end before they give up and just grumble bitterly about it over beer, and then after a mysterious attitude shift in the leadership, the next guy who suggests X (usually someone who hasn't been around long enough to know better) is hailed as a genius.

I actually got to be that guy once. I was randomly venting in a meeting about a chronic problem and the ridiculously easy fix to it, and there happened to be a business guy there who did not want his project held up by the BS problem I was talking about, so he demanded that the fix be implemented. It happened. I was amazed. I didn't cash in on the genius part, though.

The astronomer Freeman Dyson was doing similar work for the RAF (I had heard this story attributed to him) Two of his calculations weren't acted on because of illogical users.

Very few bombers crashed because of airframe failures as opposed to enemy attacks. Logically it would make sense to make the aircraft weaker but lighter/cheaper/faster the loss of a few % crashing due to breakups would balance being able to escape enemies faster.

Gunners on bombers very rarely hit incoming fighters, it would make sense to remove some or all of the gunners and instead train them as pilots and build more aircraft. The RAF's main problem was losing skilled crews and gunners were just extra wasted human resource when a plane was shot down.

The wrinkle in this story is that both conclusions were eventually discovered by others as well, acted upon, and eventually became the dominant paradigms by the end of the war (Dyson was doing operations research for RAF Bomber Command and claims to have made the suggestion in regards to cutting weight on Lancasters.) Some of the most successful planes in the war embodied this philosophy before Dyson even enlisted. The most successful light bomber in the war was the De Haviland Mosquito, which was made primarily of wood, usually carried no machine guns, and could outrun every other plane in the sky until the arrival of jet engines.

It's not completely illogical to want to protect the places with holes, because the distribution of where bullets hit isn't random. Fighter pilots aimed at specific parts of planes they were attacking. And some surfaces would have been protected either by other surfaces or by having a nearly flat angle of incidence to probable incoming fire.

I thought this too, but then realized the humans doing the shooting are also illogical. For instance, I could see how hitting the wings might feel effective and easy, but it's not a great strategy because the bullet holes don't really impact the flight capability.

WW II fighter pilots were very rational about what they aimed at. (I happen to have read a lot about this.)

How many WW2 fighter pilots were actually good enough shots that they could aim at part of a plane? I always figured that the difference between a good gunner and a bad gunner was whether they hit the plane at all.

In every instance I've read about they aimed at specific parts. Presumably the difference between the good ones and the bad ones was whether they were able to hit what they were aiming at, but they all appear to have at least tried.

Was this because of their incredibly short ammunition reserves? I heard something recently about spitfires having only having about 20s worth of machine gun fire.

Partly, and in the case of Spitfires and Hurricanes (never forget the Hurricanes -- they weren't nearly as pretty, but they were every bit as effective) partly because of the limited structural damage that the .303 round could do. Later variants were more heavily armed, but the Battle of Britain was fought primarily with Brownings chambered for the .303 British. That pretty much left pilots, the cylinders of radial engines and pressurized fuel and oil systems as the vulnerable points. (Those with .50 Brownings and 20mm auto cannon could afford to shoot at other things, but a fuselage hit still rarely did more than add ventilation.)

Yes. They always seem to have fired in short bursts.

I was thinking specifically about ground-to-air fire. Other flyers should know where to aim. Any evidence of this knowledge gap in the literature?

Any primary documents you recommend? (Curious history nerd.)

I particularly recommend Johnnie Johnson, Jeffrey Quill, Pierre Clostermann, and Hugh Dundas.

What about anti-aircraft ground fire?

For bombers thats the main cause of aircraft losses, fighters of WWII were pretty ineffective, especially at night.

It's difficult to believe a WWII era fighter diving into a stream of bombers, at night, while the multiple gun turrets on 100s of bombers were returning fire - were making precise tactical decision about which part of the airframe to target.

The nice thing (statistically) about AA fire is that it's rather uniformly random.

WW II fighters shot down a large number of aircraft. Erich Hartmann alone claimed 352.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_World_War_II_air_aces

Mostly against primitive fighters particularly on the Russian front. Assuming similar exaggeration of successes by each sides publicity offices you can probably divide the figures by 2 or 4.

Even if all these had been against night heavy bombers it's a tiny part of the losses

The RAF didn't fly in formation during night bombing attacks, rather they flew in "streams" often hundreds of miles long. So there wouldn't have been hundreds of turrets to bring to bear on a single fighter.

I think you're also overestimating how easy it would be to spot a blacked out fighter at night. A popular german night fighter tactic was often to sneak up beneath a bomber and then pitch the nose of the fighter up sharply while firing, racking the bomber's belly with cannon fire.

Many fighters were equipped with guns mounted in a vertical configuration called Schräge Musik. The guns would fire automatically when a magnetometer detected an enemy bomber was overhead.

I think that was the result of Dyson's study - a gunner never saw a fighter so they could just as effectively be removed or repalced with fixed guns.

And in Wald's research a night fighter still had some difficulty finding and approaching abomber even with ground radar - so they fired at it (using proximty fuses or upward firing guns) essentially at random points - there was no statsistical bias of the fighter pilot targetting specific systems

Well, the article is specifically about ack-ack fire. I guess from a statistical perspective, adding enough armour to prevent fighter bullets from killing you would be a bad trade-off.

Unfortunately the enemy are rarely cooperative in allowing your aircrash investigators to visit the site and examine crashed aircraft.

You could examine enemy bombers that you had shot down but apart from the design and vunerabilites being different you would miss those that had exploded leaving little wreakage or had been crippled and crashed over the sea on the way back. You would still select for a set of damage that allowed an enemy place to crash reasonably intact

Some of your interceptor craft would probably crash over friendly territory, but probably not many bombers

Sure, if they could manage to dredge enough wrecks out of the channel to provide a sufficient sample.

Barring that, and depending on the budget for armor, looking at the areas without bullet holes on the surviving planes is a reasonable approximation.

> "Really? Are most people this illogical?"

Seeing how frequently punishing people following below average performance and rewarding them for above average performance is used as a managerial/coaching/teaching technique...yes.

My immediate thought upon seeing the headline was "that seems counterintuitive," but that's because I assumed they were analyzing planes that were shot down or nearly so.