Iron Cross

Ps: I am on a business trip today and tomorrow, so the updates will be irregular. Please forgive me.

The Red Army encountered an air force crisis in 1942-1943. In addition to insufficient resources and production capacity, and the performance gap of aircraft, the third and biggest problem was the quality of pilots.

Faced with the urgent needs of the war, many Red Army pilots were only trained for 50-80 hours before being pulled out for actual combat. They received the most basic flying and combat skills training, but the training subjects such as mutual coordination, maintaining formation, adopting reasonable tactics, and troubleshooting were pitifully few. The logic of the Russians is simple and crude. Once they master the basic skills, they will fly. Every battle they participate in is the best training process, and surviving is victory. In terms of gaining experience and ability, one hour of combat is more useful than 20 hours of training.

Their opponents are usually pilots who have trained for 250 hours in Germany and have complete training experience in various levels of trainer aircraft. Although this training time has been compressed to a large extent compared to before the war (German new pilots initially had the same training time as American pilots, more than 350 hours), they are still better than the Red Army's novice pilots who have not even completed training. At the request of Hoffman, who was also the Air Force Commander, the Eastern Front pilot team also underwent major adjustments after September. Those record-breaking meritorious pilots were transferred back to their home countries one by one, or served as instructors in schools, or joined the local air force to deal with British and American aircraft. For example, fighter pilots who stayed on the Eastern Front were basically those who shot down less than 100 people, and they often brought a group of newly graduated rookies to fight.

Most new pilots like to fly Bf-219 because they are used to dogfighting and like dogfighting. They often forget their combat missions because of fighting with the opponent. Bf-219 is particularly suitable for them, while veterans usually prefer BZ tactics. Therefore, such scenes can often be seen in the sky over the Eastern Front. After the novice has worked hard to chase and entangle for a long time, his superior or senior comrade-in-arms can solve the opponent with just a light pounce.

According to the rotation system formulated by Hoffman, new pilots who graduated from various aviation schools will all join the Eastern Front operations, and then senior pilots will be transferred from the Eastern Front to the Western Front to participate in the war. There is a saying circulating inside the aviation school: the aviation school is the first training stage, and the Eastern Front is the second training stage. Only those who have attended the Eastern Front for more than five times can be considered qualified and allowed to graduate.

In this way, the Red Army rookies on the Eastern Front did not become a place for German ace pilots to brush their grades, but instead became a place for novice pilots to conduct actual combat training. Since the aircraft production and aviation students are much more than in history, the German Air Force has been able to maintain a higher frequency of sorties and can also withstand higher losses. The benefits of this policy were not visible in September and October, and it was even more passive than before. By December and January, the effect was more obvious - the Red Army pilots gradually fell into a suffocating trap of being strangled.

Hoffman's policy was clear: the best pilots were brought back to serve as instructors - to increase the intensity of personnel training; senior ace pilots served as the backbone of the Western Front - to increase the counterattack against the British and American strategic air strikes; general ace pilots led the team on the Eastern Front - to use their experience to teach and guide the novices; novice pilots went to the Eastern Front to practice their skills - facing the Red Army novices who did not even have a complete training time, they had a higher chance of survival and room for improvement. Of course, if you can't even beat the Russian novice pilots on the Eastern Front, it can only mean that you are not worthy of being a pilot.

Taking the statistics of fighter pilots as an example, after entering December, the average survival time of Soviet new pilots was 50 flight hours - more than 95% of them could not survive 100 hours, while the performance of German new pilots was much better, with less than 20% of them dying in the first 100 flight hours, which means that the exchange ratio of novice pilots on both sides was roughly 1:5. The problem is not 1:5 or 1:6. As long as the German pilot can survive this stage, he can be regarded as a mature pilot and can face the Red Army veterans calmly without worrying. And their opponents are still newcomers.

If he can survive 250 hours, he will basically have more than 5 records of shooting down aircraft, which is enough to meet the standard of an ace. When a German pilot has 250 training hours and 250 combat hours, he will begin to enter a stage of stable growth in performance and be able to lead a team on the Eastern Front. To use the terminology of the game, the Eastern Front is a huge village of newcomers. Being able to withstand the test of the Eastern Front means that you have survived the newcomer stage.

The losses caused by this rotation method are certainly greater than the previous method of letting top pilots perform missions, persist until they are shot down, and then replace them with newcomers, but most of the deaths in the rotation are newcomers, and the damage to the team as a whole is not too great. The Air Force Command was shocked to find that while a large number of pilots were lost, the quality and flight time of the overall pilot team were steadily increasing. It is now difficult to catch more than 100 super aces on the Eastern Front, but it is common to catch a dozen or dozens of aces.

Old pilots who were trained and matured on the Eastern Front and had rich combat experience would soon be transferred back to participate in the war on the Western Front. Most of the British and American pilots they encountered at this time had sufficient training time but lacked combat experience. Then these veterans happily used the tactics and strategies they had summarized and refined on the brink of life and death to deal with these novices. There were not many British and American pilots who could withstand the three tricks of the old hands on the Eastern Front. Moreover, even if the German pilots were shot down, it would not matter. As long as they could save their lives after parachuting, they could fight in the blue sky again in a few days. However, as long as the British and American pilots were shot down over the European continent, except for a few who were rescued by underground resistance organizations, most of them could only become prisoners.

As time went by and aircraft production surged, the German Air Force became stronger and stronger. The ratio of combat aircraft between the Soviet and German armies on the Eastern Front changed from 3,000:9,000 in August to 5,000:8,000. The loss rate of British and American bomber groups on the Western Front continued to rise, reaching a peak of 19%. After the introduction of the P-47 escort mechanism, the loss rate dropped, but still remained at around 14%. At the same time, the personnel structure of the German Air Force also underwent a major change, from being mainly bombers to being mainly fighters. Hoffman confidently declared: "In this world, there is no country that can defeat the German Army in a pure ground war without the air force factor and with similar forces."