ITT: we apologize for what we thought about underloved vehicles/gear when we were History Channel-watching kiddiesi'm sorry F4F for not understanding that you were a very competitive naval fighter that was often capable of meeting the Japanese on equal terms (under the right circumstances) and for your very important work with the Fleet Air Arm in the Atlantic
By spring 1943 with arrival of picrel it was officially obsolete.Still served a yeoman role from escort carriers in Atlantic flying anti-submarine TBF Avengers which needed 1 or 2 fighter escorts accompanying them on U-boat patrols. But the pawning off of post-1942 F4F (FM-1 / FM-2) production to General Motors' Eastern Aircraft division was something of a wartime profiteering grift. They needed to be building F6Fs and (the similar-to-Wildcat small airframe) F8Fs.
>>65399215nah, its because it sucked ass so much that people had to make do and create tactics to its strengthsalso that Zero crashing in alaska helped out a lot
>>65399412>sucked assIt was fine for a 1939-1942 carrier based naval fighter. They even made a 4,000-mile range extra-fuel rigid wing photo recon variant, the F4F-7. It was what the U.S. Navy had on hand in December 1941 when the decision to fight war against Imperial Japan was made. Later in 1942 the XF4F-8 lightweight escort carrier variant with Wright engine, eventually became Eastern Aircraft's FM-2 after 1943. It wasn't a front line air combat fighter after 1942 as more powerful and capable planes supplanted it.
>>65399215>FAA>Atlantic Aye, good on the Wildcat for performing well in a theatre with zero enemy air assets.
>>65399618Anon, the Luftwaffe's mass twin-engined torpedo bomber attacks on lend-lease/atlantic/Mediterranean convoys were often as big as the ones conducted by both sides in the Pacific. Almost every time the RN could spare an escort carrier to tag along with a convoy with a squadrons of Martlets on board it turned out to be a godsend against Condors and HE111s.
>>65399412>its because it sucked assit didnt tho>that people had to make do the entire US military and war effort was more or less "making do" in the Pacific until mid-1943>and create tactics to its strengthslike every other warplane ever?
>>65399412DACT is a Feature, not a Bug.
I would like to apologize to everyone on this website for ever thinking that the T-72 was anything other than an irredeemable piece of total shit.
>>65399706>Mk VIsthose are the later model, equivalent to the FM-2, produced by Eastern Aircraft which was 500 lbs lighter >>65399574 than the earlier Mk II/III (F4F-3/4) powered by the single-row 9-cylinder Wright R-1820 and had improved lower altitude performance, rate of climb and maneuverability. FM-2s had 4×.50 cals armament
>>65399215Allied tanks were a shoehorn in for this title thanks to history channel misinformation but now I feel that the pendulum has swung a little bit too much the other way as in obvious real flaws and valid criticism is now being swept aside.About the only group of vehicles I can think of off the top of my head that go a bit underappreciated are Jap tanks with the huge caveat you have to look at them from when they originally appeared i.e. 20's and 30's. 40's they're clearly outdated POS but before then I actually think they were decent vehicles for what they were.
>>65399781Don’t be sorry anon. The myth of Russian military superiority was a multigenerational con job being pushed by the highest levels of government across the entire free world. Hell, by 1992 I think a lot of people that should have known better were believing their own bullshit.
>>65401035>Russian military superiorityanyone just needs to study the Lend Lease both through the Artic and through Iran to know that without it Soviets wouldn't even have bullets to shootpretty funny when I learned that the Soviets actually had to pay for the Lend Lease with gold and most likely that gold was spanish and then sunk in a British cruiser
>>65399215Flying this in IL-2 Tobruk made me like it. Rock solid gun platform with zero bad habits.
>>65399215I'll do you one better, the P-40. I'm not sure if it counts because it was always presented as a borderline obsolete interwar design even though it started flying in 1938, but these were used by everyone, everywhere, and punched above their weight on top of being easy to service and durable as hell. History always seems presented like the US didn't even have a mainline fighter until the P-38, P-51D and P-47 arrived, but these vicious little rascals were tearing shit up from day 1.
>>65399781Yeah, I mean how could you have known. You only had 60 years of watching Israelis beat the living piss out of slavshit, most of the time while armed with literal castoffs and frankenstein abominations. How could you have known, under the circumstances, that slavshit was in fact dogshit?
>>65399215If the F4F was loved there wouldn't be a F6F and a F8F. It needed more attention.
>>65401415That is utterly retarded logic
>>65399733american planes designed mid war were superior to the IJN and IJA, on top of japans pilot losseven "poorer" performing early P-38s are taking out 5 zeroes by itself in dogfights
>>65401410Everyone coped by calling them “monkey models” and saying real T-##s haven’t been made outside of the USSR yet.
>>65401410Who invited you? We see you.
>>65401444Sorry, /pol/ I guess the arabs had a string of astounding victories over the israelis using their masterful soviet wunderwaffe, right?
>>65401258>P-40>"-51D arrived"both it and the P-39 could easily have been totally replaced during 1942 by the Allison-powered picrelbut for USAAF 'not procured here' intransigence and ignoranceThe P-40 (and -39) were the USAAF equivalents of Navy F4F. What America happened to have had available in December 1941 and what was on the production line just at that particular time interval, could be supplied to Allies etc. Yes after 1942 these fighters served in second line fronts and yeoman duties where the fiercest, latest-production Axis opposition fighter aircraft weren't encountered. P-40 also served in USAAF stateside training units (and for Allied air forces) 1942-45
>>65401427No it's not, they both came along because the US needed a better plane to shoot the Japs with
>>65401258This was gonna be my pick as well. I was under the impression they were pretty 'meh' and used only because that was what anyone had at the time, but they were actually pretty freaking great for their time and their niche. Sure they got overshadowed later on by bigger, better fighters but several years of war development will do that for you.Tomahawks and Kittyhawks bore the brunt of Luftwaffe and Regia Aeronautica fighter attacks during the North African campaign. The P-40s were considered superior to the Hurricane, which they replaced as the primary fighter of the Desert Air Force.[9]I would evade being shot at accurately by pulling so much g-force...that you could feel the blood leaving the head and coming down over your eyes... And you would fly like that for as long as you could, knowing that if anyone was trying to get on your tail they were going through the same bleary vision that you had and you might get away... I had deliberately decided that any deficiency the Kittyhawk had was offset by aggression. And I'd done a little bit of boxing – I beat much better opponents simply by going for [them]. And I decided to use that in the air. And it paid off.—Nicky Barr, 3 Sqn RAAF[30]
>>65401258>>65401714honestly i think that the aircraft designers' philosophy of "if it looks right, it is right" also applies to popular perception of WWII planes amongst the general populace as well. I really haven't seen much denigrating of the P40 in documentaries/pop history in general, but i've seen plenty of trash talking against the F4F. I'm willing to bet that this is due in large part to the fact that the gigachad jawline P40 just *looks* like a lean mean airplane in a way which the fat cartoony stubby Wildcat doesn't. also Johannes Steinhoff mentions in his memoirs that he and most of his squadron mates considered the later variant P40s in Africa to be overall better than the 109E, for what that's worth. They lost more than a few of their 109s in stupid ways early on when they came across some Desert Air Force P40s that were hauling bombs and assumed that they were clumsy light bombers that were easy prey like the Fairey Battle or something, but got a nasty shock when they ditched their bombs and suddenly became very competitive.
>>65401767also fun fact: a couple of both Brit and American wildcat squadrons fought in North Africa too when the UK/US were scraping up every flyable fighter to cover Operation Torch. One of the surviving airworthy Wildcats has a desert-themed Fleet Air Arm livery:https://www.youtube.com/shorts/N1XYqWh3m_8
>>65401789>One of the surviving airworthy Wildcats has a desert-themed Fleet Air Arm livery:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1XYqWh3m_8
>>65401798yes that's what i just posted
>>65401801also Martlet with invasion stripes just looks really funny to me for some reasonwdym you wanna fly over France ur supposed to be in the Pacific u stupid cat
>>65401801(You) posted the 'shorts' URLthat does not embed on 4chanRemember this next time
>>65401828nocopypaste the link into your search bar like it's 2008 for me, peasant
>>65401450The Israelis had ex WW2-British and American "volunteers" fighting for them. People who have lots of modern warfare experience vs the Arabs who were literally camel herders a few months before. It was not monkey model's fault. It was the monkeys. Soviet equipment were still on par with Western equipment back then. When in capable hands like the NVA, they performed well.
>>65399845>Jap tanksOne of very few games depicting this is Easy Red 2 with a DLC for early China front. If you're infantry with just an old ass G98, a Jap tank is actually scary. The best thing you might get on the Chinese side if you're lucky is an armored car wit a Vickers gun.
>>65401714>I beat much better opponents simply by going for [them]What do you think he said instead of "them"? The only thing I can think of is "it" but "going for it" still makes perfect sense so the editor wouldn't need to [help] us.
>>65401831If it was 2008 you wouldn't be posting "shorts" links.
>>65401937>The Israelis had ex WW2-British and American "volunteers" fighting for them. This. A lot of people forget that the Israeli armed forces had tens of thousands of Allied war veterans, whereas the ayyrabs had Hamid the goatfucker and his pals.
>>65402428i didn't learn about the fact that a Jewish volunteer brigade fought as part of Montgomery's Brit 8th Army and played a huge role in building/founding the IDF until very recently. It really sheds a lot more light on why the Israelis have repeatedly kicked so much ass in conventional wars of fast mechanized maneuver.
>>65402428>>65401937The Arab Legion was comprised mainly of Arab WW2 veterans and most of the officers were British veterans
>>65401767>fat cartoony stubby Wildcatthat's why I love it, it's cute af
>>65402585and that's why it was the only Arab force that achieved any succes of notebut it was only 6k men strong at the start of the war and never grew past 10k menthe real reason for israels succes wasn't just the pool of veterans it could drw from but it's ability to conscript, train and arm larger bodies of men than the arabs could
>>65402342Probably involved the word cunt
The sherman is merely "okay" which is much better than what its reputation used to be. It has probably been overcorrected at this point but it is bizarre how much it combined mediocrity with innovation at the same time. The M4 (more so the M3 hull-mate) was early design to commit to sloped armor, yet did so at an angle which proved to be irrelevant ballistically. First tank to have an auxiliary power unit, copied by later war german command tanks and became standard post war. First gun with a gyro, but stabilized only on one axis. it had the fastest traverse rate turret. Almost certainly the most reliable tank of the war (breaking down before running low on fuel was the norm on all other sides). Extremely capable HVAP round... supplied averaging less than one per month.The M4 is the ultimate mixed bag. I cant really think of anything similar. Maybe the US Gato class submarines were innovative but flawed, but not in ways relevant to the pacific theater (MK14 torpedoes aside).
>>65402635>The M4 is the ultimate mixed bag. I cant really think of anything similari reckon the SB2C is a pretty good "mixed bag" as far as its inherent design and performance were. In terms of reliability it was (for most of its service career) a fucking mess. it was entirely electrically operated most other single-engine light bombers of WWII had hydraulic systems for wheels, flaps, and wing-folding), and the circuits and airframe were full of bugs. It killed an awful lot of navy/Marine pilots and bungled many an anti-shipping sortie with an endless stream of dumb failures like opening only one flap on a landing approach or raising only one wheel during a takeoff, or circuits getting crossed and dropping the wheels down when you wanted to turn on the bombsight, or the entire tail section just falling off whenever it got bored of sticking to the fuselage.Yet despite all of that, it was in many ways a genuinely cutting-edge design that was ahead of its time in terms of top speed, a huge payload for such a comparatively small airframe, etc.
>>65401258I think P-39 is better pick for underrated. P-39 has such a bad reputation despite having objectively better performance numbers across the board and being loved by soviets.
>>65401962Even if they did face other tanks what is the scariest thing a I-Go or Ha-Go likely to face in the 30s? Basically a Vickers 6 ton which it is more than capable of dealing with and most other things are basically tankettes armed with machine guns. This is also taking focus away from the specs of the time which actually were quite advanced when looking at the I-Go as they tended to use radios and also were the first mass production tank to take advantage of diesel.
>>65401606>both it and the P-39 could easily have been totally replaced during 1942 by the Allison-powered picrelOnly in a pipe dream, even if you expanded the NAA Dallas plant two years earlier(I don't believe this was feasible) and converted the Bell and Curtiss plants to P-51 production you aren't going to get anywhere close to the number of airframes produced historically. It takes time to convert production to a different airframe or set up a new production line. If there was a changeover the time it takes to changeover is lost production which had already ramped up, and then the new production has to ramp up. New plants mean there is something else not being made and it still has to ramp up production. The expanded NAA Dallas plant took around half a year to produce more than 100 P-51 a month in 1943 and the Curtiss Buffalo plant was producing around 400 aircraft a month at the end of 1942.
>>65402794>'takes time'The U.S. Army Air Corps needed to make decisions, and many of the key United States-manufactured aircraft during 1939-40 were being produced for foreign (allied) contracts. <--That was what held back the DB-7 and NA-73 Heavy bomber production didn't exist in 1941 either, and a year later it did. All a question of top-level administrative and procurement logisitics strategy of the United States Army, USAAC, Pentagon, and the U.S. fedgov (president of the United States/U.S. Congress) making Lend-Lease decisions during mid-late 1941.>muh NAANorth American Aviation, themselves, didn't have to be the (sole) manufacturer of the NA-73/NA-83. See above. Ford produced more B-24s than any company. Nothing even to do with aircraft in particular, either. Engines (aircraft radials installed in tanks), motor vehicles (trucks/cars), tanks, small arms (typewriter manufacturers building 1911A1s or M1 Carbines) etc. North American Dallas produced B-24GsIn the autumn of 1940 (year prior to '41) U.S. government began to look to the automobile industry to augment aircraft production capacity. At that time it was envisioned that U.S. automobile manufacturers would primarily be parts makers, yet Ford eventually became the largest B-24 airplane builder. A Liberator production pool was established in early 1941, the overall plan was for 'knock-down' (KD) assemblies from a new plant in Willow Run to supply other factories (of Consolidated and others) in San Diego, Ft Worth, Douglas-Tulsa, NAA-Dallas. Logistic strategy, planning at national tier for war materiel production was the key element. You have to choose, delegate, make executive decisions.
