Painting The Stripes

"f86sabre" (f86sabre) 06/06/2016 at 20:50 • Filed to: D-Day, planelopnk

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RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht > f86sabre 06/06/2016 at 21:01

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Also known as “fuck being IDed by the enemy - now is the time to obliterate everybody in the sky without stripes because enemy planes cannot be allowed in the air today”. Reminds one of the late war German dark humor on plane ID: “If they’re green, they’re British. If they’re bright metal, they’re American. If they’re invisible, they’re German.”

ttyymmnn > f86sabre 06/09/2016 at 09:58

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Based on the models I built as a kid, I always thought those stripes were meticulously applied, when in reality, they were slathered on as quickly as possible. But D-Day wasn’t the only time invasion stripes were used. Back in 1980, when the US attempted to free the hostages in Iran during Operation Eagle Claw, US fighters and other aircraft were painted with identification stripes since Iran still had so much US-built hardware left over from the days of the Shah.

ttyymmnn > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht 06/09/2016 at 10:06

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When it comes to invasion stripes, this photo always comes to mind. I first saw it years ago in the excellent history of WWII aviation by Edward Jablonski titled AIRWAR . Jablonski’s caption for this photo:

Wo ist der Luftwaffe? Lightnings, in invasion stripes, on the prowl. This kind of formation would have been near suicide had there been a Luftwaffe to worry about.

RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht > ttyymmnn 06/09/2016 at 10:26

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I get what Jablonski’s saying in terms of that not being a good formation for anything tactical and making for a big obvious target, but at the same time, if you fly that over Abbeville and they can only scramble eight fighters, then fly over Lille and they can only scramble five, the enemy is thirteen planes down. A big formation is only a liability if the enemy can meet it in force, but that doesn’t mean the enemy is completely out of the picture yet. The bigger the formation, the harder it is for the enemy to make any kind of use of your liability in the first place, and that’s only a concern if there *is* an enemy, just a limited one. If you’ve pushed short response numbers down just far enough, it starts to get safer to fly one group of 16 instead of the four groups of four, etc.

It’s not so much gaming the enemy level of response, which was still a thing, as gaming the instant response at a given point. Once you’ve done that enough, there is no more Luftwaffe, obviously, but you also don’t need to put as many planes in the air yourself.

In other words, the giant formation is perhaps less an emblem of total superiority as a required step just short of it.

There is one very odd feature of that picture: the lead four groups are in classic Schwaerme /finger four formations, but the trailing three are in augmented Kettes. Whether that’s done in consideration of the overall formation shape or whether the trailing three are on interdiction duty, I don’t know.

ttyymmnn > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht 06/09/2016 at 18:28

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My take on this picture is that, if the formation were bounced by only a single Luftwaffe fighter from above, the Lightnings would have no room whatsoever to maneuver to fight. I have no idea when this picture was taken, but the Luftwaffe was decidedly absent during the invasion. This may have been more of a propaganda shot than anything else.