Those German Jet Fighters?

gr.sl.: I'm not sure that too many LW jet attacks were from the front. The closing speed of the jet (say about 500mph) and a c.200mph bomber would be in the range of 700mph. That, according to my calculations, is almost 400 yds a second. That's way too fast for accurate firing. The sources I have say that often an attack was started from behind and above a bomber box. The jet(s) would then dive from behind, increasing speed, and get below the target bomber and then come up from behind and below. This approach was still fast and hard to follow with turrets and hand-held guns. Then they would break off the attack, climb above the bombers and then attack downwards on another, breaking off and diving below. This roller-coaster attack would continue until the jet ran out of ammo or broke out in front of the bombers. I have read one American fighter pilot account of witnessing such an attack and it apparently was very effective. With the R4M rockets, the idea was to come from behind and the side and try to hit more than one bomber with the salvo. (However, I'm not so sure these rockets were all that effective.)

 

AFAIK the tactic of attacking from the front was used by propeller driven fighters for two reasons:
1 Mid war bombers had a blind spot in defensive armament
2) With 20mm cannon it was estimated 4 rounds wold kill a bomber compared to 20 from an attack from the rear as the most vulnerable part of the plane was the cockpit.
Any attack short of lining up your plane with the target and blazing away needed the pilot to compensate for deflection, and AFAIK the combination of German sights and training was not very good there, the 262 could afford that sort of tactic (as could the up armoured FW 190A8 sturmbocke for different reasons) because it's massive firepower allowed for a very short firing window, high deflection shooting in a 262 is likely to get you poor results due to short engagement times and low muzzle velocity.

 

"The Werfer-Granate 21 rocket launcher, also known as the BR 21 (the "BR" standing for Bordrakete) in official Luftwaffe manuals, was a weapon used by the German Luftwaffe during World War II and was the first on-board rocket placed into service by the Luftwaffe, first introduced in mid 1943.

This weapon enabled the German pilots to attack their bomber targets from a safer distance of over a kilometer, where the risk of being hit was much reduced. Although extremely inaccurate, the rockets did not have to destroy the bombers, but only cause them to take evasive action that would disrupt their protective formation, making them vulnerable to conventional attack. While a single fighter's payload of two or four such rockets was extremely unlikely to score a hit, a mass launch by an entire fighter squadron (12-16 aircraft) as it arrived to intercept the bombers would likely score two or three hits, about 15% accuracy. The rocket's huge blast radius also compensated for inaccuracy, and even a non-lethal hit on a bomber by a showering of shrapnel would have psychological effects and perhaps cause it to take evasive manœuvres that would drive it from the protection of its fellows."

- From Wikipedia.

 

The 21cm rocket was launched by propeller driven fighters, two for a single engine fighter and four for a twin engine fighter such as a ME110. Once we had fighters that could rove deep into Germany these twin-engine craft were easy targets and were taken out of battle.

What I was referring to was the 55mm rocket that was carried under each wing (12 to a wing) and launched in ripple fire from outside the bomber gunner's effective range. They were sort of used as a gigantic shotgun. However, except for one mission by A. Galland, I've never heard of them being effective. I would hope that someone might enlighten us on this issue.

 

"The R4M was developed in order to deal with the increasing weight of anti-bomber weapons being deployed by Luftwaffe fighters. Their design had started out with the 20-mm. MG 151/20 cannons, compact enough to be mounted in an internal wing bay mounting in the Focke-Wulf Fw 190, but it was found that it took an average of twenty 20-mm. hits to shoot down a typical four-engined bomber. The 20-mm. cannons, also fitted to the Bf 109 in drag-producing underwing gun pods, were then supplemented with or replaced by the 30-mm. MK 108 cannon, in slightly larger underwing pods, which could bring down a bomber with an average of one to three hits. However the MK 108 was much heavier and the larger ammunition made it difficult to carry more than one or two "passes" worth. Worse, the low muzzle velocity of this gun meant it had a very short range and extreme curvature of trajectory, of over 41 metres at 1,000 metres range. In approaching close enough to get hits, the fighters placed themselves within the range of the bomber's defensive guns. The more powerful MK 103 cannon had higher muzzle velocity and increased range, at the cost of greatly increased weight, size and much lower rate of fire: 380-420 RPM vs. 600-650 RPM for the MK 108.
Also, the Nebelwerfer 42-derived Werfer-Granate 21 (Wfr. Gr. 21, or Bordrakete BR 21) rockets fitted to Messerschmitt Bf 109 and Bf 110, and Focke-Wulf Fw 190 fighters, used to break up the USAAF combat box bomber formations, had launch tubes that were not only drag-producing, from their exposed five-strut under-wing mounting setup, but also from the fact that the launch tubes needed to be aimed upwards at some 15° from level flight, to counter the rocket's considerable ballistic drop after firing, adding to the already considerable drag the launch tube mountings created, as well as the Wfr. Gr 21's relatively slow projectile velocity of 1,150 km/h (715 mph).
The solution was to replace the underwing gun pods, and draggy large-calibre underwing rocket launch tubes, with a small-diameter solid-fuel rocket-engine-propelled projectile, mounting a warhead similar to that of the cannon shell. Although each "round" was heavier than the corresponding gun-fired shell, the lack of a gun reduced the overall weight considerably. The weight difference was so great that even a much larger and longer-ranged rocket was still lighter than the guns it could replace.
The anti-aircraft version of the R4M used a large warhead of 55 mm. with 520 g. (17.6 ounces) of the strongly brisant Hexogen explosive charge, nearly guaranteeing a fighter kill with one hit, from the "shattering" force of its explosive warhead. Each R4M weighed 3.2 kg and was provided with enough fuel to be fired from 1000 m., outside the range of the bomber's defensive guns. The main body of the rocket consisted of a simple steel tube with eight base-hinged flip-out fins on the tail for stabilisation, deployed immediately after launch. A battery typically consisted of two groups of 12 rockets and when all 24 were salvoed in an attack, they would fill an area about 15 by 30 m. at 1000 m., a density that made it almost certain that the target would be hit. The R4Ms were usually fired in four salvos of six missiles at intervals of 70 milliseconds from a range of 600 m, and would supersonically streak towards their target at a sixty percent higher velocity than the Wfr. Gr. 21's rockets would (the BR 21's projectile traveled at some 715 mph post-launch), as the R4M typically had a flight speed of roughly 1,890 km/h (1,175 mph).

Only a small number of aircraft were fitted with the R4M, mostly Messerschmitt Me 262s and the ground attack version of the Fw 190s, which mounted them on small wooden racks under the wings.
The Luftwaffe found the R4M missiles to have similar trajectory to the 30 mm MK 108 cannon in flight, therefore the standard Revi 16B gunsight could be utilized."

-wikipedia

Quite simply, there were never very many of them.

 

"...a density that made it almost certain that the target would be hit." (emphasis mine)

Not many, but they were used, expecially by JV44 in the last few months of the war. However, I have found evidence of only one successful attack, that one by Galland. If these attacks were "almost certain" then there probably would be more evidence of them downing bombers. Perhaps there was a flaw in their design or something. It seems the most potent weapon on the 262 was still the trusty Mk 108s

 

Found this.

Kind of neat:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awvik_p9uqg