HE-111, Ion Profir

[MIHAI_G.]

Ion Profir was, perhaps, the best romanian bomber pilot, in WW2. He flew a He-111 H3 from the first to the last day of the war. He took part in the Axis campains at Basarabia, Odessa and most of all, Stalingrad. He used a new bomber plane fighting technique, turning his heavy He-111 toward the fighters that attached him, and so making them disengage the fight in order to avoid collision.
After the war he managed to escape from comunist Romania, with a stolen plane to Turky. He died in Paris, sad as he saw the world not paying him the respect he deserved. The Allies had their own pilots to praise, although the american and british fighter pilots can only be credited with only half of the kills of romanian pilots. Romanians best fighter ace, Serbanescu had double the kills of the best ace from England or America. What can we say about the german aces?!?

[BogdanPatrascu]

After the Stalingrad campaign, Profir squadron was retired in the country for refit. After that he was flying the Me-110 "Zerstorer", but for a short period of time.


Bravo ma Georgescule, te-ai documentat acuma...[/:]




Edited by - BOGDANPATRASCU on April 20 2002 01:13:14

[jake431]

One thing everyone ignores about American Fighter Pilots is that there time in combat was limited compared to other pilots. Usually you had only two tours and then you went home, either to become an instructor or else do war bond tours. If you got back to the front, it was usually as a commanding officer.

Most other air forces did not have the resources America did, so they needed their pilots to fly much longer in combat, hence the greater kills. America could afford to train new pilots and rotate experienced pilots back to train, thus spreading around their insights.

"He fixes the cable?"
-The Dude

[Victor]

Serbanescu was not the top ace. He had only 47 confirmed victories. Bazu Cantacuzino had 56 victories. He was the top Romanian ace. However it is hard to compare pilots from different countries between them and say who was better. Serbanescu had 590 missions. No wonder he had more kills.

[Victor]

Ion Profir is not the only candidate for the best Romanian bomber pilot. Lt. Dan Stoian, lt. Craciun Salajan, lt. Ion Ionescu, cpt. Eusebie Popovici, cpt. Gheorghe Stroici and the list could go on. These are all pilots with over 100 missions.

[MIHAI_G.]

First to Jake 431: Jake I think you are ignoring something: if every US fighter pilot did two turns and then got home, then, after a short period of time, would have been so many pilot trainers that the USAF couldn't handle. The thing was that they lacked the balls for the job, and they were happy to get out of a war that wasn't theirs.
Second to Victor: Victor, the figures concerning Serbanescu's and Bazu's kills are long disputed as I am sure you know. But, beside all these, the thing that Serbanescu was a better pilot remains. Bazu did not cared about his wingman or the others camarades of the group. He only flew in acrobatic figures and cared only for his own safety. Serbanescu was a more popular pilot because he cared. And when it comes to this, the kills do not count any more. And Serbanescu was killed in such a courdly way by that american P51 pilot...such a pitty. Perhaps this was for the better, because if he did't manage to escape to west, the comunist would have surely put him in jail too, as they did with Greceanu and so many others.

[jake431]

MIHAI_G.,

In fact, no, I am not ignoring somthing. In point of fact. very few American pilots had more than two tours. After their two tours, pilots were rotated home to take instructor positions or to do the"dancing Bear" act; in other words War Bond tours.

Attacking from a position of strength and not from a position of weakness is not cowardly, it is wise. American pilot's did not lack balls, they were simply not needed, because we had a surplus of candidates for pilot's training. There is plenty of evidence from the War of pilot's trying in vain to get back to the front.

Another thing you need to remember is that the Americans, by 1944, had so many more aircraft in the sky regularly than the enemy that there were too many pilots for any one (or several) to amass a great number of kills. Or there were few enemy planes to shoot down by that point.

Also don't forget that the American mission was different than the Axis mission. American planes, especially in Europe were supposed to escort bombers. They were not supposed to leave the bombers to shoot down every fighter they could. All they needed to do was protect the bombers and discourage the Axis fighters. This type of mission does not allow for many kills. The Axis mission was to shoot down as many planes as possible to blunt the Allied offensives into their countries. This type of missions provides for many more kill opportunities.

All I was saying is that people tend to look at the raw score and think that the score is all because all pilots had equality of opportunity. And they did not have the same opportunities, so their scores reflected this difference in opportunities.



"He fixes the cable?"
-The Dude

[Paolo Tagliaferri]

I agree with jake ... It's not just a fact of numbers. There are so many factors that have to be considered in the "judgement" of a pilot 's activity that it's really difficult, and pheraphs not very useful, to try the "greatest pilot". For example, italian fighter pilots didn't get many kills, but this doesn't mean that they were coward or not skilled: we must take in account that in many case they were on CR-42 against Spitfires, and in many cases the planes were used in an "economic and cautious" way by the commands... and this is just an example and I'm sure a lot of other discussions could be made on other nation's air forces.

If I have to "throw" an Ace's name (that I know), I just say Hans Ulrich Rudel ... IMHO for him it's not just a fact of numbers (even outstanding numbers): he had proven his bravery and his care for his men in many episodes, so I think that he wasn't just a "tank buster" but a great pilot.


Taglia

The Great Planes webmaster
http://www.tgplanes.com

[Horseman2]

Jake, Thanks for an excellent reply to the comment made by MIHAI_G.

There is no question that each country has it's own perspecive on their part in World War II, as they should. Not surprisingly, I know more about the actions of the U.S. than I do about Romania, for example, but am willing to learn.

What is good about this forum is for us to learn from each other as we present and discuss different aspects of the war. We need to be on guard, however, that our limited knowledge of the activities of others does not lead to prejudice for or against them. Only an open mind can grow.

[Victor]

quote:
To Victor: Victor, the figures concerning Serbanescu's and Bazu's kills are long disputed as I am sure you know. But, beside all these, the thing that Serbanescu was a better pilot remains. Bazu did not cared about his wingman or the others camarades of the group. He only flew in acrobatic figures and cared only for his own safety. Serbanescu was a more popular pilot because he cared. And when it comes to this, the kills do not count any more. And Serbanescu was killed in such a courdly way by that american P51 pilot...such a pitty. Perhaps this was for the better, because if he did't manage to escape to west, the comunist would have surely put him in jail too, as they did with Greceanu and so many others.


Have you actually read any appreciations about Bazu made by some of his collegues or are you influenced by some crap published about him (by Cornel marandiuc if I remember correctly) taking a trophy from his first Mustang? True Serbanescu was a great pilot and a great leader (that's why he was loved so much).
Btw way you yourself have admitted you can't judge a pilot by his score, so I won't even comment on your childlish remarks about the US pilots.

[MIHAI_G.]

If an inexperienced reader should look at your explanations concerning why allied pilots did not have many kills, he may tend to think that you both are right. BUT…, because there’s a but. Beside European skies, there was another sky where American pilots fought: the pacific aerial battle. Here your motivations do not hold water. Here there were no bombers to escort (not so many as in Europe). There were carriers here. Big ones (even with 90 planes), and small ones (lots of them). Here the fighter pilots were free to engage the enemy. And the results still lacked. I wonder what was Dick Bong doing (with his mere 33 kills), while Saburo Sakai (approximately 100 kills) had just the time to write his reports? Maybe Dick spent more time with his beautiful and famous girlfriend. Maybe. If in the European theatre of war the allied pilots had those excuses to hide under, in the pacific theatre the situation was other and they were still …

[MIHAI_G.]

To Victor: Let's cut the crap and stick to the facts. And the facts are that the Serbanescu has never been under doubt (in any reason) by nobody, while Bazu still is. If you want to understand what you want from what i write, then it is your problem, but i never said that Bazu was arogant with the others pilots. He simply was more distant. A friend of mine went, the other day to visit Dobran and he also agrees with what i write. So you are the one that should listen to people that lived then, alongside these heroes, and stop reading so much.

[jake431]

quote:
If an inexperienced reader should look at your explanations concerning why allied pilots did not have many kills, he may tend to think that you both are right. BUT…, because there’s a but. Beside European skies, there was another sky where American pilots fought: the pacific aerial battle. Here your motivations do not hold water. Here there were no bombers to escort (not so many as in Europe). There were carriers here. Big ones (even with 90 planes), and small ones (lots of them). Here the fighter pilots were free to engage the enemy. And the results still lacked. I wonder what was Dick Bong doing (with his mere 33 kills), while Saburo Sakai (approximately 100 kills) had just the time to write his reports? Maybe Dick spent more time with his beautiful and famous girlfriend. Maybe. If in the European theatre of war the allied pilots had those excuses to hide under, in the pacific theatre the situation was other and they were still …




Despite not having the same missions they did in Europe, my reasoning still stands when applied to the Pacific. First of all during the begining of the War, Americans had crappy planes and it was all they could do to fight on even terms with the Japanese. Only after they developed some better tactics and better planes could they start to anhiliate the Japanese forces.

ALSO, the Japanese had many fewer planes. After the "Turkey Shoot" the Japanese Navy had lost it's planes and their once great carrier fleet was only a decoy. So, of course you are going to have Japanese pilots like Saburo Sakai with huge scores, because there was no other Japanese pilots trained well enought to replace him. At the start of the war, Japan had 1500 pilots. And no infrastructure in place to train more raplidly, because to train a lot of pilots rapidly you need a lot of instructors. Which as you and Ihave already discussed, the American's did, by limiting tours of duty.

Also, American pilots were not free to engage the enemy. MacGuire disobeyed orders to fly to get his kills, and Bong wanted to go back to the front but wasn't allowed because he was a hero. Joe Foss got his kills at a record pace but he was kept from the front, and when he was sent back he was stricken with malaria. Also, American fighter pilots had to fly the missions allotted them. In many cases the Fast Fleet Carriers were to fly suppport for Island Invasions and really, by the time Americans wre invading Japanese-held islands, the Japanese had already lost their air superiority.

As for American willingness, Americans were plenty willing but there were no Japanese planes to shoot down during the late stages of the war, and their were so many American Planes there it borders on the rediculous (we made just about 100,000 fighters during the war). So any few Japanese pilots who were good and well trained had their pick of targets, whereas the Americans had few targets to choose.

"He fixes the cable?"
-The Dude

[Victor]

quote:Let's cut the crap and stick to the facts.

Yeah, let’s do that.
You first said:
“Bazu did not cared about his wingman or the others camarades of the group. He only flew in acrobatic figures and cared only for his own safety.”
And then you say:
“i never said that Bazu was arogant with the others pilots. He simply was more distant.”

When you say that someone does not care about the others, doesn’t it mean that he is selfish and arrogant? Weird.

quote:
A friend of mine went, the other day to visit Dobran and he also agrees with what i write.

Here is something gen. Dobran wrote in the foreword of Vasile Tudor’s book about Bazu:

“I first met cpt. av. Constantin Cantacuzino in the Donets Basin, at Kramatorskaya, when he was a squadron commander and had 22 white lines on his fin. He had a special way of flying, never in a straight line, with evolutions in all three dimensions, which made you think of him as a butterfly. This put a lot of stress on his wingman, but it also allowed him never to be surprised. […] I loved flying with him, although it was very difficult because of his maneuvers.”

Bazu always helped his comrades and ground crew with money, if they needed (for those who do not know, he was extremely wealthy, being from a princely family). He borrowed his Fleet F-10G to the ones that went home etc, etc.

The fact that Serbanescu was very appreciated it’s because he was a natural-born leader and a great pilot. Some called him the “Galland of Romania”. Bazu was not a very good leader and he usually let the professional officers (he was reservist) to make the paper work when he was in command of the 9th Fighter Group, a task which I don’t think he loved very much.

quote:So you are the one that should listen to people that lived then, alongside these heroes, and stop reading so much.

And I who thought that knowledge comes from books! Silly me!
Of course that meeting the veterans is very intersting and educative, but there are many things that they can’t tell you and which are written in books!

[MIHAI_G.]

Let me tell you a little bed time story that I read somewhere. It goes like this. Late in the Pacific War, a group of young american fighterpilots were looking to score a kill (the first one), in order to get a permission to go home for Christmas. They were flying, trying to find a japanese plane to destroy, but the sky was clear. When they were begining to loose hope, one of them spoted a single Zero. All six of them attached the Zero, hoping that they woul get even a shared victory. But their bad luck was that the Zero was piloted by Saburo Sakai, doing a test on a new engine. The outcome: Saburo killed 4 of them and avariated the other 2 whom were happy to escape. Q.E.D.



Edited by - MIHAI_G. on May 28 2002 07:53:28

Edited by - MIHAI_G. on May 28 2002 07:53:45

[jake431]

quote:
Let me tell you a little bed time story that I read somewhere. It goes like this. Late in the Pacific War, a group of young american fighterpilots were looking to score a kill (the first one), in order to get a permission to go home for Christmas. They were flying, trying to find a japanese plane to destroy, but the sky was clear. When they were begining to loose hope, one of them spoted a single Zero. All six of them attached the Zero, hoping that they woul get even a shared victory. But their bad luck was that the Zero was piloted by Sakuto Sakai, doing a test on a new engine. The outcome: Sakuro killed 4 of them and avariated the other 2 whom were happy to escape. Q.E.D.


Hmmm....

Saburo Sakai, one of the best pilots shot down 4 Americans. That's perfectly possible. Except this would have had to have been in 1942, when we had bad planes (F4F's). He only scored another 2 or4 kills after he was partially blinded, and I know those kills were separate occasions (read his book Samurai). Anyway, if this story is from late in the war it is apocryphal at best, evidence (or Saburo Sakai, for that matter from his own book) just doesn't bear it out. Especially since Americans didn't use kills as a reward system. They may have wanted to get A kill before going home for Christmas, but they certainly would not have been given leave for doing what is essentially their job.

Anyway, I'm glad you shared this story with me, I thought you had actual evidence to support your views. Turns out you are just biased.

-Jake


"He fixes the cable?"
-The Dude

[BogdanPatrascu]

In fact was Takeyoshi Muto, not Saburo Sakai, and the plane was an Kawanishi N1K1 Shinden. He was attacked by a squadron of Corsars and he shot-down four of them.

[jake431]

Two things:

1) Why did you say Saburo Sakai when it was in fact NOT Saburo?

2) No doubt your example is true, however, the simple fact is that the trends of Aerial combat during the War do not bear out your hypothesis. If your hypothesis WAS correct, then the outcome of the War would have been different. It is interesting to note that German pilots, who by all accounts accumulated more kills than any other group of fliers don't get the accolades for being the BEST fliers of the war; they simply fulfulled their mission as best they could. That mission was to shoot down as many enemy planes as possible, and they did that mission as well as they could. By the end of the war that was Japan's mission as well, but they had few well trained pilots by that time, and though a few experienced pilots did survive until the end of the War, most were lost.

Discussions of who had the best pilots, fighters, etc is a subjective one. For any of us to call the Pilots (from ANY Nation) cowards and to besmirch their character is both totally inappropriate historically (calling someone a coward does not produce any illuminating insights) and not productive to the exchange of information that forums like these are trying to ferment.

-Jake

"He fixes the cable?"
-The Dude

Edited by - jake431 on May 28 2002 15:50:44

[BogdanPatrascu]

To Jake:

If you respond to my post, I think you confound me: I just say that Mihai was wrong about Saburo Sakai. It is, in fact Takeyoshi Muto, and his plane was an Kawanishi Shinden, not a Zero. Saburo Sakai never flown that mission.

I agree with the ideea that all the sides had different oportunities and differit kind of missions to complete. But I don't think that only the great winers or the great countries should be praized. Also the small countries like my country, Romania had an important role in the war, and of course a good number of good pilots and "aces". It is sad that this good pilots remain unknown only because they were Romanians, and Romania is a small country. A small and defeated country...

[jake431]

quote:

To Jake:

I agree with the ideea that all the sides had different oportunities and differit kind of missions to complete. But I don't think that only the great winers or the great countries should be praized. Also the small countries like my country, Romania had an important role in the war, and of course a good number of good pilots and "aces". It is sad that this good pilots remain unknown only because they were Romanians, and Romania is a small country. A small and defeated country...




I agree. Don't misunderstand me, I am not saying that American Pilots (or any nations Pilots) were the "best". What I am saying is that denigrating any one side as "cowards", impinging on a Nation's Pilots ability is not useful to the historical discussion.

It is sad that smaller countries often get ignored when dicussing World War 2; my intention was not to continue ignoring the contributions of smaller nations but to object to the slander aimed at the American contribution to the War. I hope that clarifies things.

-Jake

"He fixes the cable?"
-The Dude

[Zip Cody]

The description of aerial combat as duels between individual combatants outside of the context of the ground or naval war indicates a lack of understanding of the principals of tactical and strategic aviation practiced by the allies in WW2.

The integration of air power with ground and sea power wins battles. The U.S. army, marine and naval aviators of the pacific were more effective in sinking Japanese ships. The U.S. Tactical and Strategic flyers of the European theatre were more effective in reaching the German factories. They did what Germany was unable to do during the battle of Britain or the V1, V2 blitz.

The courage of individual warriors should be unquestioned. The relative skills of pilots can not be fairly quantified whether they are from small or large nations. But the Knights of the air myth of single aerial combat should have died in WW1.

The effectiveness of the industrial complex of a nation in designing and producing airframes and training pilots was as much responsible for victory as anything.

The U.S. was unquestionably superior in producing and deploying strategic and tactical bombers which were, I believe, more pivotal in victory than the more glamourous fighter aircraft.

[simon]

Whilst I am sure it probably wont be too helpful, I would like to point out a few a things that sometimes get overlooked.

Whilst it is true that the Luftwaffe produced the bulk of the fighter pilots with the highest kill tallies, it should be remembered that many of the top aces had flown from before the Second World War began and had considerable experience with the Condor Legion in Spain, also these men would have participated in the annihilation of the polish airforce, an inexperienced group flying obsolete aircraft. Also a great many were dead by the war's end, whereas many Allied Aces survived.

Similarly it should also be mentioned that most of the Japanese Army and Navy's best flyers had built up a considerable amount of experience massacring the obsolete aircraft and unskilled airman of the various nations of South East Asia. Something which I'm sure our American Colleagues would like pointed out as well, was that this went largely unchecked until the intervention of the American Volunteer Group (The Flying Tigers), who as a unit, rather than individuals built an unparalleled success rate for little loss over a short space of time

[Victor]

quote:
Whilst it is true that the Luftwaffe produced the bulk of the fighter pilots with the highest kill tallies, it should be remembered that many of the top aces had flown from before the Second World War began and had considerable experience with the Condor Legion in Spain, also these men would have participated in the annihilation of the polish airforce, an inexperienced group flying obsolete aircraft. Also a great many were dead by the war's end, whereas many Allied Aces survived.

Well, Hartmann started flying in 1943, when the VVS was geting better and better. But you are generally right.

[simon]

Like I said Victor, many of the Luftwaffe's top aces began their careers in Spain, but that doesn't mean they all did.

The great strength of the Luftwaffe in the early days of the Second World War lay in the quality of the personel as much as the aircraft - many of the Luftwaffe flight commanders had combat experience, whereas their opponents had only flown in peacetime excercises.

The great weakness of the Luftwaffe from about Autumn/Winter 1943 was that the attrition of their top pilots began to bite and the overall level of training and experience in the Luftwaffe as a whole began to drop.

The same is true of the Japanese, although in their case the difference was even more marked after Midway and Guadalcanal.

At the same time both the Americans and British, and to a lesser degree the VVS were putting more and more trained pilots in their aircraft, so whilst the level of competence in the allied airforces was going up, in the Axis powers it was going down.

I'm not saying that no Axis pilot trained after 1943 was by definition useless, just that many young men were put into combat aircraft before they were ready, and killed as a result.

The RAF was guilty of this too (to a degree), in the desparation to get pilots into planes in the Battle of Britain. However in the case of the RAF, and because they only had to fight for a relatively short time, this policy worked.

However, I'm guessing I'm only repeating what you already know...