Why did US fighters not use cannon in WW2?
Leafing through some old William Green books I noticed that throughout the total production run of the main US WW2 fighters - P-47,Thunderbolt, P-51 Mustang, Wildcat, Hellcat all were only armed with machine guns . The Lightning carried machine guns and one cannon.
Only the later versions of the Corsair carried 4 cannon.
When you consider than in Europe cannon started to be fitted from 1939 across the fighter types of all nations this seems strange. Especially as the US was relatively quick to adopt self-sealing tanks, cockpit armour etc etc
Any idea why?