Originally Posted by
Heathrow Harry
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?
They simply didn't to, they had the 50 cal already.
Multiple fifty's were more than adequate for the task at the time (and lets face it, the things are still being used today!) so with a huge production and logistics train already in place to support the 50 cal, there was no real need to change, and as mentioned, this continued well past WW2 and into the 1950's and the jet age.