Certain tactical games have always scratched the collector’s itch. It’s not enough to play with the ships/tanks/planes in the game you have, you have to have the expansions, you gotta catch ’em all! Wing Leader was designed to both irritate and salve that itch, and in Wing Leader: Eagles, we expand upon the late war kit from Wing Leader: Supremacy with a mixture of crowd-pleasers and oddballs.

As with all the Wing Leader core games and expansions, the selection is not led by what’s coolest, but by what we can build scenarios around. This has meant than some fan favourites, like the late-model F4U-4 Corsair and Ki-61-II Hien (Tony), were sidelined. Really hot aircraft that appeared at the war’s end, like the Ta 152H-1 and the Do 335A-1, were dropped, because we couldn’t build scenarios without getting into alternate history. We weren’t averse to counterfactuals, but as you’ll see in Part 3, when weighing the alt-hist options I broke away from the German Wunderwaffen towards something I thought more interesting.

So here, then, are some brief profiles of the new kit you’ll find in Eagles.

Germany

The strange thing about the selection of German aircraft in Eagles is that they were all failures. However, for me that makes them more interesting and not less.

The Heinkel He 177 Greif represents the German attempt to build a long-range heavy bomber. Not only was it delivered late and compromised by unreasonable requirements, such as stressing the airframe for dive attacks, but it employed coupled powerplants, where pairs of engines were slaved together to drive a large propellor. The drag savings of just a few percent were offset by the unreliability of the engines and their tendency to catch fire. The British suffered similar gremlins with their coupled-engined Avro Manchester, but changing to a conventional layout of four separate motors evolved the Manchester into the superlative Lancaster. A similar transformation was planned for the He 177 but came too late. The existing Greif bombers were used in the night ‘Baby Blitz’ on Britain, but rarely raided by day, except in the scenario portrayed in the game, where they were employed as tankbusters!

The Henschel Hs 129B is a perennial favourite with modellers. It’s a boxy-looking armoured tankbuster, but some of them carried a big-assed anti-tank gun beneath the fuselage. In truth, only a handful ever carried the big 75mm gun. Most employed smaller calibres from 30mm to 37mm. Overall, the aircraft was not a great success, as a reliance on French-built engines left it underpowered and vulnerable. While there are many stories of the success of German tankbusting against the Soviets, study of the Allied experience suggests that massive overclaiming was prevalent and far smaller numbers of tanks were destroyed from the air than from other sources.

The Messerschmitt Me 210A heavy fighter and fighter-bomber had been intended to be the replacement to the twin-engined Bf 110 Zerstörer. Pushed into production before it was ready, the aircraft proved dangerous to fly (though Hungarian pilots, strangely, did not complain). Eventually, enough fixes were made to turn the lemon that was the Me 210 into the acceptable Me 410 (which you have already encountered in Supremacy). In the meantime, the tricksy Me 210 saw service, notably in North Africa and over Hungary.

Another Messerschmitt offering, the Me 163B Komet, never quite made the cut in Supremacy, so it was essential to include it in Eagles. A bomber-killing rocket plane with extraordinary performance, it was a technology too far for the Germans. It was unsafe, employing a corrosive fuel that could melt the pilot, and had a range so small that it was hard to catch high-flying American raids. It gained some victories at considerable cost and overall has to be judged as ineffective.

Japan

The Japanese have always been a difficult nation to accommodate in the game, because in the late war they introduced a lot of new aircraft with relatively small production runs, while keeping older and increasingly obsolete types like the Ki-43 (Oscar) in service far longer than they should have.

An aircraft that was sorely missed in Supremacy, the Nakajima Ki-44 Shoki (Tojo) Army fighter marked the transition from lightweight dogfighters to more modern, fast aircraft with high wing-loadings. It had markedly heavier armament than the Ki-43 (Oscar) it was intended to supplant, and its American opponents thought it a handful. But because it was deployed patchily, in relatively small numbers, it never quite made a mark. However, it was an intermediate step towards the formidable Ki-84 Hayate (Frank).

Another Army fighter, the Kawasaki Ki-100 appeared so late in the war that it was never given an Allied codename. When American bombing destroyed the engine factory building motors for the Ki-61 (Tony), the remaining airframes were re-engined with a radial engine in place of the inline powerplant. The resulting fighter lacked high altitude performance but was fast and nimble, which pleased its pilots, and it could hold its own against the USAAF and USN in some of the late air battles of the war.

The Japanese Army also invested in twin-engined heavy fighters, such as the Kawasaki Ki-45 (Nick), which could carry a gun battery big enough to take on the American bombers. Well-known for its nightfighter role, the Ki-45 tackled day bombers and had a secondary role as an attack aircraft.

To complete a clean sweep of Army aircraft in Eagles, the Japanese bomber inventory is filled out with the Kawasaki Ki-48 (Lily) light bomber, one of those inadequate aircraft that soldiered on from the China War into the late Pacific War. The Nakajima Ki-49 (Helen) was a relatively heavily-armed medium bomber intended to replace the Ki-21 (Sally) (as seen in Wing Leader: Victories) but that struggled against the might of Allied air power.

In Part 2 we will look at the new American and Soviet aircraft.

Articles in this Series: Part 1  Part 2  Part 3

Order your copy of Wing Leader: Eagles here.

Author: Lee Brimmicombe-Wood