 Traditional accounts of the Allied fighter bomber attacks in the Battle of Mortain accepted the claims of the pilots of over two hundred destroyed German tanks. However, subsequent detailed studies of the battlefield showed that most of the destroyed German armor were knocked out by gunfire from ground forces and that the main effect of the Allied air attacks had been to destroy the unarmored vehicles and troops in the German offensive, as well as forcing the German armor to disperse to cover. The accuracy of the rockets and bombs of the Allied fighter-bombers was simply too poor to destroy more than a few of the German tanks, although fear of being incinerated inside a tank should a rocket or bomb actually strike a tank did cause some of the inexperienced German tank crews to abandon their tanks intact while under air attack. In one British study, it was found that the average Typhoon pilot firing a barrage of all eight rockets had only a four percent chance of striking a target the size of a tank.
