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As they would have said “Buggered that one”.
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Yep. It's one of the reasons why Battle Damage Assessment (BDA) is so important and gets so much emphasis in today's warfighter.
All sides thought Airplanes were just awesome at killing tanks. Come to find out they were not once BDA started happening.
The lack of BDA caused numerous mistakes during the war. The Luftwaffe stopped attacking Radar sites in the BoB, stopped attacking Allied escorts over the channel to force them to discard their drop tanks, and gave almost no actual support to the JaboGeschwader's in the "Tip and Run Campaign.
All sides put huge efforts into developing dedicated Anti-Tank aerial weapons and specialized airplanes only to find out they all were very ineffective.
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Its not that Ground Attack did not work, it did. But the payoff was other targets than tanks. Bombs and rockets were not precision nor was the bombing methods.
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That's exactly it. Infact, I would say the psychological effect was more devastating than any actual attack. I am will to bet more tanks got stuck in ditches trying to get off the road with a panicked driver than were ever even damaged from the aerial attack. Perfectly good tanks that ended up being abandoned because they had no recovery vehicles or time to recover it.