Specically for aircraft called in for “CAS”. Then id argue any engagement after D-Day in Western Europe. Aircraft like the P-47, Typhoon and Mosquitto were often called upon to provide close air support. Though communication was of course much harder back then and weapon accuracies were of course far more limited.
For example, I think P-47s proved highly vital providing close air support during the battle of the bulge.
In January 1945, with the Germans retreating desperately from the Bulge, 1st Lt. Robert V. Brulle operated from K-29 airfield in Belgium and flew low-level sorties over the front lines. “You would have an Army guy in a Sherman tank talking to you on the radio,” Brulle remembered in a telephone interview. “When you appeared overhead, he would say something like, ‘We need you to bomb the Germantank hiding behind the little farmhouse with the red roof.’ The problem for us, overhead in our Thunderbolts, was that we could see dozens of farmhouses with red roofs. To pinpoint the enemy, we needed somebody directing our flying who spoke our language.”
So, fighter pilots like Brulle began rotating to the front, joining American ground troops and directing their fellow Thunderbolt flyers. “We would be talking to somebody we knew. We could say something like, ‘Turn right at the S-turn in the river, head up the two-lane road going 15 degrees northeast, and bomb the German tank behind the third farmhouse on the east side of the road.’” That, as it turned out, worked. Source
But I would be reasonably confident to say that aircraft did provide a pivitol role in most major land battles in WW2, perticuraly after the Luftwaffe was greatly diminished in the later years of the war.
If we try to apply a “real world” context to war thunder. Then I would consider the spawn point to be the “convoy” of troops/vehicles coming to the battlefield. So aircraft attacking and intercepting that “convoy” before it could actually enter the main battle to be highly accurate. Something akin to this account during the battle of the Bulge:
When the squadron had swept the road clean of German vehicles, Motzenbecker led his flight up and down the wooded side roads. What began as a chance encounter grew into a marathon air-ground battle that went on and on.
Spotting a platoon of tanks under the foliage, the Hell Hawks dive-bombed the panzers until they disappeared in a boiling cloud of smoke. The next pass revealed several tanks blown completely over, on fire and smoking. But the Germans fought back with a vengeance, streaking the sky with an intense barrage of 20mm flak. One of the 387th’s newer pilots, 2nd Lt. John D. McCarthy, was caught in the web of cannon shells. His aircraft exploded and crashed just yards from the road. The native of Canandaigua, NY, had been with the squadron barely a month.
By the time the daylong fight near Monschau was over, Major Motzenbecker’s squadron, joined by the rest of the Hell Hawks’ 365th Fighter Group, had played havoc with the German column. More than 115 German vehicles and artillery pieces were verified as destroyed, another 65 completely wrecked or damaged, and an unknown number of troops put out of action. The Thunderbolt pilots had lost two of their own to the storm of flak put up by the convoys.
The running battle had blunted the impact of that particular German column, but Hitler’s final counterattack moved forward elsewhere along the front. Unfortunately, bad weather the next day, December 18, kept most P-47s on the ground—but not all. - Source
