Mike, that account of 401 Squadron's victory over a single Me262 is telling... it needed multiple aircraft getting many, many bullet hits on the German jet fighter to knock it down.
As the excerpt you've quoted says eloquently, this was the end of the prop fighter. It wasn't just that the jets were faster. Their airframes had to be more robust to harness all that power, which meant that machinegun bullets were of no value unless you got literally hundreds of hits on the target, or you were very very lucky and shot into an engine turbine.
A friend I went to college with was the son of a West German air force officer who flew Me262's. He visited his son on one occasion and he took us all out to dinner, then happily regaled us with tales of WW2 dogfights. He was a very wealthy man. He told us that he made his initial fortune by selling Me262's to Spain in the waning days of the war. The logistics seemed sketchy to me at the time, but what do I know?
