Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Good Book:"The Decisive Duel: Spitfire vs. 109"

If you wish to say "best fighters prior to 43 in Europe" I might agree but WW-II was a big place and in a lot of it both the Spit and the 109 were far less than optimal. They were both essentially point defense European Fighters.

I never had the honor of shaking Bader's hand, but Galland did, so I can pass that along. I understand Bader became quite a good golfer?

Churchill - how great would it have been to spend a day with him?

I ordered the book.

Again, re-reading Deighton's book... I'm impressed by how much the forward-thinkers in the air forces of BOTH sides were able to accomplish in spite of the outdated thinking/doctrine of the high command. In Britain, the Lord-High-Muckamuck's were thinking, "a pair of .303 machineguns worked just fine for me in my Sopwith Camels last war, putting 8 of 'em in the Hurricanes and Spitfires will make 'em invincible, what?" Unlike the Germans, who had had the experience of air-to-air combat in Spain to prove what worked and what didn't, the Brits' last experience ended in 1918. The Germans' Spain experience showed them that while MG bullets were okay against fabric planes, you needed exploding cannon shells to knock down metal-monocoque aircraft.

Again, not making excuses, but the fact that the Brits didn't go into the Battle of Britain with a biplane-equipped fighter force was a very, very near thing!! If the toffs had had their way, the Hurricane and especially the Spit would have never been born.



LOTS of stuff wrong with the P38. High-speed compressibility in dives for one thing, and the trickiness of managing TWO persnickity engines instead of one, are major issues that come to mind. The biggest, IMHO, though, was that the Allison engine wasn't a Rolls-Royce Merlin (they corrected that in 1944, 3 years too late...).

But the fact remains that although it was theoretically inferior to the Bf109 and FW190 in dogfight performance, improvements made by squadron ground crew in engine performance (hot-rodding) and aggressiveness of P-38 pilots made it highly effective against those German planes, despite its "weakness" on paper.

This quote from a German fighter pilot:

Horst Petzschler of JG 3:
" ... The P-38 had its positive attributes which we respected. At higher altitudes it was faster and could out-turn both the Focke-Wulf 190 and the Messerschmitt 109. It was faster in a dive, but this was probably due to it being a heavier aircraft. Our instructors stressed that American pilots were well-trained and very aggressive ... Veteran pilots told us to exploit its weaknesses like the blind spot presented by its odd configuration below and behind its tail, which allowed us to sneak up on it. It was observed that when the P-38 went into an extremely steep dive at high speed it could not recover ... its biggest drawback was that it could be easily identified from long distances. It looked like our own Fw 189 Owl. Many Lightnings were left in their aluminum finish and this made them easily identifiable, but we figured this was done to increase their speed.
Leutnant Anton 'Toni' Hafner was one of the veteran pilots I flew with, scoring 204 aerial victories before he was killed in October 1944. Toni said that the P-38 was a hard fighter to combat and was equal to the Me 109 in maneuverability ... "

Robin Olds, in his wonderful memoir Fighter Pilot had high praise for the P-38 and states that during his P-38 service he never felt outclassed by the German planes.

I don't know where to go to get the stats, but a cursory look sez that there were quite a few German fighter pilots who had over 100 kills. Some WELL over 100 kills. How many Brit or American pilots had 100 kills or more????

Just due to the time and it having a target rich environment, little know fact but the Hurricane is credited with destroying more enemy aircraft that any other allied fighter... even if handicapped with its 8 or 12 Brownings in 303...

The Brits also evaluated the 50 cal and the 20mm for armament for the Spits and Hurricanes...

the reason they went with the 303s, is that Fighter Command doctrine at the time, was for a fighter to get it very close..


the 303 would allow the fighter to destroy its target, without getting damaged from the debris, when the target exploded.. which it would have done with the heavier armament...

so it was decided to go with the 303s, as the target would, go down instead of exploding in front of the British Fighter...

they later decided that concept had its faults...hence the upgrade in armaments...

even during the Battle of Britain, some Spits were upgraded to having a 20mm in each wing.. but that was more an experiment to see how that worked out.. which it did...

The Hurricane on the other end, was sort of like the P40.... out dated and out classed, but on the production line, and easy to keep cranking them out...with the philosophy that their life span in combat wasn't all that long anyway...so they were better than nothing...

Jim, two big differences: one, the German pilots with the highest kill ratios racked up most of their points against slow Soviet fighters flown by virtually untrained pilots. Second, the German pilots didn't get rotated out after "completing a tour". They stayed in the cockpit until they were killed.

Skill level and aircraft had to be very large factors too Doc. Galland flew in the West exclusively and with the air offensives I believe there were a HELL of a lot more. I think the Luftwaffe's biggest handicap was fuel shortages.

That's because German fighter pilots were for the most part, never rotated out of combat.. there were not enough of them... so they were just left in combat until the war ended or they were killed...

I always really liked the stories of this guy... Finland's top ace...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilmari_Juutilainen

from out of Wiki:

Juutilainen was the top scoring Finnish fighter pilot. He flew Fokker D.XXI, Brewster Buffalo, and Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighters. He was one of only four people to twice receive the highest Finnish military decoration, the Mannerheim Cross, and is considered the highest scoring non-German ace of all time. Juutilainen finished the war without a single hit to his plane from enemy fighter airplanes (once he was forced to land after a friendly anti-aircraft gun fired at his Bf 109). Like Japanese fighter ace Saburo Sakai, Juutilainen never lost a wingman in combat. He also scored the first radar-assisted victory in the Finnish Air Force on 24 March 1943, when he was guided to a Soviet Pe-2 by a German radar operator, who was testing out the freshly-delivered radar sets, that officially became operational 3 days later.

Never a hit on his own aircraft in combat by the enemy, never lost a wingman and 94 victories...

Fixed it for ya!!!

No doubt Galland was a brilliant flyer. He was also EXTREMELY lucky. He was shot down 3 times and unhurt in all 3 bail-outs.

I can't find the stats on survivability for fighter pilots bailing out after being shot down, but it's incredibly low. To give some idea, in Bomber Command the fatality rate for WW2 was 54.9%, and bomber aircrew survivability has been reported as being twice as good as that of fighter pilots. So by extrapolation, Galland's survival of 3 bail-outs is somewhere in the statistical probability range of 1.6%!

As I'm sure you know, Galland was pulled out of combat in 1941. His chances of surviving the war otherwise would have approached 0.0000000001% (made-up calculation).

...in a Brewster Buffalo yet ...a plane incidentally well-liked by its Finnish pilots.

http://www.warbirdforum.com/buff.htm

Anyhoo... I "finished" the book, I put finished in quotes because there are so many details and it is so thorough it demands a re-read. To the point that the author points out that Susanna York's lingerie in "The Battle of Britain" was actually of 1960's design

Another detail.... according to the author the last confirmed aerial victory by a Spitfire was ironically against an RAF Spitfire during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. A formation of RAF Spits and Tempests chose an inopportune moment to put in a show of force over an Israeli column that had minutes before been hit by a force of Egyptian Spitfires and which had called in air support from their own Spits.

More to come.

Birdwatcher

From the book, a Luftwaffe joke, ca. 1941, when Bf 109F's were shedding wings with a distressing frequency.....

The German fighter pilots could see the different design philosophies between the two fighters. A well-known joke among them was:

'When a Fw 190 crashes, they take the wreckage to Kurt Tank and he strengthens the parts that failed.

When a Bf 109 crashes, they take the wreckage to Willy Messerschmitt and he lightens the parts that stayed together.'

Landing a Bf109K, ca. 1945....

As each Bf109K's airspeed came down, its pilot lowered the undercarriage, checking that it was down and locked and the fixed tailwheel unlocked for landing, then, with his left hand, adjusted the trim wheel for final approach.

Each Bf109 slowed to 155mph and turned on to final approach, extended full flaps (40 degrees), lined up with the grass runway at about 140mph. Inexperienced pilots "chased" the airspeed indicator, trying to fly the right speed they had memorized, eyes on the instrument panel rather than the grass that loomed closer every moment.

The Bf109K came over the trees at the edge of the grass runway at 112mph. As the speed dropped through 100mph, the left wing started to feel heavy and approaching a stall. Experienced pilots knew to keep the nose down, making a steep approach and giving a good view of the field, but, at this point, pilots with too little Bf109 experience, watching the ground rushing towards them and, fearing a stall, gunned the engine to full power and tried to go around again.

A sudden burst of power would cause the left wing to drop even further. Even with the strength of desperation on the control stick and rudder pedals, the Bf109 would fall into a left roll. Next, for many pilots, was a horrifyingly brief inverted dive, culminating with fighter and pilot alike burying themselves, in an instant, deep in a smoking crater in the green earth at the runway threshold....

But none of that would happen... today. The blurred grass appeared to slow as the pilot cut the throttle, then gently pulled back on the control stick. Most pilots were able to put their Bf109Ks on the runway at about 85mph, all three wheels touching together with a creak as the undercarriage's long legs compressed under the weight of the plane.

Rolling from the touchdown, each pilot in turn felt the rapid jar and bouncing from the grass field. Then the pilot applied the foot brakes. These could bring the landing roll to a quick halt.

Even then, the pilot's problems were not over. With poor forward vision from the huge engine and upraised nose, he had to taxi to where he would be directed to a camouflaged dispersal parking lot. The flaps were raised again, to keep them from damage from stones thrown up by the propeller.

Turning into a dispersal site, the pilot carried out the shut-down checklist - radiators closed, mixture and throttle leaned back until the engine stopped, then cut the ignition switch, turn off the electrical power, and unstrap the shoulder and lap belts. The propeller slowly rotated to a stop.

Quickly, tree branches and camouflaged netting were thrown over the Bf109K. A ground crewman jumped up on the left wing roots and opened the 'Erla hood' canopy, much less confining than that on earlier versions. The ground crew drained any remaining fuel from the tanks, making it available to other aircraft and decreasing vulnerability to strafing attacks.

When all the surviving Bf109s had landed, ground crew manually pushed Bf109 hulks, stripped of spare parts, out of the woods where they had been camouflaged, and left them in plain sight. These were decoys, each covered by concealed flak guns....

The Bf109Ks had little chance in the air. Spitfire XIV's were estimated to have made some fourteen claims in air combat for every plane they lost. Galand said 'The improved Spitfire was definitely superior. When we had the greater quantity and better training of your pilots to contend with, the feeling of technical inferiority on the part of our fighters was much greater than was warranted by the difference in performance.'

Birdwatcher

Because most of those kills were either earlier on in the war or against vastly inferior Russian pilots and airframes.

BTW, the ME-109 had a 20mm cannon firing through the propeller nacelle through it's entire service life, so the notion of small caliber armament when compared to the Spit and Hurricane, is wrong.

Nope, the earliest Me 109s did not have a cannon. They had machine guns mounted in the nose firing through the propeller arc.

I will add too that early in the war many German pilots - Galland included - had a fair amout of combat in Spain, and thus were expereinced veterans. You can train all you want, but their is no substitute for combat, if you survive.

FWIW - Galland said the best pilot and tactition he ever knew was Werner Molders. Said Molders was not only a fantastic pilot, but was innovative and insightful, developing the finger four formation, and other tactics they used throughout the war.

About the only thing the P-51 had over the Spitfire was RANGE and in the beginning, armament. Once the Spits were armed with four 20mm cannon, range is about all a 51 had over the Spit. Another Great airplane not yet mentioned was the P-47 Thunderbolt. BTW, when it came to talent, this guy was at the top in my book:
Hans Joaquim-Marseille

Just a question for the knowledgable, but what gave the P-51 its long range capability? Was it simply that it had larger fuel capacity, or were there other design considerations?

bullshit: Armament and gondola cannons[edit]







Reflecting Messerschmitt's belief in low-weight, low-drag, simple monoplanes, the armament was placed in the fuselage. This kept the wings very thin and light. Two synchronized machine guns were mounted in the cowling, firing over the top of the engine and through the propeller arc. An alternative arrangement was also designed, consisting of a single cannon firing through a blast tube between the cylinder banks of the engine, known as a Motorkanone mount in German.[6] [nb 3] This was also the choice of armament layout on some contemporary monoplane fighters, such as the French Dewoitine D.520, or the American Bell P-39 Airacobra,

More and specifically during the Battle Of Britain: In the Battle of Britain, although the destructive power of the German cannon was evident, many Luftwaffe pilots came to appreciate the "blunderbuss" effect of the RAF's eight gun fighters. Thus there was something of an outcry when the 109F appeared with only one engine mounted cannon and the two fuselage rifle-calibre machine guns

And a painting of Galland's 109E variant (the "S" on the side clearly evident,which flew during the Battle Of Britain and also galland was pulled from operational flying for the most part by late 1941) clearly showing the nacelle 20MM:

Huge fuel capacity, Pete.