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

Yes, but they DID put Merlins in later P-40s and it didn't help the airframe much at all. The design had limitations that horsepower couldn't fix. It was a tough aircraft, but it couldn't do what Spits and 109s could. It was just an elderly design that couldn't be upgraded further.

The problem with the P-51 was it became a flying brick at high speeds and almost impossible to maneuver. Adolph Galland speaks to this in his memoirs (he had 104 "western" kills). Another German Ace with a lot of kills (although not nearly as many as Marseilles and he was killed EARLY!) was Heinz Bar with 124.

Sure Birdie, let's have a competition, I'll start a Space Program with German scientists and you start yours with Nigerians...

I'm wondering why you even had to go there on this otherwise decent thread. In fact I couldn't tell if you were being sarcastic or humorous but it appears you weren't after all.

I've already mentioned the sentiments of my own kin who were actually in it, via that song, which would have been heartily echoed by my father, except that all of those enemies he shot were Japanese and on Okinawa.

Birdwatcher

Because I think it went to Hatari's Albert Speer comment on the incredible ingenuity of the Germans as a whole, and thus germane to the discussion. Yes I was being serious.

Well, they're so friggin' smart they gave us Hitler, Goebbels and Goering et. al., perpetrated some of the worst atrocities ever, and are currently slipping into a sort of collective ethnic suicide, having just now achieved the World's lowest fertility rate, surpassing even Japan and Russia....

So I guess it all depends on what yardstick one is using.

Its a good thing we still have blondes in Texas, the original wellspring is running dry.

But moving along, I ain't looking at the book just now, but it goes into detail how early on the Brits went to three shifts on their production lines while Messerchmitt et. al were still producing aircraft via a 48 hour work week.

It also goes into depth on the eventual German use of slave labor, using either forcibly relocated civilian workers or actual concentration camp inmates, housed in small camps built next to the factories. Consequently sabotage was a frequent problem.

It seems like quite often in Allied air combat accounts one hears of apparent failures of German fighter aircraft in combat. One recently published book by a Mustang pilot has it that at one point, after a prolonged dogfight, he was actually about to be shot down and most likely killed by a German in a FW 190, having run out of ideas and altitude, him and the German racing along the deck, the German still on his tail. At that point the prop on the German plane just stopped, and it crashed.

From the book the author recounts how a piece of sharp scrap metal was found wedged between the rear of the seat and a fuel tank on one Komet rocket-powered fighter, the intent being clearly to precipitate destruction, especially upon takeoff or landing. Nearby on the airframe was written in French "My heart is not in my work."

One does hope such saboteurs could not be traced.

Birdwatcher

Stupid people can't go crazy. That said, did you know the majority ethnic group in the US is German?..

How many of 'em vote Democrat?

Anyways, this "Master Race" crap was of course a sore point with my folks, and the roots of my raising do indeed run deep.

I was taught that folks is rated on their own individual merits. My mom and dad even applied that to the Japanese, which is saying something as my dad was a Sixth Marine, and my mom lost a cousin in Singapore.

But, if you must insist, I myself have always held the Jews in especially high regard, its generally easy to go along with the Bible.

And since the fat lady ain't sung on the course of human history yet, it does appear that the Asians are back and coming on strong. Even before that, that whole toilet paper/tooth brushing/bathing thing put 'em high up in my book. I do believe too that the Chinese have a rather high opinion of their own selves.

Birdwatcher

From what I've read, the Spitfire couldn't dive due to it's wing structure or camber. The Mustang had the range with it's aero fuselage and laminar flow wings. Also, the Mustang could get a fighter to Berlin, and was fairly equal to the FW 190A and Me 109G. It was an offensive weapon, and really just a cleaned up P-40 with a better engine with a supercharger.

The Spitfire XIV with a Griffon engine was a terror in dogfights. I wonder how the Spitfire XIV would do against a Bearcat.

This is my pick:

My Fighter by Rick Mulhern, on Flickr

No argument on the jews either, Birdie.

you and me both brother...

Jug was always my favorite... and I am a big 56th Fighter Group fan....which are now at Luke AFB in Arizona...

use to be a guy in Minneapolis that belonged to a group of folks I belonged to, and had a meeting once a month... was in a wheel chair due to age, but when a young man, he flew P47s with the 406 FG, in the 9th AF... he always named his A/C "the Turtle"...his year of combat duty, he made it up to "The Turtle, # 10"... Monogram even used his markings on one of their 1/48 Scale Models of the P47...

Lost 10 of them, but made it back to base to belly land them in shot to hell and back, junked, but they always brought him home...

ONE ROUND through the cooler of a P-51 and the pilot had two options aka put it on the ground in five minutes or bail out!

Jugs came home with holes in 'em basketballs could be thrown through and with cylinders shot completely away!!

One thing that surprised me given its later virtuosity in the ground attack role, was that up until the installation of a paddle-bladed propeller and water injection early in 1944, the Thunderbolt almost sucked down low, but performed better than the German fighters above 25,000 feet.

Turns out that, besides the big engine, the plane was designed from the get-go around a supercharger housed in the fuselage behind the cockpit, which vented out through the underside of the aircraft about half-way to the tail.

This from the book "Dogfight: The Greatest Air Duels of WWII' (2011)...

The P-47 could turn with its more nimble opponents provided the pilot kept his speed above 200 mph.. They were told never to try and climb away from an enemy fighter unless having gained good speed from a dive....

I believe it was Robert Johnson who wrote that in a practice dogfight against a Spit, he was able to prevail by going into a steep dive and then using the momentum gained to zoom up, the Spit attempting to follow both these maneuvers. Johnson was then able to use his height advantage to do a stall turn and bring his guns to bear.

...Just how poor the early P-47's were at climbing is illustrated by the fact that a Bf109G averaged about eleven minutes to climb from near seas level to 30,000 feet, a FW 190A took 14 minutes and the Thunderbolt required a full 20 minutes!...

Johnson recalled (of 1943) There was no questioning the battle experience or the skill of the German pilots, nor could we find solace in the outstanding performance of the FW 190 or Bf109 fighters.... The Luftwaffe boys were hot. They screamed in from dead ahead, working perfectly as teams, throwing their bullets and cannon shells expertly into the evading fighters.....

Luftwaffe Flight Test Center Pilot Hans-Werner Lerche... extensively flew a captured P-47D-2 in late 1943....

The Thunderbolt was rather lame and sluggish near ground level, with a maximum speed of barely 310mph... I was astonished to note how lively the Thunderbolt became at higher altitudes. Thanks to its excellent exhaust-driven turbosupercharger, this American fighter climbed to 36,000 feet with ease... The strength of the Thunderbolt in a dive was particularly impressive. This was just as well as it was no great dogfighter, particularly at heights below 15,000 feet.

It was excellent at higher altitudes, in diving attacks and when flying at maximum boost. No wonder then that the P-47s were always the deciding factor as escort fighters for bomber attacks conducted at higher altitudes.

Robert Johnson on the introduction of the improved propeller, New Year '43/'44...

On New Year's Day, what a present we received. We flew to a maintenance depot at Wattisham to have the Thunderbolts modified. Our engineering officers were making a terrific fuss over a new propeller... we listened to their enthusiastic ramblings with a grain of salt - never were we more mistaken...

What a difference the blades made when I took my modified fighter up for the first time. It quivered and began to shake badly as if partially stalled.The next thing I knew I was in a dive and wow! I hauled back on the stick afraid that the engine would tear right out of the mounts.

What I didn't realize was that the new propeller was making all the difference. At 8,000 feet I pulled the Thunderbolt into a steep climb. Normally she'd zoom quickly and then slow down, rapidly approaching a stall. But now the Jug soared up like she'd gone crazy... The Jug stood on her tail and howled her way up into the sky. Never again did a FW 190 of Me 109 outclimb me in the Thunderbolt. The new propeller was worth 1,000hp, and then some.... We couild now top 30,000 feet in about 13 minutes, instead of 20.

Birdwatcher