Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire The last Battle of Britain Ace has passed.

This must have slipped by us, couldn't find it here on a search. He died last week.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/last-battle-of-britain-fighter-pilot-ace-dies-at-101



A Hurricane Ace, I've always been fascinated by those who succeeded while flying that aeroplane, handicapped as it was against the Bf 109.



Malta and North Africa were also particularly tough gigs.



Classic British reserve and understatement at its finest

Sorry to them all go. We owe them our thanks.

Birdy, while most people, including myself, are great fans of the Spitfire, and have always been led to believe it was THE plane that saved Britain, the fact is that it was the Hurricane that did the lions share of the work. The Hurricane could take more punishment than the Spitfire, and was more plentiful, therefore it saw a lot of use.

Of all the many phases of WW2, the Battle of Britain has always been the one that interested me the most. Sad to know that there are no longer any of the aces left.

"Never have so many ...."

Agreed. They changed history.

RIP sir, and to all who never came home.

The Hurricane could turn inside the 109. It did the lion's share.

RIP. They saved Britain’s ass

So I have read as well. Those 8 .303 MG's could surely throw a swarm of lead. RIP warrior.

R.I.P. sir..... The "Greatest Generation" wasn't just our guys.

I had always been led to believe that the Hurricane could not turn with the ME109, and that's why Hurricanes were delegated to attacking German bombers while Spits took on the enemy escort fighters - to protect the Hurricanes. Stopping the bombers was actually the more important job, BTW.

Here's an article about a Hurricane that was found in a bog and painstakingly rebuilt to flying condition...LINK

From Skies of WWII Courage, Battle, and Victory in the Air by Jason Biggs:

The Hawker Hurricane
"The workhorse of the RAF was widely overshadowed by the Spitfire, but the Hurricane accounted for well over 50% of RAF victories during the Battle of Britain."

"Though slower than either the Spitfire or Bf109, the Hurricane could turn more tightly than either, and it provided a steady gun platform as well as being capable of withstanding a great deal of punishment from enemy fire."

A number of documentaries report that the Spit was used vs. the Bf 109 for air superiority and the Hurricanes were sent after the German bombers.

I read an interesting article The wizard of octane about the creation of higher octane fuels (and although the article doesn't mention it driven by Jimmy Doolittle) for aviation. With the increase in the yield and the higher octane, America was able to ship 100 octane to the UK just prior to the BoB that gave substantially increase performance to the Spit and Hurricane from their time at the Battle of France much to the surprise of the Luftwaffe.

Pretty interesting article.

Ya, if it survived the first pass. IIRC most dogfights were brief and occurred in the vertical plane, the victim never having seen the guy that got him.

IIRC again, Hurricane Squadrons outnumbered Spitfire squadrons near 2:1 at the time of the battle. The most incredible one-sortie action in a Hurricane I'm aware of was that of Archie McKellar, who on October 10, 1940 shot down five Bf109's, but these were apparently on a bomb-laden "Jabo" raid in which fighters were employed as bombers. Five aircraft knocked down with just fifteen seconds of ammunition.

McKellar himself was killed three weeks later, perhaps in the act of achieving his last Bf109 kill. The guy that got him was one Wolfgang Lippert, a Condor Legion veteran who would die during an operation in a British hospital to amputate both legs after a bad bailout in North Africa in September of '41.

Of course 1941 and '42 would be really hard on RAF fighter command when it was their turn to try and project air superiority over the French coast, going up against the improved Bf109F and the new FW190, both these out classing the then-current Spitfire Mark V and certainly the Hurricane (too much drag in those thick wings, adding horsepower didn't make it much faster). The RAF wouldn't catch up qualitatively until the summer of '42 with the Spitfire Mark IX

The maneuverability of the Hurricane did lend itself to nighttime harassment raids in which single fighters would follow German bombers back to their bases in France and shoot them out of the landing pattern..

Other than that they were used as daylight "Hurribombers" against Northern France and suffered accordingly, up until the first part of 1944 I believe, before being fully replaced in that role by Typhoons.

You guys prob'ly knew all this but may have not read what is probably the best of the many books about that battle. The author argues convincingly that the Battle of Britain was never really a close thing, the Luftwaffe had already lost hundred of planes over France and incredibly, had not yet ramped-up their aircraft production lines to a war footing.

"The Most Dangerous Enemy" (by Steven Bungay), available for just $7 used. A must read for anyone interested in WWII aviation.

https://www.amazon.com/Most-Dangerous-Enemy-History-Britain/dp/1854108018

One thing "The Most Dangerous Enemy" points out is the very different approach to the pilots themselves by their respective governments.

On the German side a few Aces like Galland were built into media superstars, accordingly flight operations were designed to give the few Aces maximum chances to up their score, to the detriment of the whole.

The Hurricane could indeed turn inside the 109, but that was about it. The 109 had the advantage in the vertical and on a dive. Remember air combat is three dimensional. My lowly S-3 Viking round out turn just about any fighter, once. We did it against the Libyans (MiG 21s & 23s) as well as Greek F-4s. Our only survival was to dive down to the deck, thus limiting the :look down" but at altitude where they could zoom turn and dive we were toast.

Tks Jorge.

Turns out there's some cool WWII RAF combat aviation footage on Youtube.

Here's a 1942 raid against an Eindhoven radio factory, twelve planes lost.

This research paper on 5000 german fighter pilots over 96,000 missions through WW-II

https://www.nber.org/papers/w22992

https://voxeu.org/article/how-status-competition-killed-german-wwii-fighter-pilots

shows that when Aces were given accolades for combat performance results,
the effect was that it drove/gave incentive to the other pilots to try and do better.
Findings indicate the top 20% of pilots considerably increased their combat performance
without increasing their mortality rate, but the remaining 80% only marginally increased
their combat performance , while considerably increasing their mortality rate.

Cool paper, tks.

However the book focuses more on those Bf109 pilots in the same units as Galland and Molders in the summer and fall of 1940, as well as that third guy who got killed when he went out to get one more kill in response to Molders I think.

Apparently not everyone in these units appreciated taking second fiddle to these stars, in some cases doing so increased their odds of getting killed while at the same time greatly reducing their own chance of scoring.

The book I linked “The Most Dangerous Enemy” goes into the performance details in some detail. Of the three, the Bf109 had the best dive and recovery climb characteristics, augmented by the fact that the German pilots had more time to gain altitude ( a thing that Goering would cripple at one point by insisting the the fighters closely escort the bombers).

Of course relative performance varied with altitude, I’d have to consult the book but IIRC at lower altitude the Hurricane improved somewhat relative to the other two. In all three aircraft most pilots did not achieve the rate of turn their aircraft were capable of. In particular the Bf109, with the highest wing loading of the three, had automatic leading edge slats that deployed automatically in a tight turn to dramatically decrease turning radius. Few pilots pushed their plane that hard.

So a few German pilots swore they could turn inside either British fighter and had done so. Indeed they had, against less capable pilots.

Of course in combat position was everything,and the outcome most often decided in that first pass, if a kill was not made right off and evasive action taken, most often the two aircraft would not engage further. British pilots who had flown both types reported that, in the stress of combat, relative position in relation to the enemy was far more important than which plane you were flying, a diving Hurricane being about as lethal in bouncing a surprised Bf109 as was a Spit. Possibly more so in that firing the guns of a Spitfire pushed the plane off target unless the pilot corrected whereas those in a Hurricane did not.

One thing interesting the book points out was, the greater the number of fighters involved in a fighter against fighter engagement, the lower the success rate on either side. Too many planes added to the confusion.

The British soon learned to ignore German fighter sweeps, the following year the Germans came to ignore British fighter sweeps over France. Both sides having to send bombers to draw a response.