1. #1
    ARCHIE_CALVERT's Avatar Banned
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    The British aircraft that turned the tide...

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  2. #2
    ARCHIE_CALVERT's Avatar Banned
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    The British aircraft that turned the tide...

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  3. #3
    AndyJWest's Avatar Senior Member
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    Good Grief! The Daily Mail getting something right!
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    Airmail109's Avatar Senior Member
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    Actually I seem to remember reading an authority (can't remember who it was) on the BoB, stating that the idea the Hurricane "won" it was a total load of codswallop. It's numbers won it purely.

    Something about the poor kill/loss ratio compared to the Spitfire, that it was no easier to maintain than the Spitfire and that statistics show that it was no better at scoring kills than the Spitfire aka a more stable gun platform.

    Simply. Had it not been for the Spitfire, far more Hurricanes would have been shot down by ME109s. We very nearly ran out of enough well trained pilots at the height of the Battle as it was.

    The truth is both fighters complemented each other. We had enough high performance Spitfires to keep the ME109s off the workhorse that was the Hurricane. We had enough Hurricanes to give the Luftwaffe Bomber force a kicking.
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  5. #5
    WTE_Galway's Avatar Senior Member
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    Real airplanes preferably have two wings but at very least must include some wood and fabric.

    The effete pretty boy Spitfire was simply not up to the task of taking on the masses of bombers (Spitfire pilots complained that LW gunners were over modeled) and was relegated to dealing with the odd stray 109 that hadn't run out of fuel on the way over the channel.
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  6. #6
    VW-IceFire's Avatar Senior Member
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    <BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by Aimail101:
    Actually I seem to remember reading an authority (can't remember who it was) on the BoB, stating that the idea the Hurricane "won" it was a total load of codswallop. It's numbers won it purely.

    Something about the poor kill/loss ratio compared to the Spitfire, that it was no easier to maintain than the Spitfire and that statistics show that it was no better at scoring kills than the Spitfire aka a more stable gun platform.

    Simply. Had it not been for the Spitfire, far more Hurricanes would have been shot down by ME109s. We very nearly ran out of enough well trained pilots at the height of the Battle as it was.

    The truth is both fighters complemented each other. We had enough high performance Spitfires to keep the ME109s off the workhorse that was the Hurricane. We had enough Hurricanes to give the Luftwaffe Bomber force a kicking. </div></BLOCKQUOTE>
    I mostly agree with you except for one often repeated myth.

    Spitfire squadrons and Hurricane squadrons were not treated differently by RAF command when dispatching fighter units to shoot down bombers. Spitfires did not shoot down 109s while Hurricanes bore in on the bombers like many have repeated time and time again. The RAF fighters were sent to attack the bomber formations and focus on the bombers wherever possible and it didn't matter if it was a Spitfire squadron or a Hurricane one.

    Hurricane and Spitfire both carried the battle. The Spitfire was undoubtedly the higher performing type and had the greater development potential over the long term (the Hurricane's legacy ultimately lead to the Typhoon, Tempest, Fury and Sea Fury) but the Hurricane was "good enough" and as you say available in numbers.

    To the best of my historical knowledge there was never any occasion during the Battle of Britain where Spitfires were sent in (specifically) to tangle with 109s while Hurricanes went after the bombers.
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    Airmail109's Avatar Senior Member
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    <BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by VW-IceFire:
    <BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by Aimail101:
    Actually I seem to remember reading an authority (can't remember who it was) on the BoB, stating that the idea the Hurricane "won" it was a total load of codswallop. It's numbers won it purely.

    Something about the poor kill/loss ratio compared to the Spitfire, that it was no easier to maintain than the Spitfire and that statistics show that it was no better at scoring kills than the Spitfire aka a more stable gun platform.

    Simply. Had it not been for the Spitfire, far more Hurricanes would have been shot down by ME109s. We very nearly ran out of enough well trained pilots at the height of the Battle as it was.

    The truth is both fighters complemented each other. We had enough high performance Spitfires to keep the ME109s off the workhorse that was the Hurricane. We had enough Hurricanes to give the Luftwaffe Bomber force a kicking. </div></BLOCKQUOTE>
    I mostly agree with you except for one often repeated myth.

    Spitfire squadrons and Hurricane squadrons were not treated differently by RAF command when dispatching fighter units to shoot down bombers. Spitfires did not shoot down 109s while Hurricanes bore in on the bombers like many have repeated time and time again. The RAF fighters were sent to attack the bomber formations and focus on the bombers wherever possible and it didn't matter if it was a Spitfire squadron or a Hurricane one.

    Hurricane and Spitfire both carried the battle. The Spitfire was undoubtedly the higher performing type and had the greater development potential over the long term (the Hurricane's legacy ultimately lead to the Typhoon, Tempest, Fury and Sea Fury) but the Hurricane was "good enough" and as you say available in numbers.

    To the best of my historical knowledge there was never any occasion during the Battle of Britain where Spitfires were sent in (specifically) to tangle with 109s while Hurricanes went after the bombers. </div></BLOCKQUOTE>

    Interesting, point taken!

    However if there had been no Spitfires and we simply had 900 Hurricanes versus 600 Hurricanes + 300 Spitfires or whatever the number was. We'd have seen potentially much greater losses of pilots. Something I'm not sure Fighter Command could have coped with.
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    WTE_Galway's Avatar Senior Member
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    Are you sure of that ? I know the Defiants were definitely sent on different intercepts, not that it did any good. Regardless of where they were sent the Spitfires were more capable of getting up to the altitude of the covering fighters than the Hurricane.

    Aside from their being more Hurricanes available, another huge advantage of the Hurricane was the refuel/rearm times which were around half an hour for a Spitfire but less than 10 minutes for a Hurricane. Another issue with the Spits was the early cannon armed variants suffered from what the RAF politely called "gun stoppages" but the pilots had other more colorful terms for though their were only a handful of cannon armed spitfires around during the Battle of Britain.
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  9. #9
    leitmotiv's Avatar Senior Member
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    See Alfred Price's excellent history of the Spitfire:

    http://www.amazon.co.uk/Spitfi...id=1278946655&sr=1-2

    Spitfire production had not yet been decentralized during the Battle, and the Germans had missed a golden opportunity to bring production to a halt at the two big factories making them. In fact, one was hit and suffered a critical loss of production. Spitfires cost more to build than Hurricanes, and were more complex to build (especially their very complicated elliptical wing). There was an very long debate among WWII users in, I believe, "Fly Past", in 1994-5 about whether the Hurricane was a more steady gun platform than the Spitfire. The Hurricane had its four-gun batteries concentrated in each wing while the Spitfire had its guns distributed along the entire wing.

    If I had to choose between the two, I'd want the Spitfire. The Hurricane, which was the only one of the two which operated in France during the 1940 campaign, inflicted considerable casualties on the Luftwaffe. This was the finest hour of the Hurricane.
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  10. #10
    horseback's Avatar Senior Member
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    Of the two fighters, I know which one I'd rather enter into combat with and which one I'd rather see as an opponent.

    What people often seem to ignore is that the Battle of Britain was the very first major air battle of consequence. Everyone involved in it was a rank amateur, particularly compared to the combatants who were fighting 18 months later...

    So it was that German pilots 'stupidly' got into low-level turning contests with Hurricanes or assumed that their trusty Emil would outperform a Spitfire that had a running start, or RAF pilots might try to enter a climbing contest with an Emil, or spray and pray at a formation of bombers from 400+ yards away with their battery of .303s, never thinking that a rifle caliber bullet is still a rifle caliber bullet, no matter how many of them you fling at a target that shrugs off rifle caliber rounds fired at extreme ranges.

    People just didn't know what they didn't know, and only hard won experience would teach them what they could get away with (most often by seeing someone else try it and getting killed for their impertinance).

    Under those circumstances, a well-flown Hurricane was a lot closer match to a similarly well-flown Spitfire than it would have been against a better informed opposition. Hurris were also considered more forgiving and easier to fly than the less numerous Spits, and one also has to factor in the reality that Hurricanes had been around longer and their pilots were often better acquainted with its foibles (I've always wanted to use that word in a sentance ).

    cheers

    horseback
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