MontyB
All-Blacks Supporter
About 500 times fewer than it takes to build one. So it really pays to keep them flying.
How many millions were sitting on their asses while the few at the front fought?
Saying that the British could not keep flying 500 stupid planes a few hours away from the factories, most of them Hurricanes (which used a similar Merlin to that of the Spits) is an insult to the British people, much worse than the ones I direct at Dowding or Churchill.
So give me a number 1, 5, 100?
Obviously it took 1 or 2 to build it and mill the parts etc. how many to ensure the RAF had the fuel to stay in the air because that wasn't made a few miles from the airfields.
I will give you a bit of a helping hand, it was estimated that during WW2 it took 10 people to keep one New Zealand infantryman in the field, I would imagine keeping a Spitfire in the air would have taken a few more.
I would suggest that the greater insult to the British people is telling them that all of their leadership was incompetent throughout a battle for its survival especially given that it won that battle.
The simple reality is that Britain put as many fighters in the air as it possibly could (note that is not the same as saying it put every fighter in the air that it had) when you take into account its ability maintain, supply and fly those aircraft, it did not keep fighters on the ground for fun it kept them there for maintenance, resting pilots (because pilots make errors when exhausted and dead pilots don't fly well) and general replacements.
I am absolutely certain that had they been able to get even 1 more aircraft into battle they would have.
Just for once look at the whole picture not fragments of it.
Now I can't possibly tell what the situation was like for the foreigners from Poland, France, Belgium, The Netherlands, Denmark, etc..
But what I know is that the Norwegian volunteers, like my Grand-uncle, was shipped from UK to Canada and recieved their training there.
Then they spendt weeks and months on operational training in the northern UK and Scotland before they were sendt out on their missions.
Sometimes with less than perfect equipment, but well trained and motivated for their task.
Many of them were incorporated into 13 Group (fighter pilots that is) which covered Northern England and Scotland because it was a quieter sector which gave them operational experience in Spitfires and Hurricanes but that was the first time many of them were given those aircraft to fly.
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