Originally Posted by samneanderthal

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.

Originally Posted by 84RFK

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.

Well Monty, my Grand-uncle was in the Coastal-Command, so most of his service was up north.
As he finished in Canada after the 330 Sqd. changed from Northrop and Catalina's to Sunderland, he only had a short stint in Oban before their transfer to Sullom Voe.
He's still up there by the way, somewhere between Shetland and Iceland.

On the contrary, surviving lousy leaders says a lot about the people, as in the case of Germany, Japan, Italy and the USSR.
It was Dowding´s policy to keep at least half the planes in reserve at all times. Believe it or not.
It is even harder for me to believe than an idiot would send over two hundred pilots with the worst fighters in his stock to fight the largest air force in the world in France, while he kept all the Spits and most of the Hurricanes with 3 blades in Britain.

Originally Posted by samneanderthal

Any cretin knows that if you have hundreds of planes bombing London day in and day out in September 1940, it is not very smart to have a few pilots facing them and hundreds protecting unthreatened areas.

But forget it, you have your stupid heroes and since they got lucky thanks to Polish, Czech, NZ, SA, Canadian, etc, pilots and to Hitler's and Göring's stupidity won the battle of Britain, they did everything brilliantly.
You can continue worshipping these idiots, while I continue learning from their stupid mistakes.

So you are saying that Dowding should have left all the other sectors undefended?

Definitely and shot down most of the planes in each wave, so the Germans would have had to quit the BoB at least a month earlier. It makes more sense than shooting few planes and losing many with every coming wave for months.

Well, you see, there's this thing about airplanes, fighters, transports, bombers, commercial airliners, the lot..
They need somewwhere to land in order to be refueled, serviced, and resupplied.
And the crews need some amount of rest before they take off again.

Sending every airworthy fighter you have off in one big wave to face incoming enemy planes doesn't seem that logic to me, especially when there's a risk of being outflanked and attacked from the rear at the same time.

Read Douglas Bader's " Reach for the Sky",...they didn't have 2 blade props for long

I totally agree,..Fairey Battles sent many keen young good pilot's to their unwitting deaths....what a disaster....nearly as bad as the Bouton_Paul Defiant

The Brewster Buffalo comes to mind here as well.

Japanese pilots were well trained, disciplined, experienced and in charge of arguably one of the most outstanding fighter planes in the beginning of WWII, with excellent range, useful firepower ( cannons were more than a match), yet sacrificed armour for the pilot and no self-sealing fuel tanks......but they knew that the way they could fly their ship,....no-one coulreally come near them early on.....The Australians had P40's, and the Squadron Leader said,..."Don't EVER try to out climb or out turn a Zero, otherwise you will not be coming home for Christmas"