I don't think they had sent any VIII or IX to the Pacific in time for Darwin, though I could be wrong. They didn't get any Spit IX in the Med until a couple of months into 1943. VIII came later....
Correct, but that was mainly because Whitehall treated the Med and CBI/PTO as less than secondary importance. Whilst there was no reason for the Air Ministry to predict Darwin becoming a frontline station, they could have sent Spitfires to Australia (and India, Singapore, Malta and the Desert) in 1941 without seriously reducing operational capabilities in the UK. That early a start would have meant revealing and fixing many of the problems long before they arose over Darwin in 1943. Even when considering Darwin as a secondary port, its status as one of the most important Royal Navy bases in the theatre should have accorded it better defences in 1942, even if they had just been Hurricane IIs or Wildcats.
Hurricanes had a fairly dismal record against A6M and Ki-43 type fighters....
No, you are just repeating already debunked myths. Go back and read the post about the Calcutta raids, escorts over the Arakan, and Frank Carey. As soon as they got the right tactics the Hurri IIs did fine against the Ki-43 and Zero.
…..They even had trouble intercepting higher flying bombers at Malta which was arguably less hostile conditions than New Guinea, probably similar to Darwin....
You really need to just stop and go do a LOT more reading about the air battles for Malta. For start, it was not unusual for the Malta Hurricanes to be out-numbered ten-to-one just by the Axis escorts, let alone the bombers, on a daily basis And the escorts were often Bf109Fs and Gs, which are certainly far more deadly any model of the Zero. Considering that, after the Spit V, the Hurri II was the fasting climbing option available, had the altitude performance to get high enough and speed to catch them, plus had the firepower to shoot down the Japanese bombers, and by 1943 had the tactics to deal with the Zeros, the Hurri II was probably the next best available choice after the Spit V.
…..P-47 wasn't available later in '43.....
P-47s weren't available
at Darwin in 1943. The first P-47Cs left the factory on September 14th 1942, and the 56th FG took their P-47s to the UK in January 1943, so P-47Cs
could have been at Darwin in May 1943 if the USAAF had had the foresight to send them to Australia instead of the UK. But the climb performance of a clean P-47C was pretty bad, so it might not have been able to get high enough in time to intercept the May 2nd raid without a lengthy stern chase, raising the possibility of the P-47s also running out of fuel.
…..Considering that the P-40E, with a 12,000' critical altitude, was used to some good effect in the defense of Darwin, it stands to reason that the P-40F with a 20,000' critical altitude might have been considerably more effective......
The Jap escorts would still have been able to sit higher than the P-40F's operational ceiling and dive on them at will. Plus the P-40F took so long to get to 25,000ft the raid would be long gone by then. If the faster-climbing Spit Vs weren't getting high enough until after the Japanese had bombed then there was no way the P-40F could.
…..Rate of climb was also dependent on load, it could range from as low as 1,700 fpm to as high as 3,300 fpm, depending on how heavy the aircraft was......
Not in any figures I have seen. Maybe if you stripped it down to a water-pistol for armament, a thimble of fuel, and the pilot was a shaved-naked squirrel, then maybe 2500fps.
…..It's probably a cinch though that either way they could have taken out a pair of the wing machine guns and associated ammunition for work over Darwin, and as seen in the Med and shown in some side by side tests by the Aussies, in actual field conditions with four guns it would probably have a climb to 20,000 ft better than the Hurricane and definitely quite a bit better than the P-40E or P-39.......
We've been over this, the figures are already in and any model of the P-40 in any stripped-down form couldn't match the climb of a Hurricane II. A normal loaded P-40F weighed 8500Lbs, whereas a 12-gun Hurricane IIB was 7080Lbs, which is why the P-40F took 2.6 minutes longer to get to 20,000ft with what was practically the same engine. Those are the real test figures. Good luck trying to trim 1500Lbs off the P-40! You'd be better off taking the Hurri IIB and taking the twelve .303 Brownings out and replacing them with four .50s as the Belgians did. But that would still be slower climbing and slower on the level than a Spit V.
Interestingly (and probably very annoyingly to Pinsog), the P-40F with the 141.5-gal drop-tank had a range of 1500 miles, which implies it could have cruised the 500 miles to Darwin as escort, dropped the tank and had a ten minute combat, and then made it the 500 miles back home on remaining internal fuel (700 mile range on internal fuel at 20,000ft). The pilot would probably suffer some puckering for the last 50-odd miles, but possible. Strip it down to four guns and you'd probably feel a bit happier for those last 50 miles, and four .50s would still be deadly against a Spitfire.