Hi Flightpath,
>the A.P. 2580A 'Bag The Hun' booklet was a real find, I traded a P6 compass for it from a french collector visiting Melbourne long ago.
>It was printed in april 1943 to help RAF pilots with the FW190 problem, I had never seen one before and when I turned it over, I found written in ink on the back "OC 451 (RAAF) Sqdrn ME".... what a find!
Fantastic - that must have been the icing on the cake for you!
Good point on the Fw 190 ... that means the booklet is not than "just" an interesting tactical document but additionally the visible expression a critical point in the RAF's wartime history!
Thanks for the additional pictures, that is really great stuff
I've been trying to figure out how the excercises work, but I haven't entirely understood it. I suppose the pilot had to place the transparency with the ring-and-dot sight in the correct shooting position for each picture, probably assuming a certain target speed.
Wingspan would probably have been set virtually simply by providing the proper size of the ring on the transparency. However, the British sights could also be set to different ranges - was the ring supposed to have been set to a certain range for the excercises? (Or maybe there were different transparencies in the booklet?)
The other thing I haven't understand is how the pilot could check the correctness of his aim point estimate. I'd say for successful learning, this would be a requirement, or he'd simply reinforce wrong habits by excercising his flawed aimpoint estimation. This might have been done with another transparency, or maybe by printing the correct aimpoint on the back side of the page with the aircrat silhouttes so that they could be seen against the light. However, this appears impractical since the ring could only be held in one position at a time, and I see no way to mark the aim point for each silhoutte (for example using a pencil to make a dot through a hole in the gunsight centre dot
Having the aimpoint marked on the page would also be bad for repeated excercises!
I assume the page you showed is a "demonstration page", and on the rest of the pages, the Fw 190 silhouettes are not sorted by angle-off (and perhaps shown at random ranges)? It would be interesting to know which the largest angle-off was that was represented in the book - that would tell us a lot about the tactical expectations of the RAF
Really fascinating stuff - in my opinion, you have a real treasure there
It's really a "window into history", giving us some immediate insights on what went on in the minds of the Fighter Command leaders in WW2!
Regards,
Henning (HoHun)