RAF BoB Fighters OTL ATL v Me-109

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Bristol had trouble making the sleeve valves come out 'round' within acceptable tolerances, or perhaps 'stay' round. Engines were often using unacceptable amounts of oil in under 20 hours of running. This could often result in oil fouled plugs so the answer was not just fit a larger oil tank and carry on.

Solution, so the story goes, was found when a workman used some grinding wheels out of sequence by mistake in the finishing process( Bristol had used several hundred combinations of alloy, heat treatment and finishing processes already).

Same problem beset the Napier Sabre before Bristol was forced to help Napier ( they were not happy to 'solve' Napier's problem with Sabre while trying to sell their own 2000hp engine to the Government). Napier went through several hundred combinations themselves.

The solution was never apprentices when you are trying to make hundreds of engines a month, if not thousands.

Hooker, when he went to Bristol after the war, is supposed to have said that the people at Bristol never understood airflow.
You also have the cooling problem with air cooled engines, power is limited by the cooling system (fins and baffles) and in many cases the ability to add as much fin area as was desired was limited by the foundry techniques (casting or forging) and machining ability. Wright went to machining groves instead of fins on the cylinder barrels and 'rolling' sheet metal fins into the groves on their later engines. The Hercules went through around 1/2 dozen different cylinder head designs with ever improving cooling ability.

I would note however that in 1940 nobody had a supercharger that offered a FTH of much over 17,000ft even in high gear of a two speed set up and that sometimes it took twice the power to drive the supercharger in high gear than in low gear. Picking the right supercharger gear was always a balance between altitude desired and the power needed to drive the supercharger ( and since 30% or more of the power just went heating the intake charge there comes a point of diminishing returns).

AS far as the R-2600 goes. please remember that it is a 1900lb engine that is 55in in diameter, it is NOT a 'plug in' replacement for anything but a Hercules and the 1940 1600hp for take-off version is only good for 1400hp at 11,500ft. (Merlin III at 12lbs was good for 1310hp at 9,000ft) and Wright only hit triple digit per month production in July of 1940. Production would double by Dec and double again by April/May 1941. First 1/2 of 1940 saw production numbers of around 70 per month most months.
 
parsifal said:
So, what are the costs to Britain of foregoing serious deployment to the southeast of Britain until say early october. What could the Luftwaffe have done of long lasting importance in that time?
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Losing RN and RAF facilities along the entire south coast and southern counties. Losing access to the channel for the RN and other shipping. It might not be a case of the Home Fleet not wanting to operate south of the Wash, but of actually fearing to do so.
Dive bombers operating unopposed could wreak havoc on, for example, port facilities. Ask any Maltese. That is rather different from being withdrawn from the fray.

This might have piqued some genuine interest in the Kriegsmarine for an invasion. It was easy for it to hide behind the Luftwaffe's inability to secure air superiority when in fact it had no appetite for 'Sea Lion'. I still doubt that an actual invasion was possible but who knows. The Germans with their tails up in August/September 1940 would be a very different proposition to the Germans fought to a stale mate, as they were historically.

Allowing a foreign air force to hammer your towns, cities and citizens, no matter how ineffectively, unopposed. This might not be militarily disastrous but it was (and is) politically unacceptable. A look at the reaction to WW1 raids by aeroplanes and air ships will illustrate the point.

Militarily a draw, to the British people the BoB was presented as a first victory. For the first time they had prevented the Germans achieving their rather ambiguous and confused objectives. The psychological and political effect of this are impossible to over estimate. It's why we live with the myth today and why the BBC still makes programmes about it, whilst authors (good bad and indifferent) still make money out of it.

Britain is a small island, I've just driven from Oxford to Carlisle in a few hours. Trading space for time, as per traditional doctrine is not an option as it was for some mainland European nations. There are no Urals to fall back to. The RAF had to be seen to be doing something.

Cheers

Steve
 

There iss a cutaway rotating centaurus (I think)at the Yorkshire museum Elvington it is fascinating to watch. Easy to see the problems with the sleeves that not only had to rotate and oscillate but also conduct the heat away from the cylinders.
 

MiG-1?
 
Merlin XX also fits the description (FTH above 17000 ft, in 1940, on +9 psi boost?).

BTW, I've read in another forum that all of those, that were available for RAFs fighters, were earmarked for Hurricanes, so they would be able to haul bombs in NA! Hilarious.
 
The AM-35 was undergoing evolution during 1940 and the AM-35A engine didn't complete state testing until Sept 1940 and started production after that. Early in 1941 it got a strengthened impeller. It also weighed about 400lbs more than Merlin or DB 601 or Allison.

The Mig-1 didn't enter use with regular service squadrons until Feb 1941.
 

I think that for some of the forward airfields in Kent it was considered to abandon them, they were simply too far forward but politics dictated they remained operational, after Churchills "no surrender" speech he couldnt be seen to do just that.

BTW for non UK residents Oxford is close to London and Carlisle is on the border. Having worked in Russia they have no concept of just how small the UK is. Flying home before turning to land on a clear day you can see the North sea on the right and the Irish sea on the left. London is only 70 odd miles from Dover
 
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hi steve

These are certainly all possibilities, though I tend to discount the magnitude of the picture you paint. There are other examples of the LW having unfettered control of the air, over extended periods of time, yet I can think of no instances wherer they could flatten an entire regon in a matter of days or weeks. Possibilities might be the situation on the Eastern Front June 1941, where there was a lot of dislocation to the defence, but the collapse on that front was really a combination of pressure brought to bear to unhinge the Soviet defences. If the ground element is removed, the ability of the germans to flatten even a city, much less a region becomes very problematic. The three examples i can think of are Leningrad, Odessa and Malta. In leningrad, the naval facilities were repeatedly hit, but could not be knocked out, over Odessa, the port facitlites were again atacked but could not be neutralised, and once the air threat was removed, even naval construction, of sorts, could resume. as far as seaborne traffic is concerned, well, non-essential traffic would certainly stop, but for essential traffic, the LW was quite limited in its ability, and non-essential might choose to travel at night only and thereby reduce losses. General air force has a marked inability to hit ships. It takes specialist crews to do that, and for the germans in the Summer these were still recovering from their exertions over Norway. They possibly had the equivalent of two full wings to undertake those duties, and from October they were being progressivly transferred South. even with the undivided attentions of all available specialist resources, such as occurred over malta and the med, the LW was unable to curtail essential traffic entirely.

Not suggesting a full pullout, simply an abandonment of the forward positions. Pull back to some position behind London, leaving the SE exposed, but the rest is still covered. The LW would concentrate on the SE with escorted raids, realise this was not delivering what they needed and then extend their efforts further north, where escort for them was more difficult, exposure for the bombers more prolonged, and more time for a co-ordinated attack possible. Somewhat mallory i guess

Powers of recovery for the RAF was quite resilient, maybe 300 to 400 frontline a/c per month, maybe more. So, in reality the LW might have a week or a month in which to capitalize. I doubt that they could achieve any lasting effect in that time frame.

One final issue, that is bound to be a contentious statement. With or without the attentions of Fighter Command, the LW is going to suffer heavy losses. it was being called upon to undertake operations for which it was not designed...with fighter operating beyond their endurance limits, bombers overloaded and constantly under pressure. even during the salad days of Poland and the SitzKrieg, losses in the LW were not light...about 7% per month from memory. Unsustainable for them at the beginning of the war. It would not have been an operation under peacetime conditions
 
They didn't need to flatten cities. They did, as things stood, disrupt British aircraft production to some extent. Depending on AA guns alone (and barrage balloons) to defend the factories when even a few weeks production was important might have been a mistake.
How many Spitfires were lost with the bombing of the Supermarine South Hampton Factory and the dispersal? The Short's factory in Rochester was taken out for months if not a year, granted production was shifted to other sites. Later in the year the BSA factory (Birmingham) was knocked out for about 3 months (making rifles).
If allowed to bomb 'uncontested' how much more damage might the Germans have done? British factories had to make up for the losses in France for the army in addition to building up the air force. The Ship yards had to try to make up for the losses in shipping to the u-boats and build escorts.
The Germans may not have been able to enough damage but it would have been a narrower margin.
 

It would not be uncontested. There would be fighters 40-60 miles further north than they were, that can still protect most of England, including London and the Supermarine fatories near there. Shorts is a different matter, but as the Germans demonstrated time and again, bomb damage was something fairly easily repaired given the right incentive. Shorts dont make fighters as i recall, and BSA, being located in Birmingham is outside 109 range anyway. Dare I say it, even a fulmar would have a field day attacking a massed concentration of unescorted german Bombers in daylight heading for the midlands....

All of a sudden the parameters of the scenario are changing I see, as inevitably they do. no longer are we simply faced with the british having few or no Spits and hurris, to where the germans are miraculously and meticulously targetting the British aircraft industry as a priority, with precision, perfectly co-ordinated and targetted strikes. History shows that none of that was the case. in the initial part of the battle, the LW went after the channel shipping, which was only partly responded to by FC....the sort of response I am now envisaging, but further inland. After a month of the Kanalkampf, they started a systematic attack on the airfields in the southeast and the radar installations. There were other attacks against a multiude of other tartgets, but none of them posessed the necessary strength or power to do much, and that was independant of the FC response. it was all the fault of the German command, they really had no clue what they needed to do, so tried a bit of everything instead. Same can be assumed in this scenario. They spent about a month doing that (attacking the airfields and radar installations), and very nearly succeeded, although their reconnaisance and target priorisation left a lot to be desired. in fact a hallmark of the german assault was its lack of focus, even when the assault is broken down or looked at in terms of the individual phases. So, attacks on the British aero industry did occur, but they were not a particular focus or concentrated assault, and we should assume a similar response in this case. In the absence of a determined, front line resistance by FC, the Germans would be left wondering what the devil the British were up to, not overconfidence. and neither were they focussed at destroying key elements in the same way as a schweinfurt or the plan to destroy German oil installations was.

Anything happening outside the range of the 109 is going to be subjected to the same (or greater) sorts of responses and attrition as was historically the case. more actually, because in the scenario, the RAF is not in the front line trenches duking it out with the jagdfliegers at the Coast. there would actually be more fighters to counter deep penetration raids (including those over London). And this notion that might embolden the Navy to actually do something and attempt a crossing would have ended up a total disaster, which was shown in numerous post war simulations and studies. with or without British fighters protecting the beaches

Historically the Spitfire production program came in for sustained attacks from the LW. According to wiki....

During the Battle of Britain, concerted efforts were made by the Luftwaffe to destroy the main manufacturing plants at Woolston and Itchen, near Southampton. The first bombing raid, which missed the factories, came on 23 August 1940. Over the next month, other raids were mounted until, on 26 September 1940, both factories were completely wrecked, with 92 people being killed and a large number injured; most of the casualties were experienced aircraft production workers.

Fortunately for the future of the Spitfire, many of the production jigs and machine tools had already been relocated by 20 September, and steps were being taken to disperse production to small facilities throughout the Southampton area. To this end, the British government requisitioned the likes of Vincent's Garage in Station Square Reading, which later specialised in manufacturing Spitfire fuselages, and Anna Valley Motors, Salisbury, which was to become the sole producer of the wing leading-edge fuel tanks for photo-reconnaissance Spitfires, as well as producing other components. A purpose-built works, specialising in manufacturing fuselages and installing engines, was built at Star Road, Caversham in Reading. The drawing office in which all Spitfire designs were drafted was relocated to another purpose-built site at Hursley Park, near Southampton. This site also had an aircraft assembly hangar where many prototype and experimental Spitfires were assembled, but since it had no associated aerodrome no Spitfires ever flew from Hursley.

Four towns and their satellite airfields were chosen to be the focal points for these workshops:
Southampton and Eastleigh Airport
Salisbury with High Post and Chattis Hill aerodromes
Trowbridge with Keevil aerodrome
Reading with Henley and Aldermaston aerodromes.
An experimental factory at Newbury was the subject of a Luftwaffe daylight raid but all missed their target and bombed a nearby school.

One possible reason for the dislocation of Spitfire production in this hypothetical, might be that decentralization of production was undertaken earlier than historical, and this would give short term pain for long term gain. Foregoing production on a short term basis to secure the supply chanin by decentralization might actually be a good thing for the later parts fof the campaign. but destroying the Spitfire factory was something the germans did anyway with or without FC intervention....
 
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Not so much of " to where the germans are miraculously and meticulously targetting the British aircraft industry as a priority, with precision, perfectly co-ordinated and targetted strikes" as teh examples I used were actually done. Granted the Birmingham strike was a night strike and part of the bombing of the city and may not have been a specific target.
There is also short term and long term. The Bombing of the BSA Factory did not destroy the Factory or stop production for years, bu the loss of 3 months of rifle production in 1940 may or may not have been important. Hitler turned East in 1941 and the loss of several months of rifle production to the British Army diminished in importance. IF the Germans had stayed in France and planned a Spring of 1941 invasion ( probably still doomed) then having lost several months of production may have been much more significant. BSA was the ONLY factory making rifles in 1940 in England. BTW a bomb raid in Aug 1940 burned out one building and the loss of 750 machine tools.

The Supermarine factory was in Southampton, not really near London, and while the dispersal scheme did wonders there was still a loss of machinery and weeks worth of production until things go going again. Not a big loss in a 5 1/2 year war but for numbers in late 1940?

The point of Shorts is not just fighters but that the Germans were able to hit and cause damage to a number of war industries as it was, Damage that could be and was repaired but in the summer/fall of 1940 they didn't have the benefit of hind sight or the foreknowledge of the German plans. The US "bases for destroyers" was signed during the middle of the BoB and lend lease was 6-8 months away, ( signed in March of 1941) so what the British had for factories/equipment was pretty much it. Letting the Germans bomb even part of the county for just a couple of weeks might cause more harm than they were willing to tolerate at the time.
 
Well nobody seemed to like the Reggiane Re 2000 http://www.ww2aircraft.net/forum/av...s-otl-atl-v-me-109-a-39988-6.html#post1100901 and I agree although I suspect that a Re 2002 with a 1200 hp R-1830 would have been competitive if too late.

However, what if Britain had not sent the Leigh Ross Mission to China and if China had thus suffered an economic crisis over 1935-7 that had prevented it opposing Japanese moves. Without a Second Sino-Japanese War, Japan regards Russia as its main enemy. Thus the combination of clashes in 1939 and the Molotov Ribbentrop Pact pushes it towards the Anglo-American camp which Japan calculates will pay them for merchant ships and other equipment as in WW1. Cynically, because they are only doing it to receive manufacturing licences, they declare war on Germany well before the fall of France and the Navy agrees to send a single squadron of its new A6M2 fighters as soon as they are available. Thus these arrive in Britain by flying off Ryujo in early September 1940 after a one month voyage via the Panama Canal (note that these A6M2s have either British or American radios).

ps. Perhaps we should give these ATL IJN pilots some experience against the Russians in 1939 flying A5Ms against I-16s before throwing them against the Luftwaffe.
 
One squadron of aircraft is not going to change things one way or the other. Please remember that Britain had built about 2000 Hurricanes by the start of the BoB. granted there were operational (and training)losses and Losses in France but 12-16 of ANY kind of fighter is going have about zero impact on the campaign as a whole.
 
pbehn said:
I think that for some of the forward airfields in Kent it was considered to abandon them, they were simply too far forward but politics dictated they remained operational, after Churchills "no surrender" speech he couldnt be seen to do just that.
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Can the RAF afford to abandon it's sector airfields? Damage to these left Park on one occasion, and in his own words, flying little more than his desk. Can it afford to lose the south coast Chain Home stations? The temporary loss of two of these led to one of the Luftwaffe's most successful raids of the campaign.

What is too far forward? Just consider 11 Group's sector stations. Biggin Hill? Maybe. Tangmere? Possibly. Certainly Hawkinge which was also an important 'Y service' listening station. Do you fall back as far as London? Kenley, Northholt, North Weald? Do you leave London and it's docks and industry completely undefended? The whole idea is, frankly, ridiculous. The enemy would have to force such a withdrawal on the RAF

The UK air defence system was a co-ordinated system and dislocation (or abandonment) of any part of it would cause problems. There was a plan to withdraw north of the Thames, but only in the event of successful German landings. You can not operate from airfields occupied by the enemy.

The RAF existed as part of the UK's air defence system to defend the UK air space. The UK means from the English Channel (there's a reason it was called that) to the Scottish Isles and beyond. It would have been completely unacceptable to give up any part of this voluntarily. The Luftwaffe tried to force the issue, but it failed.

Cheers

Steve
 
But not having sufficient front line fighters (and pilots) sort of forces the british into making the best of an unpalatable situation. Rather than lose more fighters in a one sided massacre, and thereby pass air supremacy as well as air superiority to the Germans, better to withdraw to lines that they can defend. Until the fighter supply issue was rectified. And that probably means sacrificing or limiting defence of the south east, within the effective range of the 109s. where the 109s cant reach, or even where their loiter times start to thin out, which isnt even as far as London, the defenders (depending on just how short they were of fighters and pilots) could start to react to German attacks. Thats probably where the Fulmar /Defiant argument might have some weight...outside the range of the 109.

Historically the germans really didnt appreciate the importance of the Chain Home stations as part of the british defence. here we go again, conferring abilities and knowledged to the Germans that they simply did not possess. They knew about radar, they had a dim idea of what the stations did, and they even managed to knock out one or two, but only after a fairly sustained effort to do so. The CH stations were important to the overall defence, but particularly so because the RAF CHOSE to fight "on the beaches" so to speak. Pull back the 50 or 60 miles as suggested, and the RAF has more time to react anyway, which was the primary advantage bestowed by these early stations.

The RAF fought the way they did, because they did not want to concede any airspace to the germans. In the context of their available resources and strengths, that was absolutely the right thing to do. After Churchill came to power, it was absolutelyt a priority of the British Government to show that were not afraid to stand up to a bully. That courage and guts paid off eventually, and it was within the british capability to do it. Take away their advantage in numbers, and it becomes harder to make an uncompromising stand, and the british are forced to to give some ground and not quite fight the righteous fight that they did. They could still win, but they might not be able to defend every square inch of Britain, just the bits that really mattered a lot. They were sort of forced to do this during the napoleonic war when they pulled out of the Med for a short while, but were soon back once they had rectified their problems

Another way to perhaps buy some time is to pander a litle to the germans. Hitler fought the BoB to extract a concessional peace out of the British. What if the British made some quiet, unobtrusive noises that they were interested, and then after a week or two, simply reject the offer for peace, as they did historically. Get to the same point of defiance, but just take a little longer to get there. might buy some time to recover losses or restore production, or fix whatever was wrong in the British supply chain. Couldnt hurt, put it that way...
 
It never happened. Had the Luftwaffe fought a better coordinated and informed (its intelligence was woeful) campaign it might have forced some kind of withdrawal on the RAF without successful landings. Like you I don't believe the Wermacht had the will or ability to actually launch such landings and the Luftwaffe never managed to force such a withdrawal on the RAF by other means. There were always enough aircraft and pilots available, though it was a much closer run thing than the myth would lead us to believe. It's why the British see what was really a draw as a victory.

Withdrawing 60 miles and abandoning the forward posture of 11 Group would have had serious consequences. The distances and timings don't add up. 11 Group's interception rate per squadron 'tasked to raid' was around the 60-70% mark. Even the worst critics suggest a figure around 50%. 12 Group's was much lower.

By the time aircraft from this new front line had assembled the bombs would already be dropping on, say, the dockyards at Plymouth from unopposed bombers. By the time the aircraft set course to intercept those same bombers would be heading for home. How would you propose that fighters based in Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire or Suffolk protect shipping in the Channel?
12 Group only made one interception before the bombers bombed in the entire BoB. 11 Group managed often to break up attacking formations thus reducing the effectiveness of the bombing. On admittedly rare occasions its squadrons managed to prevent the intended targets being attacked at all.

The change to night time attacks, principally on the capital, was just another way of trying to force a compromise on the British. That didn't work either.

Cheers

Steve
 
Even if the British abandoned the channel the number of aircraft works alone in south east England ( or No 11 Groups area) is rather large,

Airspeed in Portsmouth.
Saunders Roe on the Isle of wight
Short in Rochester
Supermarine in Southhampton

Getting into the south west suburbs of London you have
Hawker in Kingston on Thames
Miles in SW London
Vickers in Weybridge

Going west into No 10 group you had Bristol and Gloster.

This does not require any great omnipresence by the Luftwaffe. Locations (at least towns) were listed in pre-war editions of Jane's all the worlds aircraft. Some of the factories had been in the same locations for a couple of decades. In fact it was only around 1938 that locations of RAF stations began to be withheld from print while civil aerodromes continued to be listed (sometimes with pictures).

Other ordnance factories were also well known. Granted some of the new ones (shadow factories) might have been a bit harder to find.

You also need enough Spitfires and Hurricanes to keep the German fighters busy. Defiants and Fulmars just might find their hands full against Bf 110s if the 110s aren't kept busy.

Some people claim that the home chain radars didn't work all that well behind them.

We now know that German recon/intelligence was woefully inadequate but for the British to adopt a defensive plan that counted on it would not have been very responsible.
 
Shortround6 said:
Some people claim that the home chain radars didn't work all that well behind them.
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I'm not sure what you mean by 'behind'. CH radars didn't work inland at all. The system was directional and of course directed outwards from the coast. Once a raid passed the coast it was entirely in the hands of the (Royal) Observer Corps. It's information was good in clear weather and only took slightly longer to filter. Nonetheless in anything but ideal conditions a raid could easily be lost or mis-plotted, never to be seen from the fighters being assembled and vectored from the Midlands, even if they got in the relevant area before the Germans had turned and dived (literally) for the French coast.

There is no space or time in such a confined theatre. German bomber formations spent longer assembling over France than they did flying to their targets in Britain.

Cheers

Steve
 
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