Wildcat during the Battle of Britain

[rochie]

Yeah guys i do apologise for dragging this thread out of line

 

[XBe02Drvr]

Yeah guys i do apologise for dragging this thread out of line

Hey, don't claim all the credit, you had lots of help!

 

[rochie]

Hey, don't claim all the credit, you had lots of help!

True

 

[Peter Gunn]

Would they have been any use in the Battle of Britain?

Might be a good topic for a thread.

 

[buffnut453]

Might be a good topic for a thread.

Oh, do pay attention! We had that suggestion at post #473. Try to keep up!

 

[Peter Gunn]

Oh, do pay attention! We had that suggestion at post #473. Try to keep up!

Well OK Mr. Smarty pants...

 

[Airframes]

It's true that Hitler only wanted peace - a piece of Poland, a big piece of France ........................ I'll get me coat - again !!

 

[rochie]

Thats quite a good one Dogsbody

 

[Airframes]

I have to admit to "borrowing" it from the movie "The Producers", with minor alterations.

 

[Mad Dog]

I think our hydrophobic canine is just proving he can live up to his username.

No, that would be Rabid Dog, he posts over on the Grumman fansites.

 

[Mad Dog]

You've just contradicted yourself in these two sentences, Mad Dog.

OK, for those that can't read a calendar, July comes after May and June. Churchill first told the cabinet he didn't want to negotiate peace in May. He then spurned Hitler's advances in June. If the World needed any proof of Churchill's determination, the Royal Navy's attack on the French Fleet at Mer el-Kebir on 3rd July wrote it large - Britain was not going to compromise.

 

[Mad Dog]

.....In 1944 P-39s were issued to Italian Cobelligerent Air Force, all formed by well seasoned Pilots, survivors of three years of war against overwhelming Allied Air forces.
One of these Pilots said in an interview:
"When we were assigned to P-39, we were very upset, we could not believe Allied AF used an airplane that was so dangerous. I owe my life to the fact that, to the contrary of what we Italian Pilots were used to do, I never attempted to perform aerobatics with P-39.
And to add insult to injury, other Italian Pilots, still on Macchi 205 or in very old Spitfire V, did take the P*** by calling us "i camionisti" (the truck drivers) for the car style door of the airplane..."
In this book you will see the (very poor..) esteem Italian Pilots had of P-39:

The Italians were used to light aircraft with very low wing-loading, so for them the switch to the P-39 was probably a bit too extreme. For example, the MC202 had a loaded weight over 1000Lb lighter than the P-39Q. You also have to remember that the Italian pilots were also extremely traditional - they resisted the introduction of monoplanes even after having met aircraft like the Hawker Hurricane in combat. The fact the Italians couldn't or wouldn't master the P-39 suggests the Russians were either just better pilots or a lot more open to modern ideas. That or the American conversion training was rushed. Mind you, the Italians complained when they were given second-hand Bf109F-4s in 1943, and didn't stop complaining when Kesselring got them brand-new Bf109G-6s. Maybe complaining was just the Italian way.

 

[Mad Dog]

maybe i should have wrote "realistic options" ?
hmmm !
the British empire and an Aryan empire side by side peacefully sharing the planet, that was not going to happen was it ?
i'm sure America and Japan would of loved that.

starting to sound like a lost starwars episode !

Ah well, if you don't read any historical texts and only relied on fiction then I'm not surprised everything sounds like a movie plot to you. Here's some other "movie-like" historical facts you probably missed whilst "researching" down the pub:

1. The future Queen of England enlisted and drove a truck as a driver/mechanic.
2. Germany lost 136 generals killed during the War, but Hitler executed 84 of those, far more than were killed by the Allies.
3. Coca-Cola was considered so vital to Allied success that the US Army built three plants in Africa just to make the drink.
4. Texan Seaman Calvin Graham earned the Bronze Star for his heroics fighting on the battleship USS South Dakota at Guadalcanal. Unfortunately, his mother cut short his naval career when she informed the authorities that Graham was only thirteen (he had managed to bluff his way through enlistment aged twelve).

There you go, plenty of homework for you to do, and no skipping off to the pub until you've learnt something.

 

[Mad Dog]

The Wildcat wouldn't climb fast enough to reach them and be fast enough to catch them, as posted above the .50's don't have a reliable feed mechanism and jam under G, they don't have effective AP, no incendiary, no HE, just a barely good enough daytime tracer and low velocity cup and core ball ammunition.

Missed this post earlier!
The ammunition problem was fixable. Before the War, Kynoch made export orders for many aircraft guns not in use by the RAF, and had supplied the ammunition used in the 1923 and 1924 RAF trials of the .50 Browning. They supplied "flame-tracer" (phosphorous incendiary of the Great War Buckingham type) and ball at first, but by the '30s they were supplying foreign customers with modern tracer, AP and incendiary rounds. They never did make a good HE round, finally giving up in 1944, though a few commercial experimental designs were later tried in the '50s.

 

[PAT303]

They supplied "flame-tracer" (phosphorous incendiary of the Great War Buckingham type) and ball at first, but by the '30s they were supplying foreign customers with modern tracer, AP and incendiary rounds.

The first reliable .50 cal incendiary round wasn't issued until early 1942, same for tracer, as for the AP round it tumbled at oblique angles, specialised .50 cal ammunition was a tale of disappointment before 1944.

 

[XBe02Drvr]

The fact the Italians couldn't or wouldn't master the P-39 suggests the Russians were either just better pilots or a lot more open to modern ideas.

You don't suppose the Russians were a little more pressed by necessity than the Italians, and on their own, far from US supervision, free to innovate, modify, and adapt to their conditions of combat? They wouldn't have been tainted by USAAF's dismissive attitude about the plane, and were operating in a climate that woudn't impair the plane's performance as much as the Med. A plane with an undersized wing for its weight and barely adequate cooling in temperate climates, is not a likely winner in more tropical conditions.

 

[rochie]

Ah well, if you don't read any historical texts and only relied on fiction then I'm not surprised everything sounds like a movie plot to you. Here's some other "movie-like" historical facts you probably missed whilst "researching" down the pub:

1. The future Queen of England enlisted and drove a truck as a driver/mechanic.
2. Germany lost 136 generals killed during the War, but Hitler executed 84 of those, far more than were killed by the Allies.
3. Coca-Cola was considered so vital to Allied success that the US Army built three plants in Africa just to make the drink.
4. Texan Seaman Calvin Graham earned the Bronze Star for his heroics fighting on the battleship USS South Dakota at Guadalcanal. Unfortunately, his mother cut short his naval career when she informed the authorities that Graham was only thirteen (he had managed to bluff his way through enlistment aged twelve).

There you go, plenty of homework for you to do, and no skipping off to the pub until you've learnt something.

Must be a terrible burden being the cleverest person you have ever known.

 

[Elmas]

The Italians were used to light aircraft with very low wing-loading, so for them the switch to the P-39 was probably a bit too extreme. For example, the MC202 had a loaded weight over 1000Lb lighter than the P-39Q. You also have to remember that the Italian pilots were also extremely traditional - they resisted the introduction of monoplanes even after having met aircraft like the Hawker Hurricane in combat. The fact the Italians couldn't or wouldn't master the P-39 suggests the Russians were either just better pilots or a lot more open to modern ideas. That or the American conversion training was rushed. Mind you, the Italians complained when they were given second-hand Bf109F-4s in 1943, and didn't stop complaining when Kesselring got them bs. Maybe complaining was just the Italian way.

Italian Pilots complained about monoplanes as the first series monoplane fighters that were issued (MC-200 and Fiat G-50) had serious aerodynamics flaws, mainly due to absence of wash-out in the wings and, for MC-200 a sharp leading edge.
After that issues were solved, expecially in the MC 200, they complained about the engine, as an engine of 840 HP was certainly not enough for 1941, as was not enough second-hand with worn-out engines Bf109F-4s in 1943.
I'm not aware that they complained about new brand-new Bf109G-6s and -10S that were issued to the Aeronautica Nazionale Repubblicana, as they considered Me-109 of the latest series more than a match to all Allied fighter up to the end of the war (Spitfire and P-51) and vastly superior to P-38. They were more cautious with P-47s, as an Italian Pilot stated, they had such a huge armament that even a couple of seconds in their sights would have been deadly.
The problem with P-39 was not only the high wing-loading, as the main problems of P-39 were:
A - a C.G. far too much aft , expecially in some conditions, that in every airplane is a sure recipe for disaster
B - masses too concentrated, that gave to the airplane a flawed longitudinal Moment of inertia.
These two very serious flaws (and many others) induced quite rightly Top Brass and Pilots of AAF to get rid of the airplane ASAP:

 

[swampyankee]

The Italians were used to light aircraft with very low wing-loading, so for them the switch to the P-39 was probably a bit too extreme. For example, the MC202 had a loaded weight over 1000Lb lighter than the P-39Q. You also have to remember that the Italian pilots were also extremely traditional - they resisted the introduction of monoplanes even after having met aircraft like the Hawker Hurricane in combat. The fact the Italians couldn't or wouldn't master the P-39 suggests the Russians were either just better pilots or a lot more open to modern ideas. That or the American conversion training was rushed. Mind you, the Italians complained when they were given second-hand Bf109F-4s in 1943, and didn't stop complaining when Kesselring got them brand-new Bf109G-6s. Maybe complaining was just the Italian way.

Of course, the USAAF's P-39 instructors may not have been terribly interested in training their former enemies in a new aircraft. Also, these instructors may not have been pulled from the elite of the flight training organization, but from a pool of pilots with P-39 time sometime in the distant past, some of whom were contemptuous of the P-39 and Italians, and had no more idea of how to teach than does my dog.

 

[Elmas]

Of course, the USAAF's P-39 instructors may not have been terribly interested in training their former enemies in a new aircraft. Also, these instructors may not have been pulled from the elite of the flight training organization, but from a pool of pilots with P-39 time sometime in the distant past, some of whom were contemptuous of the P-39 and Italians, and had no more idea of how to teach than does my dog.

In the three months of training with P-39 there were 11 accidents, with 3 Pilots killed.
Some of the accidents were due to bad location of the airfield (main AB were occupied by Allied AF) and to the fact that airplanes P-39N and -Qs, were letf to the open for a long time, when Allied Pilots discharged the airplane.