[Kyt]

Originally Posted by Adrian Roberts

I suppose it comes down to being careful of generalisations and cliches. I don't think I'd realised just how advanced the later marks of 109G with the DB605 engine were. The "aircraft performance" website is worth bookmarking even if it reminds me of long-forgotten University studies.

It was indeed a aircraft that went through so many incarnations and yet was basically the same aircraft - comparable to the Spifire. The FW190 was considered an excellent aircraft for a while, purely because of the shock that the RAF received at such a superior aircraft to their own Spitfire mark of the time.

But there were many teething problems with the 190 (especially the engine), and the production could never reach the required levels.

It is often said that the Luftwaffe was reduced to using barely-trained nineteen year-olds by the middle of the war; I believe that Galland said after the war that the Battle of Britain had taken a quarter of Germany's experienced combat pilots and the Luftwaffe was never the same again. Whereas many of the most experienced Soviet pilots were either murdered in Stalin's purges or killed in the initial days of Barbarossa, which may explain why the Germans were up against inexperienced replacements, and why the Finnish Buffaloes had virtually the best kill-loss ratio of the war, even shooting down Soviet Spitfires. But Hartman, Barkhorn and Rall had mastered the 109 and like all good weapons it was an extension of themselves.

This is why I asked the question about what makes a good fighter pilot. Technical training alone is probably lowest in the list of requirements that I mentioned. Stalins purges may not have affected the pilots in the Soviet Union to any great degree but what it do is remove experienced higher officers who knew how to use these forces, and most importantly (especially at the start of the Invasion) how to disperse the forces to better protect them.

And although Hartman et al believed in going in close, they also believed in diving away afterward to avoid getting into dogfights. This kind of tactic often meant that disciplined teamwork allowed an inferior aircraft to beat a better one; it was largely how the F4Fs in the Pacific were able to get the better of the Zeros - and Phantoms in Vietnam had to resort to this as the Mig-17s gave them a nasty surprise in dogfights.

A lesson that the Buffalo pilots also learnt very quickly over Malaya - they knew that in a "traditional" dogfight the Japanese had the edge on maneuverability, but were less armoured and so more vulnerable to hit and run tactics.