The Battle of Britain Five Months That Changed History, May—October 1940 by James Holland (z-lib.org).epub

in his chest, but as he had pushed down the nose of his aircraft and sped
towards the airfield, he had calmed down. Spotting a fuel bowser refuelling
a Spitfire, he opened fire and it exploded destroying two Spitfires in the
process. It made him realize how much power he had with his cannons and
machine guns and how effective a low-level attack such as that could be,
especially when they were streaming across at 300 mph, making themselves
very difficult targets for the British flak gunners. He firmly believed that
fighters should be used in a ‘free hunt’ mode at all times. ‘I predicted that if
we were to continue as we were,’ he wrote, ‘the losses would end up being
higher because, slowly but surely, we were losing our pilots in a long
drawn-out battle of attrition.’ It was not so very different from the debate
between the mobile-armour progressives and the conservatives before the
campaign in the west. Guderian and his fellows had been right then as the
fighter pilots were right now. An attritional war of any kind, whether on
land or in the air, was bad news for Germany, even now with her improved
resources. And what must have made these flying restrictions even more
frustrating was that in the Me 109E the Luftwaffe had the best fighter in the
world in the summer of 1940.
Since the end of the Battle of Britain, there has been almost endless
discussion about the various merits of the fighters involved. Most conclude,
however, that, on balance, there was not much in it between the Spitfire Mk
I and the Me 109E series. On paper, the maximum speeds of the two were
about the same, while the Spitfire could out-turn an Me 109E, something
that has always been viewed as a key attribute in dogfighting. ‘But who
gives a bugger about turning?’ says Tom Neil. ‘You don’t need to turn. All
you need to do is go like a bat out of hell, catch the other fellow, fire your
guns, and disappear. These things the Me 109 did very, very well. It could
catch us and it could run away from us, almost at will.’
Tom is quite right. When compared with either the Spitfire or the
Hurricane Mk Is, the Me 109E had a superior rate of climb and speed of
dive, and most definitely vastly superior firepower. These were the key
ingredients to successfully shooting down lots of the enemy in the summer
of 1940.
The reason for its superb acceleration was a combination of its
supercharger, fuel injection and electric variable pitch propeller, all of
which also contributed to its swift rate of climb. Even after tests were made