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

his 109 when he took off and suddenly hit a strong cross-wind. He had also
just had a few whiskies since he had not been expecting to fly. Clearly, he
had not been concentrating as hard as usual. What this showed was in the
hands of very good and experienced pilots the Me 109 held no terrors. It
was the inexperienced who struggled with it. In contrast, most pilots found
the Spitfire and Hurricane both very straightforward and forgiving to fly. A
really superb pilot flying a Spitfire could not get much more out of it than
an average pilot. An excellent pilot flying an Me 109, however, could do all
sorts of things in his machine that a pilot of lesser ability would never
achieve. Already, the leading German aces – or Experten, as they were
called – were amassing considerable scores, Dolfo Galland and Werner
Mölders among them. In part this was because of the pairing system, with
one man doing the principal shooting while the wingman watched his back.
But it was also because all those men were excellent pilots and could get a
performance from their Me 109Es that was significantly superior to
anything the enemy could manage.
The other key factor was firepower. Both the Spitfire and Hurricane had
eight machine guns, four spread in each wing, that simultaneously fired
1,200 rounds per minute. The problem was that they only carried
ammunition drums of 300 rounds, which meant they had just fifteen
seconds’ worth of firing time. Most pilots found this was very quickly used
up. The second problem was that to bring the full effect of these machine
guns to bear, the target needed to be hit at the point at which the bullets all
converged. And since most of these bullets were ordinary .303 that could
have been used in a Bren or a Lee Enfield rifle, on their own they did not
pack that much of a punch. The advent of De Wilde incendiary ammunition
improved matters a bit. ‘When it hit an aeroplane,’ says Tony Bartley, ‘it
flashed and you could see the flash as it hit, which was good.’ But De
Wilde rounds only ever made up a small proportion of the bullets used.
Dowding and the Air Ministry – and Beaverbrook especially – had
recognized that cannon-armed Spitfires were the way forward, but although
some Spitfires had been trialled with cannons, jamming and seizure were
recurring problems that had yet to be ironed out.
In contrast, both the Me 109E3 and E4 had two MG17 machine guns
and two MGFF 20 mm cannons, one in each wing. The E4 had the
MGFF/M, which fired a new and more powerful explosive shell. Both
machine guns were mounted on the engine cowling so there was no need to