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

worry about bullet convergence – a pilot simply pointed his plane at a target
and fired. Each of these high-velocity machine guns had 1,000 rounds, that
is, more than three times as many rounds as each of the Brownings. Since
the MG17s also had a slightly lower rate of fire, that meant German fighter
pilots had around 55 seconds’ worth of ammunition, almost four times as
much as their British counterparts. It was true that the cannons only had
sixty rounds each, and that even though they had a far slower rate of fire
they were worth just seven seconds of firing time. However, the cannons
and machine guns had different firing buttons – a thumb button on the top
of the control column grip fired the cannons, while a finger trigger fired the
MGs – so the cannons could be used once the machine guns had already
found their mark. And while just one 20 mm high-explosive cannon shell
could mean instant destruction for a British fighter, it often took a lot more
.303 bullets to shoot down anything, as 74 Squadron discovered when
between them they fired 7,000 bullets at a Do 17 and still failed to knock it
out of the sky. Stand at 250 yards and fire a single .303 bullet into a piece of
aluminium and the result is a tiny neat circle. Do the same with a 20 mm
cannon shell and a hole the size of a fist is the result. Add something on the
other side against which the shell can explode and the mess is astonishing.
Allan Wright once saw a Spitfire hit by a German cannon shell. ‘The
cockpit blew up,’ he says. ‘You could see the canopy disappear and
presumably the bloke as well because there was such an explosion.’
Unsurprisingly, most pilots when asked which they would rather have,
the German or British armament, opt for the cannon and machine-gun
combination. ‘They had much more ammunition than we did,’ says Tom
Neil, ‘and it was effective. Their cannon shells exploded.’ Pete Brothers
agrees. ‘Cannon gave them a tremendous advantage,’ he says. ‘You
certainly envied them their cannon.’
The Me 109 was thus a better fighter aircraft than the Spitfire in 1940,
and a far superior one to the Hurricane. It has been endlessly pointed out
that the Hurricane shot down more aircraft than the Spitfire in 1940, but
there were many more of them than Spitfires, which makes this something
of a false argument. Compare the profile view of the Hurricane with its
biplane predecessors such as a Hawker Hart or Fury, for example, and the
genealogy is immediately apparent. All three have almost identical
fuselages, tail-planes and cowlings. The fuselage of the Hurricane was also
made of doped Irish linen like the earlier biplanes. Another big drawback of