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

the RAF at seventeen, he had later, in December 1938, been accepted into
the RAFVR, although because of the short provision of training places it
was not until November, more than two months after the outbreak of war,
that he was finally called up to begin his EFT course.
Nine months later, he was at his OTU training to go operational on
Spitfires. There was no more mention of ordered formation attacks,
although he did practise flying vic formations, which struck him as counterproductive.
‘It was bloody silly,’ he says. ‘If you are flying in a really tight
formation, wing inside wing, there was only one person looking for the
enemy and that was the commander.’ The course highlight was the gunnery
training, which involved air-to-ground firing only and against fixed targets.
That was it, and was no preparation at all for the mad, frenetic air-to-air
combat that was to come.
‘We couldn’t shoot for toffee,’ says Tom Neil. After the war, he
attended the School of Land Air Warfare and became associated with
operational research. ‘It was deduced that of every hundred bullets fired by
us,’ says Tom, ‘ninety-seven missed.’
Pete Brothers had the unfortunate experience of being shot at by one of
the squadron’s new boys. Chasing an Me 109, Pete banked only to see in
his mirror that his number two’s guns were firing across him. ‘I was a bit
rude to him,’ says Pete. ‘Told him to desist!’ Back on the ground, Pete
hauled him off for some one-to-one gunnery practice, and took him off ops
for five days. ‘That was a great blow to his pride,’ says Pete, ‘but it taught
him a sharp lesson.’
Some people mastered deflection shooting, but very few – the leading
aces only. It was no accident that the most successful fighter pilots so far –
men like Dolfo Galland, Mölders and Helmut Wick – were Condor Legion
veterans, with a bucketload of combat experience behind them already.
Dolfo Galland was also a fine shot on the ground; he understood the
principles of deflection shooting and was a skilled marksman.
Sometimes aircraft came down because of a catastrophic mechanical
failure. The Hurricane, for example, also had a habit of leaking oil from a
seal around the propeller. ‘It would cover your windscreen,’ says Tom Neil,
‘and you couldn’t see out.’ The canopy of both the Spitfire and the
Hurricane also tended to steam up if they lost altitude quickly. How many
pilots were lost because they could not see properly will never be known,