About Faith, Hope and Charity: I guess I’m not familiar with the way the RAF remembers them today, but I would have thought that it’s precisely because they were inferior aircraft (and grossly outnumbered) that the story is valued today? Its the whole underdog thing, like the Battle of Britain itself, only more so. Much more so, in fact. So their actual combat record is beside the point as far as their myth is concerned — they stayed in the fight. (Come to think of it, there could be national prejudice here too — “Useless Eyeties, couldn’t even shoot down a couple of old biplanes” whereas the British muddle through in the end, as always.)

For sure, propaganda is rarely a lie. More often it is the spin-doctored truth. But in a time of crisis, folks are likely to manufacture their own, comfortable version of the truth. If a piece of kit is inferior, it will be regarded as the enemy’s equal when wielded by plucky British crews. For sure, the Cromwell tank was inferior in many respects to the Tiger and Panther–both of which held a fearsome reputation–but that didn’t stop the tankers charging ahead with élan at Operation Goodwood. Clearly, they found some way to acc-en-tu-ate the pos-it-ive.

In the case of fighter aircraft, where the difference is less clear, that positivity may edge into a sense of superiority. If you look for flaws in the enemy’s kit, you will find them. For example, the Me109 was not a good airframe for future development. In 1940 a trained eye could see it was a developmental dead end with an airframe too small for improvement. That it soldiered on to the end of the war is an indictment of the German war economy and a tribute to the brilliance of the Messerschmitt engineers. But the 109 was increasingly outclassed in those final years and had become specialized as a bomber-killer.

Look at the biplane. Even up to the beginning of the war you would have found some aviators (albeit a dwindling band) insisting that it held the edge on the new monoplanes because it was more manoeuvreable. Utter tosh, as it turned out. Just see how the Italian CR.42s were slaughtered by Hurricanes in the Battle of Britain. But contrast that reality with the RAF mythology that to this day holds a special affection for Faith, Hope and Charity over Malta, whose record was, at best, modest.

You’ll find examples of this sort of prejudice all over the place. Sometimes it is conflated with a conservative preference for the new over the new-fangled. The British Army’s preference for the SLR rifle over the American M16, for example. In the ’70s you would hear Ruperts sniff about the British soldier’s traditional excellence at musketry and the wasteful antics of GIs handed automatic weapons. And this in spite of years of evidence about the firepower superiority of automatic rifles. It’s interesting that even the Flight excerpt you quote carefully identifies the problem as being the machine/pilot combination, and not purely the machine.

So bigotry, conservatism, national self-belief all serve to spin the picture. The propagandists often need to do little more than reinforce these prejudices.

Can you find, for example any wartime newspaper articles, highlighting the inferiority of the British tank?

That’s a good question, but it’s not quite parallel. A parallel question would be: did the press claim that British tanks were superior to German tanks? I don’t do tanks, so I don’t know, but I doubt it, given how rum they actually were. (Though the Matilda wasn’t too bad, IIRC.) I don’t think British press/propaganda outfits (presumably, journalists would mostly get this type of information from official sources) were much given to outright lies; it was more a matter of exaggerating the positives and passing over the negatives in silence (where possible).

The treatment of the ill-starred Boulton Paul Defiant is instructive here. I’ve discussed the high hopes held for this fighter early in the Battle of Britain — which were plausible, being based on spectacular early results. The disasters suffered by Defiant squadrons early in the Battle were not, as far as I know, made public. Instead an announcement was made in November that Defiants had been switched to night-fighting, as that was their original purpose. (OK, that was a lie!) Why did the British propaganda machine not keep pumping stories about how the Defiants were helping defend British cities etc? Because it wasn’t plausible: they were a bad design.

Just FWIW, Flight’s verdict on the Me 109 was that it had ‘just missed being a success’ (”Nazi fighter”, 24 October 1940, 347):

But the combination [of Me 109 plus pilot] has failed against the fighter pilots of the Royal Air Force, with their efficient and trustworthy Hurricanes and Spitfires, and some of the reason can be found in the Me 109 as a fighting aeroplane [...] So the Me 109 has become Germany’s only fighter, and it does not seem that the choice has been a particularly happy one.

I love this bit (in reference to cockpit instrumentation):

It does look as though the Luftwaffe thought about its fighters as the air-raid shelters were thought about in this country. They wouldn’t really be needed — not very much at any rate — so a second-class job was made to do.

Oh, snap! Unfortunately, though the article goes on for a few more pages, it gets mired in detail and never gets into a serious comparison of the Me 109 with the British fighters.

It’s quite possible (although by no means certain) that the writer knew the reality, but felt it better to promote the success. Can you find, for example any wartime newspaper articles, highlighting the inferiority of the British tank?

To quote from the http://www.spitfireperformance.com/spit1vrs109e.html website:

Oberleutnant Gerhard Schöpfel, Gruppenkommandeur of III./JG 26 wrote of the Me 109 E:

“It was superior to the Hurricane and above 6,000 metres, faster than the Spitfire also. I believe that our armament was the better, it was located more centrally which made for more accurate shooting. On the other hand, the British fighters could turn tighter than we could. Also I felt that the Messerschmitt was not so strong as the British fighters and could not take so much punishment.”

Oblt Hans Schmoller-Haldy of JG 54 commented:

“My first impression was that it had a beautiful engine. It purred. The engine of the Messerschmitt 109 was very loud. Also the Spitfire was easier to fly, and to land than the Me 109. The 109 was unforgiving of any inattention. I felt familiar with the Spitfire from the start. That was my first and lasting impression. But with my experience with the 109, I personally would not have traded it for a Spitfire. It gave the impression, though I did not fly the Spitfire long enough to prove it, that the 109 was the faster especially in the dive. Also I think the pilot’s view was better from the 109. In the Spitfire one flew further back, a bit more over the wing.

“For fighter-versus-fighter combat, I thought the Spitfire was better armed than the Me 109. The cannon fitted to the 109 were not much use against enemy fighters, and the machine guns on top of the engine often suffered stoppages. The cannon were good if they hit; but their rate of fire was very low. The cannon had greater range than the machine guns. But we were always told that in a dogfight one could not hope to hit anything at ranges greater than 50 metres, it was necessary to close in to short range. ”

Günther Rall, who served with III./JG 52 during the Battle of Britain, reflected on the strengths and weaknesses of the adversaries at that time:

“The elliptical wings of the Spitfires had fantastic characteristics, great lift. They were very maneuverable. We couldn’t catch them in a steep climb. On the other hand they could stall during inverted maneuvers, cutting off the fuel because the force of gravity prevented the flow of fuel. But they were still a highly respected enemy. In contrast, our Bf 109s had shortcomings. I didn’t like the slats and our cockpits were very narrow, with restricted rear visability. Fighter pilots need a good all-round field of vision and we didn’t have it. ”

Adolf Galland wrote of the matchup: “the ME-109 was superior in the attack and not so suitable for purely defensive purposes as the Spitfire, which although a little slower, was much more manueuverable” and in a fit of frustration uttered the famous passage to Göring “I should like an outfit of Spitfires for my Squadron”.

By the way, I’m chuffed to see Lee turn up here! Lee is a wargame designer — most pertinently, he’s responsible for a very fine Battle of Britain game, The Burning Blue. Despite buying it nearly 18 months ago, I’m sad to say that the counters remain unpunched — I haven’t had the time to actually play it :( That hasn’t dimmed my enthusiasm for getting Bomber Command if and when it eventually appears, though!

The top speed of a Spit I tested at Boscombe Down was around 362 mph at height (around 16,000 or so, I forget exactly what). But service Spit Is in the Battle of Britain had great difficulty sustaining speeds greater than 300 mph (I have some anecdotal evidence on this). Once you had a few hours on the engine and airframe it just didn’t perform as well as it should, and the manufacture of the aircraft was shoddy enough to add variation. (One friend of mine had his riggers spend tens of hours using filler on all the cracks and holes and bad joins on his Spit V, then polishing her up to a shine, and put 30 mph on its top speed.)

So the performance differences between these aircraft types only came into their own when used by experten, who could exploit them. For sure, on the whole a Me109 had enough speed that it could extend away from a Hurricane in a fight, and the Hurricane didn’t have the same advantage. But all this nonsense about turn rates and carburettors and suchlike obscures the fact that only a small number of pilots made the most of these margins. The workaday fighting was done by pilots not experienced enough or good enough to leverage these differences.

Other than those odd occasions where biplanes matched up with monoplanes, it wasn’t until the jet era that true dissimilar combat could take place. Where aircraft with vastly different performance profiles would battle it out. Other than that, WW2 was notable for the fighters maintaining a rough parity of performance throughout the war. Or at least close enough for discussion to be mostly in the realm of quibbling.

The Hurricane certainly made a significant contribution to winning the Battle of Britain, simply because the RAF had more of them - if I’ve counted right, there were 35 Hurricane squadrons to only 19 of Spits. So Hurricanes certainly shot down more German aircraft in the Battle (indeed, it is apparently the case that Hurricanes shot down more enemy aircraft than Spitfires in the war as a whole). The numerical balance comes about because Hurricanes got into production and out to units quicker (the first Hurricane squadron was equipped a full ten months before the first Spitfires arrived), which is down to a number of factors, part of which was the difficulty of manufacturing the Spitfire’s wing, but another part is that Sydney Camm and his Hawkers team had plenty of experience in fighter development, whilst Mitchell and Vickers-Supermarine were more starting from scratch. In the actual Battle, production difficulties didn’t matter - IIRC there was only a very short period in August when production of new fighters was outstripped by attrition, and there were enough planes in reserve to cover that.

As for the relative merits of the single-seat monoplane fighters involved in the Battle, this debate has been going on for a long time. When I first got interested in the early 1970s, the general view was that the Hurricane I was almost a match for the 109E, with the Spitfire some way in front of both. Nowadays, more credit is given to the 109, which is seen as a match for the Spit (if with some disadvantages, such as a very cramped cockpit), and the gap between Spitfire I and Hurricane I has narrowed. The Hurricane certainly had advantages - pretty much those that Brett mentions. But Alex is right that the Hurricane, being basically a biplane fighter with the top wing removed, was approaching obsolescence in the summer of 1940, and after 1941 Hurricanes largely disappear from Fighter Command, to be sent to other theatres (the Middle and Far East).

The Spitfire, on the other hand, had plenty of life in it, and continuned to be developed throughout the war. As did the 109, though this is partly due to the odd way in which the Germans frittered away resources on development projects that never went anywhere, whilst keeping pre-war designs in production long past their sell-by date. Nevertheless, though the 109Gs and Ks were undoubtedly outclassed by the end of the war, the 109F of 1941 was as good a fighter as anyone had until the first Fw 190s appeared.

What the Spit also has, of course, is that it looks beautiful, and so is a priceless gift to a skillful propaganda machine. Hence why it, not the Hurricane, has become symbolic of the Battle.

And in the end, the differences in performance between the Hurricane I, Spitfire I and 109E are quite marginal. The most significant factor in the outcome of an individual combat would be not the qualities of the machines, but those of the pilots.

I think it’s probably true that the Hurricane was near the end of its useful life in 1940. Despite the various updates, like the four-20mm cannon version, it became a liability in 1941 with the first Focke Wulf 190s and the Me109-F, and was flushed out of squadrons in the UK in favour of Spitfires (which were struggling to deal with the 190s themselves until the VIIIs and IXs arrived).]

The Spitfire airframe, though, had much more potential for further development.

Also, you have to see capability in the round - the Me109 was badly shortlegged throughout its existence, and the cockpit was tiny and afforded less of a view than the British types. And however good the rate of turn and top speed, it’s useless if you don’t have the time-over-target to be there for the battle, and worse if you don’t see the other guy!