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Chickenboy -> RE: Battle of Britain (7/28/2020 3:54:16 PM)
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ORIGINAL: stuart3
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ORIGINAL: Orm
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ORIGINAL: warspite1
Hey Ormster, can you give the title of the book you've got that info from please?
Many thanks [:)]
See point 4 in this article.
https://www.historyextra.com/period/second-world-war/battle-britain-ww2-myths-facts-raf-royal-air-force-luftwaffe/
I'll get back to you on the book after I've checked if there is an English version of it.
The book is The Battle of Britain: An Epic Conflict Revisited by Christer Bergström. I have purchased a copy and read far enough into it to cover his comparisons on the fighters. Bergström's comparison of the spitfire and 109 is fascinating, but his championing of the 110 seems to be quite selective. He does indeed argue that "The idea was to dispatch these twin-engined fighter aircraft in advance, at a high altitude over the intended bombing target area, to clear the air of enemy fighters before the bombers arrived. In fact, when used in that way, the Messerschmitt Bf 110 was quite successful", but doesn't say when or where that tactic was used successfully. It may have worked well over Poland or France against their more dated fighters, but I don't see how it could have cleared the skies over target cities during the battle of Britain. The use of the Chain Home RDF meant that there was no need for the RAF to maintain standing patrols over southern cities. Raids, including those by Bf 110s were normally intercepted by fighters vectored onto them by their controllers before they reached their targets.
Bergström also claims that turning was a defensive tactic and that diving on an enemy from height was the standard attacking technique but doesn't mention that the 110s were frequently reported by RAF pilots to have formed defensive circles or explain why an apparently successful offensive fighter plane should have found such a defensive tactic necessary.
Thank you for the summary, stuart3. Very helpful. I think I understand enough about the revisionist verity of Bergstrom's book now. [&o]
@Warspite1: I was positing earlier about *how* the Me-110 could have purportedly derived a 1.5:1 kill ratio in the absence of the specific documentation requested. I think there's enough evidence to suggest that it *wasn't* possible for the Me-110 in BOB, but *could have* been possible if one considered the entire war and the usage of that airframe until 1945. Again, I don't have any verifiable facts and figures in front of me to know that, just an accumulation of anecdotal and summarized reports.
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