And psychological warfare. From what I've read, the German flight crews were much more frightened of the Spitfires (and British RADAR guidance for interceptions made it look like there were many more planes than the British actually had).
Also, I'm not certain about this, but I believe that often the Spits would concentrate on engaging the fighters so that the Hurricanes could get at the bombers. Obviously, the Spits would rack up many fewer kills themselves that way, but I'm not sure how well the BoB would have gone if Britain hadn't been able to deploy a fighter well-matched with the ME-109.
From what I've seen on TV and read, the hurricanes usually fared better against cannon equipped aircraft because they have a lot of fabric on their airframe. The cannon rounds would pass straight through many parts of the airframe causing a minimal amount of damage (minimal seems the wrong word to use!). Whereas the spitfires monocoque conventional structure took cannon rounds quite badly in comparison...
There was a series of TV documentaries here recently called 'Spitfire Ace' which I thought was very good. I think you can buy the accompanying book from Amazon.co.uk. One of the quotes from a German pilot was with refernce to the 8 browning machine guns on the spitfire...it was something like 'if he gets you at the right distance with all 8 guns you will be caput!'.
Whichever way you look at it they were brilliant, brave pilots on both sides.
All the best,
Matt.
_______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
