Battle of Britain comparison

In terms of straightforward performance, there were various comparitive trials conducted by the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE) and the Aeroplane and Armoument Experimental Establishment (A & AEE) during the war. The results of these are widely published in the better books on the individual aircraft types.

Some of the A & AEE trials, as well as those of the AFDU, pitted two aircraft in a ‘combat situation’ to enable tactics to emerge (though this tended to happen towards the end of the war, not at the time of the BoB)

An example of some of the results, in this case 109E v Spitfire I, is at http://www.spitfireperformance.com/spit1vrs109e.html

An AFDU report from later on is at http://www.kurfurst.org/Tactical_trials/109F2_UK/109F2_ES906_AFDU.html

Hope this helps!

The Most Dangerous Enemy by Stephen Bungay – excellent, excellent book on the Battle of Britain as a whole, but with a lot of analyses into the main combatants.

I suppose that depends on what aspects of these aircraft you are comparing and what you hope to prove or disprove from your research. A straight comparison of ‘performance’ figures will tell you nothing because those figures will have no meaning when taken out of context of the overall Battle-of-Britain.

Was the Bf109E better than the Hurricane? Maybe on paper ‘performance’ it was but it wasn’t ‘better enough’ because there were more Hurricanes (and Spitfires) and Britain was building them faster than the Luftwaffe could shoot them down (and faster than Germany could produce the Bf109E). And it doesn’t end there, you have to consider the pilots, their experience and the training of replacements that flew the fighters (more important than the aircraft themselves), the strategy and tactics used by both sides, the influence of radar and radio ground control, and the effect of the wider war that probably had a greater influence on the outcome of the battle than anything else.