There is no denying that there were aircraft with better performance than the Hurricane, P40 and F4F and from 1942 onwards these three were increasingly consigned to the more marginal theatres, however all three were still in service and performing their assigned tasks at wars’ end. Although none could have survived in the hothouse aerodynamic breeding atmosphere of Europe after 1942, elsewhere was another story.
However James’ “like for like” comment is spot on – in the end it is the way in which the aircraft is used rather than the naked statistics of performance that counts. The Hurricane, P40 and F4F were there when needed and we had the pilots who could get the best out of them and that’s what mattered.
In these sort of discussions it is apposite to consider the Hawker Tempest IMHO probably the finest fighter of WW2, but it attracts no great attention simply because by the time it came into service the target rich environment was gone, and it was no ground pounder and lacked sufficient range to challenge the P47 and P51 in the long range escort environment.
Still it makes one think what might have been if the Typhoon had originally had the wings that Camm wanted.
As for bad press for the P40 – I think this is more a post war thing. It wasn’t a Spitfire or a Mustang, it had a limiting wing design and the Allison engine, however good, loses out because in the popular mind there is only one V12, the Merlin. But pilots liked it, it was rugged, carried hardhitting .50 cal. mgs, and could lift a good sized bomb, and in the theatres it operated that was what was needed. Forget dogfights, it was ground attack that gave us the edge in those theatres. Ask the Australians at Milne Bay.
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