buzzbeurlingAs for the RAF in France….
“At a meeting of the War Cabinet on 13 May 1940, Sinclair and Newall warned against sending any more squadrons to France in addition to the six which by then were already there. Churchill agreed.”
” That night, a telegram arrived from the BEF’s Commander in France, Lord Gort, asking for more fighters. It was followed the next morning by a telegram from the French Prime Minister, Reynaud, asking for ten squadrons. Churchill was reluctant to respond. Newall warned that once they had left Britain the squadrons would never return, and so Churchill put Reynaud off with a vague message of support. Reynaud was not put off, and called Churchill at 7 a.m. on the morning of 15 May, excitedly begging for assistance. Churchill reported this to the chiefs of staff meeting at 10:30 a.m. and summoned Dowding to hear his views. Dowding stressed the danger if things were to go badly and urged that no more fighters be sent”
” At the Chiefs of Staff meeting the next day, 16 May, Newall read out a message from Gamelin pleading for ten squadrons again and saying that without them, all was lost. This time, in view of the ‘new and critical situation’ he agreed to sending some and the other Chiefs of Staff agreed. Churchill thought it was a’a very grave risk’, but necessary in order to bolster the French”
“in France, Churchill was subjected to even more intense pleas. Churchill said that he did not see that more fighters would make a difference but the French disagreed. In the end, Churchill wrote in his evening telegram to the War Cabinet that six extra squadrons should be sent to France in addition to the four agreed that morning as it ‘would not look good historically’ if France should fall for lack of them. Colville found the telegram ‘terrifying’. Newall decided to fulfill the request by having three squadrons fly out to French airfields, return to England, and be relieved by another three squadrons in the afternoon. Churchill made it clear that he expected a ‘supreme effort’ from the French in exchange for the air support offered”
” The decision was undoubtedly correct. The fighters would have made no difference in France, but did make a big difference in Britain. The French did not need them anyway, because they had plenty of their own. After the war, the French government looked into the question and found that large numbers of French fighters had been held in storage units. The French Air Force commander, General Vuillemin, testified at the end of hostilities he had more aircraft available than at the beginning. Colville records that in the summer of 1941, Churchill and Sinclair agreed that the French had acted shamefully in calling for more fighters when they knew all was lost.”
” The drama nevertheless continued during and after the Dunkirk evacuation”
“On the evening of 6 June, Reynaud’s personal representative in London, Jean Monnet, came to appeal to Churchill in person. By this time the British had had enough. They began to suspect that it was a ploy to blame them for the French defeat”
“….on 16 June, General Petain asked Germany for an armistice.”
“Halifax visited Dowding at Bentley Priory a few days later. and told him what had just happened. Dowding got up and looked out the window, then turned around and said ‘Thank God we’re now alone.'”
Any comments on the highlighted areas?
buzzbeurlingSo why no immediate attack after the fall of France….
“The brief but fierce campaign in the west which began on May 10, cost the Luftwaffe 1428 aircraft destroyed-about half its operational strength-and about another 488 damaged. The RAF lost 959 aircraft, half of which were fighters. The RAF withdrew licking its wounds, with Dowding issuing grim warnings and all expecting a massive blow to fall almost immediately. That it did not is partly because the Luftwaffe was barely capable of delivering it. The losses had been incurred in a short space of time, and whereas the British were able to rebuild their critical defensive strength by concentrating all their efforts on fighter production, the Germans had to re-stock their bomber units as well as their fighters to create the balanced offensive capability required.”
buzzbeurlingOverhead picture of the crash site in this report…
buzzbeurlingWilly Messerschmitt’s design history was interesting, with him…
“….designing gliders in 1921 when he was only 22. Most of them crashed for a variety of reasons including structural instability”
” His first airliner for Lufthansa, the M20, crashed on its first flight in 1928″
“In 1930, BFW’s first military aircraft, the M22 twin-engined bomber crashed on a test flight killing the pilot. In October, an M20 crashed on landing in Dresden killing all seven occupants including the wife of a Lufthansa official. Another went down in April 1931. Lufthansa cancelled further orders for the M20 and BFW faced bankruptcy”
But Goering got an old fighter friend to help rebuild BFW and to work on a fighter which became the BF109 with its famous ground handling characteristics, although…
“The first Bf109 sent to Spain crashed on takeoff. The second was damaged on landing. The first production Bf109B crashed at Augsberg after sideslipping too steeply killing the pilot”.
buzzbeurlingErnst Udet may have been famous for his WWI exploits but that doesn’t mean he should have been in charge of manufacturing….
“When Milch himself took over the job after Udet committed suicide in 1941, he found such chaos that he cancelled most new types……”
“The industry only reached its productive potential under Speer’s radical measures in 1944. The Luftwaffe in 1940 was a lot smaller than it might have been.”
“Such was Udet’s enthusiasm for dive bombing, however, was that he made dive-bombing capability a requirement for all future German bombers. The first victim of this obsession was the Junkers JU-88.”
“As a result of the need for a strengthened fuselage, dive brakes and sundry extras, the JU-88’s weight doubled to 12 or 13 tons, and production was delayed.”
“The other penalty was that only 60 JU-88’s had been delivered by the end of 1939.”
“This was fortunate for the RAF, for, though complex, the JU-88 was a superb aircraft…”
buzzbeurlingOn the big bomber front(or lack of)…
“There was another reason to concentrate on smaller aircraft: the obsession with numbers. Three twin-engined machines could be produced for every two four engined ones, and Goering took the simple view that ‘The Fuehrer will not ask how big the bombers are, but how many there are’. Numbers impressed not only the Fuhrer but the outside world as well.”
buzzbeurling” After the Spanish civil war, members of the Condor legion became a group apart.They had earned good money, so most had cars and tended to think they had a licence to misbehave. Their combat experience led them to think that they knew it all, and they showed a romantic disdain for new technology, and rejected anything that was not practiced in Spain, including night flying. They also formed a clique favouring promotion from within. This clique literally died out as the war progressed, but had a strong influence over the Luftwaffe in 1940.”
buzzbeurling“Ulrich Steinhilper was by chance made communications officer of his fighter wing in Jan 1939. He describes in detail how from that point his attempts to install radios in 109’s, let alone to develop proper procedures in the air, were frustrated and ridiculed at every turn by the Condor Legion veterans, led by his commanding officer, Adolf Galland. Galland argued that radios were unnecessary as pilots could communicate well enough in the air by waggling their wings as they had in WWI and in Spain, and that radios just added weight. This romantic amateurism, based on the Richthofen-inspired cult of the heroic individual, dogged the Luftwaffe until 1940 and seriously affected their operations over England.”
buzzbeurlingIt turns out that Goering was addicted to morphine as a result of treatment from a gunshot wound at the beer hall putsch. Apparently this can have serious side effects like making an honest person completely untrustworthy and delusional resulting in criminal actions.
buzzbeurlingI have just started reading this book. It turns out that Britain is The Most Dangerous Enemy for Germany. And Hitler wanted to negotiate to prevent any further fighting. Perhaps even not wanting to humiliate Britain by destroying the BEF on the beaches of France.(perhaps why there was a window to escape back to Britain).
But Churchill would never negotiate.
This, my favourite speech says it all. And I really do love the UK 10 pound bill with him on it. Politically correct people on money never saved Britain.
buzzbeurlingI thought that the Canadian Hurricanes were the higher Mk numbers like XII not a IIB
buzzbeurlingGeorge Neal also still was flying as a couple of years ago in his Chipmunk. Keeping busy in his ’90’s.
buzzbeurlingO.K. guy, Maybe a few of you could list some of the best private collections around that are mostly off limits.
Someone asked what is a Greenham Common. Does any one here care to say.
Thanks
buzzbeurlingO.K. guy, Maybe a few of you could list some of the best private collections around that are mostly off limits.
Someone asked what is a Greenham Common. Does any one here care to say.
Thanks
buzzbeurlingObviously, I don’t know who Rocketeer is.
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