Quote:
|
Remember that the Battle of Britian was the first truly large scale, and long range (for the time) aerial combat of the war. Both sides found out where pre-war doctrine, tactics and equipment was found to be flawed and lacking.
|
Arguably the distances in WWI were not that different. Some long range stuff including bombers and the Zeppelins. The Germans were just across the channel. Spain was similar. The main issue for the Germans (good news) was their air force was oriented to Army support.
You also get into the Weeds of locating airfields close to the channel where they could not take off and reach altitude as well as subjected to bombings.
Better would have been to move back to mid fields further back and use the fighters to the North and those fields as activate and assign as raids were developed and fighter command had determined where they would go.
Even taking off from Fields in France on the coast (or close aka Abbeville) the German fighters did not have much range let alone staying time once over England.
Why did not regular night bombings occur to those fields?
And there was the undermining of Fighter Command by Leigh-Mallory’s - its clear he in conjunction with Douglas brought down Dowding.
Park had to be cognizant of it and pulling his fighters back would have put them in Leigh-Mallory’s area.
Post Battle harassment of Leigh-Mallory were negative and the staffs worked around him for the Normandy invasion.
You can bring in pilots wasted in staff positions and lack of cooperation in the Midlands from Leigh-Mallory’s command.
There is also a lot of variance in reporting on management on the UK side. They did not allow fighter squadrons they did not rotate allowing some down time.
The Vic formation was a serious issue and only time and fighting were going to get things changed.
I don't think the battle was as close a thing as many historians say it was, not that it was not fraught, but they still had reserves and if it had been closer, they would have used them.
As for gas octane, UK got its fuel from the US. That is where the high octane fuels were developed allowing higher hp out of engines.