Okay… daytime fighters. Night fighters were sort of their own beast and didn’t really have the same performance requirements that daytime fighters did.
Although aircraft which can fire forward seems an obvious improvement, there was a lot of opposition to the idea - including Churchill. This still confuses me a bit.
I did see an interview with a surviving Luftwaffe pilot who said trying to attack one was like trying to make love* with a porcupine that’s on fire.
*He had the slightest hesitation before that.
ME110? 
Bristol Fighter, Westland Whirlwind, Mosquito with nose guns?
Edit: K, missed the American bit…
I read a book on air combat once that made a distinction between turn radius and rate of turn. So one plane might fly a smaller circle than another, but the other plane can fly a full circle in less time.
The P-70, like the Ju-88p, being intended to fight other aircraft, and being unable to bomb, was a fighter, regardless of its bomber origin.
There was a WW2 American ‘fighter’ capable of flying home after losing two engines: YB-40.
Now we’re stretching the point to unrecognizability. Calling the YB-40 (a B-17 gunship without bombs) a “fighter” is technically correct, but not at all within the bounds of what we’re actually talking about here.
Yeah, there are other factors too. A plane with lighter wing loading can maintain a steeper bank while turning because it has a lower stall speed. Stall speeds increase for a given aircraft as turning the turning G’s increase. The higher wing loading plane cannot do so and one can reach a point where even its higher speed can’t make up this. There’s always the sweet spot of optimal corner velocity of a given plane. Any faster and your turn radius increases ( taking more time to complete a full 180 or 360 due to more distance needing to be traveled ). Any slower, your radius will tighten but then the turn will take longer because you’re going slower.
Aircraft with high rates of roll can sometimes use this advantage to cut inside a tighter turning aircraft it is pursuing. I believe it’s referred to a vector roll. If it is done from a position with an altitude advantage, this plane can also use it’s weight as it plummets down in a rolling wingover. Gravity assist is what I’ve seen it referred to.
If we can jump back to the topic, I think the observation about Churchill’s memoirs is interesting in terms of what we tend to remember versus what was actually important at the time. Not that either is necessarily perfect.
After the fact, casual discussion of war, especially WWII, tends to concentrate on weapons; was the Spitfire better than the Bf-109? Should the Germans have built more Fw-190s or was continued Bf-109 production logical? How should the Soviets have used the P-39? Was the B-24 better or inferior to the B-17? Or tank stuff, that’s a big deal; whole books could be bound from arguments abot the pros and cons of the Sherman.
During WWII, the UK built just over 130,000 military aircraft. What percentage of their fighters were Spitfires, do you think? Less than half, actually. What percentage of their bombers were the famed Lancaster? Far less than half. The famous Mosquito, one of the most storied planes of the war, was not their most common two-engine fighter; that honor belongs to the Beaufighter, a capable plane that is now totally forgotten (probably because it had a dumb name.) Mustangs represented only ten percent of U.S. fighter production.
(If you want to win a bar bet, ask someone what American-designed fighter had the most credited kills in WWII. It’s the P-39 Airacobra, which was heavily used by the Soviets, who loved it.)
The Germans are famed for the mighty Tiger tank, but it was not at all a significant portion of the German tank fleet; their most common tank, by a wide margin, was the Panzer III, which doesn’t even have a cool big-cat nickname.
In truth most of this stuff doesn’t mean shit. Very few weapons really changed the war out of sheer superiority. There is little doubt the Mustang was a huge boon to the USAAF; clearly the Zero was great in the early war and out of date later. Clearly the T-34 was a very good tank. Would it really have made much of a difference if the Zero was a bit better, or the T-34 a bit worse? Nah, not really. The Allies won the air war because they were way, way better at building, fuelling and arming a lot of planes. The Soviets’ biggest advantage is that they built way more tanks and were way better at maintaining them. Every side was working to the maximum of technological innovation and there really weren’t many genuinely war-changing differences.
Quantity has a quality of its own. Same thing applied to transport. Was the Liberty ship all that? Hell, no. But we could crank them out a lot faster than the U-boats could sink them.
Absolutely. An 80% effective weapon that can be easily built, deployed, used and maintained is likely a better option than the 100% “wonder-weapon” that perhaps has cachet but is a pain in the arse at every point in its lifecycle and “expensive” in every way.
The Tiger tank certainly counts as such an example of the latter. The Schwerer Gustav also The V-weapons even more so.
Some allied weapons would also fall into that category.
Note comment at 5:30 or so
Based on the Beaufort, sort of a weird combined name.
It’s probably apocryphal but I read of a Luftwaffe pilot who was shot down and captured. At one point in the interview he exclaimed, "Why, your planes are terrible – it takes ten of your to equal one of ours… but you always have eleven.
I saw a documentary on the Pacific Theatre 20 or 30 years ago, where a Japanese mechanic said he knew the war was lost when every American plane the recovered was better than the last.
I think it was The World At War docuseries where I saw an interview with a German survivor of D-Day, who said something to the effect that when he saw the size of the Allied flotilla off-shore and the sheer number of landing craft and the raw amount of material they were bringing on shore, he knew the war was over.
Similarly, I read an account by a junior German officer whose unit captured an American trench in Normandy. The unit stood in amazement to find an ice-cream maker there … if the Americans had the spare logistic capacity to put luxuries like that in the front line, there was no hope.
Another Normandy story: in one of the British attacks around Caen (Epsom? Goodwood? I forget) the Brits lost ~500 armoured vehicles to the German ~100. A devastating defeat? Not really, because the majority of those British tank crews were in a new vehicle within days, as the Allies had 500 spare tanks parked in fields behind the lines. The Germans were down to a handful left with no ability to replace them.
German soldiers in western Europe after D-day started telling a cynical joke; “If you see white planes, they’re American. If you see black planes, they’re British. If you see no planes, it’s the Luftwaffe!”
Another German complaint: the US Army kept winning because they always had a mountain of 105mm artillery shells to drop on the Germans.
It’s almost like focusing on the genocide of ethnic minorities within your lands/conquered lands (rather than, say, building weapons, tanks, and planes) is a counterproductive way to go about managing your war effort.
There must be an endless amount of apocryphal stories. Maybe the lesson was to pick very stable geniuses to lead you. Maybe it was not to invade indomitable Russia near the wintertime. Maybe to not harass your best physicists and relatively smart people. Maybe not underestimate the massive latent potential of the United States and pick a fight. Maybe just be a better person, go to art school, get some dogs, learn to relax a little. I do not know what lessons war teaches except that those who want to fight it rarely have the courage to do so personally and think nothing of sacrificing others in their stead.