From: (Nick)
Date: 29/08/03 02:58 GMT Daylight Time
Message-id:

(Nick) wrote in message
.com...
-remove- (Mhoulsby) wrote in message
...
From: "Jerzy"
Date: 28/08/03 07:33 GMT Daylight Time
Message-id:
Right Nick, I`ve just heard on the radio that today we are commemorating
Polish pilots that fought in the Battle of England in 1940 on your side.
There were several squadrons of them. Over two thousand sacrificed
their
lives in the air fight.

To be more accurate, more than 2000 Polish airmen may have been killed
during
the entire war, but far fewer than 2000 were killed during the Battle of
Britain in 1940.

29 Polish airmen of Fighter Command were killed during the Battle
of Britain.

Mark Houlsby wrote:
although Poles comprised the greatest number of foreign nationals)

Only if 'foreign nationals' are regarded as persons outside the
Commonwealth.

Actually, during the Battle of Britain, there were slightly more
Polish fighter pilots in the Royal Air Force than the pilots from
any single nation of the Commonwealth, though not from the combined
nations of the Commonwealth.

Fighter Command's Aircrew in the Battle of Britain (abridged list)
('The Battle of Britain' by Richard Hough and Denis Richards, 191):

Nation: Flew Killed
Poland 141 29
New Zealand 129 14
Canada 90 20
Czechoslovakia 87 7
Belgium 24 6
South Africa 22 9
Australia 21 14
France 13 0
Ireland 9 0
United States 7 1

Mark Houlsby wrote:
the RAF would, at the very least, have struggled to win the Battle of
Britain and would most probably have lost.
...
In general, the non-British pilots in the Royal Air Force were more skilled
than the British pilots at that time, and a disproportionately high number
of its leading fighter aces were not British.

During the Battle of Britain, the Operational Training Units needed
to pass out the new British pilots as quickly as possible, which
inevitably impaired their skills in combat:

"The supply of replacement pilots was more important still and was
rapidly becoming the most critical aspect of Fighter Command's
continuing defence. Between 8 and 18 August no fewer than 154 pilots
had been lost, killed, missing or so gravely wounded as to be out of
the Battle. During that same period the OTUs produced few more than
a third of this number. They had, it transpired later, made no effort
to accelerate the final training course, to pack in more flying hours
per day, or to increase the facilities for firing practice. It was
just as if peace still prevailed, except that the extent of the
course was *severely shortened*....

The crisis was compounded by the quality and experience of those
lost, including a large number of squadron and flight commanders,
and the dangerous inexperience of those replacing them. Taking a
random sample in 1988 of the many survivors who reported to their
OTU training after the Battle began, the average was eleven days,
which could mean six to nine hours (several of them less) in the
air. 'I fired my guns once into cloud', was a typical comment;
and few of them had any air-to-air gunnery practice, or experience
with the reflector gunsight.

'I tried to take up my new pilots once or twice before taking
them on ops', one squadron commander, James Leathart, claimed.
'It was like sentencing them to death if I didn't, and not far
short of it even if I did. They hadn't a clue about high-speed
combat or deflection shooting or holding fire until 200 yards...'"

--Richard Hough and Denis Richards (The Battle of Britain, 200-1)

'Death, where is thy sting?'

--Nick

Interesting, Nick. I am well aware that many Hungarians fought in the
wehrmacht.

Of course, Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding's principal concern during the
Battle of Britain was a shortage of trained pilots, if the RAF had been able to
muster fewer than a critical number, the Luftwaffe would have won. With this in
mind, I was conviced (evidently wrongly) that some Hungarian *refugees* had
served in the RAF during the battle, an idea which your statistics effectively
refute.

Mark