Battle of Britain Spits and Hurris no camo?

[Allan]

in order to speed up production during the Battle of Britain wouldn't it have been a good idea to dispense with camo on Spits and Hurris and leave them in natural metal with a black anti-glare panel on the nose only?
Allan in Canberra where it was 41 yesterday and about 40 right now at 2pm Saturday 11 Feb

[PR19_Kit]

I don't think there was a problem with the number of available Spitfires and Hurricanes during the BoB, it was more the lack of suitably experienced pilots that was the largest availability problem.

[zenrat]

But what if the luftwaffe had bombed the factories producing the fighters instead of just concentrating on the airfields?

[PR19_Kit]

They tried, but there were a lot of them, scattered all over the place. There was hardly a single small metal shop in Hampshire that WASN'T making parts for Spitfires.

[kitnut617]

Photos in the Morgan/Shacklady book Spitfire show all the aircraft were painted before the assembly was finish,

[PR19_Kit]

There's one pic I've seen of a Hurricane or Spitfire with an A scheme port wing and a B scheme starboard wing.

I bet someone got a right roasting for that!

[Gondor]

There's one pic I've seen of a Hurricane or Spitfire with an A scheme port wing and a B scheme starboard wing.

I bet someone got a right roasting for that!

Would be a nice idea for a whiff though

Gondor

[PR19_Kit]

There's one pic I've seen of a Hurricane or Spitfire with an A scheme port wing and a B scheme starboard wing.

I bet someone got a right roasting for that!

Would be a nice idea for a whiff though

Gondor

Yes indeed, maybe even better on a Lancaster, so much more area for the JMNs to get stirred up about. 

[kitnut617]

There's one pic I've seen of a Hurricane or Spitfire with an A scheme port wing and a B scheme starboard wing.

I bet someone got a right roasting for that!

Would be a nice idea for a whiff though

Gondor

Yes indeed, maybe even better on a Lancaster, so much more area for the JMNs to get stirred up about. 

Might be because it had been repaired at one of the multitude of repair depots dotted around the country. Some photos in one of the Spitfire books I have shows where damaged aircraft had been taken apart, the good bits stored and then reused to repair other Spitfires. There wasn't time to get picky about the camo scheme didn't match up.

[zenrat]

They tried, but there were a lot of them, scattered all over the place. There was hardly a single small metal shop in Hampshire that WASN'T making parts for Spitfires.

IIRC Deighton, in Fighter, says that their intelligence was lacking and that not only did they not seem to realise that the main Supermarine plant was within easy bombing range in Southampton (?) but that they bombed a lot of bomber and transport squadrons leaving many of the fighter airfields alone.
Mind you, if the fighter aircraft had been in NMF they might have been more easily spotted on the ground.

[PR19_Kit]

IIRC Deighton, in Fighter, says that their intelligence was lacking and that not only did they not seem to realise that the main Supermarine plant was within easy bombing range in Southampton (?) but that they bombed a lot of bomber and transport squadrons leaving many of the fighter airfields alone.

Yes, it was in Southampton, and maybe there were two of them. One was right down near the Harbour in Woolston where their slipway (which still exists!) was, but I think they did some assembly at Eastliegh Airport as well. Once the monster Castle Bromwich plant (now the Jaguar factory) was built it became the major production facility for Spitfires though.

Mind you, if the fighter aircraft had been in NMF they might have been more easily spotted on the ground.

And most of the airfields were all grass too, so it would make even more sense to keep them camo'd.

[zenrat]

On a related note, how many German spies remained at large in the British Isles throughout WW2 and how many of those managed to get information back to the Fatherland?

Watching accurate historical dramatised re-enactments, like Dad's Army, they were always paranoid about nazi spies but was it actually justified?

[Snowtrooper]

They tried, but there were a lot of them, scattered all over the place. There was hardly a single small metal shop in Hampshire that WASN'T making parts for Spitfires.

This. Compare for example how German aircraft production peaked in late 1944, and even that was more due to oil shortage than the actual destruction of assembly site! Every major industrial centre had supposedly been bombed to rubble several times over already, but airpower simply couldn't catch all the small workshops all over Germany. Oil refineries and synthetic oil plants were not as easily redistributed however, so hitting them was much more effective: by the end of the war there were thousands of brand new fighters that remained unused, being stranded at their assembly sites due to lack of fuel.

Which of course begs the question - had Luftwaffe concentrated on the British supply of oil instead of airfields or factories, would that have yielded better results?

[andrewj]

On a related note, how many German spies remained at large in the British Isles throughout WW2 and how many of those managed to get information back to the Fatherland?

Watching accurate historical dramatised re-enactments, like Dad's Army, they were always paranoid about nazi spies but was it actually justified?

During the war 19 foreign agent were tried and executed under The Treachery Act, which was brought in to aid Britain's efforts to stop German spies , At the end of the war the security services claimed that only one German agent had evaded detection and capture and that he had commited suicide in Cambridge after his supplies had run out. The other German agents operating in Britain had all either been captured and executed or turned to act as double agents.
   It would appear that most of the paranoia was therefore unjustified.

Andrew

[Martin H]

On a related note, how many German spies remained at large in the British Isles throughout WW2 and how many of those managed to get information back to the Fatherland?

Watching accurate historical dramatised re-enactments, like Dad's Army, they were always paranoid about nazi spies but was it actually justified?

During the war 19 foreign agent were tried and executed under The Treachery Act, which was brought in to aid Britain's efforts to stop German spies , At the end of the war the security services claimed that only one German agent had evaded detection and capture and that he had commited suicide in Cambridge after his supplies had run out. The other German agents operating in Britain had all either been captured and executed or turned to act as double agents.
   It would appear that most of the paranoia was therefore unjustified.

Andrew

There is one story of an agent that managed to avoid detection compleatly. We only found out that he or she exsisted when a message was intercepted a few days before the wars end in Europe, reporting that RAF Balloon command was being disbanded as it was no longer needed.

Apparently it was the only time this agent was heard from, and their identity was never uncovered. He or she just melted away into the back ground.