Comments by "Ray Purchase" (@raypurchase801) on "Imperial War Museums" channel.

  1. Worth remembering there were Royal Navy carriers at Okinawa as well as American. The British carriers fared better because, unlike the US carriers, the British carriers had armoured steel decks.
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  2. The first-generation Dreadnoughts were obsolete by 1914. A bit like state-of-the-art biplanes from 1936 being obsolete by 1940.
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  3. Thanks, Ron. There's a few lines in Shakespeare's "Henry V" about how gentlemen now abed in England will hold their manhood cheap, because they weren't at the battle. That's me. I was the right age but not in the forces. I wish I'd been there. The risks of death, amputation, burning or drowning would be a throw of the dice. You did good work, sir, and I'm jealous.
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  4. The Hunter had a very quick turnaround time: Fast to refuel and rearm. It also had great reliability. In wartime, an air force with Hunters might have twice the serviceability of the opposing air force. Having twice the serviceability will double the size of your air force.
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  5.  @GnomaPhobic  Belgium requested the British should uphold their treaty obligations. The contemptible little British Army had been immensely improved following the Boer War. The BEF arrived very swiftly and threw a spanner in the German machine, which the Germans had never anticipated.
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  6. Nice to see a fellow nerd here. 1940: Spitfire & 109 were broadly equivalent. 1945: Different story.
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  7.  person  Agreed. Similarly there are people claiming the Germans used the first tailless swept-wing military aircraft. They know nothing about the RSF's Westland Pterodactyl of the 1930s.
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  8.  @touristguy87  You know your comment is bullsh*t, right? "The Spitfire was woefully ineffective as an interceptor". History has decided otherwise. Your comment fits the day fighter version of the Blenheim, but not the Spitfire.
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  9. I love secondhand furniture with the wartime "utility mark". This furniture tended to be made from offcuts. The bigger bits dropped bombs on Berlin.
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  10.  @davegeisler7802  Two Spitfire squadrons had 20mm cannon in the BoB. Read the account in Johnnie Johnson's autobiography. The 20mm guns were very unreliable. Cannon-equipped Spitfires would intercept the Luftwaffe, but the 20mm guns would immediately fail. The Typhoon and the Hurricane Mk. II were designed to accept the 20mm cannon. 12 X .303s were fitted until the flaws in the 20mm cannon could be fixed.
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  11.  @freddiemac1438  Yep.
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  12.  @davegeisler7802  Douglas Bader always preferred the .303. He advised his pilots, "Get as close as you possibly can before opening fire. When you think you're too close, get even closer".
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  13.  @billyosullivan3192  The Royal Navy suffered greater casualties than the Germans, but succeeded in its purpose of keeping the Germans bottled-up in port. Where the German fleet remained until, starving and desperate, the crews mutinied before sailing to Scapa Flow and sinking themselves. The Royal Navy sacrificed itself at Jutland and, by doing so, won the war at sea.
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  14.  @guinnog2  From memory, the Jaguar was intended to be carrier-capable for the French Navy. I don't know whether the French Jaguars actually served from carriers. The British Jaguars weren't carrier-capable.
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  15. Britain was very class-orientated in 1939. The air ace Johnny Johnson was refused a commission in the 1930s because, despite being a graduate (unusual at that time), he was considered too working class because his father was a policeman. So Johnson joined the Volunteer Reserves instead. Things changed very quickly from 1940. Squadrons suffered horrific casualties. Dead officers could only be replaced by promoting skilled NCOs from the ranks. Colonial servicemen were contemptuous of the class system. Aussies, Kiwis, Canucks, South Africans promoted skilled aviators solely upon merit and nothing else.
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  16.  @dovetonsturdee7033  The Swordfish is a brilliant example of the exception to the rule. I can't think of another1930s biplane which wasn't past its sell-by date by the 40s. Yes I know the Italians were still using biplanes, but they came a cropper when put up against Spitfires and Hurricanes in the autumn of 1940. Yes, I know Gloster Gladiators were still serving during the Battle of Britain, but in the far north west of the UK and they didn't see any combat. Yes, I know about the Maltese Gladiators. Yes, I know about the Luftwaffe's Henschel biplanes on the eastern front. Some "super-dreadnoughts" as they were termed still served in places like the South Atlantic, but they performed poorly against state-of-the-art warships.
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  17. My uncle was in the British Army in Italy. His enduring memory was mud, mud and more mud.
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  18. I was in the ATC (air cadets) in the seventies. Two of our lads were planespotting at a local airport. A light aircraft went the wrong way down a taxi way and bloody nearly ran into the two lads. Ten minutes later, the pilot walked to them and sincerely apologised. He admitted he'd f*cked it up, and said how stupid he'd been. The pilot was Douglas Bader. This demonstrates Bader himself could make silly errors, but he was never harder on other people than he was on himself. If he made an error, he had the guts and masculinity to apologise and admit his own stupidity. One of the two ATC lads later became an RAF Tornado pilot.
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  19. Agreed. Some excellent replies in this stream as well. Numpties claim the Normandy invasion should've happened in '43 instead. They forget Mulberry hadn't been built, PLUTO wasn't ready, the Fortitude deception operation was barely started, the railways between Germany and Normandy hadn't yet been wrecked, the Luftwaffe was still strong in '43, the P51 wasn't yet in widespread service, it wasn't known the U-boat menace would shortly be neutered, Ploesti was still gushing oil, Hitler could've cancelled the Kursk offensive and sent it to Normandy instead, and Stalin needed IMMEDIATE assistance in '43, not '44. The failures in Italy were mainly down to poor generalship at Anzio, and Mark Clark seizing Rome instead of devastating the Wehrmacht.
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  20. Every Nazi superweapon combined failed to add one day to the length of WW2. All of them failed.
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  21.  @touristguy87  You're a troll.
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  22.  @saadinfo6363  A sensible comment. YouTube throws up two kinds of commenters: 1.) Nerds like us, and - 2.) Complete f*ckin' morons who think they know stuff 'cos they once saw a movie. Plenty of examples of both categories on this video.
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  23.  @brettpalfrey4665  Lots of sensible, reasoned views here. I regard Dowding and Park as heroic commanders, but even Park made errors. Park became an ace on Bristol Fighters during the Great War. The Boulton & Paul Defiant was the modern equivalent of the Brisfit. The Defiant was misused in 11 Group, where it was shot to pieces. The Defiant would have been better used in the north, where it could have taken on bombers without interference from 109s. It's f*ckin' easy to be wise after the event.
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  24.  @garyseeseverything8615  What?
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  25. Unit cost. The US was producing VAST quantities of F111s and F4s for its own services, and selling them very cheaply to friendly nations. The TSR2 would only be manufactured in penny-packet numbers. The TSR2 was a superior product, but US aircraft were almost as good and a fraction of the price.
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  26.  @richardvernon317  A truly excellent reply.
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  27. The Kaiser caused the war. The German constitution was at fault. It afforded the Kaiser executive power. An aggressive militarist megalomaniac controls Germany. What happens next? Yours is a nice point about Princess Victoria.
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  28. Why did the Plan fail? The Germans didn't expect a contemptible little army to slow their advance to a crawl.
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  29. The BoB changed as it progressed. By late September and into October, the massed daylight raids had almost ceased. Instead the Luftwaffe sent over big formations of 109s at high altitude. Hurricanes were useless at intercepting them, because their climb was poorer than that of the Spitfire and their aerodynamics were unsuitable for high-altitude fighting. At that point, the Spitfire was a viable interceptor whereas the Hurricane was completely outclassed. Night fighting was a different matter. The Hurricane's better view over the nose and better undercart made it a preferred mount for night-interception specialists.
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  30.  @zen4men  Sorry my error! I'll go back and edit. It's nice to receive a POLITE correction. I hope you'll accept my POLITE thanks. How very un-YouTube.
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  31.  @samburkes7552  8 X .303 machine guns represented a HUGE leap forward in the 1930s. Progression was very rapid. State of the art aircraft became obsolete within two years.
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  32.  @malcolmscrivener8750  There was a movie made about RJ Mitchell and the Spitfire's birth. No movie made about Sidney Camm or Roy Chadwick.
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  33.  @sblack48  The Spitfire had the identical design for its fuel tank. EDIT - I've been corrected in the comments below. Both aircraft had the same location, but there were lots of detail differences.
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  34. Park's Wiki biography is a good read.
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  35. It was indeed developed as a mobile system. V1s were launched in flight from bombers.
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  36. Agreed. 109s sometimes "clapped hands".
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  37. "A better aircraft than the Hurricane": No. The Hurricane could easily out-turn the 109. The 109 only had the advantage at high altitude and in a -G bunt.
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  38. Excellent comment.
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  39. The devil is always in the detail.
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  40.  @beatglauser9444  I wouldn't believe anything the Soviets claimed.
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  41. 1940: About equal, although the 109 had the advantage in a -G bunt. After 1941: You're correct. Every year after: More and more and more correct.
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  42. The term "dreadnought" has been misused in this video.
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  43. The Plan failed because the Kaiser didn't expect a contemptible little army to intervene and slow its advance to a crawl. The British Army had been modernised since the Boer War, and arrived very swiftly. In an era before radio, German soldiers didn't realise they were at war with the British and didn't know who was shooting at them. Without British intervention, the Kaiser would've reached Paris as planned.
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  44.  @TheFrenchscot  Every book about the German advance covers this. Lacking heavy weapons and being smaller than its German counterpart, the British could only mount a fighting retreat. This delayed the German advance and both sides decided to dig in. The Kaiser had always assumed the British wouldn't intervene and that their Army would be slow to mobilise. He was mistaken.
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  45. @@endikaeche4359 What the eff are you referring to?
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  46.  @bunkerkorpf1440  Anglo Saxons? WTF are you writing about? The British Army was indeed small by continental standards in 1914, but it delayed the Kaiser's army until it could continue no more.
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  47. Does anybody know what happened to R.J. Mitchell's Rolls Royce saloon? Most Rollers of that era have survived. I've Google-searched Mr. Mitchell's car, but there's no reference to it. Perhaps the car still exists, but the owner doesn't know its importance.
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  48.  @AdamMGTF  If Germany had put the same effort into developing submarines as it did with the V1, V2, V3 and other failed systems, D-Day might have been delayed until 1945.
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  49.  @AdamMGTF  Agreed 100% with your last paragraph. Good advice: The best YT comments are always short and funny. Like Peter Griffin's penis.
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  50. Do you still have it? Worth $millions!
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