"Shores: Bloody Shambles vs Buffs & Hurris over Singapore?" Topic

Hello All,

I have Christopher Shores' "Bloody Shambles" volumes and see he also did both "Buffaloes Over Singapore" and "Hurricanes Over Singapore". "Bloody" is pretty comprehensive so I'm wondering what the other two add that hasn't been covered. Any help out there?

Daniel

They're both a lot more anecdotal, filling in a lot of the background around squadron ops, conditions on the ground and first-hand accounts. From a strictly gaming point of view Bloody Shambles is probably all you need, but Hurris Over Singapore is a good read, and Buffaloes Over Singapore is excellent. (I am a closet Buffalo fetishist, so take with a pinch of salt, but I'd certainly recommend it.)

Dom.

Yes Dom--Those fantastic Buffaloes did a great job fighting off the Japanese!!!--Yes a very good fighter……

Now that's service! I was hoping to find a way to not get these, but they're calling to me… :)

Thanks Dom – you're quite a resource.

Lengthy reply to Archstanton deleted as I can't be arsed – like most aircraft it came in several marks, and unfortunately the Brits and Americans piled theirs with enough extra weight to ruin them completely…. Of course he's doubtless right; the Buffalo was useless, which is why it did so badly everywhere it flew. Oh, it didn't, did it….

Daniel
Chris Shores didn't actually write either of the "Over" books. These are written by his regular co-author Brian Cull. Like Dom says the books are a much more anecdotal than Bloody Shambles. Personally I prefer them but it is a matter of taste. I have all of them but would say that that level of coverage is only for the saddo airheads like Dom and I. ;-P

archstanton73

“Yes Dom--Those fantastic Buffaloes did a great job fighting off the Japanese!!!--Yes a very good fighter……”

A couple of quick questions for you. Would you like to hazard a guess which aircraft of WW II had the highest ratio of aces to airframes produced? Or the third highest number of kills per airframe produced? The Buffalo was not a great aircraft but it was far from the disaster that people make out. I take it you have heard of the Finns?

The poor beggars flying in defence of Malaya and Singapore could have been flying Typhoons, and I mean Eurofighters not Hawkers, and it wouldn’t have made that much difference. Half trained kids straight out of flight school, war emergency training not proper flight schools at that, facing the best trained pilots in the world at that time. Not forgetting that many of the Japanese pilots, both army and navy, had extensive combat experience.

Even if the RAF (And yes I know that the majority of the Pilots were from the RAAF and RNZAF. RAF is easier no disrespect intended.) managed to inflict losses on the Japanese, which they did when more experienced crews arrived from the Middle East and Europe, it wouldn’t have done much good. Japanese air superiority had little real effect on a campaign which was being lost a sea and on the land.

Sorry bit longer post than I originally intended. As you may have guessed it’s a bit of a touchy subject.

Fatman

Oh and one more thing, many of the Buffs in Malaya had refurbished airliner engines fitted!

trying to work out why my reply took over an hour to get through.

Yes while the Far East was low down on defence priorities it was criminal of the RAF not to send over at least some of the hundreds of fighter squadrons from British shorea--A few sccres of Spits while probably not able to turn back the tide would have done a lot better than the valiant Buffs…As for the ratio of airframes and aces and kills per airframes I do know that is a statistic which is bounded around--however out of interest what are the actual numbers??
Also against the Red Airforce in the early war period it was quite easy for a fighter pilot to gain a very high score very quickly…
And fatman maybe your reply took so long because it was powered by a Buffalo engine ;) (only pulling your leg!!)

LeLv24 had 35 aces with 5+ kills in Buffalos, another three who scored kills in Buffs but switched to 109s before making ace, two had D.XXI kills and then made ace after switching to Buffs, and one who scored Buffalo kills but was already an ace flying D.XXIs…. I don't know if LeLv26 had any Buffalo aces – they only got the few remaining 239s in '44 when 24 got 109G-6s, so didn't see much action. There were no Dutch or US aces that I know of, and 4 Commonwealth, so that's 39 total, possibly a couple more – one for every 12 or 13 aircraft across all air forces, although obviously the Finns skew it massively – there were nearly as many Finnish Buffalo aces as Finnish Buffalos….

(As an interesting aside, there's been a fair bit of analysis of Finnish claims against Soviet loss records over the last few years, with one Buffalo coming out at 42.5 kills with various pilots – quite possibly more than any other airframe ever….)

Dom.

PS – Total airframes was just over 500; 509's the usually quoted number for all variants.

PPS – Great quote from a Finnish ace and instructor: "The easiest one to shoot down of the enemy fighters is the Hurricane."

Actually a further extract which seems *very* pertinent:

"It all started in 24 Fighter Squadron during '42 or '43 if I remember correctly. Someone suggested that one of the squadron pilots go to Kauhava (Air Force Academy) to lecture on tactics, 'how to wage war with Brewsters'. That was because the Americans also started waging war and they had no clue how to go about it. There in the Pacific when they started fighting it was completely pitiful. They had three engagements where Brewsters were used. And in the last one they had 17 Brewsters in one aerial engagement, and if I remember correctly, 13 were shot down. After that all the Brewsters were sent to Florida for their Air Force cadets.

And all of this was the result of them attacking Zeros. They didn't consider at all that the Zero had no armour, was made of wood and was much lighter. But it had an engine of the same size. And they (Americans) started turn-fighting them (Zeros). So, the Brewsters were shot down. They just should have used rocking-chair (vertical) tactics, attack and pull out. "

Full text here; definitely an interesting read:

link

Dom.

some very good pilots who worked out how to fight with the Buff!!!
I love stats like this--For example the Defiant Night Fighter has the highest kill to intercept ratio of any night fighter in World War 2..Which means the half dozen times one actually managed to intercept a German bomber they usually shot it down!!!!

Hi

Dom, the zero was not made of wood.

The flight envelope of the A6M2 completely encloses that of the buff…meaning even fighting vertically isn't a solution.

Rocky

For the better marks there wasn't much in it either way; there seems to be an insistence that "the Buffalo" is one aircraft with consistent performance, when nobody lumps Spitfire Is and XVIs together as a single identical plane. The F2A-3 was always going to struggle against the Zero, but the F2A-1 had a much closer performance, while the 239-D was better still. It's also interesting to note the experiments RAF units were conducting shortly before hostilities commenced, eg. the infamous Singapore Sports Special; at least some people at the time seem to have realised that RAF and USN "improvements" had done more harm than good.

As for the Zero's construction, I'm well aware of that, but it was a direct quote….

Dom.

I think even a Hellcat would have had problems dogfighting a Zero with a decent IJN pilot--Much better to scream out of the sun let off a barrage of AP and tracer rounds and zoom back into the stratosphere!!
As for comparing the Spit I to the XVI's etc both versions of the plane were really rather good in their time where as the poor old Buffs only had a few lucky versions that were any good(ish)…….

Hi

Dom, actually, the aircraft with the flight envelope (trust me I used your tax money to explore the flight envelopes of every buff), was the P36, the model with the Pratt and Whitney 1200 hp motor.

Ironically, the brits got a bunch of these off a french contract, sent them to burma. But decided that the plane didn't need that level of performance for the japanese and reengined them with the same CW motor as the Buff!

that flight envelope was exploited in France and is reflected in the scores of THE successful french pilots. In essence, the 109s facing Hawk 75s were facing "zeros" except for the cannon part…a "sero" that could out run any plane in the theater in a dive.

Rocky

Another book is "Ketchil : A New Zealand Pilot's War in Asia and the Pacific" about Vic Bargh, and details his experiences in 488 sqn in Singapore & Burma – he prefferred buffaloes to hurricanes!

As an aside the Buffalo was a woeful piece of aircraft design in technical terms – because it was not modular. Most a/c of the era had wings that bolted to eth fuselage (either jsut outboard ofhte fus-wing box, or as a complete span-width assemby)….but not the Buffalo – it's wing and fuselage were a single item meaning that battle damage could not be repaired by simply removing a wing & replacing it with another.

At the end of the war the Aussies weer building a fairly advanced piston engined fighter the CA-15, and I recall reading that they used a stripped down Buffalo as a zero-equivalent to test manouvreability – with all excess weight removed it was just as manouvreable.

Rocky if you used Dom and my tax money to research it HM Government is going to be seriously ed. After all we have British people to come up with ways of misusing our taxes.;-p

Fatman

FWIW, I caved and bought both Buffs and Hurris over Singapore. As long as I had no self control I went ahead and got both volumes of First Team. Somebody please stop me…

Hi

I studied under the guy who wrote the early mainframe stuff for this sort of analysis. AS A HOBBY, we were doing computer runs on interesting pre-modern aircraft to find out exactly, no anacdote, what the planes could do. Good times. He retired, and I became "the guy who answers questions".

The questions came from time to time, but the computer was there always. Good times.

Rocky

Like Dom, I've always had a soft spot for the "also ran" aircraft. The Buffalos in Malaya were hampered by a laundry list of faults, real and percieved. The RAF actually did send experienced pilots to SEA to form the cadres of the Buff squadrons. One Squadron Leader, a BoB ace, simply refused to fly in a Buffalo and had a very prejudiced opinion of the "Colonials" he was being asked to train. Think that did wonders for the morale and confidence of his subordinates? By the way, when the Hurricanes arrived, they didn't fare any better against the Japanese either. It took several months for the Allies to regain their footing from the initial onslaught. The Zeros and Oscars were the best dogfighters in the Pacific in 1941-42. Spitfire Vs were pretty helpless against them too, until the Allies modified their tactics to zoom and boom attacks. Once they did, the Japanese were no match for the faster, heavier armed and armored allied aircraft

Well Hurricanes were not the fighter of choice to tackle other fighters in the ETO either!

Hi

A lot of the Spit V problem wasn't quite the performance of the airplane or the pilots but the issue of the fight. The spit's lack of range was no problem in the Battle of Britain, or North Africa against the very maneuverable italian aircraft… in the far east, the spit was suffering from a range problem.

One of my favorite versions of this was an american in spits who made ace, but made most of his kills in a mustang. Not, by his admission, because of the performance as in turn and climb, but the mustang's ability to go find Targets!

Not an issue we usually deal with in a game.

A similar but reversed issue is the "tojo" which performed much like a 109, but the japanese pilots, with a couple exceptions, did not adjust to using energy and maneuvering vertically but instead hated the airplane. It was NOT an Oscar, that simple.

Rocky

Hey Rocky,

Which mark of 109 would you say the first Ki-44's behaved most like?

Hi

Pretty much the same envelope as the 109E-3

R

Roger. Thanks. I want to use the 9 pre-prod units in Mayala during the initial 1941 invasion…