The Most Underrated British Plane of WW2?

greetings this is Greg this is going to be a completely unscripted shooting from the hip non technical video with a bit of a personal story in it so it's quite a bit different from my normal content in a recent video I mentioned that there are a lot of underrated British accomplishments and equipment from world war ii the opposite is true as well a lot of the stuff is overrated this tends to be true for world war ii airplanes from all nations but for some reason i think it's more so for the british stuff that remark I made caused a fair number of comments and the most common was asking me for an example of something British that I don't think gets enough recognition that's easy there's a lot of things but specifically there's a British plane that I think is highly underrated this underrated British airplane flew from around the time of the Battle of Britain until the end of the war 70 RAF pilots became aces while flying this airplane and it stayed in service with the RAF until 1960 and that was a long time back then the plane was operated not only by the RAF but by Australians and the US as well as numerous other countries especially in the post-war period it saw service in Europe during the war as well as the Mediterranean Burma and in the Pacific and it performed well in all theatres yet it's rarely mentioned you're probably trying to guess what plane I'm talking about and that's good and as you think about it I want to tell you about a time I met a world war two RAF veteran that flew this plane now we're going back to about 1976 so I would have been ten years old but it could have been 77 or 78 when I was 11 or 12 I really can't remember the exact date my father worked for some computer company he worked for several throughout his career and I can't remember which one he worked for at this particular time but it was probably either burrows or Memorex my dad was in sales and meant something a little bit different back then at that time salesman for those sort of companies had to have a huge amount of technical knowledge about the products there was no internet so potential customers couldn't just look things up so if a potential customer for example if a big corporation like an airline wanted a reservation system or something else that required computing power they would contact one of these companies which would then send someone like my dad to meet up and explain to them the product line and try and make the sale usually the first part of these meetings entailed figuring out what the customer wanted and then if it was something that was even possible to deliver if it was from there it was just a normal sales job explaining why your product is better than the other guys working out pricing and and so on so my dad had a sales call at Ravel in Venice Beach California which was not too far from where I grew up Ravel was and still is a company that makes plastic models airplanes planes tanks whatever I was really into building plastic models at the time it seemed like everybody I knew was everyboy anyway I recently read that at the peak of the plastic modeling hobby in the 1960s something like 80% of boys built models on a somewhat regular basis at this point in the 1970s it was probably still around 50% it's hard for kids today to understand just how big this was I'll explain it this way every grocery store carried plastic models made by Revell monogram and the other big companies of the day so did the drugstores I personally liked the kits from Revell so when I heard my dad was going to their factory I begged to go with him and thankfully he took me by the way these are just generic pictures of models that were copyright free this one is of the USS tani the only ship that was at Pearl Harbor on the day of the attack that still afloat I've been on it several times have a lot of pictures of it I might include a quickie video tour of it at the end of another that someday back to our story we got there to the Revell Factory and we were met by a secretary who took us up to the office of the man who I think was the president of the company at the time I don't know what his official title was but he was the big guy running the show I've made efforts to determine what his name was but these have been unsuccessful Revell is still in business but they've gone through several buyouts and mergers and that sort of thing plus it seems to be impossible to contact anybody that works there there's no phone number or email address on their website that I could find as soon as I walked into this man's office I realized he was an RAF pilot from World War two you could tell why the pictures on the wall he flew three aircraft during the war and one of those is the plane I'm saying is highly underrated it's the bristol beaufighter you probably weren't guessing that one maybe a small percentage of you were now he also flew the Spitfire and the mosquito he did not like the Spitfire which I found shocking at this point in my life I had read every book on the subject of World War one and World War two airplanes that was available in my school's library and I don't think I had ever read a single negative thing about the Spitfire but he articulated very clearly why he didn't like it and unfortunately I can't remember many details of the conversation I do remember that he hated the landing gear he said it was barely okay during normal conditions but if the pilot was wounded or the plane damaged it just became a nightmare to deal with none of his criticism involved the planes performance or flying qualities I do remember that I just don't remember the specifics of his other criticisms but I suspect they centered around the aircraft systems this discussion made me realize that there were a lot more to these airplanes than what I was reading in the books from my grade school library now he had nothing but praise for the mosquito but mo léa he talked about the Beaufighter it was clear to me that he thought very highly of the plane he really loved the Beaufighter however the adults in the room only had so much patience for my curiosity and eventually the conversation had to turn to business that actually didn't go very far it turned out that what Revell wanted was what we today would call a handheld 3d scanner I remember what my father told him my dad said that to his knowledge such a device did not exist and that he was certain that if it did exist it did not exist within his company's product line so that ended that I mean the meeting ended on good terms you know if we ever have your needs we'll call you again that sort of thing now when it was time to go the old RAF pilot gave me a 1/32 scale p-38 lightning and understand that was a big gift that was an expensive model at the time by expensive meaning it was probably like $8 when most of the 1/32 scale models were about 4 bucks and I was getting paid 50 cents to mow a lawn so that was kind of a big deal and I really lovingly built that model and I put a lot of effort into it of course I no longer have it on the way out we got the full tour of the place and it was impressive they had blueprints of just all kinds of airplanes and tanks and ships and everything else they had research people they had an actual factory they built the models right there none of this you know we've got an office downtown and a factory in China stuff they they actually made all the rolls and of course they had a lot of incredibly well built models in display cases even the cafeteria was full of displayed professionally built models it was really an impressive thing for a 10 to 12 year old to visit now back to the Beaufighter nothing about it in terms of its performance is stellar it's not bad but it's middle-of-the-road in most respects kind of like a Douglas a20 the plane's strength seems to be in that it has no serious vices its rugged and reliable carries a lot of firepower and it's versatile it operated as a day fighter night fighter bomber and torpedo bomber and a few other odd things British Coastal Command used them in an anti shipping role to great effect one coastal command Strike Group operating from the RAF base at North Coates sank a hundred and seventeen ships flying both fighters that's half the ship sunk by all the strike wings between 1942 and the end of the war now they lost 120 Beaufighters and 241 crew members doing it but the sad math of warfare is that a one-for-one trade plane to ship it's a good deal it's also an impressive statistic as there were enemy aircraft anti-aircraft fire weather basically every threat a plane could encounter and it still managed to do pretty well remember that those lost numbers include all of those other sorts of losses now over in the Pacific Beaufighters flown by Australians played a very important role in the Battle of the Bismarck sea during early March 1943 the Japanese were trying to decision they're trying to send troops and supplies from rebel to lay new guinea they were trying to reinforce their forces on New Guinea the convoy they sent consisted of eight destroyers eight troop transports had an escort of about a hundred fighter planes mostly zeros and the Allies attacked the convoy with a variety of planes including a twenty Havoc's Beaufighters b-25 mitchell x' and also they attacked with PT boats which actually sank at least one of the transports i think only one an australian war photographer named Damien Pereira rode in one of the bow fighters and took this picture furthermore he filmed a lot of the battle and you can find the footage of the battle on YouTube I'll put a link in the description or you can search for Bismarck convoy smashed that's the name of the little mini war documentary propaganda sort of thing they put together using his footage pretty anyhow the Allies sunk all the transports in the convoy I believe all but one sunk by aircraft the bow fighters were delicated the dangerous strafing duty to suppress the ships in a aircraft fire and this strafing was horrifyingly effective the Japanese thought the bow fighters were coming in for torpedo attacks and turned into the bow fighters which allowed the plane to strafe the entire length of the ship in a single pass the bow fighters carried four hispano-suiza 20 millimeter forward firing cannons I have an episode in my p-47 series coming up the deals with firepower and we talk a lot about different types of guns so I'm not going to go too far into this right now but just know that the Hispano 20 millimeter is a very effective weapon it was one of the best airborne guns of the war arguably the best furthermore some of the Australian planes had an additional 450 caliber browning machine guns which are nothing to sneeze at I'm not sure however if those were on the planes used in this battle I did look that up I couldn't find out anything either way now the Allied victory here was incredibly lopsided only six Allied aircraft were lost one of them was a bow fighter and it was lost in some sort of accident wasn't even a combat loss there were 13 allied casualties 13 versus over 2800 for the Japanese not to mention the big picture strategic victory of preventing the Japanese from reinforcing New Guinea so the Beaufighter was successful as a coastal command day fighter it was successful as a night fighter ground attack aircraft and in anti shipping on in the Mediterranean the Pacific and Burma it was really a success everywhere it went you can't say that about some of the more successful or corrections some of the more famous airplanes um for example the p-38 lightning was never truly successful over Germany the Spitfire wasn't successful in the Pacific or when used by the Soviets on the Eastern Front now there are reasons for those lacks of success and maybe I'll talk about those in another video another time but the Beaufighter doesn't need any reasons it doesn't need any excuses it's showed up did its job well and for some reason it just doesn't get the respect it deserves that's all for now I'm gonna get back to my normal video format for the next video I've added a teespring link for shirts and coffee cups and the like to help keep this channel going have a great day and I hope to see your comments below goodbye

Channel: Greg's Airplanes and Automobiles

Views: 1,203,601

Keywords:

Id: YFDOGwptxOg

Length: 14min 6sec (846 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 13 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/OldCodger39]

RAAF loved them in the SWPA.

"Whispering Death"

[u/icko11]

Spoiler: Bristol Beaufighter

[u/Millennium7history]

I always liked it, it was never forgotten to me.