Quote:
Originally Posted by Nicholas
Hi Graham
Do you have Jim Grant's 'Spitfires Over Darwin 1943'? If not, I can highly recommend it.
It is a very balanced Australian perspective,
"stupid response 'Oh yes, didn't they get the hell beaten out of them by the Japs' or 'they all fell into the sea out of petrol or something'.
Grant, a groundcrewman, explains in detail the several technical issues affecting the Spitfires and analyses the raids on a case by case basis. As in most air warfare the holistic nature of multiple factors belies any single factor being used as a "smoking gun" by armchair warriors. Having said that I have no doubt that being a Dinah crewman over Northern Australia was a very dangerous occupation when the RAAF Spitfires began operations in theatre.
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I think this was asked, and not answered previously. Does this book include information from Japanese sources? I don't think any work on WWII air combat can be viewed as "definitive" if it does not account the other side's losses and tell the real story in those terms. First hand accounts without such info can add "color" as one part of studying any given chapter of the war, of course, can't be definitive.
No full two sided *book* on the Darwin '43 raids has appeared AFAIK, but it has been treated in print by reputable authors with the basic story from the JNAF side: very light losses of fighters and bombers on escorted raids, very much lower than what the Spitfires claimed, quite one sided fighter-fighter combat in favor of the A6M's, especially for that period of the war (although, impressions of Allied success v. JNAF fighters elsewhere ca. mid 1943 are often also *still* distorted in conventional wisdom by *still* relying on Allied claims in one sided accounts). Those sources were mentioned far back in this thread. I do see an effort to avoid that information from Spit fans; that's the thing that strikes me most when this chapter in the Spit's history is brought up various places on the internet, but this forum is supposed to be very scholarly and elite on WWII air combat history, it's rather surprising here.
Questions as in one of the recent posts beyond the barebones score tally (when did Dinah's operate over Darwin, why did the JNAF discontinue escorted raids, etc), from the Japanese side, would have to be emphasized as part of completing the story. *Assuming* the answers to those questions certainly isn't a serious study, that *would be* internet junk.
Rdunn: would you please answer the questions you laid out rhetorically?, I don't know the answers to all and would like to.
Joe