Historic Spitfire Mk1/1a loadout
 

I have been playing about with loadouts recently and read that during the Battle Of Britain the aces loaded up two of their guns with incendiary,two with armour piercing and the rest with the regular .303 rifle ammo,although it did'nt mention tracers,presumably these being incorporated into the .303 rifle ammo?

Has anybody got any more infomation on historic loadouts please,I'm very interested,thanks.;)

Early BoB - 3 guns loaded with ball, 2 with AP, 2 with Mk IV incendiary tracer (smoke tracer) and 1 with Mk VI (De Wilde) incendiary.

Later on (when De Wilde / Dixon were more common) 4 guns with ball, 2 with AP and 2 with incendiaries (Mk VI) with 4 of the last 25 rounds being tracer (Mk IV incendiary/tracer) to let the pilot know he was running out of ammunition
(although some pilots didn't like this as they thought it also let the enemy know too!)

Initially the guns were aligned to fire a pattern (not converged into one point) but this changed pretty quickly to convergence at 300 yards down to 200 yards, some pilots had them converged at 50 yards ( Flt Lt Pete Brothers being one of these)

Source : Fred Roberts Book "Duxford to Karachi - An RAF Armourer's War"
And "Flying Guns of WWII" by Anthony G williams

It was also dependant on rank, Sergeant Pilots were often told how their guns were set by the Armourers (same rank) whereas the Officer pilots could order the armourers to do what they wanted.
Lots of interesting stuff in there for anyone interested.

Thanks Winny top stuff,I appreciate it mate:grin:

What you mean pattern convergence changed pretty quick?

I like pattern as I prefer z&b (even though I fly brits).
Guess point convergence is good if one sneaks up.

You got more info on which type pattern or point that was used for what and by whom and why?

It's hard to find concrete evedence of what the 'Pattern' was but it wasn't a single point (if anyone knows what it was let me know).

Fred Roberts just says that initially they set the guns to fire a pattern and that after Dunkirk pilots asked for them to be converged to a point (Quote: " the size of a dartboard"). I've seen photo's that appear to show the target they used to align the guns to this pattern and it looks like it was 4 points (roughly high and low and left and right) about 4 or 5 feet left to right and maybe 3 or 4 feet top to bottom (it's hard to tell). It's in a book I have somwhere, I'll try to find it. So I'm guessing they 'paired' the guns.

Pete Brothers (RAF) says that in order to make sure you killed what you were shooting at you needed to get in close, very close, and the original pattern meant that, because the guns fired upwards slightly, (11 degrees I think) when you got in close your bullets went over the top. He started at 250 yards, single point but then went to 50 yards. (This was for the 8 x Brownings) simply because it was "much more devastating" and accurate. He preffered to fly through the rear-gunners crossfire "collecting a couple of holes, if you were lucky" kill the rear-gunner and then get as close as possible and give them a good 4 second burst - He reckoned even the bombers would go down from a 4 second burst at 50 yards.

200 yards seems to have been the most used distance on average and was more effective for head-on attacks, a 2 second burst starting at 400 yards into the cockpit, then turn down the line and try and get another one. Then get the hell out of there.

Another bit of interesting info from Fred Roberts was that the only person allowed to fire the guns was the pilot, the armourers aligned the guns using a periscope that looked down the barrel, they never test fired them unless the pilot wanted to.

quick question
why we don't have a smoke tracers :confused:

They are there, but they are not called tracers, they are the Mk IV incendiary.

Basically a dual purpose, incendiary / smoke tracer. No visible light.

Why only have a couple of guns with armor peircing ammo, was it too expensive?

Partly to do with supply, but it was basically deemed too ineffective. AP is only effective if it hits 'straight on'. They found that the bullets would tumble as they passed through the superstructure drastically losing speed and just bounce off any armour plate (this applies mainy to bombers). Ball ammo didn't suffer from this effect (tumble) and was mainly there because it was in plentiful supply and it was pretty good at killing the crew.

Interestingly, the Germans realised this way before the Brits and they phased AP out except for specialised roles - ie. Ground attack. They knew the best way to bring down an aircraft was to use HE rounds, hence the early adoption of cannons.

EDIT: Another point about the RAF guns during the BoB was that they tended to load all the guns with the same type of ammo, they didn't mix it. This was because they found that the different recoil characteristics of the rounds meant the guns were more likley to jam if mixed ammo was used. There were exceptions of course, but this was the standard for RAF armourers. If you watch any RAF BoB gun camera footage you can notice this.

thanks winny for the reply:-)