Real World BoB Hurricane Pilot's views on SOW

[BadAim]

Originally Posted by Skoshi Tiger

Not implied by me!

I think people are entitled to be passionate about their views and in some cases both sides of a discussion can be right or wrong. (or both at the same times which is confusing! )

I tend to find the paper is good at recording the big picture of an event, but there are a lot of little details that are next to impossible to record.

It's these little details and anecdotes that I find fascinating

Cheers!

That is exactly right, I have found that individual servicemen oftentimes have little understanding of what was going on around them in the big picture, but can recall the most minute details about their own little corner of the war.

I also also can relate to the pressure of the event impressing the memories deeply. I too can remember few things from 20 years ago, but I remember very clearly 28 years ago having my Camaro sideways at 110mph on the Highway sliding towards a bridge footing! I remember pulling off to the breakdown lane and getting out to walk off the adrenaline, much like the pilot in the Yak 50 thread. I can still taste that tinge of nickel on my tongue.
I have no Idea what the plate number on that car was, or the date of the incident, or any other myriad facts, but I can take you to the spot and describe what happened.

I guess my point is that the cold eye of the historian can only tell you a part of the story, and a necessary part, but it's the firsthand accounts that give history it's 'flavor'.

[Romanator21]

"As for the simulator I cannot pass comment for it was short and looked like a computer game which I used to play some years ago. I guess it is more like a game than a simulator. A hurricane would have been shot down long before it reached the Heinkels."

Although this could be in reference to the tail-gunners (the Hurricane was flying straight and level on their six for over a minute) it could also have something to do with the fighter escort. Just because the 109's had 20 minutes over London, didn't mean they couldn't be really nasty to the RAF. The Bf-109 was considered in many respects, the Spitfire's equal in the battle.

[Skoshi Tiger]

Originally Posted by Romanator21

Although this could be in reference to the tail-gunners (the Hurricane was flying straight and level on their six for over a minute) it could also have something to do with the fighter escort. Just because the 109's had 20 minutes over London, didn't mean they couldn't be really nasty to the RAF. The Bf-109 was considered in many respects, the Spitfire's equal in the battle.

To choose between either the 109 or spitfire at this stage of the war would be very hard indeed. In some respect the Spitfires had a distinct disadvantage, one being the Negative-G Cutout issue.

Where the Germans pilots had a lot more experience that the British at this stage, the British however had the Home-Ground advantage.

This is going to be one of the interesting things about the BOB Sim. How evenly matched the aircraft were!

Cheers!

[winny]

Originally Posted by swiss

You're right, only - no one did.

Other than that, I tend to trust paper over memories.

well, whatever.

Really? Even your own? I was in a car crash 20 years ago. I remember it all vividly.

As for the BoB pilot saying the hurricane would have been shot down long before it got to the Heinkels he's absolutley right. Because no matter how realistic SoW is it's still a game. If you approached like that in IL-2 you'd get killed pretty quick. In real life it's not a case of seeing how much damage your plane can take before you bail out completley uninjured. There were real bullets. It only takes one to kill the pilot.

[mazex]

Originally Posted by swiss

Look, the last thing I want is to degrade/belittle them.

But: If you asked me about things that happened 20years ago, most of it is blurry - and black and white.
I could'nt tell for sure.
20years.

My worst IRL incident as a pilot happened 24 years ago (i just described it in the YAK-thread):

http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showpos...8&postcount=26

I can remember silly details like that I was a bit to the right of the ideal line when the tow pilot disconnected, the line was not loaded fully, it was sunny with 2/8 of Cumulus, the exact jacket I had on me, the jacket the instructor had on him etc - but what did I do more in 1986... Ehh - chased girls and drank cheap wine at high school parties probably? Who did I date? Don't remember... I am pretty sure I will remember the incident when I am 90 too if I get the privilege to remain "clear in my mind".

So if I remember an incident like that where no one got hurt, why should not a BoB pilot remember what is was like back then?

[philip.ed]

Originally Posted by mazex

My worst IRL incident as a pilot happened 24 years ago (i just described it in the YAK-thread):

http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showpos...8&postcount=26


So if I remember an incident like that where no one got hurt, why should not a BoB pilot remember what is was like back then?

Because each sortie would merge into the next like sugar in water. Apart from episodes of considerable interest/excitement/danger etc, I can't see a pilot remembering everything as clearly as one might in such an incident as yours.
I do, however, think that their combined recollection of different episodes is enough to give a pretty damn good impression IMO Although if, for instance, you asked the pilot about tracer; would he be able to distinguish between the different types he may have used? I'm not sure.
I think a veterans perspective is the best evidence to give. At the end of the day, if you can fly a sortie in SoW and come about with nearly exactly the same images as the pilots of 1940, then that is (for me) a near perfect sim

[winny]

Originally Posted by philip.ed

Because each sortie would merge into the next like sugar in water. Apart from episodes of considerable interest/excitement/danger etc, I can't see a pilot remembering everything as clearly as one might in such an incident as yours.
I do, however, think that their combined recollection of different episodes is enough to give a pretty damn good impression IMO Although if, for instance, you asked the pilot about tracer; would he be able to distinguish between the different types he may have used? I'm not sure.
I think a veterans perspective is the best evidence to give. At the end of the day, if you can fly a sortie in SoW and come about with nearly exactly the same images as the pilots of 1940, then that is (for me) a near perfect sim

The only thing the BoB veteran needs to remember is that if you flew up behind a gaggle of heinkels like that you'd get killed. Not what day it was, or what he was wearing or what coulor the tracer was.. This thread is confusing memories and experience. Is anyone here arguing against what the guy said? I'm pretty sure you'd only need to see a friend killed once for it to register.. and for you not to forget it.

[Splitter]

Remember also that these guys were debriefed and probably did some commiserating among themselves over a pint or tea between missions. Those kinds of things tend to reinforce memories.

Now, we all know kill claims were always exaggerated. I don't think pilots all lied in these situations. They shot, stuff flew off the enemy plane, the enemy plane dove out of sight. Or several planes took shots at an enemy plane as it went down.

Still, I am thinking that some details got etched into their minds. Sometimes, "you just had to be there".

Splitter

[Blackdog_kt]

What Splitter says about debriefing holds quite some value. It's a generally accepted fact by medical scientists in the fields of neurology/psychiatry that going over the instinctive/automatic/subconscious experiences and brain functions while they are still fresh tends to imprint them a lot better in your conscious mind and memories.

I once read a book called "the tower of dreams" written by a French neurologist, which explains these things through a fictional story. A guy inherits a chateau from a distant uncle and upon moving there, he finds a chest filled with old manuscripts belonging to an ancestor from the 1700s. The manuscripts are actually dream journals and the book evolves into parallel storytelling between the two characters in the present and past. It's actually a very good book giving some insight on how our brain works by dressing it up inside a fictional story, while there still are scientific footnotes on the bottom of the pages that explain things professionally.

I think we can all relate to waking up after a very vivid dream and needing some time to get our bearings and acclimatize back to reality, but when we try to remember what we dreamed about later during the day we can't, despite the vividness or tension of the dream. However, if we take the time to think about and recollect the experience just after we wake up, it becomes that much easier to remember later.
A different instance would be going home drunk and having small memory lapses (not passed-out drunk, but sufficiently so that you miss a few small, 2-3 minute parts of the preceding night and wonder "now what happened between fact A and fact B?")
If you recall the events of the night before going to bed to sleep off the alcohol, you have a much better chance of eradicating these little memory gaps.

What happens is that the brain automatically discards information that's deemed superficial and places it into a subconscious "long time storage" area. However, mulling about it in your head tells your brain that it's important to you and it gets recalled to the conscious "fast access to data" area. Since the subconscious is the main material pool from which dreams get conjured up (some even say dreaming is like a "safety valve", we might be annoyed by something we don't realize and we get a bad dream about it to remind us to do something about it), recording these memories for later recollection is in fact a scientifically accepted tool by medical scientists dealing with a patient's mental health.

A mission debriefing would do just that, reinforce the importance of last mission's events which the human brain would tend to brush aside due to their repetitive nature. Flying a combat mission would be a nearly unforgettable experiece the first time, but flying 50 would have your brain going "bah, same all, same all, off to subconscious memory with you!", until someone forced you to focus and dwell on it, sending the signal that it's important stuff to remember

In fact, some time ago i came across a linked video from a website called factualTV, one that took the viewer through a Lancaster night bombing mission from noon with the engineers working on the aircraft till the next morning when the bombers returned. The actual debriefing process was a long and exhaustive one, with each crewmember interviewed by an officer separately, so as to prevent different airmen from influencing eachother's accounts. In fact they took so much care to prevent them mixing up their memories of the events, that watching it made you feel they were interrogated by enemies and not their own colleagues

I know i'm going off-topic here, but i find it very interesting to see how many different branches of science were used during WWII in the effort to indirectly but crucially improve combat results. Aside from aeronautics, engineering and the code breaking mathematicians led by Alan Turing there was tremendous work done in the UK in other fields, from the psychiatry and psychology used in these airmen debriefings to mathematical optimization models. I once read an article in a military history magazine dealing with the latter one, saying that they used business research algorithms and models to deduce all kinds of stuff, from the obvious logistics to the not so obvious, like the camouflage pattern of the ships in the atlantic convoys. Insane stuff and very interesting due to their relative obscurity, compared to the well known parts of the war.

Anyway, let's stop before i derail this further

[moilami]

Originally Posted by PeterPanPan

Flight Lieutenant John Greenwood flew Hurricanes in the Battle of Britain with RAF 253 Squadron. He shot down a Heinkel over Farnborough in August 1940. He is now 91.

Through a mutual friend, I managed to show him this ...

... and here's what he had to say.

"As for the simulator I cannot pass comment for it was short and looked like a computer game which I used to play some years ago. I guess it is more like a game than a simulator. A hurricane would have been shot down long before it reached the Heinkels."

Pretty blunt you might say but pretty revealing too.

Hmm, what else he could say when seeing a flight combat simulator? I think he had very good eyes! How else he could describe a stupid computer? I think he have very good brains!

Remember gentlemen, SoW is just a game, even though it should be by far the most awesome WWII combat flight simulation. It will look like a game, as will all games we see in, say, next 20 years.

Respect to the veteran who told what he saw and thought.