This file is an absolute banger.

28th Feb 1934, stamped: MOST SECRET

This is around when the machinery of the Empire really began to prepare for war with Germany.

Chamberlain, in 1934 in the same MOST SECRET file commented:

"it was apparent that 5 years was the shortest possible time in which existing deficiencies could be made good. This was on the assumption that within that time Germany continued her arming....

.... we should be in a position to deal with Germany at Sea, especially if we had the assistance of France, and that the greatest potential threat lay in the aquisition of submarines and aircraft by Germany.... our expeditionary force should defend Holland against Germany."

That year Chamberlain (then Chancellor) threw out the Defence Requirements committee estimates on required new RAF Squadrons, by adding ten to the number, against strong opposition from Lord Hankey, who insisted the British estimates of German war preparation were hopelessly exaggerated.

A few months later, the Air Ministry issued Type Specification F.37/34 (the 37th fighter specification to be issued in the calendar year 1934) to industry, it led to Supermarine scrapping their hopeless Type 224 aircraft, and directly led to the Spitfire.

One year later, 1935, Britain initiated discussions with the USA about supply of vast volumes of 100 Octane fuel to Britain.

Two years later, 1936, the first mass produced military aero engines rolled off the production lines, in new factories turned over to aero-engines. All setup, paid for and organized by the State. Five "shadow" factories were set up, Austin, Daimler, Rover, Standard and Humber, merely for Bristol engines alone.

In the same way the MOST SECRET file mentioned, "as long as every German act at home belies them", at home, these actions (which were mostly highly classified state secrets) belied the idea that Britain was placating Hitler. It was little more than a thin plaster facade, covering what was really happening.

Two months before the Prime Minister declared "Peace for our time!" in 1938 (a year before the five year preparation time he had committed to had been completed), Rolls-Royce signed the deal with the Air Ministry for the state to set up a mass production plant for Merlin military aero engines in Crewe. This would soon by joined by another factory in Glasgow.

Key strategic lessons from history, which apparently, remain almost as un-heeded as they were in the 1930`s and 1940`s among several of the less fortunate protagonists,

@RoyalAirForce @almurray @QinetiQ @AeroSociety

1) If you do not control the metallic and petrochemical resources to complete your mission, you will fail. Listen to the supply analysts, and if they say no, either do not engage in the project, or put in place a plan to get those resources under your control before you do.

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In the late 1930`s German analysts provided the Luftwaffe with detailed appraisals of the German stocks and production of key strategic metals for aviation, the picture painted was pitiful. These concerns were ignored, and faith was placed in the mission providing its own resources through conquest, which was fine so long as every single campaign suceeded in sucession... they did not, and Nickel, Cobalt, Tungsten and even rubber shortages proved crippling to the German war economy. All this was known before the campaigns were embarked upon.
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2) Your scientists must have a direct link to frontline operators, where limiations, failures, sucesses and anticipated requirements can be voiced directly from the operational personell to the scientific staff, do not rely on memos. If your scientists dont know exactly what the requirements are they will develop the wrong equiptment, and the more barriers you put between those using the eqipitment and the scientists, the less accurate will be the feedback.

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Dr Walter Georgii was interrogated by the Allies in 1945, he wrote a paper called "A Scientists View of the Defeat". In it he ridiculed the policy of not having German scientists in frontline weapons trials debriefings as a standard procedure. It was carried out on an ad-hoc basis for certain projects, but never to the level needed, as such considerable retardation was experienced in Germany comparing the equiptment which could have been provided, and that which was actually delivered.
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3) Even in 1930 the world was becoming so technological, that it was critical that a sucessful Air Force needed to employ or use the services of first rate scientists. The reason for that, is that if the "wishlist" from your pilots is given to administrators, even reasonaly good ones, they cannot possibly evaluate their merits. You cannot run a military organization without an absolutely top class scientific staff.

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Budgets were so tight in 1930, that the RAF had hardly any top scientific staff on their payroll, this certainly contributed to severel very poor descisions, such as almost entirely ignoring a survey of pilots the year after, who demanded advances such as fuel injection. The report was passed to RAF HQ, and nothing more was heard of again until nearly a decade later when Spitfires and Hurricanes started stalling when trying to dive to follow German fighters, who had fuel injected engines.
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4) Do not pay sole attention to the requirements of the war YOU wish to conduct, you have to also understand the war (whatever your wishes may be) that the enemy will conduct against YOU. It may prove to be highly inconvenient !

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German aircraft from mid-1942 onwards began to seriously fall behind the very latest allied types in high altitude performance, this was a crushing blow, and dramatically lowered the efficacy of the Luftwaffe in the defence of Germany by Luftflotte Reich. This was however not due to any lack of technical aptitude in Germany, where their engineers had already gone a long way to developing the same 2-stage supercharging that Rolls-Royce famously deployed in the Spitfire Mk 9 in mid 1942. These developments were halted in about 1938, according to famous German aircraft designer Kurt Tank, the reason for this was that the Luftwaffe was seen by the leading Nazi`s as a tool to support ground warfare, Blitzkrieg, and the appetite to pour resources into making fighters in 1939 which could fly to 40,000 feet seemed to them entirely useless and wasteful. But, their opponents had no such interest in limiting themselves and outclassed the Luftwaffe in mid 1942 with a 2-stage supercharger which had already been proposed and tested in Germany years before the war, then left on a shelf.
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5) Small things matter, and a holistic view is needed for intellectual investment. You may have an adequate scientific staff now, but if the war carries on, will you still in five, eight or ten years ?

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In Germany Nazi paranoia resulted in the banning of many amateur radio club activities, as they wished to discourage unvetted information leaving Germany by radio. This shattered the buoyant German anateur radio club societies in the 1930`s, and when after an initial lead in electronic warfare, Germany began to fall behind in 1943, the German secretary of state for Air, Erhard Milch, dryly reminded Göring that they themselves had severely damaged the future supply of capable radio amateurs to become the radio professionals of tomorrow.
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6) Forward planning can be just as effective as late application of huge resources. Britain has carefully laid a narrative that at the last minuite we were saved by both America and Churchill from the weak and useless appeasers such as Chamberlain. The truth is very different, Britain had a massive imperial defence organization, which had formed during the Boer War. Literally called the Committee of Imperial Defence, they ensured careful, well planned and significant defence expenditure under Chamberlain, years before Churchill.

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In 1932-34, Britain spent TEN TIMES the amount Americans did on aero-engine development ($2 Million USD - unadjusted). Aero-engine developments have a "lag" of at least 5 years. Hence, nearer the outbreak of war, the USA was not in the position her resources might indicate, and Britain was, just in time - and not by accident. This is the reaon reason the Spitfire and Hurricane arrived in 1940.
=========== 1) 1938 chart in the Luftwaffe top level meeting records, showing that Germany produced 0.5% of global bauxite ore, needed for Aluminium production.

Britain controlled about 13% and the USA, 30%.

In fact this was one of the least worrying charts.

In WW2 history, with the possible exception of Chamberlain`s policies in the 1930`s and entrenched views about Britain vs. Nazi Germany`s relative level of organizational prowess, almost nothing is as badly explained, misunderstood, and stupidly presented as that of aircraft fuels in the Second World War, which as it was the first "Air War" was utterly pivotal.

I have helpfully pre-prepared a 1/4 million word treatise for you on this topic. However, accepting that this might appear to be an unreasonable response to a reasonable question, I will do my best within the laws of space and time to explain a few of the more important aspects of that in a shorter format.

Fuel in an aeroplane can make the difference between basically the same plane going at 350 or 450mph, which is the rough difference in top speed between a pre-WW2 plane, and the peak of final wartime development, in other words, the difference between being shot down immediately witout even seeing your attacker, and winning a war (or at least being one of the prerequsites to it).

The fuel in a WW2 fighter (and any petrol engine) needs to do several things very well all at once.

1) To not boil at low pressure, otherwise it will boil in the fuel tanks in the wings and in the float carburettor float bowl (which is connected to external atmosphere, if you`re daft enough to use a float carburettor.)

2) To DEFINETLY boil at a temperature LESS than the oil temperature of the engine, or, the fuel will progressively accumulate in the oil, and slowly destroy your bearings, as it is very thin compared to engine oil.

3) To not eat your fuel tanks and fuel lines and rubber seals (useful chemicals such as Methanol and sulphuric and nitric acids tend to do this, these acids carry extra oxygen which are chemically very useful)

4) To not immediately kill everyone who touches it (unfortunately many very useful fuel type chemicals are absurdly toxic and can kill through simple skin exposure)

5) To not explode if roughly handled (sadly making Hydrogen Peroxide and pure oxygen rather tricky)

6) Not to burn invisibly, Methanol does this, and is quite unamusing as everyone else just sees you running around shouting, apparently at nothing, until you die.

7) To be able to be made in millions of gallons and distributed all over the world in simple barells without going "off".

8) To burn instead of exploding with a shockwave when ignited at extreme pressures and temperatures, the ability NOT to do this was known as the Octane number, higher being "better". The higher this number (sort-of) the more power you can get out of the engine, as you can shove more air and fuel into the cylinder with a massive supercharger which means more atoms reacting and more energy release.

9) To preferably be supplied irrespective of enemy trade interventions, which basically means you have to make it with your own equiptment and raw materials.

There are more, but you get the idea, making aeroplane fuels is bloody hard work.

In the early days of the first world war, almost nothing was known about any of the above, and the engines started off with the carburettor being a bit of rope with one end dunked in the fuel tank. Fuels introduced thusly, had only one overriding reqirement, to be easy to evaporate, since this was linked to the specific gravity of the fuel, in WW1, aero engine fuels were graded by sticking them in a bucket and weighing them !

This soon proved to be of only limited use as some engines started blowing themselves to bits anyway, and it was realised that some fuels burned "nicely" and some "grumpily".

Eventually in the USA this resulted in the Co-Operative Fuel Research Committee being formed in the 1921, and the Waukesha company was tasked with the design and manufacture of a standard test engine which would be used by all firms for testing new fuels. Thus in 1928 was born the first “CFR” Test engine (Co-operative Fuels Research). It operated by moving the whole cylinder head up and down relative to the piston crown with an easily adjustable mechanism. Which was regarded at the time as a far better solution than previous methods which included taking the cylinder head off and installing a thicker head gasket to decrease the compression ratio. The man mostly responsible was the Chief Research Engineer, Arthur W. Pope. Thousands of engines were built and sent all over the world in the following years. It was a tremendous commercial sucess.

This led to the invention of the "Octane" number, where zero octane was how Hexane reacted to being burned (it merrily exploded at the slightest provocation) and 100 Octane was how Iso-Octane behaved, which was very stoic and burned predictably and nicely even when boosted to high pressures in the cylinder.

In Britain Sir Henry Tizard, Randal Pye and Ricardo collaborated and came up with the "Toluene Number", which was in theory even better, because Toluene was even more stoic than Iso-octane. However, for reasons nobody really understands from a technical perspective, the Octane scale stuck.

There was however, as Captain Blackadder liked to say, "ONE... SMALL...PROBLEM". The Octane scale was only useful as it was better than literally weighing fuel in buckets on a bathroom scale.

But, it was tested on a laboratory engine, which bore NO resemblance in any design respect to the engines in aeroplanes (or cars) at ONE specific speed and ignition point. It was in fact possible for a fuel with a higher octane number to have LOWER power in one engine type than another.

The engineers to first realise and record this, were of course the Germans. For they had pursued Direct Fuel injection, after the British had thrown away a lead in this technology in the 20`s, and had understood tha the nuances of the new state of the art aero engine made the octane number worthless. By the mid 1930`s German aero engine designers consigned the conventional octane number to the scrap heap.

However, they had rather serious supply issues, and after experience in the first world war, they realised that since there was almost no crude oil in Germany, and that neighbors got grumpy after wars started that they needed to get fuel by "other means".

They invested heavily in the Bergius Hydrogenation process, which involved compressing Hydrogen gas and carbon rich slurry together under immense pressure. Obviously reacting the carbon and hydrogen to create Hydrocarbons..... of almost any type depending on the process control. In other words fuel and oil.

To get both of these you need only ONE thing, Coal mines, which Germany had in VAST quantity.

In the 1930`s Germany began building a huge Hydrogenation fuel capability, which could in principal produce virtually ANY Hydrocarbon needed. But, there was a catch, with the type of coal Germany had, if you wanted to run the plants to their maximum throughput, you ended up with fuels very high in "Aromatics", Benzene, Toluele and Xylene. These just so happened to give you extraordinarily high engine power but ONLY if you ran the engines at fuel rich mixtures. At lean mixtures needed for economic running, they were average.

What were to become the Allied countries had no such worries, Britain had an enormous global empire with numerous productive crude oil sources, and the USA was so full of crude oil it was almost farting through the rivetts.

However it was actually surprisingly difficult to make really outstanding fuels without additives to boost the Octane number, the best that had been found, through trial and error, was Tetra-Ethyl-Lead, and its manufacture was guarded by US patents. But commercial skullduggery was at work, and the US Firm Ethyl Corporation, sold Nazi Germany the complete plans to build T.E.L. manufacturing plants.

This was though hardly bucking the trend, because who had invested in, build, and even underwritten the German hydrogenation fuel plants?

Britain and America, this we know as sheepishly in WW2 intelligence files, the British lay out why they knew nearly everthing about German aviation fuel plant capability, we had the reciepts. For Britain was also interested in Hydrogenation, we had the 5th largest coal deposits on earth (Germany being 3rd) and the diffiulties to supply which U-Boats might pose had not been lost on us. Britain also embarked on a large fuel from coal programme with I.C.I., the goal was that a battle of the size of the Battle of Britian, could be supplied by our own coal alone, with no supplies from America. Own own fuels chemists on our Hydrogenation Programme kept close tabs on that which was happening in Germany.

Although Britian had this contingency in motion, we had also since 1935 been in close contact with the US Army Air Corps, about supply of aviation fuel from America, the USA had pioneered the Alkylation process, which enabled production of a huge volume of the Octane scale top reference fuel at economic cost.

Britain planned for it, but we built our own synthetic plants at vast cost anyway, in case a U-Boat embargo prevented imports.

Germany meanwhile had built a massive underground system of fuel storage sites under a fake trade name "WIFO" which was ostensibly a trade organization, but was really, a secret military avaiation fuel storage capacity, they began purchasing vast volumes of fuel from abroad to fill the tanks.

When the Lufwaffe began operating they were using foreign imported fuels, and slowly the migrated from 1939 to 1941 to their own synthetic fuels from coal.

However it was very rushed and disaster struck twice in sucession, first the latest (and in my view very best) Messerschmitt Bf 109-F model with a new engine, and array of aerodynamic advances such as radiator boundary layer bypass, started dropping out of the sky.

After months of investigation, it was found that the new fuel tanks, made of synthetic rubber impregnated fabrid, safe with the generic internationally sourced fuels, reacted chemically to the German synthetic fuels, ruining its octane resistance. The reaction took 2 weeks to occur fully which made diagnosis extremely difficult.

At about the same time, the engine bearings were being destoyed, after the German synthetic fuels were modified at the last minuite to maximise production rates, the modified fuel, evaporated at too high a temperature, and so the direct injected engines accumulated fuel in the oil gradually until the bearings gave out once the fuel fraction in the oil reached about 15%.

These problems were solved eventually, but the Germans were left a quandry, their fuels, could only perform at their best with very fuel mix mixtures, which meant very high power. But, they had run out of Cobalt and Nickel, which rendered their valves suceseptible to corrosion, which generated lethal detonation.

British Intelligence, being immensely well infomed and capable, with the scientists from I.C.I. who had helped Germany build their infrastructure, discovered it first, "it is a mystery" they wrote... wht the Germans are not using aero engines with extremely high power, because their fuels clearly permit it.

The Germans could not, becuse their metallurgists were powerless to use the fuel to its potential, which was always equal to or even better than the best Allied 100 Octane fuel throughout the whole war.

This led to the idea that German synthetic aero engine fuel was useless, in fact a lot of it was of low potential, but their top grades, C2 and C3 were probably better in terms of maximum power potential to even the ultimate Allied 150 grade fuel of 1945, but this was never realised in combat due to metallurgically induced hot corrosion of the valves, which capped the maximum possible supercharger boost pressure.

The British, once it became clear that US imports would be able to satisfy R.A.F. requirements, stopped erection of an even bigger synthetic fuel plant, but the British synthetic programme operated throughout WW2 supplying aviation fuel for the R.A.F. Had it been needed, it would likely have been able to supply the R.A.F. with aviation fuel in the Battle of Britain, although once the immense air fleets of 1944 had materialised, with 1000 bombers per raid plus escorts only the fuel from the USA and the British empire combined was enough to satisfy it, just.

In short, the Allies had reliable, consistent fuel, and engines with the metal alloys to take maximum advantave of them.

Germany had in some ways more advanced fuels for maximum power but due to the requrements to push for maximum throughput, were hadicapped with constant changes in the fuel composition and engines which never had the metals needed to make the most of them. Because their fighter fuel was necessarily of aromatic compound, it naturally produced this huge excess of power potential by default, which is why they kept making the C3 fuel in addition to the very basic 87 octane "bomber fuel" B4. C3, at rich mixture, had an effective octane number at rich mixture of about 150+ octane.

Because the Octane scale "ended" at 100, anything above it was called the "Performance Number" which was a simple multiple of its performance at 100 Octane, a fudge which would probably not have been needed had Toluene been chosen as the top reference scale as the British scientist Tizard had wanted....

So to this day, German fuels are regarded as useless and Allied fuels are regarded as superlative.

Neither is an accurate statement because the qualities of he fuels and the chemists behind them did not manifest in terms of the measured performance potential of the fighters and bombers which used them.

When SHELL Thornton Aero Engine Laboratory tested the BMW 801 aero engine on British 100/130 octane fuel, as opposed to the original German C3 fuel, the power went DOWN.

https://x.com/CalumDouglas1/status/1984970296563060786

I`ve made a few posts like this over the years, but this is a slightly different take on it.

After six years of extremely intense research into aviation engineering before, and during the Second World War, what six things surprised me the most ?

1) Technical Intelligence.

I couldn't believe the pages of fuel chemists at I.C.I. and their peers discussing spectrographic analysis of German fighter aircraft fuels, and correctly deducing extremely complex engine combustion issues in their enemy`s engines, which I only knew about myself because 75 years later - I had copies of the German internal reports detailing the problems from the other side. Its amazing having both sets of paperwork and comparing what one side THINKS it knows compared to what the other is ACTUALLY doing in parallel.

2) The engineering standard in the aviation design offices of all combatants.

So much mathematics, so little guesswork. These were astonishing people, I`m not sure people like that are still alive today, certainly not in enough numbers to do that again without computers.

3) How many questions which to quote one reviewer of my book had been "bouncing around the aviation community for decades", which were answered right there in the archive files, and even more so, how much of what is generally considered "accepted" about that period in history, was either not supported by the original files, or was even flatly contradicted by it.

Its obvious that hundreds of extraordinary history books remain to be written, because the notion that the available files have all been picked clean is a nonsense. I suspect many researchers know many of these things, but are possibly not people who write books. There are lots of web forums where the top contributors (who get these files and read them in their own time) are far more knowledgeable than many quite famous historians you`ll see on TV talking about WW2.

4) Some legends really ARE true, not everything is there to be picked apart and debunked. On many topics what is often talked about today is just exactly as it was then, and in fact sometimes it is UNDER credited today.

The applies in the main to the De Havilland Mosquito, and also the P-51 Mustang, which both really were THAT good.

5) How organized the British military and industrial machine was. As far as I can tell the entire "muddling though" thing, and the "fighting alone" stuff, was really just propaganda designed to amplify the British achievements (of having won against "all odds"). In reality its amazing that Germany got as far as they did.

6) The Chamberlain "appeasement" stuff falls apart once you read the Committee of Imperial Defence (C.I.D.) files from 1935, where they state it is of the utmost importance to British defence to keep Hitler on friendly terms for the maximum possible duration. I`ve posted EXTENSIVELY about this before, but whilst Chamberlain certainly wanted to avoid a war, this was very much his personal opinion, and had not a great deal to do with what he was actually doing, which was funding the rebuilding of the RAF and the Royal Navy (against strong opposition!), and prioritising defence of the British homeland (as opposed to the empire).

Its literally impossible to watch films like DARKEST HOUR after you`ve read the C.I.D. files without throwing your popcorn at the screen in rage.


The R.A.F. which Churchill found himself with had mostly been planned and built under Chamberlains tenure. Who had fought with virtually no resources, carefully and cleverly to sacrifice expenses in the Far East to use the money to build the RAF at home.

The part of his plan (which was hardly one he invented, and which was the doctrine) was that the Army could be cut to fund the RAF and Navy, because France (who had a huge army and impressive land defences) would do the job of attacking future German advances on the ground.

It was a cataclysmic shock to everyone that France fell so easily. His idea in principle was sound, and was one shared by all opinion in the mid 30`s.

When you`re such a prodigy that its almost embarrasing.

A Battle of Britain Spitfire, modified to have the boost level set to +12 lbs supercharger boost on 100 octane fuel could reach a level top speed of about 360 mph, which it was allowed to do for a few minuites.

The final WW2 PR version of the De Havilland Mosquito, reached that SAME speed - but with its engines set to maximum ecomony cruise.

If the Mosquito pilot actually pushed the throttles fully forward, it vanished into the distance at 420mph.

If they kept their altitude up, it was almost impossible to intercept a Mosquito over Germany. The only real sucesses of any kind were by Messerschmitt 262 turbojet fighters, but even they struggled sometimes as the Jumo 004 jet engine power began to drop off quite fast well below the service ceiling of the PR Mosquito.

In my view clearly the best overall piston powered twin engine aircraft of WW2. With close runners up being the He 219 Uhu, Mitsubishi Ki-46 Dinah, Junkers 388, Beufighter and A-26 Invader. The lightning I feel misses out as it suffered from fundamental aerodynamic design flaws which made it unsafe in high speed dives, and were never totally resolved.

The Me 410 was actually quite good too, but due to the design issues (not actually caused by Messerschmitt in my view) with the 210, the 410 (which was really just a "fixed" 210) arrived about 3 years too late to do anything very useful. The Me 110 was also really quite good, but was just getting a bit dated by 1943.

After the war, a PR34 Mosquito cut the London to Capetown record to 21hours, the previous record being also held by an older De Havilland aircraft...


For the real enthusiast, note that the 4 quadrant photo of the Mosquito, is the real PR.34 version.

The RAF Bomber Command lost 55,000 airmen in WW2, although the USAAF also had losses which amount to not THAT dissimilar levels of horror, they did so in daylight and without really effective escort until quite late in the war. But arguably daylight without top class escort proved to be not much worse than bombing at night unescorted.

What always bothered me was, given how heavily armed the American heavy bombers were, WHY did we send so many pilots out armed with what were more or less pop-guns?

Luckily, an Operational Requirements War Diary gives much of the story of why Bomber Command had heavy bombers with such light weight defences.

When the British heavy bombers we all know were being planned, 303`s in power operated turrets WERE in fact pretty state of the art, and were dramatically better than the German tactic of having hand aimed guns (this is confirmed in WW2 German files also).

However, around the time of the Battle of Britain, self sealing fuel tanks, armored glass and aircraft steel armour plating generally gave the Luftwaffe quote:

"comparative immunity from small arms fire".

The British Air Staff were not surprised by this and had been planning for the day when 0.5" or 20mm cannon turrets would be needed back in 1939. After deliberations they decided that 0.5" was not enough of an improvement, and decided upon 20mm cannon turrets for the first new bomber specification issued to tender in January 1939 (B.1/39), which require EIGHT 20mm cannon.

Plans were made that the current operational and soon-to-be operational bombers could be converted to two, 20mm turrets.

However, the Air Staff had underestimated the additional equipment needed when war arrived, and the bombers rapidly became so overloaded with armour plating, new radios and suchlike that the designers stated the center of gravity of the bombers would not stand 20mm turrets whilst retaining safe flight characteristics. (a 2x20mm turret weighed 350lbs more than a 4x303 turret and had triple the drag).

At this point Lord Beaverbrook cancelled the B.1/39 programme, and also, all work on 20mm turrets (some time before mid 1940).

It was then decided that .5" guns were needed, as an improvement was required and 20mm was no longer an option. However, no 0.5" gun was being manufactured in England at the time, and the USA only promised a low volume of "export" pattern 0.5" guns (inferior to American service guns). When tested these showed only marginal gains over the .303.

Britain then entered into talks with Breda and FN, in Italy and Belgium respectively, but when Italy entered the war on the German side and Belgium was overrun, this plan floundered.

Boulton-Paul designed a 0.5" gun turret for manufacture in the USA, but trials at night showed that it was very hard to damp the 0.5" muzzle flash at night, which rapidly blinded the gunner and studies showed that such heavy turrets seriously lowered the range of the bomber, and it was inferred that the 0.5" gun at night was further rendered of low utility as the main ballastic advantage was longer range than 303, but at night, the gunner could never see far enough away to engage at the range where the 0.5" could "reach" out so much further than the .303 anyway.

The Air Staff concluded that therefore any armanent upgrade at night, was useless until the Mk II gyro gunsight was in service (letter dated 23rd Oct 1942)

Hopefully this helps explain the story of why the RAF had to endure such poor armament for so long, although it does seem that had it been given maximum priority, its possible that some more serious modifications could have been made the the bombers to apply very heavy armaments.

However, the whole reason that the Lancaster could carry so much bombload compared to American bombers, was that it was designed to carry maximum bombload so less bombers were needed, at the cost of armour and weapons when used at night.

So to have outfitted them adequately would have required material and doctrinal shifts in parallel, which was probably asking too much.

There were though, clearly many very sound and intractable reasons why larger armaments were not adopted, and so it was not just a case of wilful neglect of the Air Crew.