@@trooperwolfie But if you were going to make a convincing Spitfire prop to burn you could have done better than connect the propeller to a broomstick. Or if there's one place that CGI would have been appropriate, this would have been it. Anything better than the broomstick.
When I encounter the poorly done, arbitrarily “historical” AI videos, I always give them thumbs down, leave a post “AI generated garbage,“ and block the channel
@@CalibanRising When you want to have it correctly - the Flugwerft of the Deutsches Museum, Munich got the CASA 2.111 that memed for a Heinkel 111 in the original "Battle of Britain" movie - in its movie livery, german camouflage. They completely overhauled the plane (I got a friend in the workshop there, so got some closer looks) - and repainted it in its original spanish markings. Argument was that it is a spanish machine, that it would be wrong to have a 111 with Merlin engines and present that as german plane. I would have left the movie markings, and on the display notes would have explicitly said it is a spanish license build that was repainted in german colours for the movie. Just comes to my mind - the movie scheme also has a swastika on the fin, and swastikas on today's objects and today's images are an absolute no-go in Germany - maybe that was the reason, to be authentic movie status the swastika would have to remain, that is impossible, and overpainting it is unauthentic. Just looked it up, Guido Mutke's Me 262 that he landed in Dübendorf, Switzerland and that is now in the Deutsches Museum has no swastika in the repaint scheme. The swastika-paranoia can become hilarious - in original footage and photographs you can show as many swastikas as you want. I had subscribed to "Aeroplane Monthly", and got my copy directly per mail from the UK - swastikas on the old photos and on the photos of the rebuilt planes. Then one day I saw in a copy in a bookshop that there the old photos were untouched, but on all modern photos of the rebuilt planes someone had blotted out the swastikas with a marker. I wonder whether they would also blot out the swastika kill marks on allied planes of the finnish swastikas - I am really not a Nazionalist, but that is really too much.
Since AI became so perfect and (maybe expensive, but) easy to achieve, trick technique became boring. Now you can create ANYthing via AI, there are ZERO limits. You can make a movie with Tom Hanks and let him age from 15 to 75, and it all looks perfect. Back in the "good old days", there still was an "How could they have made this?" or "That looks quite impressive for a model" effect. I grow old...
The biggest problem with the role of the RAF was the notion of Spitfires flying at low level at Dunkirk when they’d be wide open to being shot down by Me109s flying down from above. The RAF was heavily engaged with the Luftwaffe but at a distance from Dunkirk and much higher up.
From the beginning of the war Germany was hunting ships in North Sea and over the Channel with heavy fighters like Do-17, Ju-88 and with anti ship equipped He-111s. The RAF flew patrols on lower levels to get rid of the ship hunters. Those low-level patrols were common. They simply not portrayed as much as the high alt air battles or bomber interception missions. But they were not less common or less important. Also they flew reconaissance around naval missions and air battles to search for sailors and pilots in the water. They wouldnt have done those missions with those Spitfires at this stage of the war, but the style of the mission in general would have not been unrealistic.
Could somebody actually please calculate the combined mass (and maybe total volume) of those about five thousand .303 British rounds, and how much less that is than the total 7.62x51mm NATO ammunition the brutes in Predator spew out from Jesse Ventura's ol'Painless alone?
YES! that ! why ? Because it's more exciting to get caught up in the action than to watch someone reload or head home out of ammo. Also, flying at low level looks so much cooler than seeing an airplane at 20,000 feet with no relative motion. I have 0.0 problem with this movie.
Oh Grud Yes. I caught up with the parents a couple of weeks back and even my Dad was slinging shit on that part of the movie and Dad has reached the stage of his life where he can get away with not caring about anything.
There’s also the way that the wings flop around on the ditching Spitfire, like they’re made from wet noodles. I may be misremembering the scene but doesn’t he perform a 180° turn in a gliding Spitfire in order to down the Stuka too? For me, the woeful lack of accuracy of the flying scenes ruined the entire film for me. For all of the money that was spent, they could have actually got those scenes right.
@@phlodel yes, little known fact that Spit pilots were trained to wingwalk, lean over and refill the ammo stores. They had special conditioning to be strong enough to dangle and pack.
Not true ,the Film stars used Brownings modified by the same company(Unlimited Ammo Pty Ltd ) that did the Colt six-shooters for the good guys in the Hollywood Westerns
"I know what you're thinkin', Fritz, 'did he fire 2400 rounds or 2800,' well, to tell you the truth, in all the excitement, I kind'a lost track myself, but seein' this is Spitfire MK II, with eight Browning caliber .303's and will tear your Messerschmitt to shreds, you gotta ask yourself just one question, 'do I feel lucky?'. . . . Well, , , do ya Fritz?
Er... Spanish Buchon (re)designed by herr Willy Messerschmidt using the very same engine that powered the Spitfire. It's incredible that anybody has kept some unit of that anecdotal aircraft and is still flying it.
Here's a nitpick. The Spitfire fuel gauge can only give a reading up to 37 gallons, even if there is more fuel in the tanks than that. A pilot just doesn't know exactly how much fuel they have until they get below 37 gallons. In the first scene of the planes they check their gauges and radio call out having 70 and 68 gallons. There is a 37 gal main tank, with the fuel gauge in it, and a 48 gallon aux tank that sits on top of the 37 gal tank. The 37 gal tank feeds the engine and the 48 gal tank feeds the 37 gal tank. Once the 48 gal tank is empty the 37 gal tank starts to drain and then the fuel gauge starts working.
Yes. This did come to mind after playing DCS quite a bit lately. The other thing that surprised me was when Tom Hardy switches over to a reserve tank. I'm sure that the Mk II had two fuel cocks but the layout looked a lot different to what was shown in the movie. Of course a good pilot would have a fairly good estimation of the fuel burn before the fuel contents could be shown.
@@CalibanRising well, yes and no. The early Spitfire Mk.I portrayed in Dunkirk had a gauge for both fuel tanks (you can tell it's an early one because he has to pump his undercarriage down at the end). The second gauge was deleted later in the Mk.I production run. Unfortunately, the cockpit scenes show only one gauge instead of the correct two. So he should have been able to know his fuel content as shown in the movie, but the movie doesn't actually give him the means of knowing it. But now we're REALLY splitting hairs. Honestly, in spite of the inaccuracies that are there (and some people like to jump on that band wagon and bash things that weren't actually wrong), I was more impressed with the things they did get right, that few, if any movies get right. Compared to reality, yeah, it has issues; compared to other movies, it's miles better.
Mk1 spittys had a top gauge for main tank & lower gauge for the 'drop tanks", main gauge on my records shows 48 gal & 35 gal, but we need to be sure we're speaking about British Imperial gallons which is not the same as US gallons.
@@JackManiacky Which gives the LIE to the nazi Galland’s boast in his memoirs “The First & the Last” that, when asked by Goering what the Luftwaffe pilots needed to win against the RAF, he allegedly replied “Give us Spitfires.” The ME109 was superior at the time to the earlier versions of the Spitfire in range & speed. Really remarkable the absence of nazis in Hitler’s Luftwaffe.
Unlimited ammo in movies doesn't bother me too much, as it is to be expected. But if my memory serves me well, judging by the varying light in the sky, that Spitfire must have been airborne for 12 hours and sometimes flipping back and forth in time. Still, better a "cut-corner" movie about Dunkirk than no movie at all. Reading the comments, I can't help but to think that from an historical awareness perspective, we should try to have a little indulgence for war movies that, despite all their faults, reach a wider audience than scholarly books. It is relatively easy to shout them down in flames for "artistic license" and sometimes "artistic ignorance", but I am pretty sure that is only discouraging the production of more historical movies (and good for the critic's ego). For example, in this case, there is more to the Dunkirk story than how much ammo a Spitfire actually carried and maybe the former is more important. And that movie might just be the only exposure that the Dunkirk story ever got with some people. Not everyone has Spielberg's budget. So, maybe, comment about the incongruities, but also praise the fact that a movie was made about a subject that is more and more forgotten and worthy of being remembered.
@@CalibanRising The issue with that though is you get films that don't portray the historical events correctly, and the faults enter the zeitgeist as being what actually happened. Pearl Harbour, Enigma etc portray a Hollywood-tinted version of actual events, where they decide to corrupt history to suite a Hollywood spin.
I'll take a Dunkirk over a Pearl Harbour any time 😂 Seriously though, in an age where we rarely see any war movies at all I applaud Nolan for tackling a movie where he surely must have known beforehand that it wouldn't be his biggest grossing film. It takes some cojones.
Well said. On the other hand of this video's satire, I can appreciate the acknowledgement of this sentiment by the viewers and the poster of the video which in my honest opinion should be the common sense when it comes to approaching films such as Dunkirk. At the end of the day, they are simply movies. They may have their faults to X or Y details, but that doesn't make them bad movies- Dunkirk is an excellent story-telling narrative, nor does it detract from engaging a larger audience from being educated, even if on a basic level or at all, of the story of a relevant topic!
@@CalibanRising Then show them the movie made in the 1950s starring John Mills. It was a better depiction of the realities of the Dunkirk evacuation than Nolan's heap of crap could ever be. But of course we can't do that because its not in colour and doesn't show enough of the actors gibbering in terror to meet modern 'woke' expectations.
Just came to say.... Battle of Britain..... best film ever. Saw it with my dad in 1968, seen it about 100 times, also, best film quotes, repeat please, they can teach monkeys to fly better than that!!!!
Strange how the polish pilots have to be boll**ked in polish, but when they are told that they are to be made operational they give a cheer as they understand it straight away with no translation!!
6:21 the percents should be other way round... But what his movie really taught me was one of the last scenes: the all metal Spitfire without juice burns like a torch, and when its engine burns out completely, you will find the prop was mounted on a long stick that ran through the engine. 😉
I heard that they were mainly Hurricanes at Dunkirk. The air tech was getting too good by then, so the army couldn't see the dog fights. They did their fighting either too high or just away from the beaches to be seen, so there was some resentment from the army, because they thought the RAF was not doing enough.
Yeap ! you may wel,l be right. I fully participated in the making of the movie and seen with my own eyes quite few mistakes made. Oddly enough, while mentionning them to a tech chap, Nolan happened to be standing close by and heard what I was saying. Result was, my name was forbiden to be in the generics. Yet I did many things to help the maknig of the movie. Well, all I can say is that Nolan is full of himself, rude and not a nice chap at all !
My friends grandfather was shot down during Dunkirk He was flying Defiants with 264 Squadron. Two confirmed stukas, One ,me109 probable. Shot down, his rear gunner was killed. He bailed out and returned to Britain with burns. His name Pilot Officer Samuel Richard Thomas.
@@timothylyons5686 My father had a similar experience in 1944. He was shot down over Normandy in a Lancaster and normally a rear gunner was the mid upper that night and he was called William Johnson, or Bill Johnson, Sergeant air gunner. He unfortunately lost three of his friends, who were fellow aircrew, including the pilot. He helped the Maquis resistance for two weeks, before being liberated by the British army.
@Dan-gk7ti On top of not being a nice guy, he made a complete bollocks of The Dunkirk Film! There were too few soldiers on the beach. Too few ships to evacuate 300,000, (more like 300.) And everyone was too clean. They were supposed to have been in combat! And Dunkirk was too clean and modern. And there were no signs of it being bombed and/or shelled! It was a shit film which had little or no resemblance to what it must really have been like!
@@gdutfulkbhh7537 it's bad, but honestly seeing modern buildings throughout the movie was a lot harder for me it completely broke the immersion, just stupid to not remove them in post
@@andgate2000 I dunno; I found the view from the Yak with some fake exhaust stacks tacked on quite jarring. Even a non-aviation geek would be confused by that. I thought it could easily have been cleaned up with a bit of discrete CGI. The Buchons and CASA could have been tweaked in edit too to make them look real. I was completely disengaged by the time the physics defying Spitfire scene rolled around. I thought the whole thing could have been good but was just kind of unfinished.
Dunkirk in one sentence: '10 to 12 years old british boy scouts in their brand new uniforms are playing WW2 during their summer holiday in France like they imagine how the war happened, after that getting home in a tram with 1990s interior.' Did anyone notice the tv-tower behind the beach, in 1940!!! The cute, undemaged and freshly in modern colors painted houses beside the 1980s bungalows? The nice and clean beaches without any trash or destroyed weapons? Did Nolan ever see some pictures of Dunkirk 1940 or read a book about it?
@@rolandjung9337 Aarghh, that train! Apparently the Swanage Railway offered them 1930s carriages, but Nolan thought that they "didn't look right, and the interiors were too dark". Couldn't make it up.
This film is an example of where CGI could have made it so much better. A lot of the mistakes you mentioned could easily have been remedied with clever use of CGI, removing new buildings & infrastructure, making the place look war ravaged & above all, filling the beaches with personnel. The beaches were almost empty in this film, whilst Tom Hardon flew around overhead for what seemed like forever with his infinite fuel tank & limitless ammo. All in all I thought it was very poor.
I'm a retired defense analyst and military historian with half a century of experience. Overlooking some of the over-dramatizations and historical and technical inaccuracies, I still thought Dunkirk was a brilliant film, and especially liked his use of differential chronology, synching the three timelines (ground, sea and air) only in the last half hour or so. In war, people have widely varying perceptions of time.
@ I am an active movie critic with over half a century of experience. In the same tone I can tell you that Nolan has yet to make a brilliant film. With him it is all visual without substance, atmosphere rather than scenario, and cardboard character development. I'm not even talking about his complete lack of historical accuracy.
I knew a guy who crewed a high-speed rescue launch out of Portrush NI during the War. He told me that they almost never pulled ditched Spitfire pilots out of water - the narrow fuselage, combined with the heavy Merlin up front and the scoops under the wings resulted in the wings coming off and the fuselage going straight down, often before the pilot could get out I also came across a memoir by asn Aussie Spitfire pilot who said essentially that ditched Spitfires swam rather then floated - as in, don’t ditch on the water
A pilot in my Dad's squadron chose to ditch his Spitfire in the sea north of Darwin, Australia rather than taking to his parachute. His aircraft touched down, being nose heavy pitched forward and disappeared in seconds. He didn't get out. R.I.P. Fg Off R. A. 'Dick' Palmer, 549 Sqn RAF. 8th November 1944.
The other and bigger problem is that spitfire running out of fuel, but still managing to shoot down a Stuka before gliding and making a perfect landing on the beach...
Strangeer things have happened. Half a century of researching military history has taught me that some of the most implausible stories are actually true, and if they were not well documented, people would chalk them up to bad writing and an overactive imagination.
@@StuartKoehlA Tiger tank of Schwere Panzer Abteilung 502 once shot down a Russian plane with its 88mm gun. Nobody would believe it if it wasn't true.
The RAF Spitfires at Dunkirk were accused of letting the ground forces down while being evacuated. The reason was that they were so high they would be difficult to see.
@@CalibanRising In this particular film I disagree. Nolan obviously could not afford 300,000 extras, but he probably could have afforded 300,000 cgi extras, plus cgi ships and cgi Luftwaffe aircraft, which would have made the film very much more realistic! I think not using cgi was a form of snobbery. It also ruined the film. Nolan obviously could not make it look ANYTHING like the real Dunkirk evacuation while sticking to his own rules! Youngsters of today who were judging the Dunkirk Evacuation from Nolan’s film could be excused for not understanding what all the fuss was about! In my opinion it did not portray The Dunkirk Evacuation in any way, shape, or form!
In this video the commentator keeps referring to the maximum number of rounds carried by the Spitfire. Shouldn't it be `per gun` as each gun is fired simultaneously? Mk1 Spitfire had 300 rounds per gun so it is how long 300 rounds lasts not 2400 rounds? 15.7 seconds or around 8 bursts.
your Fortis leader was Micheal Cain sitting in his Spitfire awaiting for orders to scramble at his base, and was worried in case his engine over-heated, from The Battle of Britain film...
I probably could have done a full video just focusing on all the errors really. The only thing I could say in support of the scene is that the Stuka is diving too, maybe that's how it was possible????
Glide distance when you're starting at ~250-300 mph? It's hard to say. The Spitfire is a very clean airplane, so it will take some time to slow down, during which time he can turn, maintain altitude, or even climb. I'm not as quick to dismiss it. This is basic energy management, and every pilot has to be able to estimate their energy state and judge a glide to a high degree of accuracy. Check out Bob Hoover's aerobatic routine with both engines shut off in a far more draggy aircraft than a Spitfire. It is surprising what is possible.
@@CalibanRising please do a full breakdown of all the technical inaccuracies in Dunkirk, if for no other reason than to wind up Chrissy Nolan'd. Pretty much any film I've ever watched that features aircraft has something wrong, so you could make an entire series out of it!
Here's another possibility, many of the shooting sequences are shown from different angles for visual interest. It is therefore possible that a 1.5 second burst pictured form the pilot's hand on stick pov is the same 1.5 sec burst shown in the next shot from a pov in front of the wing. Or Nolan and/or his editors knew nothing of Spitfire load outs or they did but ignored facts for art and storytelling. What bothers me more are the hundreds of clean faces wearing identical helmets and nice clean battledress trying to get off the beach after fighting a continuous battle across Belgium and France.
That's a fair point Pat. Some of those shots could be duplications, but to the best of my knowledge most of them represented unique bursts in the progression of the dogfight. Like I said, it's a movie and not a documentary. Still it was fun taking the mickey out of it.
And wearing heavy trenchcoats during hot weather, walking through modern Dunkirk when in fact the town was a bombed and blazing wreck, far too few troops, vehicles, ships and aircraft in shot throughout the movie.
@@fus149hammer5 dunkirk was more of an experiment for nolan, to see whether he could make a blockbuster with practical effects alone. and for such a challenge they got things fairly accurate compared to other war movies that are often cgi fests when it comes to air combat.
I liked the Dunkirk movie but I think it was made a little less impactful because there simply weren't enough flyable period aircraft available to make big scenes. 1969's Battle of Britain had some weaknesses in that there were no Dornier 17s or Junker 88s or Messerschmitt 110s, and the Stukas were models, and what Heinkel 111s and Bf 109s there were had the wrong engines, nevertheless there were enough 111s and 109s available (plus Hurricanes and Spitfires) to make some nice combat scenes, and that, coupled with camera tricks to give the illusion of more numbers, allowed the viewer to suspend disbelief. Yes, the Heinkels and Messerschmitts had Merlin engines and the Spitfires were mostly later war variants, but the scale of the battle on screen was still believable. Not so for Dunkirk. I appreciate Nolan not going the cheesy CGI route à la Red Baron and Pearl Harbor or 2019's Midway, as it looks awful, but watching one lonely Stuka attack the French beach doesn't make the Lufwaffe look that scary. Dunkirk was in real life a savage battle, but the movie just made it seem quiet and, in my opinion, rather on the boring side.
@@glyndavies486that was still only a temporary fix from mid 1941 til 1943 it prevented engine flooding/starving (making it nigh impossible to restart) but they couldn’t pull prolonged negative G manoeuvres
Come on everyone , it’s movie , not all viewers are experts , 99 % of people would have no idea of all the technical errors , holy shit you just need to see Braveheart to see historical errors on an epic scale , and Master and Commander to see how it should be done 😊
I really didn't like this film, it just didn't have any feeling of "reality" for me. In my opinion the 1958 film starring John Mills was far better, and gave a sense of the whole story.
The complete misunderstanding of the role of the 'Little Ships' and the sidelining almost to irrelevance of the Royal & Merchant Navies in the recent movie were appalling. Surely they could have acquired an historical adviser who actually knew something about the subject?
@@Beery1962 Perhaps the difference is that the 1958 movie was watched by many people who had first hand knowledge or experience, whereas Nolan's Dunkirk doesn't seem to have involved anyone who knew much about the events.
It is a truism to never do maths in front of a live audience. On the other hand, apparently it's also a good idea to never show maths written out in formula, otherwise you'll get gems like: 843 / 2400 = 30% 843 / 2800 = 35% Which is a delicious typo in a video specifically focused on counting rounds and ammo depletion. Otherwise very well done.
Try this, 350 rounds per Browning Mk II gun. The Browning Mk II fires at 1150 rounds per minute, or just barely over 19 rounds per second. 350 / 19 = 18.4 seconds of firing per gun, and since all guns carry the same load out and all guns fire simultaneously, ergo all guns fire exactly the same as one gun. 19 rounds per second from 8 guns: 19 * 8 = 152 bullets per second being fired for about 18 seconds. The dumb thing is, that statistically speaking, on the average the RAF had to fire 3500 round of .303 to shoot a bomber down and the Spitfire only carried 2800 rounds, so you had to be either very lucky, or an exceptionally good shot to shoot a bomber down with the Mk I Spitfire. We can be thankful that there were a number of such pilots.
@@TheLucanicLord Yes, of course. What I'm getting at is, that any clips from movies showing a Spitfire pulling in behind a bomber, squirting it s couple of seconds and having it burst into a fire ball are either total fiction, or the exception. Additionally, the RAF sent the Hurricanes in after the bombers and let the Spitfires deal with the 109s. Not that no Spitfires shot down any bombers. On the contrary. Only that what is mostly being shown in films et al is completely ignoring the Hurris, which outnumbered the Spits like 3 or 4 to 1.
You left out the never-ending glide. Presumably having expended that amazing amount of ammo, the plane now had the performance of a competition glider.
Interceptors generally glide like a brick anyway, but this took the biscuit. If sticking a big sheet of aluminium down at 85 degrees worked in reality, it would give you glider boys so much lift you'd rarely need to land 😂
Great analysis. Personally I can just about forgive the optimistic ammo (it's a movie after all), the 'broomstick' Merlin engine, and the yellow nose on the 109 (3 months too early). My initial problem with the dogfight after watching this movie though was how nice it was of the 109 pilot to sit on the Spitfire's tail for almost a full minute without firing even when perfectly in position!
The troops on the beaches never saw the RAF because they were intercepting the Luftwaffe at 10,000 to 25,000 ft ,en route to the beaches, Nolans narrative is not realist.
Also indulging in Spitfire worship, the fact that Dunkirk was the first battle that the Spitfire took part in. The Hawker Hurricane had already been fighting the war single handed from day one. And was present over Dunkirk in far greater numbers than the Spitfire. But if you’re making a WW2 war film it always has to be Spits. I even once saw a film about the Battle of France with Spitfires present, which it never was, only the Hurricanes served the RAF in France, but the film watchers always must have a Spitfires. The Hurricane won the Battle of Britain with the Spitfire as much needed support.
A Spitfire shot down the first German aircraft in Britain in November 1939, Dowding was very reluctant, to the point of refusing to deploy Spitfires outside of the UK, this was the case until he was unjustifiably removed from C in C Fighter Command in November 1940. So the Hurri had not been quite "fighting the war single handed"...
Worst part of the ditching of Collins' spitfire is that in addition to the spitfire notoriously NOT being able to ditch in a controlled manner (certainly wouldn't come to rest on the surface, they sank like rocks) Is that you clearly see the engine cowling of the prop aircraft they filmed for the pov of the diching BREAK OFF just in front of the cockpit on impact! Ironically, a far more realistic depiction of what ditching would have done to a spitfire! Oh and Collins landed with the prop spinning, yet somehow when the spitfire comes to rest floating on the surface the prop is undamaged! Aircraft props do not react well to suddenly hitting water at several hundred miles an hour.
I can accept infinite ammo as artistic licence, but whoever included the upside-down Union Jack should be court-marshalled. And, BTW, it is 'derring-do', not 'daring'
@caniconcananas7687 Without going through the video again, I can't tell you at which point it was, but there was a brief shot which I assumed to come from the film showing an inverted Union Jack which I think was being flown on the beach.
Have you seen A Dollar For The Dead with Emilio Estevez? He carries 2 Colts and fires them so fast you'd swear he's using machine pistols with unlimited ammo.
As an artist writing and illustrating aviation comics, your channel is an absolute goldmine. I can't help but notice the contradiction in the excerpts from the pilot's notes, though, one saying flaps should absolutely not be lowered for risk of the plane diving below, and the other one saying flaps should be lowered to reduce landing speed. Any idea as to the dates of these two versions, as well as reason for the change in procedure?
One is taken from the manual for a Spitfire Mk II and the other for a Mk IX, with the later suggesting the pilot should lower the flaps. My guess would be that in the 4 years or so between the first Spitfires arrive at 19 squadron and the arrival of the Mk IX, a better procedure had been tested. Landing with a lower flying speed may have led to more pilots surviving or longer on the surface.
Also as I understand it you see the same scene repeated from various vantage points in time. you 'll see Fortius engaging the Bomber from beach viewpoint then it'll switch to boat viewpoint thus repeating the engagement. God I hope that makes sense.
An other mystery for me: why Malta Spitfires had only 2 .303s in the wing (Vb and Vc models)? The outer ones usually removed and only 2x 20mm and 2x .303 were kept. Of course the 4x 20mm loadout for the Vc was instantly removed when they arrived at Malta - from the carriers - firstly to reduce weight and increase performance secondly to save the guns not to run out of the to quickly as the supply was very hard rely on. So maybe the 2 outer .303s were removed to save the guns for later as well?
An interesting idea. I've not come across this during Operation Dynamo or the BoB. I did read recently something about sending up Hurricanes against Japanese Oscars with 50% fuel and less ammo in order to make them competitive. I'd not heard of them removing guns in Malta, but to be fair I could see .303s only being useful as range detectors before letting fly with the 20 mm. Again, I've read this was a Japanese tactic.
1980s Train interiors in the scenes back in Blighty - PMSL in the cinema at that particular detail even after I'd kept a straight face over the glide rate of a bingo Spitfire and the weird lack of Engine when Tom Hard touches his kite on the beach.
Just want to put a recommendation in for 'First Light' by Geoffrey Wellum(a Spifire pilot), a great memoir of the Battle of Britain that I am reading at the moment. It's very immersive. If you are the type of person interested in this video you will enjoy it.
Yep, very good read and also amazing backstory to the book. If I remember correctly it was the historian James Holland that brought Geoff out of obscurity by encouraging him to publish the book. It enabled him to regain some financial freedom towards the end of his life and tell a great story.
Morning Phil, I really enjoy your videos, they are researched and entertaining. I haven't seen this movie, but after watching your video I really have no interest too. I fly recreationally and have an avid interest in history, I however cannot stand Hollywood movies with aircraft. Keep up the good work, cheers.
@ apparently they couldn’t officially, but that didn’t stop them from firing something like a hundred times more over the course of the entire run. Even plot armour has it’s cracks :p
@@CalibanRising Was there any form of selector, whereby one could choose to fire (say) 4, 6 or 8 guns? That would extend the period the ammunition would last, with a lesser rate of fire?
@ I would think that it conferred no benefit. If you fire, you want to hit the target as hard as possible and piss-off before his wingman did the same to you. I was just wondering if it had been tried...
Clearly, Tom Hardy was playing on arcade mode so he could reload in the air. A smaller issue I had found is with the He 111. They're armed with rifle calibre machine guns but in the film, it has a very slow "dunk dunk dunk" sound like a cannon.
El cálculo era exactamente el mismo usando una sola ametralladora, desde el momento en que, al apretar el botón, se disparan las 8. The calculation was exactly the same using a single machine gun, from the moment in which, when you press the button, all 8 are fired.
If you watch the film, the fuel consumption of that Spitfire is pretty dubious considering how long he is in the air and that the thing is supposedly hit in the fuel tanks too; that really leapt out at me more than the neverending ammunition when I watched it, because you kind of expect movies to have everlasting ammunition supplies in all the guns. Ironically enough and as cheesy as the movie Pearl Harbor is in its portrayal of the American Eagle Squadron pilots, what was good about that movie in terms of the flying sequences, was the way they really shook the camera frames up to make the combat look dramatic. It was hardly realistic in terms of how much an aeroplane shakes around when the guns fire and the scenarios were more than a little far fetched, but it was a very good dramatic choice to do that shaky-cam post production effect; it made the combat scenes very exciting, which is really what you want in a movie such as that. But all that Spitfire malarkey aside, what is worse in the film Dunkirk for me, is the portrayal of the BEF soldiers behaviour, which at times is nothing short of insulting to the guys who were really there. That's why I didn't think very highly of the movie. I daresay not every soldier who was there displayed exemplary behaviour, but the film turns the poor behaviour of some soldiers into a significant plot point and makes it seem like they were a bunch of things with modern-day sensibilities and that was pretty disrespectful to the many. As a result of that, I choose not to watch anything with Nolan's name on it now.
@ChockHolocaust "Pearl Harbor" was so cheesy for me, as an American, that I walked out on the movie, so I can relate. Don't get me started on "Eagle Squadron." I'll probably die from pure, perfectly distilled, absolutely refined hate.
Unless firing DeWilde API rounds, the .303 Browning was not very effective against German bombers. Those things were bullet sponges, and there are some famous pictures of a Heinkel 111 shot down over England, its rear fuselage looking like a colander, with more than 300 bullet holes. There's another photo of a Dornier 17 which actually made it back to France with more holes. Attacks from the rear usually only succeeded in putting a lot of holes in the control surfaces and killing off gunners. The fuel tanks in the wings were self-sealing, so an incendiary round was needed to torch the fuel. The radiators and coolant lines were another point of vulnerability, but these were pretty well protected from behind. The pilot and co-pilot were another critical component, but their armor seat backs were pretty effective against .303 rounds. On the other hand, attacks from dead ahead put nothing between the crew and those nasty bullets but a few panels of plexiglas. This is one reason Fighter Command was anxious to field cannon-armed fighters. You could easily expend ALL of your .303 rounds and still not bring down a bomber,
@@AlasdairMorrison-z8m The Germans lost about 700 fighters and 1000 bombers over England from July to September 1940. About three fourths of the bombers were lost to fighters, the remainder to flak and operational accidents. The British lost roughly 900 Spitfires and Hurricanes, plus about a dozen Defiants, almost all to fighters (Bf.209 and Bf.110). These are roughly double the number of kills claimed on both sides.
There was a story I ran across decades ago that the spitfires flew directly into the German bomber formations head-on during the battle of Britain. No explanation was given as to why. Your description of the spitfire ammo and German bombers makes that heads-on approach sensible to me now.
There are some supposedly good simulation games depicting WW2 battles. What did I learn from them? Apart from the frustrating scarcity of ammo, there was also the information overload and confusion. One starts off in something resembling a formation with bearings and organisation, BUT... after the first furball, all of that vanishes. Where am I and where are all the other planes? The sky is a HUGE place. Reforming into a semblance of organisation is extremely difficult. Trying to find your mates and looking out for something yet unseen that is intent on killing you, is not Hollywood-easy. The usual action is to recover your bearings, check your fuel and ammo, and figure out where your aerodrome is. With enough luck you can do some solo patrolling, but that's about it. In the Battle of Britain this problem was likely magnified were you to be flying a Bf109.
Hollywood just doesn't get this. The 2019 Midway film has Japanese A6M Zeros blazing away with their wing cannons despite the fact that they only had 60 rounds per cannon, about 7 seconds worth (same as the Messerschmitt BF109E at Dunkirk/Battle of Britain.)
Not the same. Also, "rivet counting' is a derogatory term used by those, typically in a majority, who don't know/care about verisimilitude. As long as they find something exciting, then more often than not, that will do fine. Film makers know this, so they make movies aimed more at that group. There are relatively few 'big' films that don't adhere to this doctrine.
@ I think this is sad because films require a certain suspension of belief and "historical" films with glaring errors can ruin that. Also truth is usually far more interesting than director's fantasies. A certain amount of license is allowed (for example, the Messerschmitt BF109s in the Battle of Britain film were Merlin engined Spanish version, but were the closest that could be obtained and looked much better than models.)
It's not just Nolan getting things wrong --- in the 2000 movie Pearl Harbor the P-40 Kittyhawks easily outmaneuver Zeros The hapless Zeros' pilots try to climb away only to be out accelerated by our 'good ol boys' ----- now >> that
I can recommend a good book about 75 Squadron RAAF in New Guinea who were equipped with P40s taking on the Japanese. It's called 44 Days by Michael Veitch an Australian author. It's very well researched and written although I am biased being Australian.
I previously overlooked this matter with the aerial scenes in 'Dunkirk', concentrating instead on the wrong-looking wheels-down landing on the beach. After having raised that elsewhere I was assured that it would have been possible, but surely still highly unlikely.
It’s just a movie. There not going to measure the exact timing of ammo available they have other priorities to get the move made and be successful and profitable. Measuring ammo would be extremely low on the priority list
Of course, and it's all down to the lack of genuine technical advisors. I'm thinking of that story of Christopher Lee who corrected Peter Jackson over the sound someone made when being stabbed in the back. He'd actually done it for real. Had a Bader or Galland been available I'm sure these little details would have been highlighted more.
Honestly a less than double load of ammo on a fighter is far from the most egregious thing I've seen in a war movie. I didn't even notice when I watched it in theater, although I'm pretty sure I did say afterward "that's why you open the canopy before you ditch" and "that's not what the Spitfire's fuel gauge looks like."
I remember a BBC documentary, way back in the 1990's, where a Battle of Britain Hurricane pilot talked about just how much ammo his plane carried. He said that there was only 18 seconds worth, on the outer 6 wing guns and 20 seconds on the inner 2 wing guns. The inner pair of guns always carried an extra 2 seconds worth of ammo, due to having room for a slightly larger ammo tray. This might have also been the same practice for the Spitfire. I know, from playing IL-2 Cliffs of Dover - Blitz, that 18 seconds worth of ammo (plus an extra 2 seconds worth on the inboard pair of guns) is very quickly used up, if one likes to "Spray 'n' Pray".
What got me about this film was that if they employed a technical expert his involvement was restricted to making the tea. For instance, if you decide to ditch or crash land, the first thing to do is to open the canopy in case it gets jammed by fuselage distortion. You need a guaranteed escape route but you can check what our characters do here. If landing on a potentially soft surface, like a beach, you keep the wheels up so you won’t have them dig in and put the aircraft on its back, again preventing escape; ask ACM John Allison! So our guy actually takes the time to put the gear down. Of course his engine failure is finally diagnosed at the end when it’s revealed the Germans have stolen the Spitfire’s engine and hung the prop on a scaffolding pole. Hi hum😞
Early Spits did not have a canopy jettison mechanism (that handle in the center of the canopy bow). You had to manually push back the hood and hope it stayed locked open while you ditched or tried to bail out. Also, regardless of what the flying notes said, pilots did try to ditch their Spitfires, usually because they were too low to bail out. The noted ace, Paddy Finucane, was killed after ditching his Spitfire. The problem was the radiator and oil cooler scoops under the wings tended to catch the waves and pull the plane under the water. The problem wss more exacerbated with the Hurricane, and its large belly radiator.
Interesting that the report mentioned the aircraft encountered as including the He-113. Was this due to the belief they were actually in service? I understood that they we few and far between with some being used to defend their factory only?
No, not as far as I know. I believe some electrically powered guns, such as in the Wildcat/Martlet could be selected or deselected by popping a breaker. The Spitfire Mk 1 didn't have the same option.
@@CalibanRising the spit mk 1 and hurricane 1 had a 3 position switch. Push up for outer guns , press middle for all push down for only inner. (Grand farther was ground crew on hurricane mk.i and mk.ii ) it was a hybrid electric/pneumatic system (he worked on electric systems) . It wasn't used that often as only 4 303 were not that effective apart from staffing soft ground targets.
Cyclic rate of fire can be affected by several factors. It would be tough to nail them all down to a single number, if even possible. An average rate of fire would be a better description.
Firing off more ammo than one has is a common trope in films. As per westerns where six shooters amazingly are often able to fire way over the 6 bullets they have - I think the final scenes in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were a deliberate exception, we see the doomed banditos reloading. Yep, no pilot would close the canopy when getting ready to ditch - maybe a fear of heights kept him from bailing out which was dangerous. The sinking of the plane and escape is inaccurate in many ways. In the movie the aircraft sinks slowly and level, which allowed the boat to dramatically save the day by smashing the jammed canopy. Single piston engine craft immediately nose down from the weight of the engine block and plunge under very fast. The frantic pilot tries to bang us way out using assorted objects as I recall. In every Spit scale model there is a diagonal bar on the inside of the door panel that is to be painted red. What perchance might that be? Why it was a crowbar clipped in place for a trapped pilot to use to break out in just such an emergency. But that would have the pilot save himself rather than by the dude on the boat. Dunkirk got the Spit’s undercoats right, half black and half white as per Dowdings ground observers ID scheme, although we hardly see it. So does The Battle of Britain in the opening scenes of Hurricanes in France. A couple of week later in June Dowding dropped this for some reason and ordered the fighter bottoms to be repainted the new light green Sky, which was so hard to get at that time that the ground crews usually used duck egg blue (very probably seen in the classic pic of vics of DW squadron), duck egg green, and sky blue which was the only actual light blue of the bunch, until Sky stocks were sufficient in Aug/Sept. The Battle of Britain seems to get that right too, the underside paints seem to vary. Dowding brought back the B&W system in modified form for a while in late 40.
The disjointed cliché ridden mess also mucked up the actor’s heads ‘following’ the view of the C.G. gliding Spitfire. The cartoon Spitfire was generated too high and far away so to make it match the actor head movements it had to cross the sky gliding at an impossible presumably supersonic speed. He should have paid more attention in maths classes. The later burning ‘Spitfire’ beach scene with an obvious skinny iron pipe for an engine supporting the propeller, posed with the huge modern era container cranes in the background shows he just didn’t care.
@ Using unmodified modern appearance Dunkirk was not intelligent and nor was quasi-religious use of small crowds of extras. It put me off going to see Oppenheimer.
What I don't understand in movies with dogfights in them is why do they shoot SO MUCH FOR NO REASON !? The planes already zoom, twist and turn around all over the place, with closeups on pilots' struggling faces and aerial shots of the machines being pushed to the limits (or sometimes way past them, looking at you Red Tails and your magic planes putting Kvochur's bell to shame) which already creates a lot of tension for the viewer... Why add moments where the pilots shoot the air not even close to the target !? Sure, might be because of nerves, but in that case why fire a full burst ? Half-second, eager shots somewhat close to the target would be more believable AND communicate how intense the fight is much more effectively in my opinion. (And that's ignoring Fortis 1 being flight leader, meaning that he's probably, and hopefully, familiar with aerial combat.)
Exhaust manifolds too on the side camshots of the Spitfire (not a Spitfire) they wouldn't bolt a camera to it ,they used an entirely different aircraft .Can't really blame them for not wanting to drill holes in original Spitfires though .Still really enjoyed the film for what it was. Don't think we'll ever get another hollywood or big budget British war film ever again sadly.
If you are asking yourself about the "chorizo" and "spanish" jokes it is because all the Bf-109 in this movie were Hispano-aviación Ha-1112 Buchón. A Bf-109 version built under license in Spain after the end of WW2. Due to the scarcity of Jumo engines the company bought a lot of surplus Merlin engines. All the Ha-1112 were made at my hometown of Seville, Spain. Triana neighbourhood, the plant is now a gym btw.
the total amount of rounds carried may have been 350 per MG as .303 ammo was supplied in 350 rd belts within the army & for anti-aircraft duty with the vickers MMGs at the time. So the armourers may have left the whole belt per gun if it fitted providing the total weight of aircraft + fuel + ammo would conform to combat efficiency? the browning MGs may well have been originally sorted for 300 rd belts as per US specs but as the Brits didn't want the 30cal calibre this might have been a factor for the space to carry the additional 50 rds? on the canopy on ditching into water - at this time the ditching rule had not got to all SQNs, at the Battle of Britian it was stated to make sure that canopy was always opened on crash landing OR ditching because the airframe being alluminium would warp and the canopy would jam. even the hammer supplied couldn't smash through the glass in time.
@@CalibanRising looking up some websites for the 1940 period with regards the RAAF pilots in the RAF stated 350 per gun, definately later in the Pacific the RAAF had 350 per gun (303) as my dad was a fitter/mechanic with 9RSU RAAF Attached to 80 Wing Which had the famous Grey Nurse squadrons 352, 354 one of which you have on the opening shot Face On for your video.
Thank you so much for this! I liked "Dunkirk", I did enjoy it. But that's partially because I managed to put my nerd instincts aside. Afterwards, I heard or read quite a few opinions calling it a realistic film, with the dogfights pictured perfectly, and that really pissed me off.
8:25 I don't know what aircraft they filmed in these over the wing shots but it is NOT a Spitfire. The shape of the nose is wrong, the wing root should be faired neatly to the fuselage, the exhaust is too high up, the rivets should be flush, not round head, the side of the fuselage is much too round and there's an odd black thing hanging down under the nose.
Anyone else notice that in the combat report of FO Carbury he claims to have shot down a HE 113 and another probable in combat south of London. The Heinkel HE 113 never existed it was a totally made up aircraft type.
Where did Fortis one get all that airspeed to catch a 109 in a zoom climb when he was on the deck? What!? Sorry I forgot about the afterburner all Spits had fitted about the time of Dunkirk.
I always though, that the hero was just landing due to fuel exhaustion. Thanks God, you found out he was hit in the fuel tank, just like in the reality.
The main problem with at least one of the Spitfires, in my estimation, is that the Merlin had been replaced by a broomstick.
Only if piloted by Harry Potter 😉🙂
@PaxAlotin No.. watch the final scenes with the Spitfire burning on the beach.. 😂
@ 👍
@@iskandartaib to be fair, they weren't going to burn and destroy a real historic plane and engine lol.🙂
@@trooperwolfie But if you were going to make a convincing Spitfire prop to burn you could have done better than connect the propeller to a broomstick. Or if there's one place that CGI would have been appropriate, this would have been it. Anything better than the broomstick.
When I encounter the poorly done, arbitrarily “historical” AI videos, I always give them thumbs down, leave a post “AI generated garbage,“ and block the channel
Yep, it's been tough for us guys who try to do it correctly.
Would that be because you consider it to be YOUR internet, and people can only have a bit of fun if it adheres to YOUR standards?
@@OlleetheowlOr could it be because they’re sh t?
@@CalibanRising When you want to have it correctly - the Flugwerft of the Deutsches Museum, Munich got the CASA 2.111 that memed for a Heinkel 111 in the original "Battle of Britain" movie - in its movie livery, german camouflage.
They completely overhauled the plane (I got a friend in the workshop there, so got some closer looks) - and repainted it in its original spanish markings.
Argument was that it is a spanish machine, that it would be wrong to have a 111 with Merlin engines and present that as german plane.
I would have left the movie markings, and on the display notes would have explicitly said it is a spanish license build that was repainted in german colours for the movie.
Just comes to my mind - the movie scheme also has a swastika on the fin, and swastikas on today's objects and today's images are an absolute no-go in Germany - maybe that was the reason, to be authentic movie status the swastika would have to remain, that is impossible, and overpainting it is unauthentic.
Just looked it up, Guido Mutke's Me 262 that he landed in Dübendorf, Switzerland and that is now in the Deutsches Museum has no swastika in the repaint scheme.
The swastika-paranoia can become hilarious - in original footage and photographs you can show as many swastikas as you want.
I had subscribed to "Aeroplane Monthly", and got my copy directly per mail from the UK - swastikas on the old photos and on the photos of the rebuilt planes.
Then one day I saw in a copy in a bookshop that there the old photos were untouched, but on all modern photos of the rebuilt planes someone had blotted out the swastikas with a marker.
I wonder whether they would also blot out the swastika kill marks on allied planes of the finnish swastikas - I am really not a Nazionalist, but that is really too much.
Since AI became so perfect and (maybe expensive, but) easy to achieve, trick technique became boring. Now you can create ANYthing via AI, there are ZERO limits.
You can make a movie with Tom Hanks and let him age from 15 to 75, and it all looks perfect.
Back in the "good old days", there still was an "How could they have made this?" or "That looks quite impressive for a model" effect.
I grow old...
The biggest problem with the role of the RAF was the notion of Spitfires flying at low level at Dunkirk when they’d be wide open to being shot down by Me109s flying down from above. The RAF was heavily engaged with the Luftwaffe but at a distance from Dunkirk and much higher up.
@richardbanker3910 doesn't the scottish pilot say at the start of the film that 'we are sitting ducks down here'?
It was well known amongst the RAF fighter pilots you had to stay high for fear of being jumped on by a 109
@@richardbanker3910 along with using more fuel at low level needlessly
From the beginning of the war Germany was hunting ships in North Sea and over the Channel with heavy fighters like Do-17, Ju-88 and with anti ship equipped He-111s. The RAF flew patrols on lower levels to get rid of the ship hunters. Those low-level patrols were common. They simply not portrayed as much as the high alt air battles or bomber interception missions. But they were not less common or less important.
Also they flew reconaissance around naval missions and air battles to search for sailors and pilots in the water.
They wouldnt have done those missions with those Spitfires at this stage of the war, but the style of the mission in general would have not been unrealistic.
Problem is the fuel needed to climb. The figures are available online
Surprise! Hollwood ignores ammunition limitations. Always did always will.
Like in the Westerns where they have 15 shot 6 shooters?
Could somebody actually please calculate the combined mass (and maybe total volume) of those about five thousand .303 British rounds, and how much less that is than the total 7.62x51mm NATO ammunition the brutes in Predator spew out from Jesse Ventura's ol'Painless alone?
YES! that ! why ? Because it's more exciting to get caught up in the action than to watch someone reload or head home out of ammo.
Also, flying at low level looks so much cooler than seeing an airplane at 20,000 feet with no relative motion. I have 0.0 problem with this movie.
@@williamkoppos7039 Yes! Reminds me of the MP-40s who fire incessantly without a mag change.
Even worse than the ammo count is the ridiculous scene where he runs out of fuel and glides beautifully along the coastline for ages.
Oh Grud Yes. I caught up with the parents a couple of weeks back and even my Dad was slinging shit on that part of the movie and Dad has reached the stage of his life where he can get away with not caring about anything.
As a glider pilot, that was my biggest gripe about that part of the film. That Spit had a better glide ratio than my glider!
It’s clearly a cinematic scene . Not meant to be accurate
There’s also the way that the wings flop around on the ditching Spitfire, like they’re made from wet noodles.
I may be misremembering the scene but doesn’t he perform a 180° turn in a gliding Spitfire in order to down the Stuka too?
For me, the woeful lack of accuracy of the flying scenes ruined the entire film for me.
For all of the money that was spent, they could have actually got those scenes right.
@@Southern21076then they should stop trying to sell them as accurate. Dont take my word loook over all the info. About these movies
It hasn't been declassified that the Brits perfected in flight rearming in 1939.
@@phlodel yes, little known fact that Spit pilots were trained to wingwalk, lean over and refill the ammo stores. They had special conditioning to be strong enough to dangle and pack.
@@achmadosman9807 I only heard that they did in-flight reloading, I didn't know how it was done. Thanks for letting me know how it was done.
@@phlodelit was never done.
If it hadn’t be classified how would you know?
Not true ,the Film stars used Brownings modified by the same company(Unlimited Ammo Pty Ltd ) that did the Colt six-shooters for the good guys in the Hollywood Westerns
@@shermansquires3979Woosh?
"I know what you're thinkin', Fritz, 'did he fire 2400 rounds or 2800,' well, to tell you the truth, in all the excitement, I kind'a lost track myself, but seein' this is Spitfire MK II, with eight Browning caliber .303's and will tear your Messerschmitt to shreds, you gotta ask yourself just one question, 'do I feel lucky?'. . . . Well, , , do ya Fritz?
Er... Spanish Buchon (re)designed by herr Willy Messerschmidt using the very same engine that powered the Spitfire.
It's incredible that anybody has kept some unit of that anecdotal aircraft and is still flying it.
🤣😂😁
@caniconcananas7687 Yes, I know.
Dirty Spitfire
british cope.
Here's a nitpick. The Spitfire fuel gauge can only give a reading up to 37 gallons, even if there is more fuel in the tanks than that. A pilot just doesn't know exactly how much fuel they have until they get below 37 gallons. In the first scene of the planes they check their gauges and radio call out having 70 and 68 gallons.
There is a 37 gal main tank, with the fuel gauge in it, and a 48 gallon aux tank that sits on top of the 37 gal tank. The 37 gal tank feeds the engine and the 48 gal tank feeds the 37 gal tank. Once the 48 gal tank is empty the 37 gal tank starts to drain and then the fuel gauge starts working.
Yes. This did come to mind after playing DCS quite a bit lately. The other thing that surprised me was when Tom Hardy switches over to a reserve tank. I'm sure that the Mk II had two fuel cocks but the layout looked a lot different to what was shown in the movie.
Of course a good pilot would have a fairly good estimation of the fuel burn before the fuel contents could be shown.
@@CalibanRising well, yes and no. The early Spitfire Mk.I portrayed in Dunkirk had a gauge for both fuel tanks (you can tell it's an early one because he has to pump his undercarriage down at the end). The second gauge was deleted later in the Mk.I production run. Unfortunately, the cockpit scenes show only one gauge instead of the correct two. So he should have been able to know his fuel content as shown in the movie, but the movie doesn't actually give him the means of knowing it. But now we're REALLY splitting hairs.
Honestly, in spite of the inaccuracies that are there (and some people like to jump on that band wagon and bash things that weren't actually wrong), I was more impressed with the things they did get right, that few, if any movies get right. Compared to reality, yeah, it has issues; compared to other movies, it's miles better.
Mk1 spittys had a top gauge for main tank & lower gauge for the 'drop tanks", main gauge on my records shows 48 gal & 35 gal, but we need to be sure we're speaking about British Imperial gallons which is not the same as US gallons.
@@auscam6666 As British kings are no more emperors of India, shouldn't the name of the British units be demoted from Imperial to just Royal? 😅
@@JackManiacky
Which gives the LIE to
the nazi Galland’s boast in his memoirs
“The First & the Last”
that, when asked by Goering what the
Luftwaffe pilots needed to win
against the RAF, he allegedly replied
“Give us Spitfires.”
The ME109 was superior at the time
to the earlier versions of the Spitfire
in range & speed.
Really remarkable the
absence of nazis
in Hitler’s Luftwaffe.
Unlimited ammo in movies doesn't bother me too much, as it is to be expected. But if my memory serves me well, judging by the varying light in the sky, that Spitfire must have been airborne for 12 hours and sometimes flipping back and forth in time. Still, better a "cut-corner" movie about Dunkirk than no movie at all. Reading the comments, I can't help but to think that from an historical awareness perspective, we should try to have a little indulgence for war movies that, despite all their faults, reach a wider audience than scholarly books. It is relatively easy to shout them down in flames for "artistic license" and sometimes "artistic ignorance", but I am pretty sure that is only discouraging the production of more historical movies (and good for the critic's ego). For example, in this case, there is more to the Dunkirk story than how much ammo a Spitfire actually carried and maybe the former is more important. And that movie might just be the only exposure that the Dunkirk story ever got with some people. Not everyone has Spielberg's budget. So, maybe, comment about the incongruities, but also praise the fact that a movie was made about a subject that is more and more forgotten and worthy of being remembered.
Some very fair points. This video is just a bit of satire really, but you're right the most important thing is the story is told to a new generation.
@@CalibanRising The issue with that though is you get films that don't portray the historical events correctly, and the faults enter the zeitgeist as being what actually happened. Pearl Harbour, Enigma etc portray a Hollywood-tinted version of actual events, where they decide to corrupt history to suite a Hollywood spin.
I'll take a Dunkirk over a Pearl Harbour any time 😂 Seriously though, in an age where we rarely see any war movies at all I applaud Nolan for tackling a movie where he surely must have known beforehand that it wouldn't be his biggest grossing film. It takes some cojones.
Well said. On the other hand of this video's satire, I can appreciate the acknowledgement of this sentiment by the viewers and the poster of the video which in my honest opinion should be the common sense when it comes to approaching films such as Dunkirk. At the end of the day, they are simply movies. They may have their faults to X or Y details, but that doesn't make them bad movies- Dunkirk is an excellent story-telling narrative, nor does it detract from engaging a larger audience from being educated, even if on a basic level or at all, of the story of a relevant topic!
@@CalibanRising Then show them the movie made in the 1950s starring John Mills. It was a better depiction of the realities of the Dunkirk evacuation than Nolan's heap of crap could ever be. But of course we can't do that because its not in colour and doesn't show enough of the actors gibbering in terror to meet modern 'woke' expectations.
Just came to say.... Battle of Britain..... best film ever. Saw it with my dad in 1968, seen it about 100 times, also, best film quotes, repeat please, they can teach monkeys to fly better than that!!!!
"Spring chicken to sh*tehawk in one easy lesson"
. . .takatakatakatakatakataka . . .
1969, it was still being made in ‘68.
Silence in polish !
Strange how the polish pilots have to be boll**ked in polish, but when they are told that they are to be made operational they give a cheer as they understand it straight away with no translation!!
6:21 the percents should be other way round...
But what his movie really taught me was one of the last scenes: the all metal Spitfire without juice burns like a torch, and when its engine burns out completely, you will find the prop was mounted on a long stick that ran through the engine. 😉
THANK YOU VERY MUCH!!!!Prip on a stick!
Prop.
The pilot was pedaling, I guess…
@@greghardy9476 th-cam.com/video/Zaa4MDpnJD0/w-d-xo.html
plus: deflection shots are for wuzzies
I heard that they were mainly Hurricanes at Dunkirk. The air tech was getting too good by then, so the army couldn't see the dog fights. They did their fighting either too high or just away from the beaches to be seen, so there was some resentment from the army, because they thought the RAF was not doing enough.
This was actually the first time Spits were deployed anywhere near France.
Yeap ! you may wel,l be right.
I fully participated in the making of the movie and seen with my own eyes quite few mistakes made. Oddly enough, while mentionning them to a tech chap, Nolan happened to be standing close by and heard what I was saying. Result was, my name was forbiden to be in the generics. Yet I did many things to help the maknig of the movie. Well, all I can say is that Nolan is full of himself, rude and not a nice chap at all !
My friends grandfather was shot down during Dunkirk
He was flying Defiants with 264 Squadron.
Two confirmed stukas,
One ,me109 probable.
Shot down, his rear gunner was killed. He bailed out and returned to Britain with burns.
His name Pilot Officer Samuel Richard Thomas.
@@timothylyons5686 My father had a similar experience in 1944. He was shot down over Normandy in a Lancaster and normally a rear gunner was the mid upper that night and he was called William Johnson, or Bill Johnson, Sergeant air gunner. He unfortunately lost three of his friends, who were fellow aircrew, including the pilot. He helped the Maquis resistance for two weeks, before being liberated by the British army.
@Dan-gk7ti On top of not being a nice guy, he made a complete bollocks of The Dunkirk Film!
There were too few soldiers on the beach. Too few ships to evacuate 300,000, (more like 300.)
And everyone was too clean. They were supposed to have been in combat!
And Dunkirk was too clean and modern.
And there were no signs of it being bombed and/or shelled!
It was a shit film which had little or no resemblance to what it must really have been like!
This spitfire seems to glide forever at full speed.
The glider fighter thing is the biggest sin in that movie. Somebody gave me it on DVD but I just can't face watching it again.
@@gdutfulkbhh7537 it's bad, but honestly seeing modern buildings throughout the movie was a lot harder for me
it completely broke the immersion, just stupid to not remove them in post
@@andgate2000 Yeah, he was also quite low but the glide scenes took forever.
@ my glider has a ratio of 1:40 but this magic spitfire outperforms it lol 😂
@@andgate2000
I dunno; I found the view from the Yak with some fake exhaust stacks tacked on quite jarring. Even a non-aviation geek would be confused by that. I thought it could easily have been cleaned up with a bit of discrete CGI. The Buchons and CASA could have been tweaked in edit too to make them look real. I was completely disengaged by the time the physics defying Spitfire scene rolled around.
I thought the whole thing could have been good but was just kind of unfinished.
Dunkirk in one sentence: '10 to 12 years old british boy scouts in their brand new uniforms are playing WW2 during their summer holiday in France like they imagine how the war happened, after that getting home in a tram with 1990s interior.' Did anyone notice the tv-tower behind the beach, in 1940!!! The cute, undemaged and freshly in modern colors painted houses beside the 1980s bungalows? The nice and clean beaches without any trash or destroyed weapons? Did Nolan ever see some pictures of Dunkirk 1940 or read a book about it?
Nice!
@@rolandjung9337 Aarghh, that train! Apparently the Swanage Railway offered them 1930s carriages, but Nolan thought that they "didn't look right, and the interiors were too dark".
Couldn't make it up.
yep. Dunkirk consisted of 600 guys standing in widely spaced lines on an empty beach with their boots in the surf waiting on...something.
@@rolandjung9337 Almost as bad as the crap in Saving Private Ryan.
This film is an example of where CGI could have made it so much better. A lot of the mistakes you mentioned could easily have been remedied with clever use of CGI, removing new buildings & infrastructure, making the place look war ravaged & above all, filling the beaches with personnel. The beaches were almost empty in this film, whilst Tom Hardon flew around overhead for what seemed like forever with his infinite fuel tank & limitless ammo.
All in all I thought it was very poor.
The big problem of 'Dunkirk (2017)' is Christopher Nolan.
There. No explanatory video needed.
Ha ha!
I'm a retired defense analyst and military historian with half a century of experience. Overlooking some of the over-dramatizations and historical and technical inaccuracies, I still thought Dunkirk was a brilliant film, and especially liked his use of differential chronology, synching the three timelines (ground, sea and air) only in the last half hour or so. In war, people have widely varying perceptions of time.
@ I am an active movie critic with over half a century of experience. In the same tone I can tell you that Nolan has yet to make a brilliant film.
With him it is all visual without substance, atmosphere rather than scenario, and cardboard character development.
I'm not even talking about his complete lack of historical accuracy.
@stejer211 Maybe we did not see the same film. Or maybe you're just shallow.
@ I'm the one pointing out Nolan's shallowness, not you, genius.
I knew a guy who crewed a high-speed rescue launch out of Portrush NI during the War. He told me that they almost never pulled ditched Spitfire pilots out of water - the narrow fuselage, combined with the heavy Merlin up front and the scoops under the wings resulted in the wings coming off and the fuselage going straight down, often before the pilot could get out
I also came across a memoir by asn Aussie Spitfire pilot who said essentially that ditched Spitfires swam rather then floated - as in, don’t ditch on the water
A pilot in my Dad's squadron chose to ditch his Spitfire in the sea north of Darwin, Australia rather than taking to his parachute. His aircraft touched down, being nose heavy pitched forward and disappeared in seconds. He didn't get out. R.I.P. Fg Off R. A. 'Dick' Palmer, 549 Sqn RAF. 8th November 1944.
The armorer of real Fortis 1 in 1940 was American volunteer T/Sgt. Chuck Norris.
He simply threatened the Spitfire into carrying double its normal ammunition.
@bluesrocker91 There was no catapult to takeoff the overloaded Spitfire. Just a kick.
The movie wasnt a patch on the BW 1958 version.
Agreed with great approval.
But a 50 year old sgt though? 😅
Even the 1964 French film was better than Nolan's effort.
The other and bigger problem is that spitfire running out of fuel, but still managing to shoot down a Stuka before gliding and making a perfect landing on the beach...
Strangeer things have happened. Half a century of researching military history has taught me that some of the most implausible stories are actually true, and if they were not well documented, people would chalk them up to bad writing and an overactive imagination.
@@StuartKoehlA Tiger tank of Schwere Panzer Abteilung 502 once shot down a Russian plane with its 88mm gun. Nobody would believe it if it wasn't true.
The RAF Spitfires at Dunkirk were accused of letting the ground forces down while being evacuated. The reason was that they were so high they would be difficult to see.
Can we all agree that this style of film taking with REAL planes and trickery with film angles and drones is better then CGI
Yes, I'd agree with you there.
@@CalibanRising
Guy Hamilton’s “The Battle of Britain”
@@CalibanRising In this particular film I disagree. Nolan obviously could not afford 300,000 extras, but he probably could have afforded 300,000 cgi extras, plus cgi ships and cgi Luftwaffe aircraft, which would have made the film very much more realistic!
I think not using cgi was a form of snobbery. It also ruined the film.
Nolan obviously could not make it look ANYTHING like the real Dunkirk evacuation while sticking to his own rules!
Youngsters of today who were judging the Dunkirk Evacuation from Nolan’s film could be excused for not understanding what all the fuss was about! In my opinion it did not portray The Dunkirk Evacuation in any way, shape, or form!
I thought it was only Westerns that used “Hollywood Guns” that never had to be reloaded.
Only 15 seconds worth of ammunition.
Didn't expect to see Jonathan Ferguson, Keeper of Firearms and Artillery at the Royal Armouries museum in the UK...
...which houses a collection of thousands of iconic weapons from throughout history
@@Pijawek…and today he will be reacting to the firearms …
In this video the commentator keeps referring to the maximum number of rounds carried by the Spitfire. Shouldn't it be `per gun` as each gun is fired simultaneously? Mk1 Spitfire had 300 rounds per gun so it is how long 300 rounds lasts not 2400 rounds? 15.7 seconds or around 8 bursts.
That’s what I was thinking. It could have carried a hundred guns and it would have made no difference to how long the ammo would last. 😅
Nope, I did cover this. I also just assumed that you would all know the Spit carried 8 MGs in 1940.
your Fortis leader was Micheal Cain sitting in his Spitfire awaiting for orders to scramble at his base, and was worried in case his engine over-heated, from The Battle of Britain film...
I bet you're the only one spotted that (sarcasm)
Teutonic Shitehawk 😂😂 glad you covered his almost infinite ammo. I also thought he glide ratio was a tad fanciful
I probably could have done a full video just focusing on all the errors really. The only thing I could say in support of the scene is that the Stuka is diving too, maybe that's how it was possible????
Teutonic Shytehawk, I'm nicking that name, referencing the Luftwaffe and Battle of Britain film perfectly, goes with my thumbnail (Klaus Mitusche)
Not to mention the Propeller on the spitfire 1a COULDN'T BE FEATHERED! which would make the glide even worse
Glide distance when you're starting at ~250-300 mph? It's hard to say. The Spitfire is a very clean airplane, so it will take some time to slow down, during which time he can turn, maintain altitude, or even climb. I'm not as quick to dismiss it. This is basic energy management, and every pilot has to be able to estimate their energy state and judge a glide to a high degree of accuracy. Check out Bob Hoover's aerobatic routine with both engines shut off in a far more draggy aircraft than a Spitfire. It is surprising what is possible.
@@CalibanRising please do a full breakdown of all the technical inaccuracies in Dunkirk, if for no other reason than to wind up Chrissy Nolan'd.
Pretty much any film I've ever watched that features aircraft has something wrong, so you could make an entire series out of it!
Here's another possibility, many of the shooting sequences are shown from different angles for visual interest. It is therefore possible that a 1.5 second burst pictured form the pilot's hand on stick pov is the same 1.5 sec burst shown in the next shot from a pov in front of the wing.
Or Nolan and/or his editors knew nothing of Spitfire load outs or they did but ignored facts for art and storytelling.
What bothers me more are the hundreds of clean faces wearing identical helmets and nice clean battledress trying to get off the beach after fighting a continuous battle across Belgium and France.
That's a fair point Pat. Some of those shots could be duplications, but to the best of my knowledge most of them represented unique bursts in the progression of the dogfight.
Like I said, it's a movie and not a documentary. Still it was fun taking the mickey out of it.
And wearing heavy trenchcoats during hot weather, walking through modern Dunkirk when in fact the town was a bombed and blazing wreck,
far too few troops, vehicles, ships and aircraft in shot throughout the movie.
@@fus149hammer5 dunkirk was more of an experiment for nolan, to see whether he could make a blockbuster with practical effects alone. and for such a challenge they got things fairly accurate compared to other war movies that are often cgi fests when it comes to air combat.
@charlestonianbuilder344 an experiment that didn't really work and the different timelines merging together at the end totally baffled my wife!😅
Quite right. Also consider you see the same dogfights twice.
I liked the Dunkirk movie but I think it was made a little less impactful because there simply weren't enough flyable period aircraft available to make big scenes.
1969's Battle of Britain had some weaknesses in that there were no Dornier 17s or Junker 88s or Messerschmitt 110s, and the Stukas were models, and what Heinkel 111s and Bf 109s there were had the wrong engines, nevertheless there were enough 111s and 109s available (plus Hurricanes and Spitfires) to make some nice combat scenes, and that, coupled with camera tricks to give the illusion of more numbers, allowed the viewer to suspend disbelief. Yes, the Heinkels and Messerschmitts had Merlin engines and the Spitfires were mostly later war variants, but the scale of the battle on screen was still believable.
Not so for Dunkirk.
I appreciate Nolan not going the cheesy CGI route à la Red Baron and Pearl Harbor or 2019's Midway, as it looks awful, but watching one lonely Stuka attack the French beach doesn't make the Lufwaffe look that scary.
Dunkirk was in real life a savage battle, but the movie just made it seem quiet and, in my opinion, rather on the boring side.
Thanks for the comment Sergei, you make some excellent points here.
The spitfire had a carburetor, German planes were fuel injected . Some maneuvers were not feasible.
Beatrice (Tilly) Shilling came up with a temporary solution until pressurised carburetors were introduced.
@@glyndavies486that was still only a temporary fix from mid 1941 til 1943 it prevented engine flooding/starving (making it nigh impossible to restart) but they couldn’t pull prolonged negative G manoeuvres
Come on everyone , it’s movie , not all viewers are experts , 99 % of people would have no idea of all the technical errors , holy shit you just need to see Braveheart to see historical errors on an epic scale , and Master and Commander to see how it should be done 😊
I really didn't like this film, it just didn't have any feeling of "reality" for me. In my opinion the 1958 film starring John Mills was far better, and gave a sense of the whole story.
The complete misunderstanding of the role of the 'Little Ships' and the sidelining almost to irrelevance of the Royal & Merchant Navies in the recent movie were appalling. Surely they could have acquired an historical adviser who actually knew something about the subject?
Yes! I really hated Nolan's Dunkirk because I was raised on BBC (or ITV) reruns of the John Mills Dunkirk.
@@Beery1962 Perhaps the difference is that the 1958 movie was watched by many people who had first hand knowledge or experience, whereas Nolan's Dunkirk doesn't seem to have involved anyone who knew much about the events.
The BBC did a really good drama series on Dunkirk which is worth watching.
There's also an excellent 3 part docu drama.
It is a truism to never do maths in front of a live audience.
On the other hand, apparently it's also a good idea to never show maths written out in formula, otherwise you'll get gems like:
843 / 2400 = 30%
843 / 2800 = 35%
Which is a delicious typo in a video specifically focused on counting rounds and ammo depletion.
Otherwise very well done.
Ha brilliant! That was a quick re-edit to cover up an even bigger mistake. I will hang my head in shame now in the corner.
Try this, 350 rounds per Browning Mk II gun. The Browning Mk II fires at 1150 rounds per minute, or just barely over 19 rounds per second.
350 / 19 = 18.4 seconds of firing per gun, and since all guns carry the same load out and all guns fire simultaneously, ergo all guns fire exactly the same as one gun.
19 rounds per second from 8 guns: 19 * 8 = 152 bullets per second being fired for about 18 seconds.
The dumb thing is, that statistically speaking, on the average the RAF had to fire 3500 round of .303 to shoot a bomber down and the Spitfire only carried 2800 rounds, so you had to be either very lucky, or an exceptionally good shot to shoot a bomber down with the Mk I Spitfire. We can be thankful that there were a number of such pilots.
@@DerOrso Or team up with a pal or two.
No, that's crazy talk.
@@TheLucanicLord Yes, of course. What I'm getting at is, that any clips from movies showing a Spitfire pulling in behind a bomber, squirting it s couple of seconds and having it burst into a fire ball are either total fiction, or the exception.
Additionally, the RAF sent the Hurricanes in after the bombers and let the Spitfires deal with the 109s. Not that no Spitfires shot down any bombers. On the contrary. Only that what is mostly being shown in films et al is completely ignoring the Hurris, which outnumbered the Spits like 3 or 4 to 1.
You left out the never-ending glide. Presumably having expended that amazing amount of ammo, the plane now had the performance of a competition glider.
Interceptors generally glide like a brick anyway, but this took the biscuit. If sticking a big sheet of aluminium down at 85 degrees worked in reality, it would give you glider boys so much lift you'd rarely need to land 😂
The biggest problem with this film is that it was made at all. Absolute shite from beginning to end.
The simple answer is that they were playing in Air Arcade not Air Realistic
Great analysis. Personally I can just about forgive the optimistic ammo (it's a movie after all), the 'broomstick' Merlin engine, and the yellow nose on the 109 (3 months too early). My initial problem with the dogfight after watching this movie though was how nice it was of the 109 pilot to sit on the Spitfire's tail for almost a full minute without firing even when perfectly in position!
The troops on the beaches never saw the RAF because they were intercepting the Luftwaffe at 10,000 to 25,000 ft ,en route to the beaches, Nolans narrative is not realist.
More bollox is how he managed to shoot down a DIVING Stuka in a glider
@@kittyhawk9707 Obviously he was such “a superb pilot” that he could make his Spitfire do the impossible!😏
Also indulging in Spitfire worship, the fact that Dunkirk was the first battle that the Spitfire took part in. The Hawker Hurricane had already been fighting the war single handed from day one. And was present over Dunkirk in far greater numbers than the Spitfire. But if you’re making a WW2 war film it always has to be Spits. I even once saw a film about the Battle of France with Spitfires present, which it never was, only the Hurricanes served the RAF in France, but the film watchers always must have a Spitfires. The Hurricane won the Battle of Britain with the Spitfire as much needed support.
A Spitfire shot down the first German aircraft in Britain in November 1939, Dowding was very reluctant, to the point of refusing to deploy Spitfires outside of the UK, this was the case until he was unjustifiably removed from C in C Fighter Command in November 1940. So the Hurri had not been quite "fighting the war single handed"...
Worst part of the ditching of Collins' spitfire is that in addition to the spitfire notoriously NOT being able to ditch in a controlled manner (certainly wouldn't come to rest on the surface, they sank like rocks) Is that you clearly see the engine cowling of the prop aircraft they filmed for the pov of the diching BREAK OFF just in front of the cockpit on impact! Ironically, a far more realistic depiction of what ditching would have done to a spitfire! Oh and Collins landed with the prop spinning, yet somehow when the spitfire comes to rest floating on the surface the prop is undamaged! Aircraft props do not react well to suddenly hitting water at several hundred miles an hour.
What's going on with the British flag at 5:20 ? It's neither upside down nor the right way up. Probably made in China.
I can accept infinite ammo as artistic licence, but whoever included the upside-down Union Jack should be court-marshalled. And, BTW, it is 'derring-do', not 'daring'
Is that inverted flag in this video?
@caniconcananas7687 Without going through the video again, I can't tell you at which point it was, but there was a brief shot which I assumed to come from the film showing an inverted Union Jack which I think was being flown on the beach.
remember the old cow-boy films where a six shooter could shoot all day and never need a re-load?
I was just about to say: the average Hollywood-Colt shoots about 12 to 20 rounds before reloading - so nothing new here.
And unlike the guy in the black hat, his always fired real bullets😂
Have you seen A Dollar For The Dead with Emilio Estevez? He carries 2 Colts and fires them so fast you'd swear he's using machine pistols with unlimited ammo.
I thought this video would talk about the amazing engineless Spitfire, which surely could have made it back across the Channel for tea and biscuits.
I should have really.
Don’t get me started when the flare was fired into the Spit on the Dunkirk beach at the end, it had a burning broom handle instead of a Merlin.
As an artist writing and illustrating aviation comics, your channel is an absolute goldmine. I can't help but notice the contradiction in the excerpts from the pilot's notes, though, one saying flaps should absolutely not be lowered for risk of the plane diving below, and the other one saying flaps should be lowered to reduce landing speed. Any idea as to the dates of these two versions, as well as reason for the change in procedure?
One is taken from the manual for a Spitfire Mk II and the other for a Mk IX, with the later suggesting the pilot should lower the flaps. My guess would be that in the 4 years or so between the first Spitfires arrive at 19 squadron and the arrival of the Mk IX, a better procedure had been tested. Landing with a lower flying speed may have led to more pilots surviving or longer on the surface.
Funniest opening script in TH-cam history.
Glad I wasn't the only one giggling at that one!
Also as I understand it you see the same scene repeated from various vantage points in time. you 'll see Fortius engaging the Bomber from beach viewpoint then it'll switch to boat viewpoint thus repeating the engagement. God I hope that makes sense.
Dude, what did you expect from a film where in the final scene the propeller is literally attached to a mop
lol
An other mystery for me: why Malta Spitfires had only 2 .303s in the wing (Vb and Vc models)? The outer ones usually removed and only 2x 20mm and 2x .303 were kept. Of course the 4x 20mm loadout for the Vc was instantly removed when they arrived at Malta - from the carriers - firstly to reduce weight and increase performance secondly to save the guns not to run out of the to quickly as the supply was very hard rely on. So maybe the 2 outer .303s were removed to save the guns for later as well?
An interesting idea. I've not come across this during Operation Dynamo or the BoB. I did read recently something about sending up Hurricanes against Japanese Oscars with 50% fuel and less ammo in order to make them competitive.
I'd not heard of them removing guns in Malta, but to be fair I could see .303s only being useful as range detectors before letting fly with the 20 mm. Again, I've read this was a Japanese tactic.
'Helpfully flying in front of their asset' that made me laugh.
1980s Train interiors in the scenes back in Blighty - PMSL in the cinema at that particular detail even after I'd kept a straight face over the glide rate of a bingo Spitfire and the weird lack of Engine when Tom Hard touches his kite on the beach.
Haha!! Look at the flapping wings on that ditching Spit.🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Did I see a pilot CLOSING the canopy before ditching?😮😮😮😮
🤭
Just want to put a recommendation in for 'First Light' by Geoffrey Wellum(a Spifire pilot), a great memoir of the Battle of Britain that I am reading at the moment. It's very immersive. If you are the type of person interested in this video you will enjoy it.
Yep, very good read and also amazing backstory to the book. If I remember correctly it was the historian James Holland that brought Geoff out of obscurity by encouraging him to publish the book. It enabled him to regain some financial freedom towards the end of his life and tell a great story.
Morning Phil, I really enjoy your videos, they are researched and entertaining. I haven't seen this movie, but after watching your video I really have no interest too. I fly recreationally and have an avid interest in history, I however cannot stand Hollywood movies with aircraft.
Keep up the good work, cheers.
Thanks mate. I used to have my PPL too about a decade ago, but not much flying happens where I live now unfortunately. Thanks again for watching!
Nice one! Reminds me of the video showing how many photon torpedoes Voyager expended in it's 7 year stroll back home ^^
Couldn't the replicator just churn out more photon torpedoes, plus unlimited spare parts, as needed?
@ apparently they couldn’t officially, but that didn’t stop them from firing something like a hundred times more over the course of the entire run.
Even plot armour has it’s cracks :p
Browning thirty caliber machine rates of fire could be increased depending on use. Changing how many seconds of fire is available.
You're probably correct. I wonder if each gun also had a slightly different rate of fire too. Anyway, it was all a bit of fun.
@@CalibanRising Was there any form of selector, whereby one could choose to fire (say) 4, 6 or 8 guns? That would extend the period the ammunition would last, with a lesser rate of fire?
@@Fidd88-mc4sz It could be done, but as far as I know they never did. Probably too unreliable for the effort involved.
@ I would think that it conferred no benefit. If you fire, you want to hit the target as hard as possible and piss-off before his wingman did the same to you. I was just wondering if it had been tried...
@@CalibanRisinga war plane like that single loadout of gun you want them all firing so i doubt it
The burning spitfire at the end must have been flying without an engine.
This was the most boring and inaccurate war movie of the last decade. I wonder how it even could be nominated for any award.
Clearly, Tom Hardy was playing on arcade mode so he could reload in the air.
A smaller issue I had found is with the He 111. They're armed with rifle calibre machine guns but in the film, it has a very slow "dunk dunk dunk" sound like a cannon.
Yep, also noticed that when I was watching more closely this time.
El cálculo era exactamente el mismo usando una sola ametralladora, desde el momento en que, al apretar el botón, se disparan las 8.
The calculation was exactly the same using a single machine gun, from the moment in which, when you press the button, all 8 are fired.
You can always recognize that a space-related video is AI because they all begin with the words "Space is a mysterious place."
If you watch the film, the fuel consumption of that Spitfire is pretty dubious considering how long he is in the air and that the thing is supposedly hit in the fuel tanks too; that really leapt out at me more than the neverending ammunition when I watched it, because you kind of expect movies to have everlasting ammunition supplies in all the guns. Ironically enough and as cheesy as the movie Pearl Harbor is in its portrayal of the American Eagle Squadron pilots, what was good about that movie in terms of the flying sequences, was the way they really shook the camera frames up to make the combat look dramatic. It was hardly realistic in terms of how much an aeroplane shakes around when the guns fire and the scenarios were more than a little far fetched, but it was a very good dramatic choice to do that shaky-cam post production effect; it made the combat scenes very exciting, which is really what you want in a movie such as that.
But all that Spitfire malarkey aside, what is worse in the film Dunkirk for me, is the portrayal of the BEF soldiers behaviour, which at times is nothing short of insulting to the guys who were really there. That's why I didn't think very highly of the movie. I daresay not every soldier who was there displayed exemplary behaviour, but the film turns the poor behaviour of some soldiers into a significant plot point and makes it seem like they were a bunch of things with modern-day sensibilities and that was pretty disrespectful to the many. As a result of that, I choose not to watch anything with Nolan's name on it now.
@ChockHolocaust "Pearl Harbor" was so cheesy for me, as an American, that I walked out on the movie, so I can relate. Don't get me started on "Eagle Squadron." I'll probably die from pure, perfectly distilled, absolutely refined hate.
Legend has it that in another timeline Tom Hardon is still flying on that single leaky tank of fuel.
One of my uncles went in the bag at Dunkirk
Unless firing DeWilde API rounds, the .303 Browning was not very effective against German bombers. Those things were bullet sponges, and there are some famous pictures of a Heinkel 111 shot down over England, its rear fuselage looking like a colander, with more than 300 bullet holes. There's another photo of a Dornier 17 which actually made it back to France with more holes. Attacks from the rear usually only succeeded in putting a lot of holes in the control surfaces and killing off gunners. The fuel tanks in the wings were self-sealing, so an incendiary round was needed to torch the fuel. The radiators and coolant lines were another point of vulnerability, but these were pretty well protected from behind. The pilot and co-pilot were another critical component, but their armor seat backs were pretty effective against .303 rounds. On the other hand, attacks from dead ahead put nothing between the crew and those nasty bullets but a few panels of plexiglas. This is one reason Fighter Command was anxious to field cannon-armed fighters. You could easily expend ALL of your .303 rounds and still not bring down a bomber,
Quite a few did go down over England in 1940, mostly due to fighter attacks, unless it was these damned gremlins again!
Killing a lot of the crew was very demoralizing though
@@AlasdairMorrison-z8m The Germans lost about 700 fighters and 1000 bombers over England from July to September 1940. About three fourths of the bombers were lost to fighters, the remainder to flak and operational accidents. The British lost roughly 900 Spitfires and Hurricanes, plus about a dozen Defiants, almost all to fighters (Bf.209 and Bf.110). These are roughly double the number of kills claimed on both sides.
Yes largely true
There was a story I ran across decades ago that the spitfires flew directly into the German bomber formations head-on during the battle of Britain. No explanation was given as to why. Your description of the spitfire ammo and German bombers makes that heads-on approach sensible to me now.
I get your point about the “Buchons” but where are you going to get a 109from, accepting that you don’t like A.I.
There are some supposedly good simulation games depicting WW2 battles. What did I learn from them? Apart from the frustrating scarcity of ammo, there was also the information overload and confusion. One starts off in something resembling a formation with bearings and organisation, BUT... after the first furball, all of that vanishes. Where am I and where are all the other planes? The sky is a HUGE place. Reforming into a semblance of organisation is extremely difficult. Trying to find your mates and looking out for something yet unseen that is intent on killing you, is not Hollywood-easy. The usual action is to recover your bearings, check your fuel and ammo, and figure out where your aerodrome is. With enough luck you can do some solo patrolling, but that's about it. In the Battle of Britain this problem was likely magnified were you to be flying a Bf109.
Hollywood just doesn't get this. The 2019 Midway film has Japanese A6M Zeros blazing away with their wing cannons despite the fact that they only had 60 rounds per cannon, about 7 seconds worth (same as the Messerschmitt BF109E at Dunkirk/Battle of Britain.)
Hollyweird doesn't care, neither do the punters. It's a bad, sad situation.
Okay, and I agree, but this is rivet counting, like Star Trek fans who declare the birth of a new starship class by counting the windows on the hull.
Not the same. Also, "rivet counting' is a derogatory term used by those, typically in a majority, who don't know/care about verisimilitude. As long as they find something exciting, then more often than not, that will do fine. Film makers know this, so they make movies aimed more at that group. There are relatively few 'big' films that don't adhere to this doctrine.
@ I think this is sad because films require a certain suspension of belief and "historical" films with glaring errors can ruin that. Also truth is usually far more interesting than director's fantasies. A certain amount of license is allowed (for example, the Messerschmitt BF109s in the Battle of Britain film were Merlin engined Spanish version, but were the closest that could be obtained and looked much better than models.)
Cheers for the vid. Also good to see most of the evacuees with shiny new helmets, clean uniforms and clean shaven.
It's not just Nolan getting things wrong ---
in the 2000 movie Pearl Harbor the P-40 Kittyhawks easily outmaneuver Zeros
The hapless Zeros' pilots try to climb away only to be out accelerated by our 'good ol boys' ----- now >> that
I can recommend a good book about 75 Squadron RAAF in New Guinea who were equipped with P40s taking on the Japanese. It's called 44 Days by Michael Veitch an Australian author. It's very well researched and written although I am biased being Australian.
Has anyone mentioned the way the ditching Spitfire's wings wobble when it hits the water?
Yes, it's the problem with wood. But to be fair a real Spit wing would have a little give in it too...maybe not that much.
I previously overlooked this matter with the aerial scenes in 'Dunkirk', concentrating instead on the wrong-looking wheels-down landing on the beach. After having raised that elsewhere I was assured that it would have been possible, but surely still highly unlikely.
from what I remember you get about seven two-second gun bursts before you go home.
It’s just a movie. There not going to measure the exact timing of ammo available they have other priorities to get the move made and be successful and profitable. Measuring ammo would be extremely low on the priority list
Of course, and it's all down to the lack of genuine technical advisors.
I'm thinking of that story of Christopher Lee who corrected Peter Jackson over the sound someone made when being stabbed in the back. He'd actually done it for real.
Had a Bader or Galland been available I'm sure these little details would have been highlighted more.
My biggest issue was how they quite obviously weren't even remotely Spitfire shaped during close ups.
Honestly a less than double load of ammo on a fighter is far from the most egregious thing I've seen in a war movie. I didn't even notice when I watched it in theater, although I'm pretty sure I did say afterward "that's why you open the canopy before you ditch" and "that's not what the Spitfire's fuel gauge looks like."
I remember a BBC documentary, way back in the 1990's, where a Battle of Britain Hurricane pilot talked about just how much ammo his plane carried. He said that there was only 18 seconds worth, on the outer 6 wing guns and 20 seconds on the inner 2 wing guns. The inner pair of guns always carried an extra 2 seconds worth of ammo, due to having room for a slightly larger ammo tray.
This might have also been the same practice for the Spitfire.
I know, from playing IL-2 Cliffs of Dover - Blitz, that 18 seconds worth of ammo (plus an extra 2 seconds worth on the inboard pair of guns) is very quickly used up, if one likes to "Spray 'n' Pray".
That's a good point. I'd like to look into that and see just how they were armed. Very interesting.
What got me about this film was that if they employed a technical expert his involvement was restricted to making the tea. For instance, if you decide to ditch or crash land, the first thing to do is to open the canopy in case it gets jammed by fuselage distortion. You need a guaranteed escape route but you can check what our characters do here. If landing on a potentially soft surface, like a beach, you keep the wheels up so you won’t have them dig in and put the aircraft on its back, again preventing escape; ask ACM John Allison! So our guy actually takes the time to put the gear down. Of course his engine failure is finally diagnosed at the end when it’s revealed the Germans have stolen the Spitfire’s engine and hung the prop on a scaffolding pole. Hi hum😞
Early Spits did not have a canopy jettison mechanism (that handle in the center of the canopy bow). You had to manually push back the hood and hope it stayed locked open while you ditched or tried to bail out.
Also, regardless of what the flying notes said, pilots did try to ditch their Spitfires, usually because they were too low to bail out. The noted ace, Paddy Finucane, was killed after ditching his Spitfire. The problem was the radiator and oil cooler scoops under the wings tended to catch the waves and pull the plane under the water. The problem wss more exacerbated with the Hurricane, and its large belly radiator.
@ As I said, important to open the canopy first.
5:47 it’s the only reliable version of the 109 they could get for filming. Go to the cafe a Daedalus airfield, it has some good info about it all.
Interesting that the report mentioned the aircraft encountered as including the He-113. Was this due to the belief they were actually in service? I understood that they we few and far between with some being used to defend their factory only?
Is nobody going to mention that in "Dogfight 1", given the angle off and the moment he fires, he'd have missed that crossing 109 by a mile?
Were early Spitfires able to select which guns were firing? (only firing four at a time would double the time before exhausting ammo)
No, not as far as I know. I believe some electrically powered guns, such as in the Wildcat/Martlet could be selected or deselected by popping a breaker. The Spitfire Mk 1 didn't have the same option.
@@CalibanRising Thanks. I was just wondering.
@@CalibanRising the spit mk 1 and hurricane 1 had a 3 position switch. Push up for outer guns , press middle for all push down for only inner. (Grand farther was ground crew on hurricane mk.i and mk.ii ) it was a hybrid electric/pneumatic system (he worked on electric systems) . It wasn't used that often as only 4 303 were not that effective apart from staffing soft ground targets.
That was the later cannon armed versions. The Mk.1 Spitfire and Hurricane only had a single circular button that fired all 8 guns.
@@stevena9305 That would be the Mk1b and MkIIb. Thanks.
Cyclic rate of fire can be affected by several factors. It would be tough to nail them all down to a single number, if even possible. An average rate of fire would be a better description.
Ah, thanks for the extra information. This might explain the big difference is combat reports.
Firing off more ammo than one has is a common trope in films. As per westerns where six shooters amazingly are often able to fire way over the 6 bullets they have - I think the final scenes in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were a deliberate exception, we see the doomed banditos reloading.
Yep, no pilot would close the canopy when getting ready to ditch - maybe a fear of heights kept him from bailing out which was dangerous. The sinking of the plane and escape is inaccurate in many ways. In the movie the aircraft sinks slowly and level, which allowed the boat to dramatically save the day by smashing the jammed canopy. Single piston engine craft immediately nose down from the weight of the engine block and plunge under very fast. The frantic pilot tries to bang us way out using assorted objects as I recall. In every Spit scale model there is a diagonal bar on the inside of the door panel that is to be painted red. What perchance might that be? Why it was a crowbar clipped in place for a trapped pilot to use to break out in just such an emergency. But that would have the pilot save himself rather than by the dude on the boat.
Dunkirk got the Spit’s undercoats right, half black and half white as per Dowdings ground observers ID scheme, although we hardly see it. So does The Battle of Britain in the opening scenes of Hurricanes in France. A couple of week later in June Dowding dropped this for some reason and ordered the fighter bottoms to be repainted the new light green Sky, which was so hard to get at that time that the ground crews usually used duck egg blue (very probably seen in the classic pic of vics of DW squadron), duck egg green, and sky blue which was the only actual light blue of the bunch, until Sky stocks were sufficient in Aug/Sept. The Battle of Britain seems to get that right too, the underside paints seem to vary. Dowding brought back the B&W system in modified form for a while in late 40.
no one ever runs out of ammo in the movies. I know many service members who did. Its too easy to pray and spray.
The disjointed cliché ridden mess also mucked up the actor’s heads ‘following’ the view of the C.G. gliding Spitfire. The cartoon Spitfire was generated too high and far away so to make it match the actor head movements it had to cross the sky gliding at an impossible presumably supersonic speed. He should have paid more attention in maths classes.
The later burning ‘Spitfire’ beach scene with an obvious skinny iron pipe for an engine supporting the propeller, posed with the huge modern era container cranes in the background shows he just didn’t care.
He wanted to film on location and to avoid the use of CGI, he also had a limited budget.
@ Using unmodified modern appearance Dunkirk was not intelligent and nor was quasi-religious use of small crowds of extras. It put me off going to see Oppenheimer.
Agreed. It's as bad as the nonsense in Saving Private Ryan.
What I don't understand in movies with dogfights in them is why do they shoot SO MUCH FOR NO REASON !?
The planes already zoom, twist and turn around all over the place, with closeups on pilots' struggling faces and aerial shots of the machines being pushed to the limits (or sometimes way past them, looking at you Red Tails and your magic planes putting Kvochur's bell to shame) which already creates a lot of tension for the viewer... Why add moments where the pilots shoot the air not even close to the target !?
Sure, might be because of nerves, but in that case why fire a full burst ? Half-second, eager shots somewhat close to the target would be more believable AND communicate how intense the fight is much more effectively in my opinion.
(And that's ignoring Fortis 1 being flight leader, meaning that he's probably, and hopefully, familiar with aerial combat.)
Exhaust manifolds too on the side camshots of the Spitfire (not a Spitfire) they wouldn't bolt a camera to it ,they used an entirely different aircraft .Can't really blame them for not wanting to drill holes in original Spitfires though .Still really enjoyed the film for what it was. Don't think we'll ever get another hollywood or big budget British war film ever again sadly.
Yep, it was a Yak52 I believe.
@CalibanRising That was it!
If you are asking yourself about the "chorizo" and "spanish" jokes it is because all the Bf-109 in this movie were Hispano-aviación Ha-1112 Buchón. A Bf-109 version built under license in Spain after the end of WW2. Due to the scarcity of Jumo engines the company bought a lot of surplus Merlin engines.
All the Ha-1112 were made at my hometown of Seville, Spain. Triana neighbourhood, the plant is now a gym btw.
A gym? That's an interesting fact, thanks for the comment.
Like the amount of Spitfire ammunition, the glide after the engine expired was just ridiculous and spoiled that part of the film.
the total amount of rounds carried may have been 350 per MG as .303 ammo was supplied in 350 rd belts within the army & for anti-aircraft duty with the vickers MMGs at the time. So the armourers may have left the whole belt per gun if it fitted providing the total weight of aircraft + fuel + ammo would conform to combat efficiency? the browning MGs may well have been originally sorted for 300 rd belts as per US specs but as the Brits didn't want the 30cal calibre this might have been a factor for the space to carry the additional 50 rds? on the canopy on ditching into water - at this time the ditching rule had not got to all SQNs, at the Battle of Britian it was stated to make sure that canopy was always opened on crash landing OR ditching because the airframe being alluminium would warp and the canopy would jam. even the hammer supplied couldn't smash through the glass in time.
Some great extra info, thanks mate!
@@CalibanRising looking up some websites for the 1940 period with regards the RAAF pilots in the RAF stated 350 per gun, definately later in the Pacific the RAAF had 350 per gun (303) as my dad was a fitter/mechanic with 9RSU RAAF Attached to 80 Wing Which had the famous Grey Nurse squadrons 352, 354 one of which you have on the opening shot Face On for your video.
With the engine out one of these spits glided like a sailplane. It would have been on the deck in less than 40 seconds from that height.
Thank you so much for this! I liked "Dunkirk", I did enjoy it. But that's partially because I managed to put my nerd instincts aside. Afterwards, I heard or read quite a few opinions calling it a realistic film, with the dogfights pictured perfectly, and that really pissed me off.
Yep, I was the same.
8:25 I don't know what aircraft they filmed in these over the wing shots but it is NOT a Spitfire. The shape of the nose is wrong, the wing root should be faired neatly to the fuselage, the exhaust is too high up, the rivets should be flush, not round head, the side of the fuselage is much too round and there's an odd black thing hanging down under the nose.
Yeah, they used a Yak-52 with a backwards looking camera for those shots.
Douglas Bader learnt to pilot the newly introduced Spitfire
& saw combat in Dunkirk.
True. Whenever I think of Dunkirk I think of 'Reach for the Sky'. Probably the first book I read about the period.
@@CalibanRising Kenneth More wasn’t bad in the film, he played Bader!
6:20 - oops, a mistake.. 😁 843/2400 should be > 843/2800.
Anyone else notice that in the combat report of FO Carbury he claims to have shot down a HE 113 and another probable in combat south of London. The Heinkel HE 113 never existed it was a totally made up aircraft type.
Yep. I've noticed the He 113 mentioned frequently in combat reports up until about the start of 1941.
I too have been reading these and can confirm this - there were literally hundreds of claims for He113s.
In a possible what if, what if his guns were o only running at a ROF of say... 600 or 800 RPM, would that make things alittle more realistic ?
Certainly. I'll leave it to the experts to explain how the ROF could differ among similar firearms though.
Where did Fortis one get all that airspeed to catch a 109 in a zoom climb when he was on the deck? What!? Sorry I forgot about the afterburner all Spits had fitted about the time of Dunkirk.
ha!
I always though, that the hero was just landing due to fuel exhaustion. Thanks God, you found out he was hit in the fuel tank, just like in the reality.