Messerschmitt Bf 109 | Better than the Spitfire?

This is the Messerschmitt Bf 109 E-series. This is one that was shot down during the Battle of Britain in September 1940 and we know quite a lot about its history. You know, we know two of the pilots that flew it during the early stages of the Battle of Britain and during the later stages and it's also in really brilliant condition. It's almost the same as it was when it was shot down apart from some bits that were taken out from the inside. The Bf 109 is the most produced fighter aircraft in history with over 34,000 having been built over an eight-year period. There were many variants and it served in a variety of roles from bomber escort to night fighter to ground attack and it was the Luftwaffe's main single-seat fighter for the first few years of the war and probably one of the best fighters during that period. Fighters above at high altitudes, fighters on both sides, fighters in the front and in the rear, fighters weaving in and out of the bomber formations. By sheer weight of numbers, the enemy again and again broke through the coastal defences. So this Bf 109 is from the E-series of Bf 109s. It was very much upgraded from the first Bf 109 that flew in May 1935. So it had a top speed of 357 miles per hour. It could fly up to 36,000 feet and it had quite a powerful armament. Two MG-17 machine guns above the engine here and then you'd also have an MG FF cannon in either wing. Also with the E-3s there was usually a another cannon in the nose but often these were removed because pilots found that it caused trouble with the engine. Our recognition was appalling but I think the Germans realized that even theirs was appalling because they painted their Bf 109s yellow noses so they could recognize each other. You see a Bf 109 and a clip wing Spit looked fairly much the same actually. But the Bf 109 is for its job in the hands of a very experienced pilot such as Garland is very deadly because it's unstable and a fighter should be unstable. So at the time of the Battle of Britain the Bf 109 was a better aircraft than the RAF's Hawker Hurricane but when it came to the Supermarine Spitfire it was more of a match. So the Spitfire was slightly faster and had a better turn radius but the 109 could climb a lot faster and it could be thrown into steep dives thanks to its fuel injected engine. In terms of armament the Spitfire was armed with eight machine guns whereas the Bf 109 was armed with two machine guns and two cannon but cannon were a lot more powerful and destructive than machine guns so also kind of a match there as well. And it had inverted carburetors which we didn't have and it was slightly smaller than the Spitfire and the Hurricane the 109. It had two cannons you see with 303s you could put an awful lot of bullets in before you get before you can get something down but one hit with a cannon and down you go. You know what our general Garland said to Göring about that he said give me a that is what everybody every German fighter who had fought against the Spitfire was thinking this is a much better aircraft than our 109. During the war later on in 44 when I came back from Russia to Germany and was a group commander they brought to us different types of enemy aircraft and had refurnished them and gave the commanders of the groups the possibility to fly and so I flew during the war I flew the Spitfire, I flew the Hurricane, I flew the Thunderbolt. The Spitfire was even at that time absolutely the best aircraft. This particular Bf 109 here was built as an E3 variant. It was built in September 1939 by a company called Erle-Maschinenwerk in Leipzig. It was given the Werk number 1190 and in mid-1940 it was issued to the German fighter unit Jagdgeschwader 26. So the first known pilot of this Bf 109 was named Karl Ebighausen. In 1940 he was 26 years old. He was a very experienced fighter pilot having flown in the Spanish Civil War and he also fought in the Battle of France and during the evacuation of Dunkirk when he shot down about five allied aircraft. So we believe that this aircraft was flown by Ebighausen during the early stages of the Battle of Britain in sort of July maybe early August 1940 because it has his victory markings on it and beneath sort of the layers of paint also has the insignia of a group and commander and he was as I mentioned commander of two group during the Battle of Britain. German fighters waited overhead for the defending planes of the Royal Air Force the RAF to appear. They didn't have long to wait. So on the tail fin here we have Karl Ebighausen's victory markings so the first two ones those are the roundels of the Dutch Air Force and the third one is around the French Air Force and then the last two are the roundels of the Royal Air Force and also on here are the dates that the victories were achieved. So all of these were achieved during the Battle of France so from 13th of May and then going to the 14th of June the last one. So the number four here is the number of the aircraft and then you have the Luftwaffe symbol the Balkan Kreuzer and then you have this dash here with the dash representing the second group of Jagdgeschwader 26 with the color white representing the first staffel of the group which is number four. Ebighausen was actually shot down on the 16th of August off the southern coast of England. He was killed but he was not flying this aircraft probably having upgraded to the latest variant which was an E-4. At some point after that this was partially upgraded to an E-4 so it was given a more powerful DB-601 engine and then sometime in September it was issued to a relatively inexperienced pilot named Horst Perez who's 22 years old. So Perez was flying this Bf 109 on 30th September 1940. He was involved in sort of an escort mission escorting bombers over the Channel and towards London and this was actually one of the last major daylight raids during the Battle of Britain and at some point Perez was flying over Eastbourne with his wingman and he was bounced by Spitfires of 92 squadron. One of the pilots that is believed to have shot him down was named Don Kingaby. He was known as the 109 specialist because he had a penchant for shooting down Bf 109s and at some point Perez's engine failed. We're not sure if Kingaby had actually hit him because bullet holes were not found in the aircraft afterwards but Perez basically decided to force land it in a field and he landed it wheels up in a field near East Dean in Sussex. So this is how the 109 would have looked when it crashed. It has the bent propellers, it has the landing gear up and it's sort of been restored to look as it would have on the day it crashed. So this Bf 109 after it was acquired by the Imperial War Museum having sort of languished in a scrapyard for several decades it wasn't in a great state so it's been restored to look as it was when it was shot down on the 30th of September. So a lot of that is having been repainted and if we go over here we can look inside the cockpit. You can kind of get an idea for what it was like for Ebighausen and Perez to sit in there. So the inside of the cockpit in those decades that it was sitting in a scrapyard a lot of the stuff was taken out so the sort of dials and a lot of the stuff in here is not original to this aircraft but they are original parts so it's part of the restoration process. Yes the 109 had some problems. You know the 109 had, for instance, undercarriage. They had very high struts, very narrow. This means if you accelerate your throttle, push your throttle forward and the aircraft starts rolling and you give forward pressure to get a tail up. As soon as the tail gets up you feel the torque effect and you have to give immediately opposite throttle. So there were some problematic features but as a whole I flew all the different marks on the 109 just given my judgment. I liked it, the 109. I was very familiar on that plane and looking at the 109 today I never can figure out how I could survive or fly that for five and a half years because it was a very narrow cockpit, very tiny and the view to the back was very very limited. You know we didn't have these cockpits as we have today but if you get used to it, you know, we flew it in Russia out of snow and mud and everything and I felt familiar. Perez landed the aircraft in this field and he was pretty relatively uninjured and he was pretty much immediately arrested by the local Home Guard unit as well as the police and he was sent to a prisoner of war camp in Canada where he spent the remainder of the war. Damage to this aircraft was very light, a testament to how Perez landed it in the field. So it was sent to the Royal Aircraft Establishment in Farnborough for research and testing and then in October 1940 Lord Beaverbrook agreed to send it to Canada to the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire and from there it went on a tour of Canada to raise money for Britain's war effort and then in 1941 it was sent to the United States to do another coast-to-coast tour, this time raising money for Bundles for Britain and it was very popular because it was the first captured enemy aircraft to tour the United States who had not yet entered the war. So on this side of the aircraft we have an unrestored section of the wing and you can see sort of what's left of the original paintwork but another interesting thing that you can really see on this wing are all the names that are sort of scratched into it and this was part of the Bundles for Britain campaign, the tour that it did through North America. So in addition to buying an entry ticket to see the aircraft you could also scratch your name on it as well if you paid a little bit extra and there were a lot of celebrities that signed their names onto it as well including the boxer Jack Dempsey and the singer Lawrence Tibbett and it's just another sort of interesting historical insight that you can see on the aircraft itself. So the 109's fundraising tour ended in May 1942 and then it sort of remained in North America until the 1960s when it was rescued from a scrapyard. In 1998 it was acquired by the Imperial War Museum with support of the National Heritage Memorial Fund and it was restored to what it looks like now. So the Bf 109 is a really interesting aircraft in particular because it was the most produced fighter aircraft in history. It was one of the best aircrafts of its type at the time and it was continually upgraded throughout the war and this particular Bf 109 is quite interesting because it's one of the few surviving samples that was actually flown during the Battle of Britain and it's also in excellent condition and allows us to tell the story of the RAF's nemesis during the Battle of Britain. Thanks for watching I hope you enjoyed the video and make sure you like and subscribe to the IWM YouTube channel.