bb.de {VGAMdata}

Battle of Britain Data (a Luftwaffe subset)

Description

Luftwaffe losses during a subset of the Battle of Britain.

Usage

data(bb.de)

Format

The format is a 3-dimensional array. The first dimension is the event (in order: shot down or failed to return, written off, seriously damaged), the second dimension is the day, the third is the aircraft type.

Details

This is a Battle of Britain data set of Luftwaffe losses during operations 26 August–31 August 1940 continued on to 1–7 September 1940. The aircraft types are prefixed Bf for Messerschmitt (Bayerische Flugzeugwerke), Do for Dornier, He for Heinkel, Ju for Junkers.

Note that p.151 and p.165 of Bowyer (1990) contain tables (during the first week of September) and almost the same data; however, the former is labelled "shot down" whereas the latter is "shot down or failed to return". The latter is used here. Also, there are some other small discrepancies.

Yet to do: add the data available at other dates, and include the RAF data.

Source

Bowyer, M. J. F. (1990) The Battle of Britain: 50 years On. Patrick Stephens Limited, Northamptonshire, U.K.

Examples

data(bb.de)
bb.de[,, "Bf109"]

## Not run: 
plot(bb.de["sdown",, "Bf109"] ~ as.Date(dimnames(bb.de)[[2]]),
     type = "h", col = "blue", las = 1, lwd = 3,
     ylab = "Frequency", xlab = "1940",
     main = "Numbers shot down (Bf 109)")
abline(h = c(5, 10, 15, 20), lty = "dashed", col = "grey")
points(bb.de["sdown",,"Bf109"] ~ as.Date(dimnames(bb.de)[[2]]), col = "blue")

## End(Not run)