Abstract
The Churchillian quote “Never, in the field of human conflict, was so much owed by so many to so few” [3], encapsulates perfectly the heroics of Royal Air Force (RAF) Fighter Command (FC) during the Battle of Britain. Despite the undoubted heroics, questions remain about how FC employed the ‘so few’. In particular, the question as to whether FC should have employed the ‘Big Wing’ tactics, as per 12 Group, or implement the smaller wings as per 11 Group, remains a source of much debate. In this paper, I create an agent based model (ABM) simulation of the Battle of Britain, which provides valuable insight into the key components that influenced the loss rates of both sides. It provides mixed support for the tactics employed by 11 Group, as the model identified numerous variables that impacted the success or otherwise of the British.
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Notes
- 1.
[5] make the point that the g1, b1, g2 and b2 have no justification and are used solely to facilitate modeling.
- 2.
While [5] were able to provide supporting evidence that binning data by day rather than raid did not invalidate the approach, this author feels an alternative approach is warranted.
- 3.
In reality, this was not the case, as some RAF sorties were patrols that did not make contact with the enemy or were scrambled to meet a raid but failed to make contact. However, given the intent was to analyze actual combat performance the decision was made to ensure contact was made between the two forces.
- 4.
Given the simplicity of the bombers role, it was felt a flow chart was unnecessary.
- 5.
The other settings used were 3 homebases, ratio_fighters_bombers 3, number_of_ waves 2, number of targets 1 and ratio_spitfires_hurr 1.
- 6.
For Experiment 2 the British force was held constant, therefore the b1 term was dropped.
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© 2016 Springer International Publishing AG
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Oldham, M. (2016). To Big Wing, or Not to Big Wing, Now an Answer. In: Osman, N., Sierra, C. (eds) Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems. AAMAS 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10002. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46882-2_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46882-2_5
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