Good summary. As an old Polish Spitfire pilot once said to me as he described his first dogfight: "Zose fokkers were everywhere". You mean FW190s? "No! Zose fokkers were all Messerschmitts!"
@@dougcoombes8497 - It's no joke. British RAF Ace Sir Douglas Bader said it to a room full of girl students.that he was invited to speak to about his experience as a pilot during WW II. Bader: "So there were two of these f*ckers behind me, three f*ckers to my right, another f*cker to the left" At this point, the school's Principal reportedly turned pale, turned to the girls and intervened saying, "Ladies, Fokker was a German aircraft." Sir Douglas answered: "That may be madam, but those f*ckers were in Messerschmitts!"
Being from Germany I never heard anyone call it a Me 109 until interacting with the anglosphere on the internet. A few weeks prior to this video i decided to research this myself and as you found that both terms are used interchangably by basically anyone talking about it (except for allied pilots pretty consistently calling it Me 109).
Usually you hear "Me 109" just for abbreviation, because "Messerschmitt BF-109" is quite a mouthful, even for Germans. But calling it "Messerschmitt Me-109" is simply dead-wrong.
For consistency, you could argue for a little f. In the case of Heinkel and Dornier, the second letter is small whether written in full or abbreviated, but Focke-Wulf and Bayerische Flugzeugwerke use two capital letters in their abbreviations. However, Fw is never written FW (unless all other text is also written in all caps), so we're back to Bf, because it follows the German rules of nomenclature for aircraft types. Incidentally, the Fw 190 evolved into the Ta 152 for the very same reasons, but you don't hear people calling for the 190 to be renamed Ta 152 in honour of its designer.
My German teacher in high school (he WAS German from Bavaria) said he hated when he heard it called Bf. “It vas designed by Messerschmitt, so it is ME!” A bit of irony here. His father and mine were both at Normandy…on opposite sides. My dad survived, his didn’t.
Every veteran in every book I've read about the air war in Europe called it an ME. Every veteran I've met at a war bird air show called it an ME. Every documentary on WWII I've seen identified it as an ME. It was only about 20 years ago that I heard it called BF and I thought, 'I don't think so'.
@@qltcn Is that meant to be bad? I think its good that some games have historical value, you cant stop kids from playing games, soo make the games valuable pieces of media that can spark interest for topics, I got into IT work because I was interested in how they rendered/made games on them. I wanted a gaming pc and eventually it turned into a full blown Job. And playing warthunder got me really interested in old war machines and how they work, I now know more than I ever had about old warmachines after playing warthunder, it sparked that passion for them!
Just to weigh in on this from an actual german: We still use both terms Bf and Me, though most people I know use Bf. If we want to specify the builder we usually go with the full name "Messerschmitt BF-109".
The actual german has spoken. This is also how i tend to say it. I always thought that BF was short for the name of the designer or something and that Messerschmitt was the manufacturer but, alas, i was somewhat wrong.
It is Bf-109, this is the official name for it it got from the Reichsluftfahrtministerium and they used it for all modells. After the BFW AG changed the name to Messerschmitt AG they used Me for all the airplanes but for the Bf-109 and Bf-110 it stayed Bf.
Nice. Growing up as a Cold War kid, I was immersed in the war stories of the actual wartime era, which were still in the main our received knowledge. So, I and all my mates knew this aeroplane as the Me109. And war movies, veterans' accounts and even Battle comic books mostly used this term. It's only a little later on, as we grew up and those of us still fascinated by the period started to be a bit pedantic about details, that we started to refer to Bf109s. But we weren't exclusive about it, I'll be honest. I feel a bit of relief watching this video and knowing that there really was no right or wrong all along. TIL. - Less interestingly (because this is an aviation channel - although read on), about the time we started using 'Bf', we *also* started calling "E boats" the anglicised "S boats" - because that was derived from the original name for the type(s). Of course, the hugely inaccurate Allied (read; British) brevity code for them - supposedly 'E' for 'Enemy', but just as likely 'E' for 'I don't really care what they're actually called; I barely even know what one looks like' - is just fine when talking about them from the Allied perspective, after-action reports and so on. The biggest problem is that, half the time, an "E-boat" wasn't even an S-boat, but something else entirely and "I don't care what it actually was, I just know we shot the hell out of it and left it burning". At least RAF pilots knew if they fighting an Me109 or Fw190, rather than shooting down a helpless Fiesler Storch. Hence all the 'E-boats' which were encountered and sunk in the Tyrrhenian and Ligurian Seas after 1944, when there were less than two dozen of the things in that theatre and they were *all* in the Adriatic by then.* War is a strange place for stories. And terrible for accuracy: pedants beware! - * And a good number of those mystery boats would have been... *Luftwaffe* boats! The little-discussed 'FlBs' or 'Flugbetriebschnellboote'; anything from a little tender to flying boats and seaplanes, up to big, fast and heavily-armed crash boats and air-sea rescue launches. There - an aviation connection.
I'm used to the 109 being referred to as the BF109 because I first learned about this plane playing the old LucasArts game Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe where they referred to it as the BF109, but I've probably heard it called the ME109 way more though.
I saw and heard Bf first too but thanks to Secret Weapons Over Normandy instead. I have seen people refer to it as ME-109 but not often and in most games I played it was Bf. I think maybe one game might have designated it ME-109, though I could not tell you the name.
@@jacobmccandles1767 Possibly but SWoTL is a game that exists. I wanted to play it the first time I heard about it but never got around to trying to find it.
My grandfather flew one of those things during the war. He always just called it Me. Not even Me 109, not 109, and the Bf I "heard" the first time when I discovered Il2-1946. My other grandfather didn't fly one, he was flak helper, but arguably he was the bigger aviation nerd, he's the one who made me care for planes that much, and also, never ever used the Bf. Tbh. I learned from you, that Bf stands for Bayrische Flugzeugwerke So I have the feeling in Germany it's really just known as the Me (109), and I would go so far to say, that if you'd be asking people on the street nobody would know what a BF-109 is, probably not many what a ME 109 is either, but at least some). Also, we don't say M-E, we say Me, as one word (like Meh, the e like the e in engine, but longer) and whilst there's no difference in saying B-f or M-e, saying Beh-Eff is more complicated, than saying Meh. EDIT: I am not Bavarian, and neither was my grandfather. But I can imagine, that people from Bavaria will be more likely to call it BF. That's just how they roll. They have different names for political parties, for laws, for everything. So it would make sense for them to prefer the part, that reminds people, that it was them and not the Prussians (or "Saupreuß'n" - "prussian pigs". as they like to call every other German, disregarding if they actually have been part of Prussia or not) who have build this iconic plane. At least that's what I would do, if I was Bavarian^^ And I like your conclusion.
What do you mean with we don’t say M-E , do you pronounce the Grundgesetz abbreviation GG as [Gege] !?. Abkürzungen like Me und Bf are absolutely pronounced one letter at a time. Another example for that would be the abbreviation of carbon dioxide which would be the same as in English CO2.
@@GermaniaImmortalis Just because most abbreviations are pronounced one letter at a time doesn't mean all of them are. Especially with Heinkel and Dornier I've heard He and Do a lot more often than H-E and D-O. Also the 2nd letter usually isn't capitalized which suggests reading it as a word
@@niivai I know that some of em ain’t pronounced one at a time but Bf certainly should be as does Me because they just sound stupid otherwise or how do you explain yourself the Fw190, same thing. As for the Heinkel I either hear most people use the full name or [H-E]. The Dornier is the only one I would actually agree on because I also for some reason call it Do as in Dora even though it should probably follow the same principles as the aforementioned examples. Junkers for example sound awful when pronouncing it Ju[you? lol] so here I go for the full name as well. Point is there is no ruling here in what way these abbreviation are pronounced because there’s just no consistency some are pronounced one letter at a time: PKW, LKW, ARD, ZDF etc. Yet some are not: TÜV, Taz, FAZ etc. most of the time it seems the pronunciation is based on what feels better/ sounds better.
@@GermaniaImmortalis The reason you say they sound stupid is probably just because you aren't used to hearing it that way, I think it doesn't make much sense to split 'Messerschmitt' into M-E because it's not the initials like Bf or Fw, It's just the first two letters of one word. I notice the same thing with Soviet-designed aircraft e.g. Sukhoi is Su, Antonov is An, etc. But English speakers always seem to say the letters individually (unless it's a MiG), whereas I hear Russian or Ukrainian speakers say it with one syllable, which leads me to believe that that's the "correct" way to say it.
@@_questionmark_ true that, I do have majority of my conversations about WW2 military aviation in English so maybe that plays into my bias about certain pronunciations. Guess there’s ain’t really a „gemeinsamer Nenner” or certain rule in the pronunciation of abbreviations not only within German, because I’ve checked the Duden, but maybe even most languages for that matter.
The use of "Messer" as a nickname for the 109 *predates* WWII, it was used in the Spanish Civil War and used (IIRC) on the technicall evaluation performed by the Soviets on a captured 109 on that conflict.
20-ish years ago, one of the bigger history magazines (Military History?) published a letter from a current Luftwaffe source who said that it should be "Bf-" for the 109A - D and for the 110A - C, then "Me-" for subsequent versions (because of the change in company name). For whatever that's worth. At any rate, that's been my practice since I read the letter.
That does sound very turn-of-the-century indeed. Much more 'respectful' of foreign language sources and integrating these new perspectives into the post-90s 'soft revisionist' version of history - a version which has much to commend it and for which I still have a liking. Ze Internet und ze rise of ze not-wehraboos-at-all seems to have taken pedantry to a whole new height and created a mass revisionist do-over of what we, at the turn of the century, considered to be our 'modern, accurate understanding'. Honestly, internet history has much going for it - the sharing of fascinating and previously little-known details, certainly - but just as often promulgates factoids or just plain ignorance as 'new historical research & fact', and that's just such a shame: That we have this whole new veil of ignorance which we now have to try and pierce all over again. The internet - turning history into a long, hard slog.
109V (prototypes) A to C (1938) ... the D variant wasn't produced till late 38 after willie had changed the company name to Messerschmit A.G., so these are Me.
This pairs well with Christoph Bergs's (Military Aviation History) video. Thank you for providing further context to this. I say Me 109 for general purpose. I have yet to encounter a person outside of the internet who has a problem with Me 109, so it hasn't made much difference to me for discussion purposes. On the other hand, I do like seeing such videos because I like learning the little details.
Bismarck has that video with the 1943(?) test flight report by an Ausburg Messerschmitt test pilot. Within the same report he refers to the aircraft as a Messerschmitt, a Messerschmitt 109, an Me 109, a Bf 109, and a just plain 109.
I don't mind which indication is used. I prefer the distinction you gave around 5:20. Those types that first flew as Bayerische Flugzeug Werke aircraft to me will always be Bf, after that they are Me. If someone in a comment refers to a Me-109 and I have something to add, I still will use Bf-109 in my reply, not as a correction but simply as a way I refer to the type. I refer to the "Schwalbe" as Me-262. The only aircraft I will use other letters than the factory name is the Ta-152 by Focke-Wulf, but only because Focke-Wulf used that indication too as it was demanded by the "Reichluftfahrtministerium" from 1944 that the indication included the Chief Designer's name and for the Ta-152 that was Kurt Tank. I wonder how the allies referred to that aircraft I'm not even aware if there was any other type of aircraft that complied to the same naming convention. PS I will refer to a Spanish license build Bf-109 with a Merlin engine as Buchón; I rarely use the HA-1112 designation and never the Bf-109 indication other than for those where the airframe was rebuild to accept the DB-603/605 engine. The Czech variant Avia S-119 with the Junkers Jumo engine is rarely mentioned ..... still not a Bf-109.
I've always thought of it as Bf ever since I bought Greens aircraft books when I was teenager. I'm in my 80s now. He was the authority on all WW2 fighter aircraft as far as I was concerned. I still have them. Johnny Johnston in his book "wing Leader" just refers to them as 109s and 190s. He fought them so I guess he's as good an authority as anyone. I don't think anyone referred the A6M as such, they just talked about the "zero".
most pilots / gunners never bothered with the designation, because that's useless drivel during combat. extra syllables to spit out, while your fighting for your life. If your tail gunner says 109's 8'oclock high...everyone knows wtf your talking about.
that's just a case of not needing to define the aircraft in full, as they are all combat pilots fighting the same aircraft, i've heard nicknames as short as "The 9/A 9". in post, i've heard most ww2 vets refer to it as the Me109. personally i've always called it the Bf109 and will continue to do so
@@oceanforth21 right...but the core ( my opinion) is why younger people will do that. is because of video games. anyone who's watched countless movies, or read biographies, historical accounts. (prior to video games popularizing it) Know it as the Me 109, because that's what was written, spoken about. Only the video game industry had to go beyond to get so detailed as to call it a Bf 109. Which even this video proved, is only accurate for the first few years of it's production. So to say a Bf 109, means your only talking about a very small time stamp of 109's produced. (pre Messerschmidt A.G.) More importantly if your talking about specific models of 109...lets say the G model for instance. then you'd be completely wrong calling it a Bf 109G because that plane simply didn't exist. It was an Me 109G, as it was produced by Messerschmidt A.G. not BFW.
For some reason, even as a young boy, I always referred to all every 109 before the E (Emil) model as the Bf, and from the E onwards as Me. 60 years on, it still makes sense to my engineering brain and it's too late to change gears now.
Same for me. I was about eight or nine when I first noticed the difference and read up on it. In my mid-teens I found out that a neighbor of mine who was a navigator in a B-17. In his experience they were all bandits, or "109," "190," "88," et cetera. They were planes with guns pointed at him and his crewmembers.
This is really an example of pedantry by aircraft enthusiasts . I think Me109 is the generally accepted recognized abbreviation for the aircraft. We very rarely hear the term Vickers Super marine Spitfire which is technically who owned the company that made it .
For me it has always been Me-109 as one of the first WWII games I played called, Ace of Aces, put you in the cockpit of a Mossie and the manual called them Me-109s, so that is what I always called them. To put this into modern perspective, it would be like calling an AS-350 a H-125. Same helicopter, but Eurocopter acquired, Aerospatiale but never gave it an EC model number, however when Airbus took over Eurocopter and renamed it to Airbus Helicopter, they changed EVERY model number under their umbrella. So, what are they really called? Well, what do ~you want to call it?
I was born in 1969, and in the 70's and 80's as a young land and model maker, I always called them Me-109. So in the 21st century, I found the Bf-109. At the time, I thought I was picking up on a collective branding through Anglo based information. So seeing this, kind of answered a questions from about a decade ago. Thank you! Oh, and I am going back to Me-109 :D
What sbout the US Navy designations, such as for the Avenger torpedo bomber? The TBF Avenger was designed znd buikt by Grumman. It was built under liscense by General Motors as the TBM Avenger. (The last letter designated the manufacturer).
Great summary! I’ve never “corrected” anyone about this since veterans seem to use both terms, but I had always tended towards Bf myself, but after this video I think I might tend towards Me
As a kid I bought an Airfix model of this aircraft, which I spent hours gluing together and painting. The box said ME 109 and I’ve never been able to call it anything else since.
My Grandfather who was a veteran of Greece, Crete and North Africa always called the 109 ME and he should know as he was strafed by them enough times. So that does seem to back up the action reports that almost uniquely call the 109 ME109.
In theory any model developed pre-1938 so up until around the E-model should be referred to with the Bf designation while anything post 1938 should to with Me designation. What likely happened is that with the switch in designation and the majority of fighting happening post-1940 that the designation of the current and most frequently encountered model became the most famous and hence became the defacto name for all types regardless of manufacture date or variant. Its similar to how every variant of AK family of rifles is called an AK47 regardless of the fact that in all likely hood it isn't the actual true designation of the weapon you have in front of you.
There's a further side story here: the Bayerische Flugzeugwerke that became Messerschmitt is the 2nd incarnation of that name. The first Bfw was founded in 1916 and built airplanes under contract for Germany in WWI. After the war, with the Versailles restrictions, they cast about building furniture and other things to stay afloat. In 1922 they were bought by Knorrbremse, a Berlin based company (that still exists today) that made brakes for trains. They had a big contract with Bavaria for the state railroad and needed more skilled workers. They added Bfw to another company they had already bought based in Munich to help fulfill their contract, which specified that all the work had to be done in Bavaria. This other company, which was founded in 1917, had made airplane engines during WWI, and the engineering team really wanted to go back to making engines. They were able eventually to split off from Knorrbremse, and go back to making motors. Their name was Bayerische Motoren Werke, or BMW.
I liked this, I really enjoy deep dives into jargon pedantry and it's very fun to see where the words come from. Although in my opinion the only decisive point is that the RLM used both terms interchangabley. Arguing that Messerschmitt A.G. used "Me109" means that we should all be referring to U.S. Army M-16 rifles as Colt 604s - that is, what the manufacturer called an item has nothing to do with what the "correct official designation" should be. Arguing that the Allied and Soviet pilots called it an "Me" means we should all be calling MP-40s "Schmeissers," even though that man had nothing to do with the weapons. So it's really only the fact that the RLM used both that gives any weight to the notion that both are acceptable, when using "official" terminology. Personally, I'm going to wind everyone up and just call it an "early HA-1109." :p
I thought this too. Every time ive heard it referenced it was a Me"One-Ten", never heard Bf "One-Ten" either. Also, since Bf was essentially controlled by Messerschmitt and was then renamed before the war it would make sence to the that either prefix goes. And if you wanted to pick a side then all the models designed after the renaming could be Me and all the ones before be Bf. This essentially means for the sake of refering to the war its an Me but if your refering to its development its a Bf. Bf became Me in july 1938 and the Bf 109 C varient went into production in the spring of that same year. Therefore, anything other than the early models should really be Me as they were redesigned and produced by Messerschmitt.
Then again....some typewriters of the 40's had similar fonts for the numeral 1 as a lower case L [l] , maybe it was a typing thing some folks picked up on in referring to an ME 110 as a "Mello"...
The first model of it I ever built was an ME-109 and I've called it that ever since. I never understood where the Bf came from until this video, so thanks!
Hopefully this is not off topic but iron maiden's aces high song by Bruce Dickinson called the only 109 which is possibly the only mention of the aircraft in rock n roll with the verse "bandits at 8:00 moving behind us 10 Me 109s out of the sun Also I am absolutely shocked that the German public referred to the aircraft as the Me-109 This video is definitely informative and while not the best 11 minutes and change of my life it was still pretty cool
What did the Ministry ( possibly led by Goering ) call them? 1941 seems to have been a crossover period. It is simpler with Focke Wulf. Their aircraft were not named after Kurt Tank before the 152.
My first introduction to the 109 was via “Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator 3: The battle for Europe” and they were labeled as BF-109’s. Nowadays I just call it a 109. Same with most planes of the era. You got the 51, the 47, the 38, the 190, the 17 and 24, etc. British aircraft I just call by their names spitfire, hurricane, typhoon etc.
This has been done before by another channel, who went to the German military archives. In operation manuals, memos, communications, the terms were used interchangeably. Might say BF in the title and first paragraph, and ME in the second. The operational manual used both terms. So use either. The Germans did, there is no incorrect answer
Watching the show "Reaching for the skies" when I was younger I was introduced to this plane as the ME 109 I was a bit confused the first time I saw a Bf 109. As several others have said Interviews with Pilots in the documenters and A.A.R.'s from the time calling it a ME 109 and never mentioning Bf had me confused. Never really understood why the names where different, Thank you for clearing this up.
Since it was ME first and then temporarily Bf before going back to ME - I'll stick with ME. For years I was an advocate for Bf but since learning more I now know that ME is the more correct of the two. For correctness, I'd give it around 5% for Bf and 95% for ME accuracy wise, because Bf did not design the Me 109. and Willi Messerschmitt and his team did.
Pretty sure Christoph Berg of the Military Aviation History channel after some research in the German archives came up with similar evidence to yours, both terms were used in official German documentation.
The machine was first manufactured as the BF 109, the basic design was improved on until the end of the war, I think both designations are correct, however I think BF is correct up to the company changed its name in 1938. Post 1938 it's ME 109. So in short BF 109's fought in the Spanish Civil War, ME 109's fought in WW2.
I agree with this. With modern revisions and rebranding, this is also how we refer to things. Those that exist keep their existing names, and new revisions get the new one.
I'll always call it the Bf 109 as that's the term I got exposed to first and got used to. Same reason I call the IS-2, IS-2 and not JS-2. Both are technically correct.
I've known about both designations for as long as I can remember, but I've always tended towards Bf 109 rather than Me 109, not because I think it's more correct, but rather purely out of habit due to being a long-time War Thunder player, where they are referred to as such.
Excellent. With a dash of humour no less. This is precisely what I've read, studied and understood for 50 odd years. Like you, sir, I've inspected various field-repair and maintenance documents using both nomenclatures. Even on the same page of the same aeroplane! So I concur. Correct.
Ever since I was a kid in the '50s here in the U,S, I always heard it called ME109 or Messerschmitt. I was confused when I started hearing it referred to as Bf109.
I was born in 1962, with a father in The Royal Norwegian Airforce. I was an avid plane-nerd; and read what I could find on stuff from WWII. I remember having read in Norwegian war-history that it was possible to differentiate a BF-109 from a ME-109 from features of said planes..(Something about the air-intake?) This I read in a Norwegian book about the air-war in Europe. A few years later we went on a RNAF summer-holiday; where the highlight was a celebrated Norwegian figther-ace retelling his WWII stories. After his story I stood up and told him that one of his ME-109 kills weren't that. It was a BF-109, judging from the photo-proof. The room fell silent. I was 12 at the time. Today I think I learned that you should not speak too soon...
Interesting discussion. One can perhaps compare this to the manufacturer’s designation Supermarine type 300 etc whereas most people prefer to use the name designated by the British Air Ministry; the Spitfire.
Interesting discussion. I've seen both designations like everyone else, but I'm glad you made an attempt at making it make sense, sort of. I'm going to watch the video again until I understand it better.
as a person who's been CORRECTED in ALL CAPS more than once on this, I just love the takeaway that the Germans in general "didn't care" which term was used so thats all the response one needs vs. the endless supply of Internet denziens who live just to correct people. :p Great video! (i'll note that the 80s wargame USAAF used the ME designator so that imprinted on me to this day.)
@@CalibanRising my pleasure. and for the next person who says "The ME-109 never existed" respond with a screen shot of IL-2 Dover Cliffs as your Hurricane is descending in flames......"I was just shot down by an IMAGINARY plane!"
@@nikademuswtf people say that? Tell them that in Germany to this day nobody except scholars and fans of IL2 (and co) know what the heck a BF 109 is. It's just "die Me" (not M_E, one word Meh), or "die Messerschmidt" if you are fancy and want to show off you can add the 109. My grandpa piloted a 109 in the Med, he talked about it a lot and never, not once in the 27 years I knew him before his death, he called it a BF. Neither did anyone else I've ever met. I learned the BF designation through video games. And I have a feeling the people who give you crap for calling it "Me" have done so too, they seem like angry War Thunder idiots and probably dress up as obersturmführer for Halloween. Just ignore them, knowing that it a) doesn't matter and b) argubly calling it Me-109 is how the pilots and engineers and german people called it.
I greatly admire your restraint on this topic. Until I left Germany some decades ago now, I wasn't even aware this was a topic of debate! With the arrival of the Internet and my moving into anglosphere countries I suddenly and with a great sense of befuddlement, became aware that this is "a thing" (before we use "this is a thing" 😆). It seems to be a purely anglophone desk-thumping thing. To us (and one of my grandfathers was in the Luftwaffe in WW2 and I myself also served in the post-war LW) it *always* was the "Mehhundertneun". Nobody cared and it slips off the tongue much more easily. The (in)famous Motorbuchverlag in its book on the 109, still written when many of the engineers and pilots were still around, explained the whole "Bf" vs "Me" designation in a mere paragraph and mostly used Me-109, to the best of my memory (it's been many years). I will continue to say "Mehundertneun" or "Meoneohnine", if only for the chance to give some basement-dweller a heart-attack.
Thanks for digging into this. I answered this question to myself in the mid 90s when I did my own research. My conclusion was it doesn't matter. It's sort of similar to how the Avenger was first made by Grumman making it the TBF but then was off loaded to GM so Grumman could focus on the Hellcat. Making it the TBM. So in theory the first quarter were TBFs while the other 3/4s were TBMs. Same goes with the F4F/FM. Either ways it's the Wildcat. I guess if you want to be a purest you could call the early one BFs and the rest MEs. Personally I just call them 109s or ME109s as most were built after the switch over.
i mean, the Me 109 after the take over... had a few changes. 1938 is the key year here. Production of the short-lived Bf 109C began in the spring of 1938. In late 1938, the Bf 109E entered production. Thus. the BF-109E should be the first actual ME 109. This would work as the -E variant had MANY LARGE updates and changes. This included air intakes, gun placement, frame shape around the nose, so forth. It could warrant the rebranding.
Ever since I read Me-109 by Martin Caidin, excellent book by the way, I've been calling it Me 109. I've read it in 1974. His book on the B 17 is really good too.
We flew it during the war in Hungary, and we called and call it "Messzer" (it's something pronunciation thing, Hungarian "s" is something like "sh" in English, and Hungarian "sz" is something like "s" in English. We actually have these double letters in the Hungarian alphabet). (well presented in the words "same" and "shame").
It is: Northrop YF-17 Cobra McDonnell Douglas F/A-18 Hornet (i.e F/A-18A, F/A-18B, F/A-18C, F/A-18D) Boeing F/A-18 Super Hornet (i.e. F/A-18E, F/A-18F) Boeing EA-18 Growler
@@taproom113 ; Except General Dynamics themselves wanted to name her Viper and the USAF chose the Fighting Falcon name because Falcon already was used by the Dassault Falcon which was in service with the USA.
You should do a video on what happened to messerschmitt (person and company) after ww2 and what achievements/ drawbacks were faced. I have been looking for a video but havent seen one yet. Id like information on that topic
There's also a German song of the time about the thing where they sing "Me 109" (spelled out as "Me hundertneun"). Besides, I have also seen the plane being called "Messerschmidt Bf-190" or even "Me Bf 109". Would that be correct also?
The Bf 109 name was already used for the plane that was still produced after '38. So the name stuck just like with the Spitfre. The Bf109 A was a very different plane in comparisson to the late war 109 G. It kept however the same profile, the same lineage of engines and therefore the same name. A Spitfre Mk 1 is a very different plane compared to the Mk XXI, but it looks simulair it has the same lineage of engines so the name stays. Both planes went thru a similair development cycle.
Me would be taken as the standard designation of the maker or brand, and Bf would be the classification of the aircraft by the maker or the Luftwaffe technical staff.😊
I have vague recollections pof it being called both Me109 and Bf109. It may have even been Me 109 or Messerschmidt Bf 109! Messerschmidt is still located in Bavaria as Messerschmidt -Bolkow-Bohm (MBB) who were part of the Panavia collaboration on Tornado.
It seems the small f is correct for the RLM nomenclature, but when you look at the other aircraft manufacturers, the RLM code is just the shortening of the names: Dornier=Do, Junkers=Ju, etc. The Bf designation is an initialism, contracted from the 2 words Bayerische and Flugzeugswerke. The proper RLM code should have either been Ba(which was used by Bachem) or BF. Oddly enough, when the ME code is used, it seems they are all capitalised instead of plain Me, which is more congruent with the other codes. Personally, I'll start using Be, which is short for Besserschmitt. Besserschmitt is a portmanteau of Besserwisser and Messerschmitt.😉
@@Sacto1654 So did the 109 as all extant airframes bear the official "Bf 109" designation on their identification plates, including the final K-4 models.
Since the corporation that built the airframe primarily identified it as Me during the majority of the production run, Me should be used. Bf is fine for early production run if you want to deep dive into the minutia. After the merger between Boeing and McDonnell Douglas, the MD-95 was re-designated the 717-200. While there may still be some early, pre-merger, MD-95 airframes bouncing around out there, 717-200 is the official designation. Even though the MD-95 is a far cry from the original aircraft that carried the 717 designation, but that's another discussion.
So, I always called it the Bf-109 because that's what it was called in the penultimate reference material (the Xbox game Secret Weapons Over Normandy), but in all seriousness, when I was a kid, I thought it was a factory thing, similar to the US Navy, so like the plane was the "109" and if it was made at the Messerschmitt factory, it was Me, if it was made at a different factory it took that designation (like I said, this was when I was a little kid growing up)
Wikipedia: "Originally the aircraft was designated as Bf 109 by the RLM, since the design was submitted by the Bayerische Flugzeugwerke (literally "Bavarian Aircraft Works", meaning "Bavarian Aircraft Factory"; sometimes abbreviated B.F.W.,[36] akin to BMW) during 1935. The company was renamed Messerschmitt AG after 11 July 1938 when Erhard Milch finally allowed Willy Messerschmitt to acquire the company. All Messerschmitt aircraft that originated after that date, such as the Me 210, were to carry the "Me" designation. Despite regulations by the RLM, wartime documents from Messerschmitt AG, RLM and Luftwaffe loss and strength reports continued to use both designations, sometimes even on the same page."
Willi actually had a lot of help from another designer but right now I cant think of him. For a long time I thought he was the only designer of the plane. ah.. Robert Lusser !
Whichever descriptor you choose for the 109 people know exactly what you’re talking about. This is one of those cases where there is ample evidence to support both sides. At the end of the day it doesn’t matter and the large majority of people don’t really care. I think this video does an excellent job highlighting that. To the people who think that continuing to argue this is a good use of their time, can I suggest an alternate line of enquiry… what is the difference between “intellectual” and “ intelligent” 😉
I think I've only seen BF109. War Thunder generally just references them as BFs, and I think the sources I used in a paper once referenced it as BF109s. Been a while though.
Phil at about 6:55 you referred to what the public called the aircraft in the press. However as you also said it was /State sponsored/ press; in totalitarian Nazi Germany I doubt 'freedom of the Press' existed so it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if the public's claimed quotes mysteriously matched the party line. Everything has a designation in the design phase and a different name during production. The Avro Lancaster was a Type 683, Supermarine Spitfire originally called a Shrike. I think what matters is what it's called during production - the bulk of production if it changed. It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if the /internal/ designation of a 109 was 'me' to keep Willi happy during the design phase, but externally everyone else called it a 'bf'. Then when the company name changed everyone called it an 'me'. Just to throw a grenade into the discussion, I've also heard the term bf-110 *innocent look* albeit not as often. BTW the 1066 example made me laugh. I remember Sandy Toksvig on QI talking about her father and French. He said 'The call a horse a cheval. They have a different word for everything.. it's very annoying!' *LOL*
I can quite imagine Willi always talking about his Me 109 to his high ranking mates, just to plant the seed. I think this conclusion applies just as much to the 110 and 108, but obviously there were less of them around.
The limited extent of my knowledge on WW2 planes made me think that it was called an "ME BF 109," with BF being the industrial designation and ME being the name of the plan/name of designer. So, I was basically correct although BF was the previous company rather than just the designation. ME 109 seems like the clear winner.
All 109's up to the Emile were indeed the original airframe design, with upgrades, so "Bf 109" is proper. ---HOWEVER: WITH THE FREDERICH (109F) THIS variant, appearing years after the 11 July, 1938 "Cut-Off Date", was in reality, a completely re-designed airframe (not simple upgrades) and therefore all subsequent ships were in fact, an all new aircraft. Although sharing similar planform and profile contours, THEY WERE NOT THE IDENTICAL AIRCRAFT with minor upgrades. HENCE, the accurate and properly correct designations were: "Bf 109A" through the Bf 109E, "Emile",. But all late "109" aircraft should correctly and properly be referred to as "Me 109" as withe the: Me 109F, Me 109G and Me 109K.
well actually most we see these days are in fact likely Hispano Aviación HA-1112s which is what the aircraft in the battle of britain film used. and the he 111s were in fact CASA 2.111s in the battle of britain.
The whole issue of how the Norman Conquest affected the still-evolving English language is fascinating. Of course the main influence is the massive influx of French vocabulary, which is one the main reasons the English lexicon dwarfs other languages'. I've also heard that English owes its relative lack of grammatical complexity to the Conquest, in that, the leadership classes having become bifurcated from the common classes by language (the elites speaking Norman French and the rest speaking English, Old English, presumably), there was no "policing" of English by the elites, as there has been in the case of almost every other language, French for example, having L'Academie Francaise [sp?]. So, English was left to evolve freely on its own, because of course, "the little people" and their "crude tongue" were not worth the effort of the imposition of any controls, any maintaining of "grammatical purity."
I've heard, for example, that English used to have gender (like French and German) but shed this over the centuries as Old English became Middle English.
I called em "Meshersmits" as a kid with dad LOL Started getting back into aviation history and was like "what are these BF109s everyone loves... oh, they're just schmitties!"
If I were Willy, I'd tell you it was an ME 109 too. It seems like a tempest in a teapot. Think about it. Does an A10 pilot call his plane a Thunderbolt II, or does he call it call it a Warthog? An F35 a Lightning or Fat Amy? What should we call them? We all know what both names mean. Life's too short.
When I was growing up, I only ever heard the plane referred to as simply a Messerschmitt. I didn't learn the official designation of Bf-109 until I was a teenager, and even then I generally don't use the manufacturer code in general speech. I just call it a 109. For most German planes, I'll usually say the manufacturer's name in full and then the number designation, like Focke-Wulf 190, Dornier 217, or Heinkel 111, but for the 109, it was so ubiquitous that the number alone suffices. Also, Messerschmitt is a long name.
Basically the 109 and the 110 (And of course the 108) are developed under "Bf"... but after a change in some kind of investments or such... the Plane was "renamed" in "Me".
The major correction is not only the name, but also spelling and pronouncing. It's Me, not ME. The shortened version of Messerschmitt. And should be pronounced as the first syllable. [ˈmɛ] because the original pronunciation is [ˈmɛsɐʃmɪt]
Honestly I just say 109 or 190 and then the variants. I rarely say BF, ME, or FW. However there is one exception, I always have to say TA 152H-1. I can’t call it the TA or the 152, I could be talking about the experimental versions and I will always naturally say the TA 152H-1
I certainly became confused early on, until I realized that until mid-war when it seemed the Bf became ME. Focke Wulf remained FW even after Focke was pushed out of his own company in essence.
Good summary. As an old Polish Spitfire pilot once said to me as he described his first dogfight: "Zose fokkers were everywhere". You mean FW190s? "No! Zose fokkers were all Messerschmitts!"
Corr, I was going to say that.
That is an old joke, I first heard it in the mid 1970s.
yep I heard it too back then, was in the Navy. @@dougcoombes8497
@@dougcoombes8497 - It's no joke. British RAF Ace Sir Douglas Bader said it to a room full of girl students.that he was invited to speak to about his experience as a pilot during WW II.
Bader: "So there were two of these f*ckers behind me, three f*ckers to my right, another f*cker to the left" At this point, the school's Principal reportedly turned pale, turned to the girls and intervened saying, "Ladies, Fokker was a German aircraft." Sir Douglas answered: "That may be madam, but those f*ckers were in Messerschmitts!"
Oh Very good!
Balls to it. I'm gonna call it a Mf 109 from now on.
lol
"Mofo 109."
Lmaoo
*softly* Please dont
@@darkadmiral106 Too late
Being from Germany I never heard anyone call it a Me 109 until interacting with the anglosphere on the internet. A few weeks prior to this video i decided to research this myself and as you found that both terms are used interchangably by basically anyone talking about it (except for allied pilots pretty consistently calling it Me 109).
Funny, I am also a German soeaker and all I ever hear was Me 109 but Me pronounced as a word, never as M.E.
@@justRobinisfine Maybe it's also a regional thing
Usually you hear "Me 109" just for abbreviation, because "Messerschmitt BF-109" is quite a mouthful, even for Germans. But calling it "Messerschmitt Me-109" is simply dead-wrong.
For consistency, you could argue for a little f. In the case of Heinkel and Dornier, the second letter is small whether written in full or abbreviated, but Focke-Wulf and Bayerische Flugzeugwerke use two capital letters in their abbreviations. However, Fw is never written FW (unless all other text is also written in all caps), so we're back to Bf, because it follows the German rules of nomenclature for aircraft types.
Incidentally, the Fw 190 evolved into the Ta 152 for the very same reasons, but you don't hear people calling for the 190 to be renamed Ta 152 in honour of its designer.
Don't you mean "renamed Ta 190"?
Oh no. Don’t open that door…!
Too late. Let’s make a video on Focke-Wulf’s Ta-190 Ausf. D-13 “Dora” (read that sentence and weep!)
My German teacher in high school (he WAS German from Bavaria) said he hated when he heard it called Bf. “It vas designed by Messerschmitt, so it is ME!” A bit of irony here. His father and mine were both at Normandy…on opposite sides. My dad survived, his didn’t.
“It vas designed by Messerschmitt, so it is ME!” Tell that to Kurt Tank, he'd be delighted to hear about all those Ta 190s.
@@Dafmeister1978
Exactly what popped into my head
How about those Sc51 Mustangs and Ke38 Lightnings ?
Just kidding - mostly ;)@@Dafmeister1978
Imagine a world with Mi Spitfires and Jo Blackbirds.
@@WayneKitchingNo! Castle Bromwich Spitfires would be C.B Spitfire...surely😅
I never admired the BF262 or FW109, but the JU190 was a great machine.
😂😂💯💯
Almost had an aneurysm reading that for the first time 😆
How’d bro forget about the Do 288. Smh 🤦♂️
@@monke1351 True. Elvis Presley flew those during the Vietnam war in 1916, after he quit playing trombone in Metallica.
None of those was a match for the Hawker Spitfire or the Avro Mosquito.
Every veteran in every book I've read about the air war in Europe called it an ME. Every veteran I've met at a war bird air show called it an ME. Every documentary on WWII I've seen identified it as an ME. It was only about 20 years ago that I heard it called BF and I thought, 'I don't think so'.
hey that's how i felt when i started playing war thunder
Kids learning about aviation history from video games instead of books
I'm Finnish and unless referred to by its nickname (mersu), every Finn calls it a Bf 109. I've read plenty of books old and new on the matter.
@@EneTheGeneokay but the Finns call plenty of things differently than everyone
@@qltcn Is that meant to be bad? I think its good that some games have historical value, you cant stop kids from playing games, soo make the games valuable pieces of media that can spark interest for topics, I got into IT work because I was interested in how they rendered/made games on them. I wanted a gaming pc and eventually it turned into a full blown Job. And playing warthunder got me really interested in old war machines and how they work, I now know more than I ever had about old warmachines after playing warthunder, it sparked that passion for them!
Just to weigh in on this from an actual german: We still use both terms Bf and Me, though most people I know use Bf. If we want to specify the builder we usually go with the full name "Messerschmitt BF-109".
Messerschmitt, without "d"
The actual german has spoken. This is also how i tend to say it.
I always thought that BF was short for the name of the designer or something and that Messerschmitt was the manufacturer but, alas, i was somewhat wrong.
@@edwardjohansson2909 Bayerischen Flugzeugwerken
It is Bf-109, this is the official name for it it got from the Reichsluftfahrtministerium and they used it for all modells.
After the BFW AG changed the name to Messerschmitt AG they used Me for all the airplanes but for the Bf-109 and Bf-110 it stayed Bf.
Nice. Growing up as a Cold War kid, I was immersed in the war stories of the actual wartime era, which were still in the main our received knowledge. So, I and all my mates knew this aeroplane as the Me109. And war movies, veterans' accounts and even Battle comic books mostly used this term.
It's only a little later on, as we grew up and those of us still fascinated by the period started to be a bit pedantic about details, that we started to refer to Bf109s. But we weren't exclusive about it, I'll be honest.
I feel a bit of relief watching this video and knowing that there really was no right or wrong all along. TIL.
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Less interestingly (because this is an aviation channel - although read on), about the time we started using 'Bf', we *also* started calling "E boats" the anglicised "S boats" - because that was derived from the original name for the type(s).
Of course, the hugely inaccurate Allied (read; British) brevity code for them - supposedly 'E' for 'Enemy', but just as likely 'E' for 'I don't really care what they're actually called; I barely even know what one looks like' - is just fine when talking about them from the Allied perspective, after-action reports and so on.
The biggest problem is that, half the time, an "E-boat" wasn't even an S-boat, but something else entirely and "I don't care what it actually was, I just know we shot the hell out of it and left it burning".
At least RAF pilots knew if they fighting an Me109 or Fw190, rather than shooting down a helpless Fiesler Storch.
Hence all the 'E-boats' which were encountered and sunk in the Tyrrhenian and Ligurian Seas after 1944, when there were less than two dozen of the things in that theatre and they were *all* in the Adriatic by then.*
War is a strange place for stories. And terrible for accuracy: pedants beware!
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* And a good number of those mystery boats would have been... *Luftwaffe* boats! The little-discussed 'FlBs' or 'Flugbetriebschnellboote'; anything from a little tender to flying boats and seaplanes, up to big, fast and heavily-armed crash boats and air-sea rescue launches. There - an aviation connection.
I'm used to the 109 being referred to as the BF109 because I first learned about this plane playing the old LucasArts game Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe where they referred to it as the BF109, but I've probably heard it called the ME109 way more though.
it's ME109 in the vastly superior (by that i mean, the game i had vs that game you had) chuck yeager's air combat.
I saw and heard Bf first too but thanks to Secret Weapons Over Normandy instead.
I have seen people refer to it as ME-109 but not often and in most games I played it was Bf. I think maybe one game might have designated it ME-109, though I could not tell you the name.
@@SHADOWFRENZY92 I believe he was referring to SWON. Fun if somewhat simplistic game play. I still pop it in once in a while.
@@jacobmccandles1767 Possibly but SWoTL is a game that exists. I wanted to play it the first time I heard about it but never got around to trying to find it.
My grandfather flew one of those things during the war. He always just called it Me. Not even Me 109, not 109, and the Bf I "heard" the first time when I discovered Il2-1946. My other grandfather didn't fly one, he was flak helper, but arguably he was the bigger aviation nerd, he's the one who made me care for planes that much, and also, never ever used the Bf.
Tbh. I learned from you, that Bf stands for Bayrische Flugzeugwerke
So I have the feeling in Germany it's really just known as the Me (109), and I would go so far to say, that if you'd be asking people on the street nobody would know what a BF-109 is, probably not many what a ME 109 is either, but at least some).
Also, we don't say M-E, we say Me, as one word (like Meh, the e like the e in engine, but longer) and whilst there's no difference in saying B-f or M-e, saying Beh-Eff is more complicated, than saying Meh.
EDIT: I am not Bavarian, and neither was my grandfather. But I can imagine, that people from Bavaria will be more likely to call it BF. That's just how they roll. They have different names for political parties, for laws, for everything. So it would make sense for them to prefer the part, that reminds people, that it was them and not the Prussians (or "Saupreuß'n" - "prussian pigs". as they like to call every other German, disregarding if they actually have been part of Prussia or not) who have build this iconic plane. At least that's what I would do, if I was Bavarian^^
And I like your conclusion.
What do you mean with we don’t say M-E , do you pronounce the Grundgesetz abbreviation GG as [Gege] !?. Abkürzungen like Me und Bf are absolutely pronounced one letter at a time. Another example for that would be the abbreviation of carbon dioxide which would be the same as in English CO2.
@@GermaniaImmortalis Just because most abbreviations are pronounced one letter at a time doesn't mean all of them are. Especially with Heinkel and Dornier I've heard He and Do a lot more often than H-E and D-O. Also the 2nd letter usually isn't capitalized which suggests reading it as a word
@@niivai I know that some of em ain’t pronounced one at a time but Bf certainly should be as does Me because they just sound stupid otherwise or how do you explain yourself the Fw190, same thing. As for the Heinkel I either hear most people use the full name or [H-E].
The Dornier is the only one I would actually agree on because I also for some reason call it Do as in Dora even though it should probably follow the same principles as the aforementioned examples. Junkers for example sound awful when pronouncing it Ju[you? lol] so here I go for the full name as well.
Point is there is no ruling here in what way these abbreviation are pronounced because there’s just no consistency some are pronounced one letter at a time: PKW, LKW, ARD, ZDF etc.
Yet some are not: TÜV, Taz, FAZ etc.
most of the time it seems the pronunciation is based on what feels better/ sounds better.
@@GermaniaImmortalis The reason you say they sound stupid is probably just because you aren't used to hearing it that way, I think it doesn't make much sense to split 'Messerschmitt' into M-E because it's not the initials like Bf or Fw, It's just the first two letters of one word. I notice the same thing with Soviet-designed aircraft e.g. Sukhoi is Su, Antonov is An, etc. But English speakers always seem to say the letters individually (unless it's a MiG), whereas I hear Russian or Ukrainian speakers say it with one syllable, which leads me to believe that that's the "correct" way to say it.
@@_questionmark_ true that, I do have majority of my conversations about WW2 military aviation in English so maybe that plays into my bias about certain pronunciations. Guess there’s ain’t really a „gemeinsamer Nenner” or certain rule in the pronunciation of abbreviations not only within German, because I’ve checked the Duden, but maybe even most languages for that matter.
The use of "Messer" as a nickname for the 109 *predates* WWII, it was used in the Spanish Civil War and used (IIRC) on the technicall evaluation performed by the Soviets on a captured 109 on that conflict.
20-ish years ago, one of the bigger history magazines (Military History?) published a letter from a current Luftwaffe source who said that it should be "Bf-" for the 109A - D and for the 110A - C, then "Me-" for subsequent versions (because of the change in company name). For whatever that's worth.
At any rate, that's been my practice since I read the letter.
That does sound very turn-of-the-century indeed. Much more 'respectful' of foreign language sources and integrating these new perspectives into the post-90s 'soft revisionist' version of history - a version which has much to commend it and for which I still have a liking.
Ze Internet und ze rise of ze not-wehraboos-at-all seems to have taken pedantry to a whole new height and created a mass revisionist do-over of what we, at the turn of the century, considered to be our 'modern, accurate understanding'. Honestly, internet history has much going for it - the sharing of fascinating and previously little-known details, certainly - but just as often promulgates factoids or just plain ignorance as 'new historical research & fact', and that's just such a shame: That we have this whole new veil of ignorance which we now have to try and pierce all over again.
The internet - turning history into a long, hard slog.
What satisfy the Soul,,, but a warm (\/)emory
][ hold Wonder to all Aircraft, their form, movement thru in the S/
109V (prototypes) A to C (1938) ... the D variant wasn't produced till late 38 after willie had changed the company name to Messerschmit A.G., so these are Me.
What an excellent piece of research, thank you.
Glad you enjoyed it!
This pairs well with Christoph Bergs's (Military Aviation History) video. Thank you for providing further context to this. I say Me 109 for general purpose. I have yet to encounter a person outside of the internet who has a problem with Me 109, so it hasn't made much difference to me for discussion purposes. On the other hand, I do like seeing such videos because I like learning the little details.
Thanks for watching Jack.
Bismarck has that video with the 1943(?) test flight report by an Ausburg Messerschmitt test pilot. Within the same report he refers to the aircraft as a Messerschmitt, a Messerschmitt 109, an Me 109, a Bf 109, and a just plain 109.
I don't mind which indication is used. I prefer the distinction you gave around 5:20. Those types that first flew as Bayerische Flugzeug Werke aircraft to me will always be Bf, after that they are Me. If someone in a comment refers to a Me-109 and I have something to add, I still will use Bf-109 in my reply, not as a correction but simply as a way I refer to the type. I refer to the "Schwalbe" as Me-262. The only aircraft I will use other letters than the factory name is the Ta-152 by Focke-Wulf, but only because Focke-Wulf used that indication too as it was demanded by the "Reichluftfahrtministerium" from 1944 that the indication included the Chief Designer's name and for the Ta-152 that was Kurt Tank. I wonder how the allies referred to that aircraft
I'm not even aware if there was any other type of aircraft that complied to the same naming convention.
PS
I will refer to a Spanish license build Bf-109 with a Merlin engine as Buchón; I rarely use the HA-1112 designation and never the Bf-109 indication other than for those where the airframe was rebuild to accept the DB-603/605 engine. The Czech variant Avia S-119 with the Junkers Jumo engine is rarely mentioned ..... still not a Bf-109.
I've always thought of it as Bf ever since I bought Greens aircraft books when I was teenager. I'm in my 80s now. He was the authority on all WW2 fighter aircraft as far as I was concerned. I still have them.
Johnny Johnston in his book "wing Leader" just refers to them as 109s and 190s. He fought them so I guess he's as good an authority as anyone.
I don't think anyone referred the A6M as such, they just talked about the "zero".
most pilots / gunners never bothered with the designation, because that's useless drivel during combat. extra syllables to spit out, while your fighting for your life. If your tail gunner says 109's 8'oclock high...everyone knows wtf your talking about.
that's just a case of not needing to define the aircraft in full, as they are all combat pilots fighting the same aircraft, i've heard nicknames as short as "The 9/A 9". in post, i've heard most ww2 vets refer to it as the Me109. personally i've always called it the Bf109 and will continue to do so
@@oceanforth21 right...but the core ( my opinion) is why younger people will do that. is because of video games. anyone who's watched countless movies, or read biographies, historical accounts. (prior to video games popularizing it) Know it as the Me 109, because that's what was written, spoken about. Only the video game industry had to go beyond to get so detailed as to call it a Bf 109. Which even this video proved, is only accurate for the first few years of it's production.
So to say a Bf 109, means your only talking about a very small time stamp of 109's produced. (pre Messerschmidt A.G.) More importantly if your talking about specific models of 109...lets say the G model for instance. then you'd be completely wrong calling it a Bf 109G because that plane simply didn't exist. It was an Me 109G, as it was produced by Messerschmidt A.G. not BFW.
For some reason, even as a young boy, I always referred to all every 109 before the E (Emil) model as the Bf, and from the E onwards as Me. 60 years on, it still makes sense to my engineering brain and it's too late to change gears now.
Same for me. I was about eight or nine when I first noticed the difference and read up on it.
In my mid-teens I found out that a neighbor of mine who was a navigator in a B-17. In his experience they were all bandits, or "109," "190," "88," et cetera. They were planes with guns pointed at him and his crewmembers.
Agree 😀
This is really an example of pedantry by aircraft enthusiasts . I think Me109 is the generally accepted recognized abbreviation for the aircraft. We very rarely hear the term Vickers Super marine Spitfire which is technically who owned the company that made it .
" ][f it's B L U E ,,, WE Fly Thru It ! "
S A L U T E
Excellent summary. I like the references to Old English words.
For me it has always been Me-109 as one of the first WWII games I played called, Ace of Aces, put you in the cockpit of a Mossie and the manual called them Me-109s, so that is what I always called them. To put this into modern perspective, it would be like calling an AS-350 a H-125. Same helicopter, but Eurocopter acquired, Aerospatiale but never gave it an EC model number, however when Airbus took over Eurocopter and renamed it to Airbus Helicopter, they changed EVERY model number under their umbrella. So, what are they really called? Well, what do ~you want to call it?
I was born in 1969, and in the 70's and 80's as a young land and model maker, I always called them Me-109. So in the 21st century, I found the Bf-109. At the time, I thought I was picking up on a collective branding through Anglo based information. So seeing this, kind of answered a questions from about a decade ago. Thank you!
Oh, and I am going back to Me-109 :D
Loved the Dad's Army and O'lle O'lle references. Lt. Gruber would approve.
Don't tell him Pike
That explains so much. I clearly remember in the 70s all the model kits and book references called it the ME 109.
What sbout the US Navy designations, such as for the Avenger torpedo bomber? The TBF Avenger was designed znd buikt by Grumman. It was built under liscense by General Motors as the TBM Avenger. (The last letter designated the manufacturer).
Great summary! I’ve never “corrected” anyone about this since veterans seem to use both terms, but I had always tended towards Bf myself, but after this video I think I might tend towards Me
Thanks for watching!
German here. We really dont care, but usually it is called the Me 109
As a kid I bought an Airfix model of this aircraft, which I spent hours gluing together and painting. The box said ME 109 and I’ve never been able to call it anything else since.
My Grandfather who was a veteran of Greece, Crete and North Africa always called the 109 ME and he should know as he was strafed by them enough times. So that does seem to back up the action reports that almost uniquely call the 109 ME109.
In theory any model developed pre-1938 so up until around the E-model should be referred to with the Bf designation while anything post 1938 should to with Me designation. What likely happened is that with the switch in designation and the majority of fighting happening post-1940 that the designation of the current and most frequently encountered model became the most famous and hence became the defacto name for all types regardless of manufacture date or variant.
Its similar to how every variant of AK family of rifles is called an AK47 regardless of the fact that in all likely hood it isn't the actual true designation of the weapon you have in front of you.
As a kid in the sixties, they were called ME-109. It wasn't until l was in my forties that l heard them referred to by BF-109.
There's a further side story here: the Bayerische Flugzeugwerke that became Messerschmitt is the 2nd incarnation of that name. The first Bfw was founded in 1916 and built airplanes under contract for Germany in WWI. After the war, with the Versailles restrictions, they cast about building furniture and other things to stay afloat. In 1922 they were bought by Knorrbremse, a Berlin based company (that still exists today) that made brakes for trains. They had a big contract with Bavaria for the state railroad and needed more skilled workers. They added Bfw to another company they had already bought based in Munich to help fulfill their contract, which specified that all the work had to be done in Bavaria. This other company, which was founded in 1917, had made airplane engines during WWI, and the engineering team really wanted to go back to making engines. They were able eventually to split off from Knorrbremse, and go back to making motors. Their name was Bayerische Motoren Werke, or BMW.
I liked this, I really enjoy deep dives into jargon pedantry and it's very fun to see where the words come from. Although in my opinion the only decisive point is that the RLM used both terms interchangabley. Arguing that Messerschmitt A.G. used "Me109" means that we should all be referring to U.S. Army M-16 rifles as Colt 604s - that is, what the manufacturer called an item has nothing to do with what the "correct official designation" should be. Arguing that the Allied and Soviet pilots called it an "Me" means we should all be calling MP-40s "Schmeissers," even though that man had nothing to do with the weapons. So it's really only the fact that the RLM used both that gives any weight to the notion that both are acceptable, when using "official" terminology.
Personally, I'm going to wind everyone up and just call it an "early HA-1109." :p
Good! But, to raise another point, I've never heard anyone else say Me (or Bf) "One-One-O". It's always "One-Ten"
Just a mello thought...
I thought this too. Every time ive heard it referenced it was a Me"One-Ten", never heard Bf "One-Ten" either.
Also, since Bf was essentially controlled by Messerschmitt and was then renamed before the war it would make sence to the that either prefix goes. And if you wanted to pick a side then all the models designed after the renaming could be Me and all the ones before be Bf. This essentially means for the sake of refering to the war its an Me but if your refering to its development its a Bf.
Bf became Me in july 1938 and the Bf 109 C varient went into production in the spring of that same year. Therefore, anything other than the early models should really be Me as they were redesigned and produced by Messerschmitt.
So you heard now.
May be an American vs British English thing. I (British)call it a one one oh.
Then again....some typewriters of the 40's had similar fonts for the numeral 1 as a lower case L [l] , maybe it was a typing thing some folks picked up on in referring to an ME 110 as a "Mello"...
He calls them Bf, they call them Me, I call them some of the most amazing looking fighters of WWII, especially the Me Emil's.
The first model of it I ever built was an ME-109 and I've called it that ever since.
I never understood where the Bf came from until this video, so thanks!
Hopefully this is not off topic but iron maiden's aces high song by Bruce Dickinson called the only 109 which is possibly the only mention of the aircraft in rock n roll with the verse "bandits at 8:00 moving behind us 10 Me 109s out of the sun
Also I am absolutely shocked that the German public referred to the aircraft as the Me-109
This video is definitely informative and while not the best 11 minutes and change of my life it was still pretty cool
What did the Ministry ( possibly led by Goering ) call them? 1941 seems to have been a crossover period. It is simpler with Focke Wulf. Their aircraft were not named after Kurt Tank before the 152.
My first introduction to the 109 was via “Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator 3: The battle for Europe” and they were labeled as BF-109’s. Nowadays I just call it a 109. Same with most planes of the era. You got the 51, the 47, the 38, the 190, the 17 and 24, etc. British aircraft I just call by their names spitfire, hurricane, typhoon etc.
I used to love that game too.
This has been done before by another channel, who went to the German military archives. In operation manuals, memos, communications, the terms were used interchangeably. Might say BF in the title and first paragraph, and ME in the second. The operational manual used both terms. So use either. The Germans did, there is no incorrect answer
Watching the show "Reaching for the skies" when I was younger I was introduced to this plane as the ME 109 I was a bit confused the first time I saw a Bf 109. As several others have said Interviews with Pilots in the documenters and A.A.R.'s from the time calling it a ME 109 and never mentioning Bf had me confused. Never really understood why the names where different, Thank you for clearing this up.
Excellent summary with historical justification, sir. I’ll concede the “Bf” but still I prefer the “ME” ; )
Since it was ME first and then temporarily Bf before going back to ME - I'll stick with ME. For years I was an advocate for Bf but since learning more I now know that ME is the more correct of the two. For correctness, I'd give it around 5% for Bf and 95% for ME accuracy wise, because Bf did not design the Me 109. and Willi Messerschmitt and his team did.
Pretty sure Christoph Berg of the Military Aviation History channel after some research in the German archives came up with similar evidence to yours, both terms were used in official German documentation.
The machine was first manufactured as the BF 109, the basic design was improved on until the end of the war, I think both designations are correct, however I think BF is correct up to the company changed its name in 1938. Post 1938 it's ME 109. So in short BF 109's fought in the Spanish Civil War, ME 109's fought in WW2.
I agree with this. With modern revisions and rebranding, this is also how we refer to things. Those that exist keep their existing names, and new revisions get the new one.
I'll always call it the Bf 109 as that's the term I got exposed to first and got used to. Same reason I call the IS-2, IS-2 and not
JS-2. Both are technically correct.
God, i absolutely hate hearing people say "JS-2" and its almost always British people.
I've known about both designations for as long as I can remember, but I've always tended towards Bf 109 rather than Me 109, not because I think it's more correct, but rather purely out of habit due to being a long-time War Thunder player, where they are referred to as such.
Excellent. With a dash of humour no less. This is precisely what I've read, studied and understood for 50 odd years. Like you, sir, I've inspected various field-repair and maintenance documents using both nomenclatures. Even on the same page of the same aeroplane! So I concur. Correct.
Thanks for watching Peter!
Ever since I was a kid in the '50s here in the U,S, I always heard it called ME109 or Messerschmitt. I was confused when I started hearing it referred to as Bf109.
I've always referred to them as Me-109s and that is what I'm sticking with. I'm too old to change.
I was born in 1962, with a father in The Royal Norwegian Airforce. I was an avid plane-nerd; and read what I could find on stuff from WWII. I remember having read in Norwegian war-history that it was possible to differentiate a BF-109 from a ME-109 from features of said planes..(Something about the air-intake?) This I read in a Norwegian book about the air-war in Europe. A few years later we went on a RNAF summer-holiday; where the highlight was a celebrated Norwegian figther-ace retelling his WWII stories.
After his story I stood up and told him that one of his ME-109 kills weren't that. It was a BF-109, judging from the photo-proof. The room fell silent. I was 12 at the time.
Today I think I learned that you should not speak too soon...
Honestly i can imagine second hand cringe coming back whenever one would think about that memory
Interesting discussion. One can perhaps compare this to the manufacturer’s designation Supermarine type 300 etc whereas most people prefer to use the name designated by the British Air Ministry; the Spitfire.
I would say that any early design be Bf and all later marks Me but as you have pointed out both were used.
Interesting discussion. I've seen both designations like everyone else, but I'm glad you made an attempt at making it make sense, sort of. I'm going to watch the video again until I understand it better.
I'm not afraid to say that I don't understand things and that I will have to go through the information again until I get it.
as a person who's been CORRECTED in ALL CAPS more than once on this, I just love the takeaway that the Germans in general "didn't care" which term was used so thats all the response one needs vs. the endless supply of Internet denziens who live just to correct people. :p Great video! (i'll note that the 80s wargame USAAF used the ME designator so that imprinted on me to this day.)
Thanks for watching!
@@CalibanRising my pleasure. and for the next person who says "The ME-109 never existed" respond with a screen shot of IL-2 Dover Cliffs as your Hurricane is descending in flames......"I was just shot down by an IMAGINARY plane!"
@@nikademuswtf people say that? Tell them that in Germany to this day nobody except scholars and fans of IL2 (and co) know what the heck a BF 109 is. It's just "die Me" (not M_E, one word Meh), or "die Messerschmidt" if you are fancy and want to show off you can add the 109.
My grandpa piloted a 109 in the Med, he talked about it a lot and never, not once in the 27 years I knew him before his death, he called it a BF. Neither did anyone else I've ever met. I learned the BF designation through video games. And I have a feeling the people who give you crap for calling it "Me" have done so too, they seem like angry War Thunder idiots and probably dress up as obersturmführer for Halloween. Just ignore them, knowing that it a) doesn't matter and b) argubly calling it Me-109 is how the pilots and engineers and german people called it.
I greatly admire your restraint on this topic. Until I left Germany some decades ago now, I wasn't even aware this was a topic of debate! With the arrival of the Internet and my moving into anglosphere countries I suddenly and with a great sense of befuddlement, became aware that this is "a thing" (before we use "this is a thing" 😆). It seems to be a purely anglophone desk-thumping thing.
To us (and one of my grandfathers was in the Luftwaffe in WW2 and I myself also served in the post-war LW) it *always* was the "Mehhundertneun". Nobody cared and it slips off the tongue much more easily. The (in)famous Motorbuchverlag in its book on the 109, still written when many of the engineers and pilots were still around, explained the whole "Bf" vs "Me" designation in a mere paragraph and mostly used Me-109, to the best of my memory (it's been many years).
I will continue to say "Mehundertneun" or "Meoneohnine", if only for the chance to give some basement-dweller a heart-attack.
Thanks for digging into this. I answered this question to myself in the mid 90s when I did my own research. My conclusion was it doesn't matter. It's sort of similar to how the Avenger was first made by Grumman making it the TBF but then was off loaded to GM so Grumman could focus on the Hellcat. Making it the TBM. So in theory the first quarter were TBFs while the other 3/4s were TBMs. Same goes with the F4F/FM. Either ways it's the Wildcat. I guess if you want to be a purest you could call the early one BFs and the rest MEs. Personally I just call them 109s or ME109s as most were built after the switch over.
As someone new to your channel, the Dad's army insert took me completely off guard. Well done sir
i mean, the Me 109 after the take over... had a few changes. 1938 is the key year here.
Production of the short-lived Bf 109C began in the spring of 1938. In late 1938, the Bf 109E entered production.
Thus. the BF-109E should be the first actual ME 109. This would work as the -E variant had MANY LARGE updates and changes. This included air intakes, gun placement, frame shape around the nose, so forth. It could warrant the rebranding.
Do you mean the -F series? All of the changes you attributed to the Bf-109E are actually the F version if I understand you correctly.
All extant airframes bear the official "Bf 109" designation on their identification plates, including the final K-4 models.
@@andriandrason1318 we all understand this...
Ever since I read Me-109 by Martin Caidin, excellent book by the way, I've been calling it Me 109. I've read it in 1974. His book on the B 17 is really good too.
We flew it during the war in Hungary, and we called and call it "Messzer" (it's something pronunciation thing, Hungarian "s" is something like "sh" in English, and Hungarian "sz" is something like "s" in English. We actually have these double letters in the Hungarian alphabet). (well presented in the words "same" and "shame").
Didn’t expect a linguistic refresher from 1066… laughed out loud at that seque! Subscribed.
lol
For myself, its ME
Another example- is it Northrup / McDonnell Douglas / Boeing F-18?
Exactly! They'll always be General Dynamics F-16 Fighting Falcons to me ... ^v^
It is:
Northrop YF-17 Cobra
McDonnell Douglas F/A-18 Hornet (i.e F/A-18A, F/A-18B, F/A-18C, F/A-18D)
Boeing F/A-18 Super Hornet (i.e. F/A-18E, F/A-18F)
Boeing EA-18 Growler
@@taproom113 ; Except General Dynamics themselves wanted to name her Viper and the USAF chose the Fighting Falcon name because Falcon already was used by the Dassault Falcon which was in service with the USA.
You should do a video on what happened to messerschmitt (person and company) after ww2 and what achievements/ drawbacks were faced. I have been looking for a video but havent seen one yet. Id like information on that topic
Thanks for the video suggestion Josh!
There's also a German song of the time about the thing where they sing "Me 109" (spelled out as "Me hundertneun").
Besides, I have also seen the plane being called "Messerschmidt Bf-190" or even "Me Bf 109". Would that be correct also?
Might be showing my age here, but I think it's only 'Me' or 'Bf'. You can't be both.
@@CalibanRising Yes it can.
The Bf 109 name was already used for the plane that was still produced after '38. So the name stuck just like with the Spitfre. The Bf109 A was a very different plane in comparisson to the late war 109 G. It kept however the same profile, the same lineage of engines and therefore the same name. A Spitfre Mk 1 is a very different plane compared to the Mk XXI, but it looks simulair it has the same lineage of engines so the name stays. Both planes went thru a similair development cycle.
Me would be taken as the standard designation of the maker or brand, and Bf would be the classification of the aircraft by the maker or the Luftwaffe technical staff.😊
Top channel please keep up with the good work 👍
Thank you, Wilco!
They were issuing Bf identifiers until 1938 such as the Bf161 which flew in 1938, but the Me209 flew the same year.
I'm more used to the term Bf109 since that's how I first learned it when I was a child. Plus "Bf" rolls off the tongue better than "Me".
To be honest I haven't heard anyone actually call it Me 109 once in my entire life.
I have vague recollections pof it being called both Me109 and Bf109. It may have even been Me 109 or Messerschmidt Bf 109! Messerschmidt is still located in Bavaria as Messerschmidt -Bolkow-Bohm (MBB) who were part of the Panavia collaboration on Tornado.
Thank you. I could never get a straight answer on this.
My great-grandfather was a fighter pilot in the luftwaffe and he always told us he flew the Me109. So thats what I will call this thing.
It seems the small f is correct for the RLM nomenclature, but when you look at the other aircraft manufacturers, the RLM code is just the shortening of the names:
Dornier=Do, Junkers=Ju, etc. The Bf designation is an initialism, contracted from the 2 words Bayerische and Flugzeugswerke. The proper RLM code should have either been Ba(which was used by Bachem) or BF. Oddly enough, when the ME code is used, it seems they are all capitalised instead of plain Me, which is more congruent with the other codes.
Personally, I'll start using Be, which is short for Besserschmitt.
Besserschmitt is a portmanteau of Besserwisser and Messerschmitt.😉
Could we have the same argument about the 108 Taifun (Bf or Me) as well? 😀
Not that model. The Bf 108 was one design that stayed with the old designation right to the end of World War II.
@@Sacto1654 So did the 109 as all extant airframes bear the official "Bf 109" designation on their identification plates, including the final K-4 models.
Excellent video: engaging, informative, enjoyable, reasonable!
Much appreciated!
Since the corporation that built the airframe primarily identified it as Me during the majority of the production run, Me should be used. Bf is fine for early production run if you want to deep dive into the minutia.
After the merger between Boeing and McDonnell Douglas, the MD-95 was re-designated the 717-200. While there may still be some early, pre-merger, MD-95 airframes bouncing around out there, 717-200 is the official designation. Even though the MD-95 is a far cry from the original aircraft that carried the 717 designation, but that's another discussion.
So, I always called it the Bf-109 because that's what it was called in the penultimate reference material (the Xbox game Secret Weapons Over Normandy), but in all seriousness, when I was a kid, I thought it was a factory thing, similar to the US Navy, so like the plane was the "109" and if it was made at the Messerschmitt factory, it was Me, if it was made at a different factory it took that designation (like I said, this was when I was a little kid growing up)
Wikipedia: "Originally the aircraft was designated as Bf 109 by the RLM, since the design was submitted by the Bayerische Flugzeugwerke (literally "Bavarian Aircraft Works", meaning "Bavarian Aircraft Factory"; sometimes abbreviated B.F.W.,[36] akin to BMW) during 1935. The company was renamed Messerschmitt AG after 11 July 1938 when Erhard Milch finally allowed Willy Messerschmitt to acquire the company. All Messerschmitt aircraft that originated after that date, such as the Me 210, were to carry the "Me" designation. Despite regulations by the RLM, wartime documents from Messerschmitt AG, RLM and Luftwaffe loss and strength reports continued to use both designations, sometimes even on the same page."
Willi actually had a lot of help from another designer but right now I cant think of him. For a long time I thought he was the only designer of the plane. ah.. Robert Lusser !
I have always used both or just 109, 110 though for the 210, 410 and 262 I have only used Me and not Bf.
Whichever descriptor you choose for the 109 people know exactly what you’re talking about. This is one of those cases where there is ample evidence to support both sides. At the end of the day it doesn’t matter and the large majority of people don’t really care.
I think this video does an excellent job highlighting that.
To the people who think that continuing to argue this is a good use of their time, can I suggest an alternate line of enquiry… what is the difference between “intellectual” and “ intelligent” 😉
I think I've only seen BF109. War Thunder generally just references them as BFs, and I think the sources I used in a paper once referenced it as BF109s. Been a while though.
Phil at about 6:55 you referred to what the public called the aircraft in the press. However as you also said it was /State sponsored/ press; in totalitarian Nazi Germany I doubt 'freedom of the Press' existed so it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if the public's claimed quotes mysteriously matched the party line.
Everything has a designation in the design phase and a different name during production. The Avro Lancaster was a Type 683, Supermarine Spitfire originally called a Shrike. I think what matters is what it's called during production - the bulk of production if it changed. It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if the /internal/ designation of a 109 was 'me' to keep Willi happy during the design phase, but externally everyone else called it a 'bf'. Then when the company name changed everyone called it an 'me'.
Just to throw a grenade into the discussion, I've also heard the term bf-110 *innocent look* albeit not as often.
BTW the 1066 example made me laugh. I remember Sandy Toksvig on QI talking about her father and French.
He said 'The call a horse a cheval. They have a different word for everything.. it's very annoying!' *LOL*
I can quite imagine Willi always talking about his Me 109 to his high ranking mates, just to plant the seed. I think this conclusion applies just as much to the 110 and 108, but obviously there were less of them around.
The limited extent of my knowledge on WW2 planes made me think that it was called an "ME BF 109," with BF being the industrial designation and ME being the name of the plan/name of designer. So, I was basically correct although BF was the previous company rather than just the designation. ME 109 seems like the clear winner.
All 109's up to the Emile were indeed the original airframe design, with upgrades, so "Bf 109" is proper.
---HOWEVER: WITH THE FREDERICH (109F) THIS variant, appearing years after the 11 July, 1938 "Cut-Off Date", was in reality, a completely re-designed airframe (not simple upgrades) and therefore all subsequent ships were in fact, an all new aircraft. Although sharing similar planform and profile contours, THEY WERE NOT THE IDENTICAL AIRCRAFT with minor upgrades. HENCE, the accurate and properly correct designations were:
"Bf 109A" through the Bf 109E, "Emile",. But all late "109" aircraft should correctly and properly be referred to as "Me 109" as withe the: Me 109F, Me 109G and Me 109K.
well actually most we see these days are in fact likely Hispano Aviación HA-1112s which is what the aircraft in the battle of britain film used.
and the he 111s were in fact CASA 2.111s in the battle of britain.
I saw Me vs Bf and I was like
What?
And then I clicked on it and realized it was about the 109
The whole issue of how the Norman Conquest affected the still-evolving English language is fascinating. Of course the main influence is the massive influx of French vocabulary, which is one the main reasons the English lexicon dwarfs other languages'. I've also heard that English owes its relative lack of grammatical complexity to the Conquest, in that, the leadership classes having become bifurcated from the common classes by language (the elites speaking Norman French and the rest speaking English, Old English, presumably), there was no "policing" of English by the elites, as there has been in the case of almost every other language, French for example, having L'Academie Francaise [sp?]. So, English was left to evolve freely on its own, because of course, "the little people" and their "crude tongue" were not worth the effort of the imposition of any controls, any maintaining of "grammatical purity."
I've heard, for example, that English used to have gender (like French and German) but shed this over the centuries as Old English became Middle English.
I called em "Meshersmits" as a kid with dad LOL Started getting back into aviation history and was like "what are these BF109s everyone loves... oh, they're just schmitties!"
If I were Willy, I'd tell you it was an ME 109 too.
It seems like a tempest in a teapot. Think about it. Does an A10 pilot call his plane a Thunderbolt II, or does he call it call it a Warthog? An F35 a Lightning or Fat Amy? What should we call them? We all know what both names mean. Life's too short.
When I was growing up, I only ever heard the plane referred to as simply a Messerschmitt. I didn't learn the official designation of Bf-109 until I was a teenager, and even then I generally don't use the manufacturer code in general speech. I just call it a 109. For most German planes, I'll usually say the manufacturer's name in full and then the number designation, like Focke-Wulf 190, Dornier 217, or Heinkel 111, but for the 109, it was so ubiquitous that the number alone suffices. Also, Messerschmitt is a long name.
This is like saying that you should not say "Garand" but "U.S. Rifle caliber .30 M1".
Basically the 109 and the 110 (And of course the 108) are developed under "Bf"... but after a change in some kind of investments or such... the Plane was "renamed" in "Me".
So long as we remember that BFW AG ended chasing its name to Me AG, does it matter to anyone outside rivet counters ?
The anglophone pronunciation "Meschersmitt" will never cease to amuse me. Interesting video!
The major correction is not only the name, but also spelling and pronouncing. It's Me, not ME. The shortened version of Messerschmitt. And should be pronounced as the first syllable. [ˈmɛ] because the original pronunciation is [ˈmɛsɐʃmɪt]
The same spelling is correct to all german military aircrafts. And pronouncing to all, exept Bf (because it's an abbreviation).
Honestly I just say 109 or 190 and then the variants. I rarely say BF, ME, or FW. However there is one exception, I always have to say TA 152H-1. I can’t call it the TA or the 152, I could be talking about the experimental versions and I will always naturally say the TA 152H-1
Never really thought of it, like everyone else i just used Me and Bf interchangeably
I certainly became confused early on, until I realized that until mid-war when it seemed the Bf became ME. Focke Wulf remained FW even after Focke was pushed out of his own company in essence.
no it didn't it became the ta 152 (kurt Tank) with a longer nose due to the engine change.
Most all sources written in WWII and books written in the 20th century use the term ME109.