What was the best air force in the early part of world war 2 "pre 1943"

[Gripen]

If theres any others you think i should add post it

[Gripen]

I mean in terms of:

Planes
Personel
Leadership
Combat Effectiveness
Etc Etc

and explain your answer..

[Raptor]

Italian Air force? Russian?

[Gripen]

There i added them. Happy now?

[alyster]

Luftwaffe. RAF is the only competitor here to my mind, but RAF's formatations sucked. In early part of the war they were still flying in WW1 era vic -s
Later they improved their formatations in Battle of Britan, but German line up was still better. Luftwaffe called the new RAF formatation Idiotenreihe 

And it's pointless to add Russian and Italian airforces. They both sucked deeply. Russians outnumbered Germans like 2-3 times yet they managed to get their asses owned. Their pilot skill was not existing. Luftwaffe command discovered that it is impossible to transfer pilots from eastern front to western front because pilots had become so lazy fighting the Russians that they kept forgetting things like to check your back once in a while.

And I won't even talk about Italians. To my mind their military spendings are a useless waist. In the entire WW1 they managed to win only one battle. Erwin Rommel in WW1 commanded 100 men against 7000 Italians and won. He took alot of prisoners.

[Webmaster]

Luftwaffe, line-up, using air power to support the blitz, experienced, well trained personnel, they also had experience from the Spanish campaign. Effective, well maybe not all in all cases, but compared to the others still great. Hehe, only the leadership could be a lot better 

RAF did a great job defending, but that doesn't make it the best air force, even though they had the superior Spitfire. I admire the Japanese for their ingenuity and their Zero, and effective bombing of Pearl, but it wasn't as advanced as the Luftwaffe.

Yes, it's not useful to consider the Russians and Italians, but no point of dragging WW1 into this. I think even the Finnish air force did better than the Russians 

[Raptor]

I agree with your points. Ok. What about the rest of the war? New poll.