Suggest you ignore gooddaysir - obviously he thinks he should be a skygod and cant learn anything from anybody, and is not able to help anybody else either. Well news for him - he'd get his ppl quicker and be a better pilot afterwards if he read "some !!!! from the cretaceous period" and tried to get his apparently inadequate brain around it.
Langewiesche was American (test pilot for Curtiss) so shooting down Spitfires didn't come into it. And I don't believe the physics of flying has changed since the 1940s.
Shaggy is spot on - read Stick and Rudder and really understand what is happening.