Spitfire Ace
The Battle of Britain in 1940 is one of the most famous air battles in the history of warfare, But at its heart is one particular figure, the RAF fighter pilot. Famous for their dazzling technical skill and tremendous bravery, they are also part of a romantic mythology, with a combination of valour and glamour that has endured through to our modern age. But equally as legendary are the planes the men flew, and one in particular – the Supermarine Spitfire.
In Spitfire Ace: Flying the Battle of Britain, Martin Davidson and James Taylor reintroduce the pilots whose role in the air was so pivotal in deciding the fate of a nation. Their personal accounts are interwoven with a historical narrative of the events that led up to the war.
In this edited extract, they delineate why the Spitfire achieved legendary status during the war and has maintained it since.
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To focus on the Spitfire in talking about the Battle of Britain may seem rather unfair. Ranged against it was a fighter pretty much its equal, the Messerschmidtt Bf 109. Furthermore, while the Spitfire gets so much credit for the British success, the Hawker Hurricane flying alongside it was, and remains, the great unsung hero of the Second World War. It lacked glamour, but more than delivered results – knocking out of the sky more German aircraft than the Spitfire (which it outnumbered by three to two) and anti-aircraft batteries combined.
History, though, is rarely fair, and being glamorous, and on the winning side, has given the Spitfire an untouchable reputation, one that it actually began to acquire long before the summer of 1940. From the moment people first laid eyes on the Spitfire Mark 1, they knew they were looking at a classic aircraft, with its sleek, modern lines, those innovative elliptical wings, that unmistakable coughing roar. People still recall the excitement of that first encounter, and it made every other propeller-driven plan seem like an also-ran ...
Sweet lines
The glamour of the Spitfire has intensified over the years, not diminished. Yet its success, and fame, rest on more than just the accident of sweet lines. It would prove itself one of the great campaigners of the Second World War, by lasting longer and undergoing more development than any other Allied fighter. Indeed, it would share one thing with its German adversary: both were in production all the way through the war, though by the end, later variant Spitfires had long left the Bf 109 behind.
For a plane that worried many as being too difficult to produce in volume, the Spitfire would end its career having been built in greater numbers than any other: over 20,000 in 22 different versions. Sold off by the RAF after the war, they worked their way through the world's smaller air forces, and so Spitfires would continue carrying out operational flying duties until the late 1950s. The Indian, Italian and Burmese air forces would all make use of the Spitfire, and many of the planes changed hands several times.
Never obsolete
The last Spitfires to be destroyed in combat would, in fact, be destroyed by other Spitfires as, during the first Arab–Israeli war, the Egyptian, Syrian and Israeli air forces were all making use of them. This wasn't simply for want of alternatives, but powerful testimony to just how superbly designed and conceived this aircraft was.
Even before the Second World War, the rate of fighter plane development was accelerating rapidly; when war broke out, that acceleration went into overdrive, and yet still the Spitfire kept up. As the new-version Mustangs, Tempests and Lightnings became familiar sights in the skies over Europe, they never succeeded in rendering the Spitfire obsolete, as happened o the Hurricane. Nothing short of the jet engine would do that, and that would sweep away all propeller-engine fighters, not just the Spitfire.
Potent question
Of all warplanes, it is the Spitfire that is most likely to be the one we secretly yearn to be allowed to fly. Not just to experience the sensation of speed and living history, but because the Spitfire pilot represents the most potent question many of us ask ourselves: if we had been that age, in 1940, would we have risen to the challenge? And what a challenge! It is what those photographs of Battle of Britain pilots say to us; as though even then they knew theirs was some kind of ultimate experience, a benchmark that would challenge future generations.
In an age that has become jaded, even cynical, about historical myths, embarrassed by the distortions they require to work, uneasy about the sentimentalities they play to, the Spitfire legend has remained impressively resilient. There is still something special about the Spitfire, something that goes beyond how good it looked, or how iconic it became in the British imagination.
The Spitfire deserves its status as one of the great artefacts of British history. Of course, much of this is symbolic, but symbols are powerful, too, and the Spitfire is one of the most powerful. Above all, it is symbolic of the arms race that preceded the war, the arguments about rearmament and appeasement that tore the 1930s down the middle. Symbolic, too, of the battle that the British very nearly lost, the battle against time. And symbolic of the technology that could live up to the rhetoric of opposing slavery and the great nightmare of being subjugated to Nazi rule, something that could be put where Churchill's mouth was.
Second-rate fighters
After all, air warfare is peculiarly unforgiving for technology; the second-rate fighter will always lose to the first-rate one. The Battle of Britain deployed may planes besides Spitfires, Hurricanes and Messerschmitt 109s, and many of them simply didn't achieve the results. Both sides were forced to fly aircraft that were well behind the cutting edge, and the result was a massacre for their pilots.
In some cases, as with the RAF's Fairey Battle planes, there had been the opportunity to foresee their shortcomings and withdraw them from service. Built in large numbers from 1933, the Fairey Battle was never going to be the plane that would win a war; its main attribute appears to have been that it was ready to roll off the production line at a time when politicians seemed keener to demonstrate the RAF's fighting strength in terms of numbers of planes available than in actual combat ability. By the outbreak of war, it was all too clearly obsolete, and was taken off the front line in June 1940 after crews flying Fairey Battles in France had been annihilated.
The Fairley Battle was not the only second-rate plane in the RAF's service; several other inferior types of aircraft were still flying during the Battle of Britain. The Boulton Paul Defiant, for example, was intended to be used only for defensive patrols, but was forced into action in 1940. While it could be effective if flying in formation with other planes, on its own the Defiant was a poor match for the Messerschmitts and appalling casualties were inflicted on its pilots; and in an emergency, a Defiant gunner had little chance of escaping from his turret. The Bristol Blenheim was a failure as a day fighter, easily destroyed by single-engined interceptors, and had to be relegated to night duties.
Inordinate losses
The Luftwaffe also had flying machines that were virtually guaranteed to produce fatalities. The Messerschmitt 110 soon proved to be no match for modern fighters, its speed, manoeuvrability and defensive armament being completely inadequate, and worse, its very presence in a combat zone was often a liability for the 109 fighters escorting them …
The Junkers 87, the so-called 'Stuka' dive-bomber, the plane so synonymous with the early Blitzkrieg successes, was also, in fact, easy prey for the Hurricanes and Spitfires it would face in the Battle of Britain. Once separated from its fighter escorts, the Stuka was helpless and, like the Fairey Battle before, it proved to be a death trap, proof that, in the air, second-best was fatal. Both were slow, both placed excessive faith in the presence of a rear-facing gunner, and both paid the price. Like the Fairey Battle just weeks before, the Stuka would be pointedly withdrawn after suffering inordinate losses, and would be sent on only a few isolated raids during the Blitz.
Better officers
The fact that the RAF did possess the Spitfire and the Hurricane – planes equal to those ranged against them – was absolutely crucial. Look what happened to Poland and to France, whose pilots were as brave as any but whose obsolescent planes were shot out of the sky. For both countries, the price was total defeat.
Fighter aircraft meet each other in combat much more directly than other weapons systems. In the 18th century, the Royal Navy could afford to have ships inferior to those sailed by the French and Spanish because their officers were better. In the Battle of Britain, that was not an option. In a very real sense then, Reginald Mitchell and Sydney Camm, architects of the Spitfire and Hurricane respectively, deserve their places among the pantheon of those without whom Britain would have lost the war.
Apogee of aerial technology
The potency of the Spitfire as an object of desire hinges on where it sits in the history of technology. It was perfectly pitched between rudimentary and space age. It was a quantum leap more sophisticated than the canvas and wire of the First World War biplane that pre-dated it, but hadn't yet become the jet-fighter you guess would take a lifetime to master. So for those who don't have flying qualifications, it represents the peak of aerial fantasy.
Here is a plane that only two generations ago represented the absolute apogee of aerial technology – and yet is capable of being flown with only hours of training. In the end, this was to prove utterly crucial. Many pilots were forced to master it in days – and had they not been able to, Britain could well have lost. But nine hours of training put you at the controls of a machine that could fly at over 350 mph, turn on a sixpence, climb in minutes to 25,000 feet and deliver 3,000 rounds of ammunition in 14 seconds of devastating fire.
Unimaginable darkness
Above all, the Spitfire remains symbolic of a great national effort, spearheaded by a shockingly tiny cadre of pilots, men on whom the eyes of the world were turned. Churchill, as always, got it just right: 'The Few.' Not since the legend of Horatio on his bridge had so much turned on the efforts of so small a number, even if, in typical manner, pilots would deprecate the sentiment. The war would never be like that again.
Perhaps there is another reason it remains possible to think warmly about that period, nostalgically even. The Spitfire represents the impossible – the defiance of historical odds, winning not just one of the innumerable battles that have littered British history, but the one that, had it been lost, would have thrown our world into unimaginable darkness.
