With Wings Like Eagles (6 page)

It has to be added that quite apart from the glamour that had attached to fighter pilots from the very beginning of aerial warfare, people in the late 1920s and the 1930s were also attached to the glamour of speed. The wealthy British daredevil Sir Malcolm Campbell, who broke the world’s speed record on land nine times between 1924 and 1939 in his famous Bluebird race cars, and on water four times in his hydroplanes, was an international celebrity. Streamlining, introduced into design by Raymond Loewy, became the fashion not only in cars, railway locomotives, and ships, but even in stationary objects like toasters, radio sets, furniture, and blenders, which hardly needed to be streamlined. Even in the relatively conservative circle of the Air Council the irony that British fighter planes were still fabric-covered biplanes with fixed landing gear, their wings braced with struts and wires, and slower than the bombers they were supposed to shoot down, was difficult to ignore—not that other air forces were more advanced in this regard during the 1920s and early 1930s.

Also ironically, the world’s fastest airplanes at the time were British, though they were not warplanes. Throughout the period, the British dominated the expensive, esoteric, and even more glamorous sport of seaplane racing. Winning the biennial international Schneider Trophy race
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was, between the wars, the ambition of every nation with an aviation industry worth mentioning (the Germans were excluded in the aftermath of the war, and as time passed did not at first wish to attract attention to the fact that they even had an aviation industry), and it was, in the eyes of many, the world’s supreme speed event. The seaplanes were as beautiful and graceful as the America’s Cup racing yachts, were even more costly—the manufacturers were mostly subsidized by their own governments—and flew at speeds that were phenomenal for the day.

The Schneider Trophy—a large art deco sculpture of a winged, naked nymph,
The Sprit of Flight
, kissing a wave—was the brainchild of Jacques Schneider, of the wealthy French industrialist family, an early aviation enthusiast who believed that the future of aviation lay in seaplanes, since more than 70 percent of the world’s surface consisted of water. This belief, like that in the zeppelin, did not altogether die out until the late 1930s. The Schneider Trophy, intended to encourage the design of seaplanes, was first offered in 1912 by the Aéro-Club de France as the prize for a speed event, flown over a course of 150 miles. It began as an annual event, but in 1928 the organizers decided to hold it once every two years instead, in view of the increasing complexity of the designs, and the growing world economic crisis. If any nation should win the trophy three times in a row, it would go to that nation in perpetuity.

By the mid-1920s the major contestants were Britain, the United States, and Italy, and the fastest British planes were often those designed by a young Englishman, Reginald J. Mitchell, chief designer of the Supermarine Aviation Works, near Southampton, a firm that concentrated largely on seaplanes. Then, starting with a victory in the 1927 race in which Mitchell’s Supermarine S.5 set a new world’s speed record for seaplanes and landplanes and ending in 1931, Mitchell’s small, sleek, futuristic, monoplane designs, powered by Rolls-Royce aero engines, and largely constructed of aluminum instead of wood and fabric, succeeded in capturing the Schneider Trophy in perpetuity for Britain. They also set new world speed records—his S.6 floatplane reached 357 miles per hour in 1929; and in 1931, the S.6B, which took the trophy outright for Britain, went on to take the world air speed record as well, at 407 miles per hour—this at a time when the fighter planes of the major powers were hard pushed to reach 250 miles per hour, and despite the fact that a seaplane, however sleek, carried the additional drag of two floats on struts beneath its wings.
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From the very beginning, the RAF took a close interest in Mitchell’s Schneider Trophy seaplanes, which were, among other things, flying test beds for advanced aeronautical design and for the latest and most advanced experimental aero engines from Rolls-Royce. For the last series of Supermarine Schneider Trophy planes, Rolls-Royce was producing engines of more than 1,900 horsepower, perhaps three times the power of most current military aircraft engines. The RAF also discreetly removed the prohibition against serving officers’ competing in flying races or in attempts at speed records. Without a government subsidy and the help of the RAF, Supermarine could never have built and fielded a team for the Schneider Trophy races through the 1920s—indeed, when this subsidy for building the aircraft was finally withdrawn before the 1931 race, because of catastrophic economic conditions and widespread unemployment in Britain, the day was saved at the last minute only because a patriotic, wealthy widow, Lady Houston, made an unsolicited contribution of £100,000, an immense sum at the time (and the equivalent of at least $8 million today).
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As Air Member for Research and Development on the Air Council from 1930 to 1936, Dowding watched Mitchell’s work with special interest, for good reason. Mitchell was confronting, one by one, the problems of designing and building modern high-speed monoplanes, from wing flutter to flush head riveting to eliminating the drag of a radiator by means of evaporative steam cooling pipes buried in the sides of the fuselage. Oddly, Mitchell had begun his working life at the age of sixteen as an apprentice in a company that manufactured steam locomotives in Stoke-on-Trent—it is hard to imagine a machine more different in every way from a high-speed aircraft than a locomotive, but it taught him a lot about metal, and made him a first-class practical engineer, as well as teaching him everything there was to know about steam. In later years, when Leslie Howard played him in the film
The First of the Few
, he was portrayed as a soulful dreamer who got his ideas about the Spitfire’s graceful elliptical wing from watching seabirds soaring over the beach while he was picnicking with his family, but in fact Mitchell was a hardheaded engineer, more interested in his drawing board and his slide rule than in birds. He once told one of his aerodynamicists about that perfect, famous (and impossibly difficult to manufacture) wing, “I don’t give a bugger whether it’s elliptical or not, so long as it covers the guns.”
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When told that the chairman of Supermarine’s parent company, Vickers (Aviation), had decided to call his new fighter plane the Spitfire, Mitchell remarked, “It’s just the sort of bloody silly name they would give it.”
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In the meantime, after the Schneider Trophy had been won and the world speed record achieved, Supermarine and Mitchell were looking for something more interesting—and profitable—to do than continuing to build big, slow, twin-engine seaplanes for the RAF. Their attention was naturally drawn to the Air Ministry’s Specification F.7/30, issued in October 1931, calling for a new “Single Seater Day and Night Fighter” for the RAF, which asked aircraft companies to “consider the advantages offered…by low wing monoplane or pusher.” The idea of a “pusher”—that is, an aircraft with the engine and the propeller mounted behind the pilot (i.e., “pushing” it rather than “pulling” it through the air)—was either revolutionary or a bizarre, nostalgic return to the days of the old Farman “Shorthorn,” in which people had learned to fly in 1914, but fortunately most of the manufacturers ignored it.

Mitchell and Vickers were eager to put to good use his experience of designing record-breaking monoplanes, but curiously, of the eight fighters built to meet the Air Ministry’s specifications, his Type 224 monoplane, an ungainly all-metal gull-wing aircraft, though innovative, was one of the least successful designs, with a performance inferior to the very conventional biplane that was finally accepted by the RAF, the Gloster Gladiator.
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The Type 224 was powered by the Rolls-Royce Goshawk engine, with evaporative cooling built into the leading edges of the wings; test pilots complained that the red warning light signaling an overheating engine came on before they were even off the ground, and ground crews got burned every time they touched the wings after a flight.

Mitchell was not a man who took criticism well, even from test pilots (he was already suffering from colon cancer, which would kill him), but in this case, he seems to have sat down at his drawing board and gone back to the basics willingly enough. In 1934, while the Type 224 was still being flight-tested, he and Vickers undertook to redesign it as a “private venture” (that is, at Vickers’s own expense). Mitchell began by getting rid of the gull wings, making the undercarriage retractable, and enclosing the cockpit, the result being a very modern-looking fighter, with squarish wings and the cockpit rather far forward. He was still stuck with the Goshawk engine and its evaporative cooling system, which he liked because it eliminated the drag of an external radiator. The Air Ministry was interested, but not overly enthusiastic, so Mitchell further refined the design, in which the lines of the Spitfire first begin to appear. The most radical part of Mitchell’s design was its wing spars, made of “square concentric tubes which fitted into each other,” and which were at once lightweight, extremely strong, and very flexible. As a result, the Spitfire’s wings would flex like those of a bird in flight, to the delight or alarm of the pilot, and demonstrating the value of Mitchell’s apprenticeship in locomotive construction, which had given him an instinctive feel for metal.

At this point, another private venture entered the scene: in the Rolls-Royce PV (for private venture) XII, a twelve-cylinder aero engine of twenty-seven liters (to put this in perspective, the largest twelve-cylinder automobile engines produced by Mercedes-Benz and BMW today have a cubic capacity of
six
liters) intended to produce more than 1,000 horsepower. The Rolls-Royce PV XII was almost “a third heavier than the Goshawk,” so inevitably Mitchell’s design changed. He moved the cockpit farther back to compensate for the added weight of the engine, and made the wing thinner and broader in chord. Working with a very thick, soft lead pencil, he rounded out the lines of his fighter on the drawings provided by his draftsmen, endlessly streamlining it until it began to “look right”: harmonious, balanced, elegant, as his Schneider Trophy planes had been. By January 1935 his wing had achieved the graceful shape that was to make the Spitfire instantly recognizable—the thinnest possible wing that could contain two guns and the retractable undercarriage and its mechanism, perfectly elliptical, without a single straight line. On paper, this design impressed the Air Ministry enough that it wrote a new specification around it—events in Germany, although the British government played them down, were increasing the sense of urgency in the Air Council.

Under Dowding’s aegis a study was undertaken of what it would take to shoot down one of the new all-metal German bombers. The speeds at which aerial combat would now be taking place were calculated, and it was determined that a fighter pilot would have only two seconds in which to fire a burst that would destroy a German bomber. Also, to provide a sufficient “weight of metal” to do the job a fighter plane would require at least six and if possible eight guns of .303 caliber—although only three years earlier, two guns had been considered sufficient. Mitchell was unfazed—his elliptical wing, he said, could carry four guns as easily as two, and he quickly made the necessary alterations, at the same time eliminating the evaporative cooling system in the interests of simplicity. Dowding altered the Air Ministry’s specifications to match those of Supermarine’s new fighter, and in June 1935 the Air Ministry placed an order for the aircraft even though it was still on the drawing board and Fighter Command was still waiting for its Gloster Gladiator biplanes.

On March 5 or 6, 1936 (the log of Vickers’s chief test pilot, Captain “Mutt” Summers, is unclear), the Spitfire prototype made its first flight, and on March 15 Dowding inspected it. It was apparent to everyone that Mitchell had succeeded beyond anybody’s expectations, perhaps including his own. Anxious to gain more speed, and perhaps also moved by pride in his fighter, he asked the Rolls-Royce engineers how they got such a perfect finish on their cars, and they sent painters down from Derby to sand down the prototype, apply numerous coats of blue-gray lacquer, and polish it until it shone like a mirror—or like one of their cars. By July it had demonstrated, in a service trial flight at RAF Martlesham Heath, that it could take off in 235 yards, climb to 25,000 feet in just under eleven minutes, and fly at 350 miles per hour; that it had a ceiling of 30,000 feet; and, most important of all, that it was “simple and easy to fly and has no vices.” Even before that test flight the Air Ministry had ordered 310 aircraft at a total price of £1.395 million (about £4,500 each), excluding guns, radios, instruments, and all other “service equipment,” the largest order ever given for an airplane in Britain to that date.
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The first production Spitfires reached RAF squadrons in 1938, a year after Mitchell’s death from colon cancer at the age of forty-two,
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so he never saw the vital role his aircraft would play in Britain’s survival in 1940, but it would not have surprised him.

It had first flown in 1936, the year Hitler reoccupied the Rhineland; and it began to reach service squadrons in 1938, the year of Munich. In the air, at least, the governments of Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain were better prepared than they have been given credit for—or than the Germans believed at the time.

Perhaps even stranger was the fact that unlike the Germans, the British spread their bets, and built two very different fighters instead of just one. At the same time as the Spitfire was being developed, one of Mitchell’s rivals as an aircraft designer, Sydney Camm of Hawker Aircraft, was designing the Hawker Hurricane. In 1933 Camm, a forceful and energetic man, had tried and failed to interest the Air Ministry in building a high-speed monoplane fighter to replace the aging Hawker Fury biplane he had designed.
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Objections had been raised regarding the weight, cost, and practicality of the Hurricane, but Hawker decided to continue the project as a private venture, and by 1935 the Air Ministry was sufficiently alarmed by the rapid growth of the German aviation industry to place an order with Hawker for a prototype. The Hurricane was easier to build than the Spitfire—Camm used the existing Fury as the starting point for his fighter, with fabric for some of the surface (which also made it quicker and easier for ground crews skilled in the use of fabric, dope, and glue to repair, and reduced the cost), and it would eventually be powered by the same Rolls-Royce Merlin engine as the Spitfire. Camm developed a thick, sturdy wing, in which there was no difficulty finding room for four machine guns and an undercarriage that retracted inward, toward the fuselage, rather than outward, thus giving the Hurricane a notably wide, stable track, unlike the Spitfire, with its dangerously narrow track. (Another benefit of Camm’s robust wing design was that the Hurricane would later adapt easily to carrying four twenty-millimeter cannon and even two forty-millimeter cannon in its role as a “tankbuster” in the Western Desert of North Africa, and to carrying bombs under its wings as a Hurribomber. It could also be flown off carrier decks or fitted with skis for operating in Norway.) The Hurricane took its first flight in 1935, a year before the Spitfire, and it proved to be so easy to fly that when the Hawker test pilot, P. W. S. Bulman, who wore a snappy fedora hat for the flight, stepped out of the cockpit afterward, he turned to Camm and said, “It’s a piece of cake—I could even teach you to fly her in half an hour, Sydney.”
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