The Bomber Won’t Always Get Through
When Dowding arrived at Bentley Priory in July 1936 the Luftwaffe was officially only sixteen months old. How did it ever come about that within four years this parvenu could be strong enough to crush the air forces of Poland, Holland, Belgium and France, and be ready to launch itself against Britain?
Such astonishing and deplorable progress could not have been achieved without much surreptitious spade-work before the advent of Hitler. The principal pioneer was General Hans von Seekt, Chief of the Army Command and creator of the new Reichswehr.* As the Service chief within the Defence Ministry in the early 1920s, von Seekt was able to plan a clandestine air force, endow it with higher staff and set up, by agreement between the Weimar and the Moscow Governments, a secret military flying school and aircraft testing station for German use in Soviet Russia.
This base was at Lipetsk, 220 miles south-east of Moscow. Between 1924 and 1932 some 240 German fighter pilots and air observers graduated from Lipetsk under the direction of, among others, Hugo von Sperrle, later to command Luftflotte 3 against Britain, and Kurt Student, later to command the airborne invasion of Crete. During the same period staff at Lipetsk tested the prototypes or early models of nine military or semi-military aircraft; ironically, the Napier Lion engines used for the Fokker XIII D fighters had at first to be sent for repair to England under the guise of coming from Holland. Secrecy also enveloped the corpses of the very few German airmen to be killed at Lipetsk during training. They were returned to Stettin by sea from Leningrad in crates marked ‘spare parts’.1
Lipetsk was for the military elite. On a broader level, and in this case consistent with the Treaty of Versailles, the Weimar regime encouraged the youth of Germany to take up sports aviation. Scores of light aeroplane and glider clubs sprang into existence, and by 1929 the Luftsportsverband boasted no fewer than 50,000 members.2 Well before that time, however, and much more significantly, von Seekt’s Defence Ministry had established a vital link with another government department. In 1924 his nominee, Ernst Brandenburg, former commander of the Englandgeschwader, became head of the civil aviation branch of the Transport Ministry.
Though the secret air force was born within the Defence Ministry, the civil aviation branch of the Transport Ministry provided most of its upbringing. When the Allies in 1926 cancelled all restrictions on the size and number of Germany’s civil aircraft, the Transport Ministry lost no time in helping to create a largely state-owned airline, Lufthansa, with monopoly rights in Germany. This made control from the centre easy. The chairmanship went to another wartime pilot, Erhard Milch, who soon endowed Lufthansa with ground facilities and pilot-training sessions well beyond its commercial requirements. Lufthansa training schools ran secret courses for officers of the armed services. Some of Lufthansa’s new airliners were readily convertible to bombers.3
By the time Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933, the seeds had thus already been sown for the rebirth of German air power. Thereafter, growth was spectacular. With Hermann Goering, the Nazi’s show airman from World War I, at the head of a newly created Air Ministry, and with Milch as his deputy, plans were drawn up for a large air force independent of the older Services – as von Seekt had always intended. On Milch’s advice this was conceived as a force in depth, well balanced, to be created over eight to ten years.4
The new Air Ministry, existing officially at first only for civil purposes, soon sprouted all the necessary military departments. A military command structure in the regions came into being under the guise of civil air-traffic control. Secretly, the training facilities multiplied. When Hitler and Goering unveiled the whole creation in March 1935 it almost seemed – though not to the British Government, which had read the signs aright and begun rearmament the previous year – that Greek legend was being updated. Warriors – in this case trained pilots in military aircraft – were springing fully armed from the soil.
Under Hitler’s frenetic impulse the pace then became faster still – too fast, in fact, for his own ultimate benefit. Milch’s plans were speeded up, the rapidly growing German aircraft industry was stimulated, and the expansion of the Luftwaffe became geared not to sound long-term development but to the need to produce an intimidating weapon quickly.5 Hitler could not wait to begin his Greater Germany programme – the absorption of Austria, the break-up of Czechoslovakia and Poland, the winning of lebensraum in the East. The Luftwaffe had to be ready to help enforce it.
So the numbers grew apace. At the end of 1934, before the existence of the Luftwaffe was declared, Germany possessed 584 combat aircraft with a monthly production of about 180 machines of all types, including trainers.6 By the outbreak of war she had a fully formed and trained first-line of 3,609, plus 552 military transports, and her monthly output exceeded 700.7 No double or treble working shifts were required for this near-miracle: only plentiful government orders and generous subsidies to the aircraft industry. Secrecy also continued to play a helpful part. No government budgets were published in Germany after 1936.8
How Germany was able to produce experienced airmen as well as a wealth of new aircraft may be seen from the career of the eminent fighter commander, Adolf Galland. In 1927, while still at school, Galland became well known as a glider pilot. Determined to fly with Lufthansa he took rigorous tests lasting ten days and was one of eighteen applicants chosen from several thousand. In the course of his Lufthansa training in 1932 he was required to master aerobatics and handle very high performance aircraft – in his own words ‘real fighter pilot training, including formation flying … only the guns were missing’. The following year, when the Nazis took over and the collaboration with Russia ceased, he was sent off to Italy – in Italian uniform – to train with the Regia Aeronautica. As a fully qualified Lufthansa pilot in 1934 he was then asked if he wished to be ‘on the active list’. Having agreed, he received six months’ infantry training and a commission in the Army before being promptly discharged and sent back to Lufthansa to join what was in effect a specialised fighter school. There, a few weeks before the existence of the Luftwaffe was announced, he and his fellow pupils were treated to an oration by Goering and a preview of the new Service uniform.
Something more was needed to turn skilled pilots like Galland into veterans of combat. The Germans found it in the Spanish Civil War. Having tested their military transports by flying some 10,000 Nationalist troops from Morocco to Spain at the outbreak of hostilities in 1936, they went on to help Franco with their Legion Kondor- a mixed group of aircraft and ground forces. Relays of German pilots received their blooding in this, with Galland serving a longer term than most. Having travelled to Spain in a group purporting to be a ‘Strength Through Joy’ holiday excursion, he put in fifteen months with the Legion, gaining invaluable operational experience. To his grief, this was on the slower He 51 fighters relegated to ground attack and not on the new, fast Me 109s reserved for air combat.
Like the other squadron commanders of the Legion Kondor Galland faithfully recorded all details of developing techniques for transmission to the German Air Ministry. Eventually replaced by Werner Moelders, later to become the Luftwaffe’s leading fighter pilot, he was recalled to Germany in 1938 to be on call during the Sudetenland crisis. A year later he was on the eastern frontier, ready for action against Poland.9
In the five years preceding the outbreak of war both the Luftwaffe and the RAF acquired the aircraft with which they fought the Battle of Britain.
‘The heart of an aeroplane’, wrote the first official historian of the RAF, ‘is the engine, but the pilot is its soul.’ Here we are concerned with the engine – on the British fighter side, the product in the main of a single firm. Rolls-Royce were never remarkable for their innovation: as with their motor-cars the chief quality of the product stemmed from development and refinement from a sound base. In 1926, a year after Richard Fairey, breaking with the long tradition of air-cooled, radial engines, had imported American Curtiss D-12, liquid-cooled, in-line engines to power his Fairey Fox light bomber, Rolls-Royce unveiled their own liquid-cooled, in-line F.XI, remarkable for its low weight and high output. This was the excellent Kestrel engine, which was developed in size and power until it rated 950 hp. Eventually, by 1934, under the paternal guidance of Sir Henry Royce and through the engineering genius of A. J. Rowledge, A. G. Elliot and Ernest Walter Hives,* this became the PV 1200 Merlin, the most famous aero-engine of all time. It was to power both the Hurricane and the Spitfire, and indeed the majority of Britain’s front-line aircraft throughout the war. Built under licence by Packard in America, the Merlin was also to power the American Air Force’s most successful fighter of World War II, the P51 Mustang.
Improvements to the Merlin were introduced while still only a handful of Spitfires had reached the squadrons of Fighter Command. Stanley Hooker of Rolls-Royce worked on improving the supercharger in 1938–40, increasing the boost pressure from six to twelve psi for short periods and boosting output from 990 to 1,310 hp.
But this dramatic increase could only be obtained by the use of 100 octane in place of 87 octane fuel in order to avoid detonation.* Even today, very few people have heard of the development by Esso and Shell of this high octane aviation fuel which had such a dramatic effect on performance. Shell used a base petrol from Borneo crude, which was especially high in aromatics and blended with imported American ‘mixed octane’, but was unable to produce this in sufficient quantity for RAF needs. Reliance was therefore placed on Esso with its refineries in Baton Rouge and the Dutch colonies, although early in the war, and for a brief time only, the US Neutrality Act prohibited the export of aviation petrol entirely.
By March 1940 Fighter Command was beginning to convert its Merlin-engined Hurricanes and Spitfires to accept 100 octane fuel.** Hurricanes in France during the brief French campaign were still running on blue 87 octane, and it came as a considerable shock to Me 109 pilots in particular who witnessed the startling improvement in the performance of both the Hurricane and Spitfire from July 1940 onwards. Adolf Galland confessed that he was puzzled by the improvement of the enemy’s performance until late in August when fuel from a crashed RAF fighter was analysed. The Luftwaffe operated throughout on 87 octane fuel.
The airframes, so far at least as the British single-engined fighters were concerned, were largely the work of two brilliant designers, Sydney Camm and Reginald Mitchell. In 1928 Sydney Camm was thirty-five and had been with the Hawker Engineering Company for five years, three of them as chief designer. The first evidence of his genius was revealed in 1929 in the Hawker Hart biplane light bomber, powered by Rolls-Royce’s Kestrel, giving it a maximum speed of 184 mph, far superior to that of any contemporary fighter. But this anomaly was quickly corrected by Camm’s Hawker Fury, a fighter version of his Hart, which in 1931 gave the RAF a 200+ mph fighter for the first time.
The Hawker Fury marked the fine flowering of the biplane, in-line engined, single-seat fighter, graceful, manoeuvrable, a delight to fly. Foreign air forces queued up to order it. But, like any far-sighted designer, Camm was already at work on the next generation, and by 1933 the first hint of rearmament was in the air. The early months of 1934, with plans actually developing for RAF expansion, spelt the end of the traditional biplane fighter, represented in its final form by the Fury and the new radial-engined Gloster Gladiator – yet to come.
From then on, events moved rapidly towards the birth of Britain’s first series of high-speed, multi-gun, monoplane, single-seat fighters – fighters for the war with Germany which no one wanted but which seemed increasingly probable.
For many years Hawker’s had used a system of metal tubular construction with fabric covering. It had the merits of simplicity and was capable of taking a lot of punishment. This system was continued in the Hurricane. Very advanced for 1934, the undercarriage of the new fighter was to be retractable; and, in view of the high speed envisaged, the pilot was given a sliding canopy above his cockpit for protection.
These features, and the monoplane configuration, were not the only novel elements in Camm’s new fighter. Equally revolutionary was the armament. This had come a long way since the days of 1914 when the young Sholto Douglas,* having been fired on from a reconnaissance aircraft with a revolver, ‘afterwards, just for safety’s sake, always carried a carbine in the air’. But it had not come much beyond the standard fighter equipment of 1918 – one or two fixed forward-firing guns, sometimes augmented by a third gun operated by an observer/ gunner. In the RAF the most common of these guns were the Vickers and the Lewis. The first was particularly liable to stoppages; but these could often be cleared manually – usually with a good biff with a mallet specially carried for the purpose.
In 1934 this Neanderthal period of fighter armament gave way to a more sophisticated age. At an Air Ministry conference in July, it was shown that, in the second or two a fighter pilot could expect to keep a bomber in his sights, he would require six or preferably eight guns, firing at 1,000 rounds a minute, to destroy it. The propounder of this disturbing thesis was Squadron Leader Ralph Sorley of the Supply and Research Department – and he had the full backing of his chief, Dowding.
Early plans for the new Hawker monoplane fighter had called for two Vickers guns in the fuselage and two more guns in the wings. After the new Air Ministry requirement Camm took his design a stage further to incorporate the unprecedented armament of eight machine-guns in the wings, all of them beyond the mallet reach of the pilot and therefore needing to be reliable. This became possible with the completion of negotiations between BSA in Britain and Colt in America for the manufacture of the magnificent Browning machine-gun, bored out from .3 to .303 inches. Besides being reliable, the Browning was extremely economical in weight and size, the complete battery of eight guns, accessories and over 2,500 rounds of ammunition weighing little more than 400 pounds.
Fitted with a fixed-pitch, two-blade, wooden propeller, the Hawker Hurricane made its first flight on 6 November 1935, piloted with impressive insouciance by chief test pilot P. W. S. ‘George’ Bulman, who refused to remove his trilby hat for the event. Like the Dread-nought battleship of thirty years earlier, the Hurricane was by a wide margin the most heavily gunned and fastest of its kind in the world. Thanks to sound and steady development from the earlier Hawker biplanes, the Hurricane revealed no major flaws.
Formally tested three months later, this prototype showed a speed of 315 mph at 16,200 feet, a service ceiling of 34,000 feet and a startling rate of climb of 8.4 minutes to 20,000 feet. Without waiting for Air Ministry orders, T. O. M. Sopwith of Hawkers arranged tooling-up for 1,000 machines. Within a few weeks the first official order for 600 was in the company’s hands.
It was not until 3 May 1938 that the existence of the Hurricane was made public. The following day, the air correspondent of The Times wrote, ‘The fastest’ plane in service in any air force in the world was yesterday removed from the Air Ministry’s semi-secret list…. The Hurricane is outstanding in its class in respect of duration as well as speed.’ But as the correspondent pointed out, the circumstances of the announcement were anomalous, as the Hurricane had already ‘made itself famous by covering the 327 miles from Edinburgh to Northolt at a speed of 408 mph’. This sensational achievement was brought about with the aid of a strong tailwind, and the pilot, John Gillan, was promptly nicknamed ‘Downwind’.
Five hundred Hurricanes had been delivered to the RAF by the outbreak of war on 3 September 1939. A number of improvements had already been introduced by then, including the installation of a more powerful Merlin engine and the introduction of stressed metal wings. The fuselage retained its fabric covering for all its long life and total output of 14,000.
To a pilot coming to the Hurricane for the first time after flying Kestrel or Bristol-engined biplanes, it was a revelation of speed without any loss of manoeuvrability. The absence of a second wing, far from being a deprivation, was a liberation offering much superior all-round visibility. Roland Beamont, who flew early Hurricanes in France in 1939–40 and only recently retired as a famous test pilot, wrote: ‘To a new pilot the Hurricane was an immensely powerful but not excessively demanding aeroplane. Its wide track undercarriage, stable and responsive flying characteristics and reliable engine and hydraulic system resulted in a general atmosphere of confidence in the squadron, so that the newcomer had no reason to become apprehensive.’10*
The genesis of the Spitfire was interestingly different from that of its stouter cousin, the Hurricane. Unlike Hawker’s, the Supermarine Company of Southampton had no tradition of designing and building fighter aircraft. The company was, appropriately, associated more closely with the sea than the land, and had a sound reputation for building large flying-boats, which they launched directly into the Solent from their own slipway. In 1916 a twenty-one-year-old engineer, Reginald Joseph Mitchell, had joined this company as a designer. ‘R.J.’, as he came to be known, showed immediate promise of brilliance. One of Supermarine’s test pilots described him as ‘sandy-haired, of slightly florid complexion, and a man of few words’, though ‘not taciturn’.11
In the 1920s the company became deeply involved in the construction of high-speed seaplanes for the Schneider Trophy, which it won outright for Britain in 1931 with the elegant, Rolls-Royce engined S.6B. Shortly afterwards, this also took the world air-speed record at 406.99 mph.* By this time the company had been taken over by the industrial giant, Vickers, who were anxious to extend the repertoire of their new acquisition into fighters for the RAF.
With the benefit of his experience with the S.6s, Mitchell sat down at his drawing-board, using a fuselage of similar configuration to the racing seaplanes but creating an entirely new elliptical wing of great strength, narrow depth and memorable grace, which made the fighter immediately recognisable to the millions who saw it in the air during its twenty-year-long service life.
Structurally, the Spitfire was more advanced than the Hurricane, its fuselage being not only slimmer but of light alloy monocoque construction. The wings, too, were of single spar type, again with a stressed metal skin covering, except for the fabric-covered control surfaces. It was, without question, the most beautiful single-seat fighter of its day, and (as the old engineering slogan goes) ‘what looks right is right’. But this was not always the view of first-time pilots, who found the close-set wheels of the outward retracting undercarriage tricky, especially on rough grass surfaces. Moreover, early models required manual pumping to retract the undercarriage after take-off, a distracting operation when full attention should be given to flying the machine, which resulted in a certain amount of longitudinal oscillation. More serious were the aileron problems in high-speed dives. To manoeuvre the plane laterally at full speed was a two-handed business, requiring some strength.
Like any fighter plane, the Spitfire was only as good as its engine and armament, and both Spitfire and Hurricane owed their success – after the triumph of their designers – to the light, powerful, reliable Merlin engine and the light, small, reliable Browning machine-gun.
The prototype Spitfire’s first flight took place, in the hands of J. ‘Mutt’ Summers, the chief test pilot, on 6 March 1936, four months after the Hurricane took to the air. It carried no armament, was unpainted and, for safety, was fitted with a full-fine, fixed-pitch airscrew. The Spitfire took off after a very short run, Summers checked the flaps and slow stalling characteristics, and landed back within a few minutes. His first words of comment have gone down in aviation history: ‘I don’t want anything touched’, which has mistakenly been interpreted as a reflection of the machine’s perfection. It was nothing of the kind. There were numerous snags to be ironed out, but the test pilot wanted nothing altered until his next flight.
A week or two later, Jeffrey Quill flew this prototype, fitted now with a fixed coarse-pitch airscrew, for the first time. Settling himself into the cockpit, he found it narrow without actually being cramped, and with the seat in the up position, very little headroom. ‘I primed the Merlin engine carefully and it started first time. I began taxiing out to the north-east end of the airfield…. Never before had I flown a fighter with such a very long nose … so I taxied slowly on a zig-zag course in order to ensure a clear path ahead.’
Quill experienced a little difficulty with the torque effect of the big prop, which tended to roll the Spitfire on its narrow undercarriage: ‘However, once fully airborne and “tidied up”, the aircraft began to slip along as if on skates with the speed mounting up steadily and an immediate impression of effortless performance was accentuated by the low revs of the propeller at that low altitude. The aeroplane just seemed to chunter along at an outstandingly higher cruising speed than I had ever experienced before.’12
The test pilot confined himself to some steep turns and a few rolls on that first flight. On the approach to land he experienced for the first time the trouble which every Spitfire pilot had to contend with – ‘non-existent view’: ‘As I chopped the throttle on passing over the boundary hedge the deceleration was hardly discernible and the aeroplane showed no desire to touch down – it evidently enjoyed flying – but finally it settled gently on three points and it wasn’t until after the touch-down that the mild aerodynamic buffeting associated with the stalling of the wing became apparent. “Here”, I thought to myself, “is a real lady.”’
Two years later, Quill was to take in hand the first squadron pilots to convert from their biplanes to the first production Spitfires at Duxford. Among these was Pilot Officer Robert Stanford Tuck, who fell in love with the fighter from his first flight and who found it ‘an understanding and intelligent creature that responded instantly to the most delicate suggestive pressures of its master’s hands and feet’. His biographer wrote: ‘He had never dreamed that flying could be like this. He knew that with a little time he could make this’ plane almost a part of him – like an extension of his own body, brain and nervous system.’13
Flying a Spitfire, which many still enjoy today, has been described in many ways, but there is no account on record that is not favourable, even those of German pilots who flew captured examples during the war. But a great deal of work had been done between Quill’s first flight and his first instruction of squadron pilots like Tuck. The first official speed trials had been disappointing, showing a top speed of only 335 mph, hardly a respectable superiority over the Hurricane, which had a head start in development anyway. One of the earliest modifications, to the propeller, resulted in a significant increase of speed and made the Spitfire the 350 mph fighter Mitchell had hoped for.
Trials, and modifications, moved fast, in unison with the worsening international situation. Within a few weeks of Hitler’s marching his troops into the demilitarised Rhineland, the first production order for 310 Spitfires was given by the Air Ministry, which with the 600 Hurricanes promised to multiply many times over the front-line strength of the nation’s fighter force. By the outbreak of war three years later, over 2,000 Spitfires were on order. Supermarine had long since been forced to subcontract on a large scale, and the first of numerous shadow factories was working on the fighter.
The Hurricane and the Spitfire each had their proponents, roughly divided between the squadron allocations, the Hurricane in the Battle of Britain being more numerous in the ratio of about five to three Spitfires, even though it is still popularly believed that the Spitfire ‘won the battle’. Certainly the Spitfire attracted the most immediate admiration, as befitted its glorious appearance, by contrast with the hump-backed Hurricane. The Spitfire by 1939 was also significantly faster and with a faster rate of climb. In handling there was little to choose between the two. The Hurricane was a superior gun platform and its twin batteries of four Brownings closely grouped in the wings was preferred to the more widely scattered guns in the Spitfire’s wings. Moreover, the Hurricane offered a better forward view in the air and felt capable of taking greater punishment than the Spitfire, and was certainly easier to repair.
In the run up to war, both fighters took a heavy toll among pilots brought up on biplanes with a much lower performance. The loss of these pilots was to be felt severely when the fighting was at its hottest, more severely (from a strictly military point of view) than the losses sustained during training on them during the war.
Mitchell, alas, died of cancer before the first production Spitfires were delivered, but he was comforted in the knowledge that he and his staff had produced a winner. Camm went on to design the Typhoon and Tempest, and, at the end of an amazingly productive life, the first VTO Harrier jump-jet, which in its small way won control of the air over the Falkland Islands in 1982, just as his great masterpiece helped to tame the Luftwaffe in 1940.
In addition to the Hurricanes and Spitfires two other kinds of aircraft were in Fighter Command’s front line by 1940, though in much smaller numbers. The first of these, the two-seat Defiant, was something of a hybrid. A two-seat fighter had proved successful in World War I in the form of the superb Bristol Fighter, and the idea of a gunner able to give his whole attention to his task instead of flying and aiming a high-speed aircraft at the same time certainly had its appeal. Moreover, by the mid-1930s such a gunner could swiftly traverse through 360 degrees, since in the new four-gun, enclosed, hydraulically operated turret he could bear on the target effortlessly while protected from the elements.
When, therefore, the Air Ministry issued a specification in 1935 calling for a two-seat fighter with main armament in a revolving turret and a speed around the 300+ mph of the future single-seat fighter, several designers applied themselves to this formula. The only company that brought it to fruition and the production stage was Boulton and Paul, who had a special interest because they had themselves perfected a powered four-gun turret.
The Defiant of 1939, powered by the same Merlin fitted to the Hurricane and Spitfire, looked every inch as modern as its contemporaries with lines more reminiscent of the Hurricane than the Spitfire, but spoilt by the massive four-gun turret set into the fuselage behind the pilot’s cockpit. In spite of this burden, the Defiant handled pleasantly and without any vices. Its virtues were loudly extolled at the time, and the press wrote of ‘the fighter with the sting in its tail’. But, as one critic later wrote: ‘Its biggest shortcoming and the most serious error in its concept lay in the division of responsibility between pilot and gunner. The Defiant possessed no fixed forward-firing armament, and while the pilot had to think in abstract terms of his gunner’s likely line of sight, it was all too easy for an enemy fighter to creep in under cover of the blind spot beneath the tail and deliver the coup de grâce.”4 This, however, was to become plain only after the fighting had begun.
The other aircraft in Fighter Command’s front line in 1940 were the six squadrons of twin-engined Blenheims converted from the light bomber role. These Bristol-designed machines had been as much a sensation in their class as the Hurricane, and for the same reasons: their high speed and revolutionary configuration, with retractable undercarriage. In fighter form, intended mainly for night work, Blenheims were capable of close on 300 mph and had an armament of up to seven .303 machine-guns, four of them in a fuselage belly-pack fitted just to the rear of the wing leading edge. But on any unfortunate occasion when they might be obliged to contend with enemy day fighters, they were likely to stand little chance, and as night fighters they would have a hard task to catch the German bombers even when they were fortunate enough to locate them.
Meanwhile, what of developments on the other side? Some six weeks before ‘George’ Bulman took off in the prototype Hurricane from Brooklands, Flugkapitaen ‘Bubi’ Knoetsch conducted the first flight of what was to become the new German Air Force’s most numerous and famous fighter, the Messerschmitt Bf 109.* By 1935 the rearmament of Germany was in full swing and the most important event in the expansion of the Luftwaffe’s fighter force took place in October: the trial of four competing machines for the order, and honour, of providing Germany with a mass-production front-line fighter.
The four competitors were from Arado, Focke-Wulf, Heinkel and BFW (later Messerschmitt). The first two were quickly discarded, being too crank or too slow, narrowing the choice down to the two low-wing, all-metal Messerschmitt Bf 109s and the Heinkel He 112. The Heinkel was one of the lost causes of military aviation. By all accounts it handled beautifully, and the later production V9 series, which attracted a number of export orders, was favourably compared with the Messerschmitt by those who had flown both types. But a combination of superior salesmanship and swifter development won the day for the Augsburg company. Just possibly, this was a blessing for the RAF.
The design team at Augsburg, under the direction of Professor Willy Messerschmitt, had set out to create the smallest possible, single-seat, monoplane fighter that could accommodate the most powerful engines under development in Germany, notably at Daimler-Benz, although ironically the trials prototype, like the Heinkel, was powered by a Rolls-Royce Kestrel imported for the purpose. The 109, again like the Heinkel, was a low-wing, all-metal monoplane with a flush-riveted duralumin skin, the fuselage being an oval-section monocoque structure. But the pilot was less thoughtfully cared-for than in Heinkel’s machine, his cockpit being cramped and visibility much inferior.
The 109 was sharply purposeful in appearance and lacked the grace both of its competitor at the trials and its chief British antagonist in future combat. By 1939 the developed ‘E’ series of the 109 was being delivered to the Luftwaffe’s squadrons contemporaneously with Supermarine’s Spitfire to the RAF. This production 109E was powered by the DB601 engine, a power unit only marginally inferior to the Rolls-Royce Merlin and in some respects – the fuel injection system, for example – manifestly superior. It produced 990 hp at 2,400 rpm by contrast with the Merlin’s similar output at 2,600 rpm. The straight-and-level performance, with 311 mph obtainable at sea level to 354 mph at 16,500 feet, was remarkably similar to the Spitfire’s.
Numerous armament permutations were worked out for this new Luftwaffe fighter, from four heavy calibre (roughly .5 inch) machine-guns, two mounted in the fuselage and two in the wings (109E1), to the more popular twin heavy machine-guns augmented by the much more lethal and longer-ranging 20 mm cannon, one in each wing (109E2). The most recently delivered 109s in the Battle of Britain were armed with a single cannon firing through the airscrew hub, supported by four heavy machine-guns (109E3). But RAF pilots were most likely to have to face a 109 armament of two-wing cannon and two 7.9 mm (.3 inch) machine-guns sited on the engine crankcase and firing through the upper nose decking. All these combinations, except the first, were potentially more lethal than the eight .303s of the British fighters, the cannon not only permitting the pilot to open fire at a greater range but having no difficulty in piercing the British armour, whereas the Browning .303 was incapable of penetrating the German bomber armour which later became increasingly common.
The 109 was a superb fighting machine which attracted strenuous pilot loyalty, even after the advent of the Focke-Wulf 190 when the Battle of Britain was over. But the pilots had to overcome more inherent faults than those faced by RAF pilots. At high speeds the controls, and especially (and critically) the ailerons, were even heavier than the Spitfire’s, and many pilots got into trouble struggling for purchase with the near-immovable ailerons within the confines of a tight cockpit. They also suffered from the absence of a rudder trimmer, which added to the difficulty of banking to port at high speeds. But the aircraft’s most significant weakness, as the Battle of Britain was to show, was its short endurance. A single fuselage fuel tank following the contours of the pilot’s seat (but best forgotten by him!) accommodated eighty-eight imperial gallons, sufficient for only marginally over one hour’s flying at maximum continuous power.
A few months after Willy Messerschmitt had settled at his drawing-board to conceive his successful single-seat fighter, he learned that the Luftwaffe was also planning a long-range escort plane – ‘the strategic fighter’ – to protect its bombers on deep penetrations into enemy territory. For this purpose some air forces were venturing into the unexplored field of the twin-engined fighter. The trouble here, however, was that a heavy twin-engined fighter was a contradiction in terms and function. It was not possible to design such a machine to match in manoeuvrability a nimble little Spitfire or Bf 109.
The Messerschmitt Bf 110 twin-engined fighter, with a crew of two, achieved no such manoeuvrability, but it was as good a compromise as could be expected, and in its configuration, speed and armament made impressive material for Dr Joseph Goebbels’s spine-chilling propaganda machine. It was a slim, low-wing, all-metal, cantilever monoplane with twin fins and rudders, the pilot and gunner-navigator sharing a long plexiglass enclosed cockpit, which gave them both excellent visibility. The first prototype flew in May 1936 and, for what it was, proved highly satisfactory, being faster straight-and-level than both the early 109 and the Hurricane. In 110C production form, with the same DB601 engine as the 109, the ‘zerstoerer’ or destroyer (as Goering liked to call it) was capable of 350 mph at 23,000 feet and had a range of 565 miles – formidable figures indeed, especially when complemented by an armament of two cannon and four machine-guns in the nose and another machine-gun firing to the rear. But in the Battle of Britain the 110s were to prove no match either for the Hurricanes (when they could catch them) or the Spitfires.
Mercifully for Britain, and later her allies, the Luftwaffe failed to produce a heavy bomber force in any way comparable to the American Eighth Air Force in Europe or RAF Bomber Command. The German bombers were all single- or twin-engined machines with a strictly limited bomb capacity.
The type that became most familiar to Britons during the Battle and the subsequent night bombing, both for its readily identifiable silhouette and the irregular beat of its unsynchronised engines, was the Heinkel He 111. Like its stablemate from Dornier, this Heinkel was designed ostensibly as a high-speed transport although its more lethal role was intended from the start. It dated from the early days of German rearmament (1934) when Hitler still wished to proceed with some degree of caution. But, even under the colours of Lufthansa, the potential of this 240+ mph machine was at once evident.
There was no more pretence after the Luftwaffe flew some thirty 111 s in bomber form to Spain to gain experience in the Spanish Civil War. The Heinkel proved highly effective and possessed the considerable advantage of outpacing enemy fighters (except the latest from Russia). Like the Bf 109, it gained useful experience in combat before the more serious battles of 1939 and 1940.
The 111 was a low-wing, all-metal, twin-engined machine with a crew of four, a bomb-load of 4,400 pounds, a speed just short of 250 mph at 16,000 feet and a defensive armament of three 7.9 mm machine-guns. This was to prove inadequate against eight-gun British fighters. The types most used in the Battle of Britain were the 111P and H, the second with slightly more powerful engines. Armour-plate was increasingly added. This was a comfort to the crew but also made the bomber more vulnerable by reducing its speed.
The Dornier Do 17 – the ‘flying pencil’ – had more authentic civil origins, having been originally designed in 1933 to meet a Lufthansa requirement for a fast mailplane with accommodation for half-a-dozen passengers. Three prototypes of this shoulder-wing, all-metal, twin-engined monoplane were built, with single fin and 660 hp BMW engines. The new venture gave all the speed expected – around 250 mph – but failed its tests as passengers would have had great difficulty in getting in or out, or, if there were six of them, in all sitting down. The prototypes were then put into store until someone had the idea of converting them into bombers. With the cockpit area glazed and enlarged, the fuselage shortened, the single fin and rudder converted to twin, and a dorsal gun blister fitted, the Dornier became a fast light bomber. Despite a bomb-load of only 2,200 pounds it was to give useful service, but to prove as vulnerable as its stablemate to the Hurricane and Spitfire.
The third twin-engined Luftwaffe bomber, and the best, was the Junkers Ju 88, which had no mixed ancestry and, like the Messerschmitt fighter, was the winner of a competition. Just as a German took the major part in the design of the best American fighter,* so the American Alfred Gassner was the co-designer of Germany’s best bomber.
Like the He 111, the Ju 88 was a cantilever low-wing, twin-engined monoplane, built with flush-riveted stressed skin and a single fin. It was powered by twin Daimler-Benz 600 engines. This bomber at once proved its exceptional qualities, in handling, capacity, speed and potential versatility. A specially ‘souped up’ prototype, now fitted with two Jumo 1,200 hp engines, carried a 4,400 pound load over 600 miles at an average speed within a closed circuit of over 320 mph.
In production form, with the characteristic Luftwaffe glazed nose and armed with three machine-guns, the Junkers could still achieve 286 mph at 16,000 feet with a 4,000 pound bomb-load. As many who suffered during the Battle of Britain bore witness, the 88 was equally formidable as a dive-bomber, diving at sixty degrees and releasing its load at just above 3,000 feet. Because of its high speed, the 88 was to prove all too often capable of getting away from the Hurricane.
The other Junkers aircraft to participate in the Battle, the Ju 87 Stuka (Sturzkampfflugzueg, dive-bomber), was unique in being single-engined and with a fixed undercarriage. It was intended exclusively for dive-bombing. It was also immediately distinguishable in the air by its single inverted gull wing, which had prominent dive-brakes fitted to the trailing edge to control the plane’s speed in a near-vertical dive. It was notorious for its screaming siren, the sole purpose of which was to demoralise even further anyone in the line of flight of its bombs.
The 87 carried a crew of two, and was protected by one rear-firing and two wing-mounted machine-guns. It normally carried during the Battle a single 1,100 pound bomb under the fuselage and a selection of lighter bombs beneath the wings.
In the role for which it was intended – pinpoint bombing in support of ground troops – the 87 was to prove very effective in Spain, Poland and France. It was also very accurate against ships. But its low speed – little over 200 mph – and poor manoeuvrability made it an easy target for modern fighters, and only heavy, close escort was likely to give it much chance of survival against well-co-ordinated attack.
In November 1932 Stanley Baldwin, who had a habit of blurting out uncomfortable truths and half-truths, delivered himself of one of his most memorable pronouncements. Impressed by the potential horrors of air warfare to the point of wishing to abolish aeroplanes altogether, he pronounced, in the course of a Commons debate on disarmament, his famous warning to the British public:
I think it is well also for the man in the street to realise that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through. The only defence is offence, which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves.15
The reality of the situation in 1932 could not, in fact, be expressed quite so crudely. Even with completely inadequate warning of attack, even with resort to an utterly wasteful and inefficient system of flying standing patrols, the defences would still have shot down some of the bombers. And though attack was indeed considered the main element in defence, it was not, in 1932, conceived in terms of killing more of the enemy’s women and children than the enemy could kill of ours.
Nevertheless, allowing for exaggeration, Baldwin was not too far from the mark. The fighters of 1932 had little edge over the bombers; the anti-aircraft guns, limited in range and number, could not do much more than keep the bombers high; and, above all, the warning of enemy attack, derived from observer posts and a few unreliable sound locators on the coast, would be far too short to permit effective defence of London and other vital areas.
How the development of the Hurricane and the Spitfire from 1934 onwards helped to redress the balance of advantage earlier enjoyed by the bomber has already been indicated – to redress it, that is, as long as the bomber came by day and not by night (when it could anyway do much less military damage). But no transformation in the performance of the British fighters could have made effective defence possible without a corresponding transformation in the means of receiving warning of attack.
With every increase in the speed of aircraft – and of the approaching bomber – the problem of securing good early warning of attack became more and more acute. In the early 1930s it seemed unlikely that anything could provide the RAF in Britain with warning before, as in 1918, the enemy came within sight and sound – a crippling handicap to the defence of the coastal regions and the capital. But, just as the press of crisis – the rise of Nazi Germany – led to the flight of the 300+ mph eight-gun Hurricane in 1935, so in that same year of renaissance began an equally revolutionary improvement in the early-warning system.
During the early 1920s sound locators of intermittent performance and a range of eight miles or so had been installed on Britain’s south coast, and later there were experiments with outsize locators, curved concrete rectangles dubbed ‘acoustical mirrors’. Construction in series would have been a major task – the ‘prototype’ at Hythe was 200 feet long. All sound locators, however, gave only the most limited help. Quite apart from their short range, in some conditions they did not work at all, and at all times they suffered from the interference of general noise – anything from seagulls and breaking waves to the human voice and passing cars.
More fruitfully, it had been noted from time to time that passing aircraft sometimes interfered with radio signals. A somewhat wild hope was also being expressed that radio waves might detonate the bombs of enemy aircraft before they reached their target, or that some form of electro-magnetic ‘death-ray’ might kill the aircrew. To examine such theories and the general application of science to air defence, the Air Ministry towards the end of 1934 set up a small body officially entitled the Committee for the Scientific Survey of Air Defence. The Air Ministry members were two scientists from within Dowding’s Research and Development Department – the Director of Scientific Research, H. E. Wimperis, and his assistant, A. P. Rowe, who had initiated the idea of bringing in outside help and who acted as secretary. The outside members, entirely unpaid, were three scientists of great distinction: Henry Tizard, Rector of the Imperial College of Science and Technology and Chairman of the old-established Aeronautical Research Committee, Professor A. V. Hill of University College, London, and Professor P. M. S. Blackett, who had recently discovered the positive electron.
In the mind of the public, the formation of a committee immediately suggests deputation, procrastination and bureaucratic delay. All these characteristics might have been manifested in this small group which had its first meeting on 28 January 1935. But under the chairmanship of Tizard, a pilot of World War I, the very reverse was the case. Well aware of the vital importance of their task, and perhaps sensing that they were on the brink of epochal discovery, these men were like Sir Walter Scott’s black dogs – ‘unmatch’d for courage, breath and speed’.
At once they called in Robert Watson-Watt, a brilliant, forty-two-year-old, Scottish-born scientist who headed the Radio Research branch of the National Physical Laboratory. Confirming their own thoughts, he swiftly brushed aside as boys’ science-fiction stuff any ideas of a death beam – the amount of radiant power required was too ‘fantastically large’. But following suggestions by his assistant, A. F. Wilkins, by the time of the Committee’s next meeting a month later Watson-Watt was able to produce a paper showing the possibilities of using radio waves not to destroy aircraft, but to detect them. This described lines of research ten years earlier in which the height of the ionosphere above the earth’s surface had been measured by the transmission of radio waves. This had been achieved by noting the length of the interval between the emission of a radio pulse and the return of its ‘echo’, as registered by a cathode-ray oscillograph. ‘Why not see if we can bounce radio emissions back off aircraft?’ Watson-Watt asked.
Within a fortnight the Committee had acted on his suggestion. A bomber pilot, who had no idea of the historical nature of his flight, flew his machine up and down above a fixed line corresponding to the lateral centre of the beam transmitted by Daventry’s BBC radio station, while Watson-Watt, Rowe and Wilkins huddled round a receiver to which was attached a cathode-ray oscillograph. As soon as the bomber entered the path of the beam, its presence was registered by the oscillograph. Electro-magnetic energy, it was now proven, was reflected from an aircraft.
By 4 March Wimperis was able to write an astonishing minute to Dowding, which began: ‘We now have in embryo, a new and potent means of detecting the approach of hostile aircraft, one which will be independent of mist, cloud, fog or nightfall.”6
In the rapid advances that then followed two figures apart from the scientists stood out. The first was Dowding, Air Member of Research and Development. He had needed the proof just vouchsafed that this new idea was worth pursuing before he could seek resources from the Treasury; and having had the proof, he threw all the weight of his influence and position into translating the idea into an actual early-warning system. The second figure was Sir Philip Cunliffe-Lister, soon to become Viscount Swinton, who was appointed in June 1935 to succeed Lord Londonderry as Secretary of State for Air. He was already chairing the Air Defence Committee, a sub-committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence embracing ministers, Service leaders and scientists. In his new post at the Air Ministry he now rapidly proved to possess all the intelligence, the drive and the spirit of urgency which the times (and these new developments) demanded.
The first step was to set up experimental equipment. This was done at a radio research station at Orfordness, on the Suffolk coast. Transmission and receiving aerials of modest size were erected, and serious trials using aircraft began in the summer. Though Watson-Watt, in charge of the work, had to overcome many difficulties, within a few weeks aircraft were being tracked at forty miles range. ‘RDF’ (radio direction finding, as it was named with misleading intent) had been born.*
Less than nine months after the Tizard Committee’s first meeting, the Air Council was recommending the construction of a chain of stations to cover the coast from Southampton up to Newcastle. A beginning had to be made slowly with three stations – the first at Bawdsey Manor, near Orfordness, purchased by the Air Ministry to permit larger aerials and greater scope for experiment. Watson-Watt, in charge at Bawdsey, ran into great constructional and administrative difficulties, but all were overcome. By the outbreak of war the planned chain of twenty stations at home – the Chain Home (CH) stations – had been completed, as well as three overseas. Their mysterious soaring transmitting (350 feet) and receiving (240 feet) towers soon became a feature of the landscape. Such installations, termed for security’s sake Air Ministry Experimental Stations (AMES), could detect aircraft up to 100 miles away, and could give the bearing and an approximate indication of the height and number of an approaching formation. Already, too, by the outbreak of war they were being supplemented by another series – Chain Home Low (CHL) – specially designed to detect aircraft flying below 3,000 feet. A further element in the system was, of course, necessary – a device to distinguish friendly aircraft from hostile. It was provided during 1939 and 1940 by a small transmitting device – IFF (identification friend or foe) – which was fitted to RAF aircraft and operated when within British radar range. It gave a distinctive periodic elongation to the blip produced on the radar screen by an approaching aircraft.
Much had still to be done before the outbreak of war to produce more aircraft, to integrate the new radar into the basic defensive lay-out, and to improve and complete the system of fighter control. But, in essence, within the short space of four years, the revolution had been completed. New fast fighters. Greatly extended early warning. No need, inland, for wasteful standing patrols. Effective defence against fast-flying raiders at last possible. The bomber won’t always get through!
* The German Armed Forces, 1920–35.
* Later the first Baron Hives, who worked for Rolls-Royce from 1908 to 1957.
* See Appendix XII.
** By 1943 there were some fifty alkylation plants operating in the USA, Canada and the Caribbean meeting the colossal need for 100 octane aviation fuel and the higher 115/145 grade.
* Later Marshal of the RAF Lord Douglas of Kirtleside (1893–1969).
* This writer vividly recalls climbing into the cockpit of a Mark I Hurricane for the first time on a dirty afternoon in Scotland and being awed by the overall size of the machine by contrast with the claustrophobic effect of the enclosed cockpit. The power, after training machines, was heady, one’s back pressing hard against the seat as the 1,000 hp sent the aircraft racing down the runway, and then into a climb so steep and swift that it was hard to credit the truth of the instrument figures. Though I later flew faster machines, nothing could equal the joy of handling the utterly predictable and vice-free responsiveness of the Hurricane. But its most enduring memory is the song of the Merlin, deep-noted without harshness, accompanied by an unobtrusive and steady pulsation. R.H.
* Amid growing economic difficulties, Ramsay MacDonald’s Government had declined to make funds available for a British entry. The eccentric and ardently patriotic philanthropist Dame Lucy Houston came to the rescue with a gift of £100,000.
* Bf 109 stood for the name of the works – Bayerische Flugzuegwerke – and was at first the official abbreviation. After 1938 this became Me 109.
* Edgar Schmued, late of Fokker and Messerschmitt: the North American P51 Mustang.
* RDF remained the official term until 1943, though when its existence was officially acknowledged in 1941 it was called radiolocation. In 1943, to harmonise with the Americans, it became ‘radar’ (radio direction and ranging).