Wings (19 page)

Hitler’s arrival in power and the acceleration of German rearmament forced a decision to scramble to make up the ground lost in the 1920s. In July 1934 Expansion Scheme A was announced. It
was the first of thirteen such schemes unveiled over the next four years, most of which never got beyond the proposal stage. The aim was to achieve some rough parity with Germany, though the target
would keep shifting. The initial intention was to signal to Hitler that Britain was prepared to compete in an aerial arms race. The plan laid the foundations for a training programme and a
framework for wider expansion, should the warning be ignored. The programme increased the targets for RAF growth laid down in 1923 – though not by much. The planned number of Britain-based
home defence squadrons would rise from fifty-two to sixty-four. Of these, twenty-five would be fighter squadrons – eight more than in the earlier plan.

This shift towards fighters was a concession to politicians who, despite having warned that the bomber would always get through, were anxious to show the public that the
raiders’ job would be made as difficult as possible. The air staff – and in particular their chief, Sir Edward Ellington – maintained their view that a big bomber fleet was
central to Britain’s security. This would remain the prevailing wisdom at the top of the RAF for several more years.

Nonetheless, the rapid changes in the performance of small aircraft could not be ignored. The age of the biplane was clearly at an end. It was fortunate that in 1933 the Operational Requirements
Section of the Air Ministry was commanded by a bold, intelligent and far-sighted officer. Squadron Leader Ralph Sorley was thirty-six years old, a former RNAS pilot who had won a Distinguished
Service Cross (DSC) for daring attacks on the German warships
Goeben
and
Breslau
in 1918. He was also keenly aware of technological innovation and its implications for future
warfare. The Air Ministry had no designers of its own and relied on private firms to meet its requirements for new aircraft. Sorley came up with a wish list of specifications for a world-class
fighter, which he believed to be achievable, and it went out to the manufacturers. The new aeroplane should have eight machine guns, mounted in the wings, an enclosed cockpit and an engine that
would take it to at least 300 mph and 33,000 feet.

In August 1933 Sydney Camm, the chief designer at Hawker Aircraft Limited in Kingston upon Thames, had produced a new model, the Fury, which came in both biplane and
monoplane versions. They were offered to the Air Ministry, but rejected as ‘too orthodox’ – a welcome indication that the need for radical new designs had been
recognized. The board at Hawker nonetheless allowed Camm to continue work on his monoplane. What he came up with was a hybrid, halfway between the pioneering and the modern ages of aviation. The
frame was of metal tubes and wooden formers and stringers. The skin was fabric, coated with dope to reduce drag and stressed metal wings were only added at a fairly late stage. But it definitely
looked modern, and it carried an inspiring name, the Hurricane, which conveyed a note of confidence and aggression that was absent from the placid Harts, Flycatchers and Grebes of the previous
generation.

The question was: would it fly as well as it looked and sounded? On 6 November 1935 it made its first flight at Brooklands. The test pilot was George Bulman, a short, bald, ginger-moustached
extrovert who had flown with the RFC in the war and won a Military Cross. The prototype Hurricane had been developed in great secrecy and when the tarpaulins were stripped away and the hangar doors
opened there were murmurs of surprise.

The new machine had been painted a futuristic silver, which emphasized its smooth, aerodynamically efficient lines and the way the wings fitted flush to the fuselage below the neat narrow
cockpit. It was big – bigger than any existing fighter – and very heavy at more than 6,000 lbs. It seemed unlikely that a single engine could get it airborne. Bulman strode to the
aeroplane, clambered up onto the wing root and
hopped into the cockpit, watched by Camm and a clutch of Hawker executives from the edge of the field.

The Hurricane bumped away into the distance, then turned into the wind. The rumble of the Rolls Royce engine deepened into a growl. The aeroplane moved forward, but slowly, so that it seemed to
some that Bulman would run out of field before he got airborne. At the last moment the Hurricane left the ground in an abrupt bounding movement and climbed steeply. Neatly, the undercarriage folded
inwards and disappeared into the underside of the wings. The muscular shape dwindled, then disappeared and the engine note faded to nothing. Then, half an hour later, it was heard again. Bulman
touched down in a perfect three-point landing and rolled over to where Camm was waiting to report that the flight had been a ‘piece of cake’.
⁷
It was clear to all that in the Hurricane a star had been born.

It would soon be eclipsed by another. Sorley’s call had also produced a response from Supermarine, makers of high-performance aeroplanes that had several times carried off the Schneider
seaplane speed trophy, and now owned by the armament giant Vickers. They offered the Spitfire, the first prototype of which flew in March 1936. It was a more modern design, all metal with a
monocoque fuselage and thin, elliptical wings. It had the same Rolls Royce Merlin engine as the Hurricane and carried the same guns, but weighed 1,000 lbs less and so went 30 mph faster. No one has
ever established where the name came from. Its designer, Reginald Mitchell, was said to have thought it ‘bloody stupid’. In the propaganda
film of his life,
The First of the Few
, which came out in 1942, he is portrayed as coining it himself: ‘A curious sort of bird . . . a bird that spits out death and destruction . . . a Spitfire
bird.’ Mitchell was worth a biopic. He really did give his life’s blood for his creation, as ‘Johnnie’ Johnson, whose flying skill was perfectly and devastatingly married to
the Spitfire, acknowledged. Mitchell knew that he was dying of cancer, yet ‘convinced of Germany’s evil intentions he did not spare himself, and as his beautiful machine took shape, so
his life wasted away . . . every day he could be seen in the workshops, contemplating the progress of his machine, walking round and examining its graceful lines, rejecting this, approving that,
talking with the mechanics, and then going back to his office where he would sit for hours, face cupped in hands, elbows on the drawing board, pondering the latest problem.’
⁸
Mitchell lived long enough to see the first Spitfire fly. Another 20,000 would be built and it was a further tribute to his engineering powers that the basic
design could bear endless improvements, so that by the end of the Second World War it had gone through twelve incarnations.

The quality of the two types was apparent. The Air Ministry did not hesitate and ordered 600 Hurricanes and 310 Spitfires. They began arriving on the squadrons in 1938. Pilots enjoyed flying the
latest generation of biplanes. The Hawker Hart, for example, was fast, handled beautifully and could be thrown about in the air in whatever fashion a skilled flier fancied. But when an aviator took
the controls of a Spitfire for the first time he felt he was undergoing the sensation of flying anew.
Like birth and death, it was an experience that could only be undergone
solo. There were no dual-seater trainers and after a certain point the instructor pointed you at the cockpit and you were on your own. No one ever forgot their first flight in a Spitfire and when
they remembered it these modern men, practical men, reached for the language of poetry to describe it. The first squadron to receive it was No. 19, and George Unwin, the former Ruislip apprentice,
was one of the five pilots selected to put it through a 500-hour series of tests.

It was love at first flight. ‘There was no heaving or pulling and pushing and kicking. You just breathed on it. She really was the perfect flying machine. She hadn’t got a vice at
all. She would only spin if you made her and she’d come straight out of it as soon as you applied opposite rudder and pushed the stick forward . . . I’ve never flown anything
sweeter.’

The Spitfire’s engine note was instantly recognizable to those who had flown it, somehow distinct from that of the Hurricane, even though they were both powered by Merlins. Many years
later, Unwin was coming out of Boots the chemist in Bournemouth with his wife when he heard ‘that peculiar throaty roar . . . I said to her, “There’s a Spitfire somewhere.”
A taxi driver was standing there and said, “There she is, mate.” It’s a noise you will never forget.’
⁹

In the Spitfire and the Hurricane, Britain made a crucial technological leap. She now had two aircraft that were as good as – and in the case of the Spitfire perhaps better than –
anything around. With them they could face the perils ahead with some confidence.

The modernization of the bomber fleet was slower and the results were far less satisfying. The requirements of an effective bomber were more complex and often hard to
reconcile. It was argued that as aircraft speeds increased, the performance gap between fighters and bombers was likely to narrow. Why not aim at building a bomber that could outstrip interceptors
and therefore have no need of on-board guns? Something like this would eventually emerge in the shape of the Mosquito. But in the meantime the thought was too radical. The confidence of the crews
in the machines they flew had to be considered and they demanded some degree of protection, particularly from attack from the rear. The result was a compromise, which produced the twin-engined
bombers of the early years of the war – the Blenheims, Whitleys, Wellingtons and Hampdens, which, while respectable machines, were not adequate for the strategic task they were supposed to
perform.

The RAF’s real work, as conceived from the 1920s onwards, was to launch a bombing offensive which would at least deter attack and possibly – in the minds of dedicated bombing
enthusiasts at least – deal the enemy a ‘knockout blow’. To achieve this they needed big aeroplanes, carrying big payloads and travelling long distances. Four-engined aircraft
were needed and here, in accepting this fact, Britain was ahead of the game. Long before the war began, Britain alone among the belligerents in the European theatre was preparing a super bomber
intended to prove the theory that aerial bombardment could decide wars.

In July 1935 the Air Ministry issued a set of specifications, coded P12/36, seeking an aircraft with a crew of six, a bomb load of not less than 12,000 lbs and a normal
cruising speed of not less than 180 mph at 12,000 feet. This initiative produced the first four-engined RAF monoplane bomber, the Short Stirling. It was followed by a second specification, the
P13/36. This was the genesis for the Halifax and the Avro Manchester, which evolved into the Lancaster – the greatest bomber of the war. Its designer, Roy Chadwick, was the third in the
triumvirate of British aeronautical engineers whose efforts made a huge contribution to victory. Roy, Reginald and Sydney, homely names, now long fallen into disuse, were heroes of the drawing
board and the test bed.

The bigger the aeroplane the more problems there were to resolve and it was not until August 1940 that Stirlings began arriving on squadrons, Halifaxes began flying operations in the spring of
1941, and Lancasters a year later. Even the most urgent development was a lengthy process, and had the work only begun after the outbreak of war the new types might not have emerged in time to have
any effect. As the government scientist Sir Henry Tizard pointed out when asked by Philip Joubert in the spring of 1940 for his opinion on some promising ideas offered by inventors: ‘My dear
fellow! You must realize that any project that is going to have some influence on the course of the war must have been examined, tested and put into effect already.’
¹⁰

The most dazzling example of foresight was the development of radar in which Tizard – himself a former RFC pilot
– played a crucial role. It was he who sought
the advice of Robert Watson-Watt, Superintendent of the Radio Department of the National Physical Laboratory at Teddington. When Watson-Watt suggested that it might be possible to detect aeroplanes
by reflected radio waves, which could be seen and measured on a cathode-ray tube, there was none of the self-interested scepticism that often greets revolutionary innovation. Though other
scientists in America, France and Germany were on the same scent, it was Britain that seized on the possibilities and took the lead, so that by the time the war began the coast was protected by a
chain of stations that allowed squadrons to be controlled with maximum efficiency, multiplying the effective fighter strength and improving the odds against the Luftwaffe.

The growing number of machines had to have men to fly in them. The snobbery that had held back George Unwin was relaxed, allowing more ground staff to take to the air and the number of short
service commissions on offer was boosted. But who would fill the gaps left by the casualties when the fighting began? In another demonstration of imaginative planning, the Director of Training at
the Air Ministry, Air Commodore Arthur Tedder, had conceived the idea of a ‘Citizen Air Force’. This, in August 1936, would become the RAF Volunteer Reserve (RAFVR). Tedder’s idea
was that it should be ‘open . . . to the whole middle class in the widest sense of that term, namely the complete range of the output of the public and secondary schools’. Given its
nature it was felt ‘inappropriate to grade the members on entry as officers
or airmen according to their social class’. Everyone therefore started out as airmen
under training, before being given the rank of sergeant pilot once they had qualified.

The RAFVR cleared away social and economic obstacles to open up the air force to young men from families of moderate means. Advertisements appeared in newspapers and flying magazines, offering
males between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five the opportunity to learn to fly, for free, in their spare time. They would receive £25 a year and after an
ab initio
, fifteen-day
course at a local flying school, attend weekday classroom sessions with training flights at the weekends. The recruitment offices were swamped with volunteers.