Spitfire

by John Nichol

  The prototype Spitfire, serial number K5054, had employed flush riveting to create a smooth, aerodynamic surface. Cheaper dome-headed rivets would be required for mass production. Supermarine glued hundreds of split peas to the flush rivets in various key locations and then removed them progressively, in order to identify the most effective balance of cost and performance.

  The Spitfire’s pilots quickly discovered that its slender wings produced turns so tight that the resulting G-force induced blackouts. The classic elliptical wings also allowed for an excellent climb rate and lower stall speed. More importantly, and unlike the Me109, the elliptical wings also produced an alarming wobble if a turn was about to lead to a stall, giving the pilot a chance to pull out. Being able to out-turn an opponent in a dogfight and pre-warning of a stall could prove decisive in the fast-evolving world of aerial combat.

  New exhaust pipes boosted the top speed to 362mph. Engine heat was diverted to the wings to prevent the eight machine guns freezing at high altitude.

  The first Spitfire Mark I was soon ready to take to the sky. Sadly, it would not be witnessed by its creator. R. J. Mitchell finally succumbed to cancer aged forty-two in June 1937. ‘His work,’ wrote one admirer ‘is his memorial.’11

  Seeing the Spitfire in the skies gave some succour to a British public worried by an increasingly bellicose Germany. Jimmy Taylor, a schoolboy at Eton, the renowned English public school, was on manoeuvres with the Officer Training Corps when one streaked low over Aldershot’s bracken. It was a wonderful moment for the fifteen-year-old aeroplane enthusiast who always had a camera to hand. The sight encouraged his belief that he might one day be alone with his thoughts in a flying machine that responded instantly to his every wish.

  His father, the Reverend Harold Taylor, had administered to the dying and led the burial service far too often as a chaplain in the First World War. Such conflict, he concluded, was obscene. So he had taken his son to Portsmouth a few years earlier to see first-hand what life was like aboard a submarine.

  The exercise worked. Much to his delight, when young Jimmy clambered out of the cramped, oily and nausea-inducing vessel, he had vowed never to join the navy.

  He would join the RAF instead.12

  * * *

  Jimmy Taylor had seen just a single Spitfire. Delivery dates for the batch of 310 were badly adrift. A desire to rapidly rearm was one thing; the practicalities were altogether different. British industry simply wasn’t equipped to deal with the demands that it now faced. Large-scale, specialised expansion with skilled labour could not happen overnight. Supermarine had to subcontract the work, which led to further delays. Delivery of its wings was held up for months. Manufacturing fell at least six months behind schedule.13

  The Southampton plant managed to roll out its first production Spitfire in May 1938. At the same time Me109s were coming off the Bavaria assembly lines in their hundreds and the Luftwaffe had 20,000 airmen with operational experience from the Spanish Civil War. In just five years it had become the best-equipped, most technologically advanced and battle-hardened air force in the world.

  Many hoped that it would not be put to further use. Foremost among them was Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who flew to Munich in September that year to head off Hitler’s threat to seize the Sudetenland. A chunk of Czechoslovakia was the price for appeasement. Chamberlain returned to Heston airport, waving his piece of paper and declaring ‘peace for our time’. Then his car got stuck in the mud.

  Jimmy Taylor was on hand with his Eton pals to help push him out of the quagmire.14 He had survived the bullying and beatings at Eton by closeting himself in his study-bedroom and building an armada of 1:72 scale models. Hawker Furies, Wellingtons and a Spitfire were carefully constructed and painted. He also lost himself in the tales of dashing pilots like Biggles in his Sopwith Camel.

  Reverend Taylor had first taken his family on a tour of Nazi Germany, along the fast and impressive autobahnen, in their Ford V-8 in 1935. Then, the only sign of military activity on that first trip had been a labour battalion carrying polished spades.

  Three years later, during the Taylors’ most recent visit, the shadows had lengthened, though Jimmy had found some kindness among the swastikas and massed ranks of Stormtroopers. One helped him find a space to photograph Hungary’s Admiral Horthy driving through Berlin to meet Hitler in August 1938. Jimmy retained a ‘warm spot for that soldier, whatever his future role . . .’

  While Goering’s boasts of Luftwaffe supremacy were widely reported, Vickers remained an old-fashioned institution that saw publicity as vulgar and undesirable. So when Jeffrey Quill flew the Spitfire from London to Paris in a record-breaking forty-two minutes and thirty seconds in November 1938, virtually nothing appeared in the press.15

  1939

  While Messerschmitt employees were hard at work in Regensburg, the gentlemen of 601 Squadron were not far away, enjoying fresh snow in the Bavarian mountains. With poor weather in January and February and a scarcity of Spitfires or Hurricanes to practise in, downhill skiing seemed a good alternative.16

  Germany might have been considered a curious choice of venue in early 1939. The remilitarised Rhineland was churning out arms, the Condor Legion had subdued the Spanish Republicans, Czechoslovakia had been eviscerated and Hitler was making noises about Poland. However, Chamberlain’s ‘peace’ still held.

  Although the snow was glorious, the edge of their enjoyment was taken off somewhat when they skied alongside a detachment of German alpine troops. There was something in their swagger that suggested both confidence and menace.

  Something was afoot.

  * * *

  The Germans could build three Me109s in the time it took to construct one Spitfire. With its revolutionary wings and complex engineering, the British fighter was a tricky machine to assemble.

  Under the muddled leadership of motoring magnate Lord Nuffield, the Castle Bromwich factory set up in 1936 to turn out 100 Spitfires a month was experiencing major delays. The First World War plant in Eastleigh, near Southampton, Hampshire, had to step up to the plate. But, as the American millionaire flier Charles Lindbergh, famous for his solo non-stop transatlantic flight in 1927, could not fail to notice on a visit in 1939, it lacked the chromium-plated modernity of Germany’s Regensburg production line.17

  Lindbergh had been invited to Europe by Goering for a red-carpet tour of the ultra-modern Messerschmitt factories, where 2,000 fighters had already been assembled. He was invited to Supermarine’s Eastleigh works afterwards. As the aviator’s eye roved over the old wooden roof trusses and factory floor, Jeffrey Quill detected only a passing interest in the Spitfire. ‘I was suddenly aware of a burning anger and resentment which I hope I managed to disguise. As he taxied out I felt like shouting after him in the American idiom, “OK, wise guy, just you wait.” ’

  Sadly, it was the RAF that would have to wait. Things at Eastleigh were not about to improve, and progress at the Castle Bromwich factory verged on the non-existent. Then, in June 1939, a government memorandum appeared. It suggested that on completion of the order for 310 Spitfires, Eastleigh should concentrate on building Beaufighters, the heavily armed, twin-engine night-fighter.18

  There were no plans for continuing with the Spitfire beyond the Mark I.

  * * *

  Ken French’s love of trout fishing should have kept him casting into the lakes and rivers that flowed through the green hills of West Cork for the rest of his life. But a well-off Protestant family was always going to be a target in post-independence Ireland. His uncle had been taken hostage by the IRA and his father only just avoided summary execution.

  In the end, it was the economy that lured Ken French abroad, as it did for thousands of his compatriots. For an educated young man, England offered opportunity. It was his brother’s suggestion that the number of pretty girls there were worth more than a boatload of trout that finally made up his mind. In July 1939, aged eighteen, he landed the princely sum of £83 a year as a clerk for North
British and Mercantile Insurance in London.19

  He arrived in Southend in time for the carnival. Everyone was happy and carefree and his brother’s promise was not unfounded. Ken’s love of dogs, and slight limp – from a knee injury sustained at Portora Royal School, which had counted Oscar Wilde and Samuel Beckett among its past pupils – provided frequent openings for conversation that he rarely passed up.

  * * *

  Hugh Dundas joined the part-time pilots of the Auxiliary Air Force too late for the Bavarian alpine jaunt. But the 6ft 4in redhead was made of the right stuff. He wanted the kind of excitement that wasn’t on offer in a solicitor’s chambers. For reasons never given, he failed his medical three times, despite being at peak fitness, so found a rugby-playing Irish doctor to sign him off, fit for duty.20

  By June 1939 Dundas was a ‘Pupil Pilot’ flying Avro Tutor biplanes with 616 Squadron. The thrill of flight swept aside everything else going on in the world. Nicknamed ‘Cocky’ by one of the veterans who thought he resembled a Rhode Island Red rooster, he was a quietly popular source of advice. But during annual camp among the orchards of east Kent, he also showed an eighteen-year-old’s eagerness for the new and the magical.

  He learned the joy of taking off into the dawn sky, of crossing the Channel when the air was crisp, of glimpsing the luxurious Pullman coaches that waited at Calais and Boulogne to transport travellers to far-off places.

  Afternoons were reserved either for drinking gin in the mess tent or dozing in the sunshine, or both. There was little to trouble them beyond their imminent inspection by Air Vice-Marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory, brother of George Mallory, the Everest mountaineer who died in 1924.

  Formalities over, Leigh-Mallory took a snifter of gin and accepted the popular mess-game challenge to shimmy up one marquee pole, through the ventilation hole, along the spine then back down the other. Despite some middle-age ‘thickening’, Leigh-Mallory achieved the first phase of the mission, but became stuck when he attempted the descent. A climber was sent up to pull No.12 Fighter Group’s commander through the hole. He popped out like a champagne cork and descended the last 10ft in freefall.

  Restored with a stiff whisky, he promptly left.

  Two days later, the squadron was enjoying its postprandial nap when the mess tent received news that a Nazi–Soviet Pact had been signed.

  ‘Well that’s fucked it,’ one pilot, a former Guards officer, said. ‘That’s the start of the fucking war.’

  In less colourful language, Jimmy Taylor’s father told his family to pack their bags in readiness to flee France. The family were holidaying in the Pyrenees as Hitler’s forces massed on the Polish border. The Reverend’s hopes and prayers that his three boys would avoid war had proved forlorn.21

  The Taylors were forced to leave the blue skies and tranquillity of the mountains when their hotel shut down. They headed north to the nearest port for passage to England, threading through mobilised French reservists. When they got to St Malo it was crammed with their fellow countrymen fighting to return home.

  They boarded the ferry to Portsmouth on the morning of 1 September, after a final sightseeing trip to celebrate the ‘splendid defiance’ of Mont St Michel, as the Luftwaffe bombed the Polish town of Wieluń, killing 1,200 civilians.

  * * *

  Flames lit the night sky to the north of their Kent home the night Brian Bird’s half-brother was born in 1936. Brian rushed downstairs to tell his stepfather the news that the Crystal Palace, the glory of Victorian Britain, was burning down after an accident.22

  Three years later, on Sunday, 3 September 1939, fifteen-year-old Brian prepared to bring him an even more momentous bulletin. He crouched by the wireless, waiting for the Prime Minister’s 11am announcement. His stepfather had gone to church, having left him with strict instructions to be kept informed.

  ‘This is London . . .’

  It was 11.15.

  Brian felt the tension crackle in the air as Chamberlain began speaking. ‘It is therefore with regret that I have to tell you we are at war with Germany . . .’

  His address had barely ended when Brian was pedalling hard through the deserted streets of Sittingbourne.

  Somewhat self-consciously, he marched up the aisle of St Paul’s Church and delivered the note his mother had written just as his stepfather began the sermon.

  Air-raid sirens wailed as he cycled home. Brian stopped and raised his eyes to the sky with a deep sense of foreboding. Even at the tender age of fifteen, the young Brian Bird was shaken by the sound. He contemplated what the future might hold for both him, and his country. He could never have imagined.

  * * *

  The shows still went on in London’s West End. Ann Todd was treading the boards on her way to becoming a Hollywood star, winning praise for her poignant performance in The Man in Half Moon Street, the story of a man who retains his youth and cannot die.23 The morning’s sirens had disturbed the city’s Sunday peace. She counted ten people dotted about the stalls. They were ushered to the front and the show began with blackout curtains in place. The performance was completed in half its usual running time, and audience and actors gratefully left the building.

  Ann Todd took a taxi and drove through the night to Shropshire to be reunited with her small son David from her first marriage and her budding fighter pilot boyfriend, soon to be husband, Nigel Tangye. They made an intriguing couple. Todd was a diminutive and beautiful blonde, nicknamed ‘the Pocket Garbo’. Tangye was a tall, good-looking Cornishman with a colourful history. He had combined journalism with clandestine work for MI5 during the Spanish Civil War, and had joined the Auxiliary Air Force a few months earlier. He had just been called up by the RAF.

  Ann Todd experienced the same moment of introspection that couples all around the country were feeling: uncertainty and fear.

  ‘During that long drive I realised how important it is to belong to someone who cares, when one is in danger and to a woman, how necessary it is to have a man around. It was interesting when the raids were on and there was fear for survival. Couples who weren’t getting on or even disliked each other rushed into each other’s arms and clung together rather than be alone.’

  * * *

  The Vickers Supermarine workforce in Eastleigh looked at each other in resignation and dismay. They had known for some time that their precious fighter would be tested in combat, and were working their hardest to assemble as many as they could. But resources and capacity were still limited. As the bungling at Castle Bromwich continued, all Eastleigh could manage in September 1939 was thirty-three Spitfires.24 The Messerschmitt factory built more than 120 Me109s. At the outbreak of war little over 300 Spitfires had been built, with less than a dozen squadrons operational.

  They did not have to wait long for the first Spitfire action. Sadly, it was an engagement all concerned wanted to forget. At 6.15am on 6 September, Spitfires from 74 Squadron were scrambled by ground control to vector on an enemy presence over the River Medway in Kent. Two aircraft were shot down. But they were Hurricanes, not Messerschmitts.

  The scientists had to come up with a solution fast to prevent further ‘friendly fire’ tragedies: the first ‘Identification Friend or Foe’ system that could spot friendly aircraft was introduced. A transponder that was fitted onto RAF aircraft amplified and returned the incoming radar signal. It gave a distorted ‘blip’ on the radar operator’s screen, which made it easily identifiable as non-hostile on the ground controller’s screen.

  German bomber crews were not new to combat. Nor were they particularly nervous. Most had seen action in Spain or Poland. They had confidence in themselves and their aircraft.

  The Junkers 88 crews had more right to be confident than most. Their Schnellbomber – fast bomber – was designed to outrun fighters. Twin Jumo engines could power it to 320mph, roughly the same speed as a Hurricane. They had been briefed about the Spitfire. They knew it was dangerous and fast, that it could top 350mph, possibly 364mph. But they also knew its eighty-five-gallon fue
l tank limited its range to 425 miles.

  Thus when Leutnant Horst von Riesen was ordered to bomb the Royal Navy at their Scottish base in the Firth of Forth on 16 October 1939, he was content.25 There was enough speed in the V12 Jumos to get them out of trouble, and they had a 1,400-mile range.

  After the two-hour trip across the North Sea he watched with satisfaction as his boss, Hauptmann Helmut Pohle, straddled the cruiser HMS Southampton with 3,000lb of bombs.

  Moments later his face fell. Pohle’s aircraft ditched into the chilly Firth of Forth, riddled with bullets.

  Seconds later von Riesen saw the sleek outline of a Spitfire for the first time, over his right shoulder. He acted swiftly and instinctively. The procedure was to drop to 50ft above the water, protecting their vulnerable underbelly from enemy fire.

  As von Riesen streaked across the wave tops, raindrops peppered the surface. Except there was no rain.

  The clatter of metal on metal a split second later confirmed his fears.

  Then came the unmistakable churn and screech of mechanical failure. The starboard engine cut out. Von Riesen shut it down, reducing the fire risk, and held the Ju88 steady. There was little else he could do. He risked another glance over his shoulder. Thank God. The Spitfires had broken off.

  Some 375 miles of open sea separated them from Germany, and they were limping along at barely 100mph.

  He consulted the three other crew members. ‘Turn back and ditch in the Firth of Forth or carry on?’

  ‘No, no, never,’ one rasped over the intercom. ‘If we go back, the Spitfires will certainly get us.’

  He was right. Better take our chances swimming in the North Sea rather than face the ferocious fighters again.

  Von Riesen kept the Ju88 aloft for the next four hours, until the seaside lights of Westerland, lying off the Danish peninsula, twinkled on the horizon. They were home.

  * * *

  German bomber crews were not going to be put off by a few losses. And they were out to prove a point to the RAF: We’re not scared, and we’re coming for you.