I know you got soul: machines with that certain something

by Jeremy Clarkson

  Then there were the problems of starting the Merlin, oil-consumption, ‘float’ just before the plane landed, and ‘Spitfire Knuckle’, which was caused when pilots were pumping the undercarriage down by hand. Worst of all, there was a chronic shortage of headroom. Early Spitfires had a flat canopy. Only later models came with a bubble.

  And then there were issues with altitude. The prototype Spit had reached 37,000 feet, which is the same height you reach on your way to Barbados today. Fine. But this far up, the guns froze. You pulled the trigger and… nothing.

  Worse, as you came down they thawed out so that when you hit the ground even the mildest jolt would release a single round. Worrying for the ground crews.

  Months were spent trying to get heat from the engine into the wings, to stop the Brownings seizing up.

  And then there was the difficulty of actually making a Spitfire. Unlike the Hurricane, it was a monocoque with a stressed skin, which required specialist production techniques. Worse, because it was felt the plane couldn’t be made in a single factory – what if it were to be bombed? – the government approached Lord Nuffield, the car boss, to ask if his Castle Bromwich plant would be available. He agreed but, even though war was imminent, the workforce did not, and responded in the only way the Brummies know how – with a series of industrial disputes.

  Eventually the government became so weary of the problems in Birmingham they took control of the factory from an astonished Nuffield and gave it to Supermarine’s new owners at Vickers. The Spitfire was in business and all for a cost to the taxpayer of just £12,478. Has there ever been a better deal?

  The list of countries queuing up to buy this amazing new plane was astonishing. Every air force in the world wanted a go. Cheekily, even the Japanese sent in an order – for just one. I wonder what they were going to do with it. In fact only one was exported, to France, before the War began.

  It may have been hard to create the Spitfire but the finished product was demonstrably better than anything the Nazis sent our way. In essence, the Spit could climb, turn and fly faster than a Messerschmitt. More importantly, when an Me109 reached its ceiling the Spit had 3,000 feet in hand. And height, in a dogfight, is everything.

  Yes, the Me109 had fuel injection, which meant the engine would work even when the plane was pulling negative g, whereas the Spit’s Merlin used carburettors that ceased to provide fuel if the g-meter started reading a minus figure.

  Sadly, though, the first two planes shot down by Spitfires in the Second World War were Hurricanes.

  Eventually Fighter Command sorted itself out, the radar stations came on stream and the Battle of Britain was underway.

  It was agreed that the Hurricanes should go after bombers, leaving the Spitfires to take care of the Messerschmitt fighter escorts. But having read several accounts of what life was like in a dogfight, I know this was a nonsensical notion.

  You dived down on the German formations, picked a target, fired a very short burst, and then found yourself miles from the action, twisting and turning to make sure no one was on your tail. Occasionally you’d encounter another plane and have another pop at it, but more often you’d lose sight of the battle completely. And then run low on fuel.

  The notion that you could dive into the pack and worry about what sort of plane you should be shooting at is just plain silly. I can’t even do that on a pleasant day’s pheasant shooting. Often we’re told to shoot cocks only, but I find this almost impossible and regularly hit hens as well, along with a selection of owls, buzzards and songbirds. And that’s when I’m standing still. The notion of being able to determine the sex of a bird while running around a field at top speed is laughable.

  Something else that’s laughable is the idea that ‘our young men had to shoot down their young men at the rate of four to one’. In fact by the second week of the Battle of Britain we had more Spits and Hurricanes than we did when the War started. Between July and October in 1940 747 Spitfires were delivered, 361 were destroyed and 352 damaged.

  Yes, there was always a shortage of good pilots, but with plenty of Poles and Canadians flocking to Britain at this time it wasn’t as acute as you may have been led to believe.

  So, on 15 September Germany launched its biggest attack yet. 200 bombers were launched against London. Even though they were protected by fighter escorts, 52 never made it back again. And the number of Spitfires lost? Seven. That night Hitler postponed his plans to invade Britain indefinitely.

  A year later, however, the Luftwaffe took delivery of the Focke-Wulf 190, which was better than the Spitfire in every respect. Had the Germans been equipped with this when the War started we’d have lost; it’s that simple. It was so good in fact that Churchill called an immediate halt to all fighter operations over Northern Europe.

  But the Nazi advantage was short-lived because in 1943 the Spitfire Mark IX was introduced. It had a 37-litre, 2,050-horsepower engine with a two-speed, two-stage supercharger, a five-bladed propeller, two cannons and four machine guns, and it could fly for 850 miles at speeds up to 450 mph. More than 5,000 Mark IXs were made and suddenly the Germans’ FW190 looked like a horse and cart.

  And this was the beauty of Mitchell’s original design. It was almost as though he’d realised that the first incarnation would need to be updated over and over again, and it was. They were used on aircraft carriers, they were used in streamlined form for photo-reconnaissance, they were turned into ground-attack mud movers. One Spitfire even reached a speed of 680 mph. It became the RAF’s Swiss-Army knife.

  The last time the Spit was used in a military operation was 1963. There was trouble in Indonesia, where the locals were still using old propeller-driven Mustangs. So to see how these would stack up against a modern jet fighter, the RAF staged a duel between their new Mach 2 Lightning and an old Spitfire.

  Although the Lightning crew always had the option of lighting the burners and getting the hell out of Dodge, it was discovered that in a turning dogfight the Spit would get some rounds into its tormentor.

  So, the Spitfire was more than just a good plane. It started out as a great plane and, having seen off the Nazis in 1940, became better and better and better.

  However, those with plenty of time on their hands have found that statistically it was no better in action than the Hurricane. Both had an equal chance of victory.

  Perhaps the Hurricane was a great plane too. From a pilot’s point of view it was certainly easier to fly and it was a better gun platform. From a government’s point of view it was cheaper to buy than the £6,000 Spitfire and easier to mend. But from the point of view of those on the ground, the poor souls on the receiving end of all those German bombs, it was the Spitfire that won their hearts.

  Technically, the Hurricane might have been able to win the Battle of Britain on its own. But for keeping up the spirits of the people on the ground while running rings round anything the Third Reich could throw at it? That was the job of the Spitfire, a symbol of British brilliance, a symbol of hope.

  The fact is simple. The Spitfire looked good. It was every bit as dashing as the young men who flew it, and in flight it was as graceful as any bird. Its progress through the sky seemed effortless, as though it was simply riding the breeze and its Merlin engine was only there to provide a suitable soundtrack.

  You had Mr Churchill on the radio explaining that we’d never surrender, and above you had the Spitfire, and you couldn’t help thinking: Yes, we can win this thing.

  Possibly, just possibly, the Spitfire is the greatest machine ever made.

  Picture Credits

  Inset One

  Page 1: (top) John M Dibbs/The Plane Picture Company; (bottom) Buzz Pictures/Corbis Sygma. Page 2: (top) Courtesy of Rolls- Royce Motor Cars; (bottom) Alamy Page 3: Alamy. Page 4: Kobal Collection/Lucas Film/Twentieth Century Fox. Page 5: (top) Kobal Collection/Lucas Film/Twentieth Century Fox; (bottom) Caught on the Surface by Richard Oliver, courtesy of the Military Gallery. Pages 6–7: aviation-images.com. Page 8: (top) Top
foto; (bottom) National Maritime Museum. Page 9: Getty Image/Hulton archive. Page 10: (top) Martin Bond/Science Photo Library; (bottom) John M Dibbs/The Plane Picture Company. Page 11: (top) © Daniel Werner; (bottom) © Ian Woodrow. Page 12: (top) Novosti (London); (bottom) Courtsey of California Newsreel. Page 13: Bettman/Corbis. Pages 14–15: Bettman/Corbis. Page 16: (top) Milepost 92; (bottom) NMM/Science and Society Picture Library.

  Inset Two

  Page 1: US Air Force. Page 2: US Navy. Page 3: (top) Reuters/Corbis; (bottom) US Navy Photo via Navsource. Page 4: Alamy. Page 5: Kindly supplied by Alfa Romeo. Page 6: NASA Dryden flight research centre. Page 7: (top) © Crown Copyright/MOD. Reproduced with the permission of the Controller of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office; (middle) TRH Pictures; (bottom) Mirrorpix. Pages 8–9: NASA. Page 10: (top) NASA; (bottom) NASA Kennedy Space Center. Page 11: (top) Bettman Corbis; (bottom) © Graham Endeacott (www.gt40.org.uk). Pages 12–13: TRH Pictures. Pages 14–15: John M Dibbs/The Plane Picture Company. Page 16: (top) United Artists/The Kobal Collection; (bottom) John M Dibbs/The Plane Picture Company.

  It was a scientist with NASA who summed up Concorde better than anyone I’ve ever met.‘Putting a man on the moon was easy,’ he said,‘compared to getting Concorde to work.’

  25 July 2000: Air France Concorde AF4590 leaves the runway in flames.She crashed two minutes later, killing 113 people.

  I could not feel the road passing by through vibrations in the wheel and could not hear the Rolls-Royce’s engine, big and V12-ish though it was. I have had long soaks in the bath that were more stressful.

  The Riva is fun, it’s fast, it’s exquisitely made and when you’ve finished looning around and you’re back on dry land you can look back and think to yourself, ‘That is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.’

  The leatherwork in white and turquoise seems to go so perfectly with the deeply polished mahogany hull, and the whole thing is finished off with a tail that tapers and flares just so.Now, that the most beautiful man-made creation should comefrom Italy is no surprise.There’s a passion for aesthetics in Italy that you simply don’t find anywhere else.

  The Millennium Falcon was forever going wrong.Time and again Han and his rebel cohorts would have to bang the dashboard with their fists to get some wayward system working. And this helped give the ship a flawed, almost human quality.This is something I look for in all machines.

  The Falcon was styled to resemble a burger. And the unusual, protruding control pod was modelled on an olive that George Lucas saw peeping out of the bun.

  The Sunderland became the most formidable anti-submarine weapon in the country’s arsenal. In the five years of hostilities Sunderlands killed 28 U-boats and helped to destroy another seven.

  The Princess had been taken out merely to see how she handled while taxiing but test pilot Geoffrey Tyson gave all ten engines some beans and up she went. Much later, when asked why he’d done this, he said,‘Well, she simply wanted to fly, so I let her.’

  It was the most amazing ocean liner of all.The SS Great Britain wasn’t the biggest or the fastest, and it certainly wasn’t the most luxurious, but it was Genesis. A ship 50 years ahead of its time.

  The Great Britain limped into the Falkland Islands, where she was turned into a floating wool and coal bunker until she became so riddled with holes that they took her round to Sparrow Cove and left her to die.

  The Mauretania set a transatlantic record in 1902 and it wasn’t beaten for another 22 years.TheMauretaniawas not only fast and vast, but also beautiful. Imagine the Palace of Versailles at sea, then double the size and double the luxury and you’re still not halfway there.

  What on earth must people have thought when Arthur was unveiled? This huge white saucer, supported on a latticework of girders, tracking an invisible object in the sky so we in Britain could see what was going on in America . . . right now. He must have seemed like science fiction.

  The Jumbo has become the modern-day yardstick in the lexicon of superlatives. Like football pitches, and Nelson’s Column and Wales, it is now an established unit of measurement.

  The newer Boeing 777 cruises at 565 mph.The 747 pictured above is a full 20 mph faster and, over 11,000 miles, that makes a big difference to your deep-vein thrombosis.

  I was horrified by the exchange between the pilots who hadn’t heard which runway they were supposed to land on.‘Oh, just follow the bloke in front,’ said the captain to his young apprentice in the right-hand seat.Then we hit a flock of birds. ‘Got ’em,’ said the captain, but I hardly registered because I simply couldn’t believe how much effort the co-pilot was having to make. He was bathed in sweat as he manhandled the big jet out of that sticky, sultry sky.

  Mikhail Kalashnikov set about designing something that could rival the Germans’ MP44.A hand-held sub-machine gun. Something called the AK47.

  Think of any conflict since 1947 and it’s a fairly safe bet that at least one of the sides has been using AK47s.The warlords in Mogadishu, the Vietcong in Vietnam, the Republican Guard in Iraq.This half-timbered gun has been a 50-year thorn in Uncle Sam’s side.

  It was suggested that the Empire State Building could be used as a mooring tower. But after the Hindenburg mysteriously exploded when coming in to land in America passengers were understandably wary.

  The Graf Zeppelin was the mother of all airships, 787 feet long and 115 feet high. Imagine Canary Wharf, on its side, floating over your head.

  The Flying Scotsman is exquisite to behold, partly because he’s so nicely balanced and partly because he seems to shout,‘I AM VERY POWERFUL.’

  The Flying Scotsman set a record by doing 392.7 miles from King’s Cross to Edinburgh. Non-stop. In a whisker over eight hours.The press went mad. The public fainted.The Flying Scotsman had started to make a name for itself.

  The B-52 was conceived with only one purpose in mind. To drop atom bombs on men, women and children. So by rights we should look at it with the same hatred that we look at the swastika.

  While training for an air display, the pilot of this B-52 exceeded the bomber’s limits. A split second later the whole crew was dead.

  It’s a ship, first and foremost. But it’s also a nuclear power station. And it’s an airport. And it’s an instrument of war.And above all this, it’s a city with shops, cinemas, hairdressers, banks, hospitals, its own television station, its own daily newspaper and 5,000 inhabitants.Think about that.Would they put a nuclear reactor in the middle of a city?

  Here’s what I knew was going to happen.We’d land, fail to stop, fall off the front and then the huge ship would run over our plane, turning it over and over until it, me and everyone else on board was minced by one of the three nuclear-powered, five-bladed propellers, each of which is 21 feet in diameter.

  A good modern warship can thunder along at 28 or 29 knots. But a Nimitz Class carrier will hammer along at 33. It is, according to one admiral, the racing car of the seas.

  The best thing about the Hoover Dam is the way it looks.With it’s art deco intake towers and that preposterous slope, which seems to accentuate the height when you stand on the top, it’s every bit as beautiful as the canyon in which it sits.And that, believe me, is saying something.

  It’s as European and as perfect as a girl in a little black dress, at a pavement café, sipping an espresso coffee.You have an Alfa 166.You have style.

  As a place to be, the 166 has no equal. It’s a combination, really, of the hand-stitched upholstery and the exquisite choice of colours. Black carpets. Tan seats.Why does no one else do that?

  The Blackbird was almost completely unshootdownable. I spoke once to one of its pilots, who said that if, by some miracle, he was detected in enemy air space, he still had absolutely nothing to fear. ‘We’d see the MiGs coming up to get us, but when they hit 60,000 feet we’d have gone and they would fall out of the sky.’

  On full throttle, two giant blue plumes are left in the Blackbird’s wake, each framing a series of perfect blue balls of equally perfect energy. You
watch it and you think,‘God almighty.How did man ever create a sight like that?’

  Were there to be a war tomorrow, a big one against a properly tooled-up country, I wouldn’t hesitate for a second. I’d buy myself a nice white polo-neck jumper, get on the first train to Scotland and join the submarine service.

  The job of the dedicated missile boats is to pootle about, like mice in carpet slippers, with their ballisticmissiles, waiting for the order to destroy an entire continent.

  When the Argentine light-cruiser Belgrano was hit by two torpedoes from the snout of HMS Conqueror,a British hunter-killer, the enemy escort ships immediately gave chase. They were out of ideas after just five miles.The Royal Navy vessel had approached unseen, fired unseen and simply disappeared. After the conflict was over Conqueror sailed into Scottish waters flying the Jolly Roger.