The Secret Life of Fighter Command
Page 6
She remembers vividly how strange the atmosphere was, in 1938, to a young girl who paid very little attention to politics. ‘In my Swiss school, there were girls from all over the world. I had a German friend at the school called Hannah – she was Jewish, not that that meant anything to me in those days because the school was completely non-religious – and she wanted me to go to spend Easter holidays with her in Frankfurt. I was allowed to go, which was very interesting because Hannah’s parents, one or other of them, was with us at all times. If we went to play tennis, if we went to the cinema, we always had an adult with us. It was only much, much later on, after the war had broken out and I started to learn about what really went on there, that I realised that there was a ruling, if you like, that as long as there was a foreign person with the Jew, they wouldn’t be touched. It was a safeguard for them. So they needed to make sure that Hannah was never on her own without me there.
‘Of course I didn’t know that,’ adds Mrs Clark. ‘Anyway, I decided that it would be nice to learn German. I persuaded my mother to let me leave the Swiss school and go to Germany as a paying guest and I was billeted with a professor who was supposed to teach me German for a year. I had a wonderful time in Munich! Now that was the year before the war. And all that time I was there, I must have been blindfolded.’
Indeed, the truth of what was happening beneath the placid middle-class surface of life chills Mrs Clark as she thinks back on it; certainly, when she joined Fighter Command later, she was able to piece together exactly what a nightmare regime the British were fighting.
In the middle of 1938, the uneasy period of Anschluss and secession, of the appropriation of Austria and the Sudetenland by Germany, Britain’s Minister for the Co-ordination of Defence, Sir Thomas Inskip (a figure not held in universally high regard in the services) outlined the strategy for the days to come. The priority was that the mother country should be protected above all else. ‘It would seem in accordance with strategic principle,’ he said, ‘that the decisive place and the decisive time for the concentration of our air forces would be somewhere over our own territory at the outset of a war.’ Fighter planes were the thing; fighter pilots would be at the forefront of the coming conflict.
But were there enough aeroplanes for the job? In 1930s peacetime, air production in Britain was a fraught and uneven business (unlike in the sleek and modern early days of Nazi Germany, where the government was able simply to commandeer the successful aviation company Lufthansa). In Britain, with so many mixed and confusing signals about military intentions being beamed out from Whitehall, it was a matter of some anxiety for the RAF hierarchy that there would be any suitable planes with which to beat off the enemy.
Chapter Four
The Lines in the Heavens
It seems surprising that it was as late as the mid-1930s that the wooden aeroplane finally evolved into something approaching its modern form. Visionary engineers at Vickers Supermarine and Rolls-Royce were combining new metal structures that used lighter alloys with new engines. One particular aircraft designer, who had spent many years specialising in flying boats, had been giving particular thought to the future of fighters. His creation is now immortal, and symbolises the triumph of Fighter Command.
Reg Mitchell – known as RJ – born in Stoke on Trent in 1895, had been mesmerised by aeroplanes since news of the first Wright Brothers flights took wing around the world. As a young boy, he would make functioning toy aeroplanes with any bits of wood, bamboo and fabric he could find; his childhood home was filled with his imaginary and futuristic designs, and the prototypes were flown in the family’s garden. Mitchell’s precocious flair for engineering, plus his increasing passion for aeronautics, took him after his apprenticeship in the Potteries to the Supermarine plane factory just outside Southampton, in Hampshire. He joined at the tail end of the First World War, devoting the interwar years to innovative new civilian passenger planes that would win prizes.
Just as the community of pilots was genuinely international, the same went for aeronautical designers; as a result, intelligence was unusually keen. By the early 1930s, designers in Britain had a shrewd idea of what was happening among their German counterparts. This was certainly the case with R.J. Mitchell.
And their disquiet spread upwards; Sir Hugh Dowding (who at the time held the title of Air Member for Research and Development) and Supermarine’s Sir Robert MacLean were anxious that Britain should have a new type of day and night fighter. It must have a ‘low landing speed and short landing run’, a speed of 402 kilometres per hour (250 miles per hour), a steep rate of climb, sharp manoeuvrability and a proper all-round view.
Mitchell, a fair-haired man with pale blue eyes and a seemingly permanent expression of anvil-like determination, went to his drawing board in 1932; the technical demands and complexities of the new beast were all-absorbing and it was only in 1934 that a prototype was ready to be tested. The new plane, streamlined and modern, still had an open cockpit, wooden propeller and fixed undercarriage. The tests were extremely disappointing. It attained only 370 kilometres per hour (230 miles per hour) and there were problems with cooling the powerful Rolls-Royce engine. Mitchell himself was extremely dissatisfied; nonetheless, the plane was given a name, and the name stuck. It has been suggested that ‘Spitfire’ was the inspiration of Sir Robert MacLean; possibly it was a reference to the way that the plane’s machine guns spat flames. But the term was also, at that time, a slang term for a particularly hot-willed woman. Scarlett O’Hara, heroine of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, would have been described as a spitfire.
In 1936, a prototype Spitfire took to the skies for the very first time, piloted from Eastleigh airfield in Hampshire. It was obviously a closely guarded secret, yet the local press could not help noticing the marvel scorching through the heavens above and no one was particularly minded to muzzle journalists. ‘Keen observers in and around Southampton have recently been interested in the high-speed performances of a remarkable plane which has made occasional flights from Eastleigh Airport …’ disclosed the Southampton Echo, ‘here is a plane out of the ordinary.’
The first Spitfire, on its test flight, was still unpainted and as Mitchell’s son reports, the cowling had a kind of yellow-green factory finish colour to it. The first test pilot was Captain J. Summers, known as ‘Mutt’. He was thrilled with the plane, commenting on its ‘remarkably good’ handling, the ‘powerful and light to operate’ ailerons. The cockpit, he concluded, was ‘very comfortable and all controls accessible and very well laid out’.1 There were some critical notes; he had difficulties with the clear canopy over the cockpit, finding it almost impossible to open at high speed (which would make an emergency bail-out especially fraught); there were also concerns about giving the brakes a new air reservoir.
But this test was not quite a seal of official approval; there was another RAF test to come, at Martlesham in Suffolk. The plane was taken up and put through all sorts of different manoeuvres, gaining the instant thumbs-up. The pilot this time was Humphrey Edwardes-Jones – later an air marshal and a KCB. Later he recalled: ‘I flew the aircraft for about twenty minutes and found it delightful to handle with no problems in normal flight. I was very much aware of the unusual audience the flight had attracted and was therefore determined to make no mistakes in my approach and landing.’2 However, he was aware on approach of the plane’s nose coming up slightly; moreover, he quite forgot to lower the undercarriage – remembering just in time, climbing, and then going in for another landing. On the basis of this short flight, the ultimate decision lay with Edwardes-Jones. The Air Ministry asked him if the Spitfire would be suitable for a new generation of novice pilots. He took a deep breath and said yes – with the proviso that they were given very strict instructions about the undercarriage.
With a speed quite remarkable for the normally sclerotic Whitehall, an initial order was placed with Supermarine for 310 Spitfires.
Four years quite literally on a drawing board; and now Mitchell�
��s vision was being realised. All this came at a time when – unbeknown to many of his colleagues – Mitchell was suffering terribly with rectal cancer. He very rarely said a word to colleagues about his illness; nor could you now guess from photographs what he was going through. Mitchell’s obsession with aviation was one of the things that sustained him; he worked intensively, but also with love.
‘There was in fact no mystique about Mitchell’s design,’ wrote C.F. Andrews. ‘It was a straightforward merger of all the technical knowledge of the time into one composite piece of machinery … Everything came right at the psychological moment – a rare event in aircraft and engine design.’3
In fact, Mitchell’s intensely driven nature was a key element; his wife gave a beautiful description of how enraptured he was with his work. ‘He’d be talking to you one moment and the next minute, he’d be miles away, and you knew he had thought up something new,’ she said. ‘He loved snooker but even in the middle of a game, he would suddenly put down his cue and out would come an old envelope or a scrap of paper and as he began to draw, he would give me a rapid explanation of the diagrams he was making.’4
Mitchell never lived to see his creation carrying out the work that would make it immortal. When he died in June 1937, tributes flowed from all corners of the aviation industry, as well as from the Air Ministry and from pilots too.
And his work went on. With a great deal more draughtsmanship and testing, the refined Spitfire formally entered RAF service in 1938. What made the Spitfire stand out at first was its speed; designed as a means of intercepting enemy bombers, the aircraft had to be supple in its manoeuvres. Mitchell had specially designed a thinner elliptical wing for this purpose.
It is a single-seater aircraft; and when you look at one at close quarters (surviving Spitfires are exhibited in museums across the world), it strikes you just how tight and small that seating space is, and how petite and bijou the entire craft is. So much so that while you can imagine soaring through the firmament at speed, you also understand how thin is the skin – a shell or ‘monocoque’ of sheet aluminium – that protects you from bullets, or from the explosion that could rip you and the aircraft apart. The Spitfire is undeniably beautiful, an ageless work of aesthetic skill. But you gaze on it and think that there is also something toy-like about it; something brave yet frail and vulnerable. The interior of the cockpit is so thin and cramped that you wonder how it was possible to get the thing airborne, let alone loose volleys of machine-gun fire from it.
The Spitfire could reach speeds of 560 kilometres per hour (350 miles per hour); and it could climb to 4,572 metres (15,000 feet) in six minutes (the eyeball-pressing G-force was terrific). Still so little was understood about the potential and indeed the hazards of aviation. One minister in the 1930s, for instance, was convinced that it would never be possible for any pilot to dive-bomb; the effects of gravity on the body would be so severe that he would black out or even die before he even got close to his target.
Yet it is difficult to find any instances of a fighter pilot who did not immediately fall in swooning love with the Supermarine Spitfire. For Adolph ‘Sailor’ Malan, a notoriously tough South African Royal Flying Corps veteran, the Spitfire was only superficially an efficient killing machine; much more, he said, it was ‘a perfect lady with trim sweet lines’. Pilot M.A. Liskutin said more straightforwardly that it was ‘love at first sight’. At North Weald, Hurricane pilot Peter Townsend observed his Spitfire colleague Bob Tuck fall head over heels: this was a very serious romance. ‘So enchanted was he with the Spitfire,’ wrote Townsend, ‘that he believed in time it affected his character, maturing him and giving him an inner balance.’5 Elsewhere, young pilot Geoffrey Wellum – who likened his maiden voyage to dealing with a racehorse or a kangaroo – gave the game away with the more Freudian images he used. He was almost put into a trance by the plane; not just by the beautiful curve of its wings, but also by the way, on his first flight, the plane seemed to be leading him, guiding him through the clouds and the skies; a young man being seduced:
Elation! We sweep effortlessly about the sky, upwards between two towering masses of cumulus cloud and through a hole like the mouth of a cave, beyond which lies a valley leading into clear sky. We climb up to the very tops of the clouds which stretch away … the very shape of the Spitfire wing is a thing of grace and form … Curved leading and trailing edges, not a straight line anywhere. It’s beautiful.6
The French pilot Pierre Clostermann went a little further with his appreciation of the craft. ‘How beautiful the machine seemed to me, and how alive! A masterpiece of harmony of power, even as I saw her now, motionless. Softly, as one might caress a woman’s cheeks, I ran my hand over the aluminium of her wings, cold and smooth like a mirror, the wings which had borne me.’7
The most amusing para-erotic reaction, however, came from Lord Balfour of Inchyre, who was wartime Under-Secretary of State for Air. ‘I know I fell in love with her the moment I was introduced that summer day in 1938,’ he wrote. ‘I was captivated by her sheer beauty; she was slimly built with a beautifully proportioned body and graceful curves just where they should be … Mind you,’ he added with a jocular flourish, ‘some of her admirers warned me that she was what my mother called a fast girl, and advised that no liberties should be taken with her until you got better acquainted.’8
In the years to come, the mesmerism would spread beyond pilots and Air Ministry officials. The Spitfire was soon to acquire a devoted following among the general public. Even if, as many argue, it was ultimately the Hurricane – a less fleet but more robust plane which had come into service in 1937 – that was to prove the more effective machine, the morale-boosting properties of the Spitfire were simply beyond measure; a machine that inspired so much confidence in pilots and public alike was a completely new phenomenon.
The Spitfire was also to prove remarkably versatile – a plane that was just as good for photo-reconnaissance missions as it was for intercepting and firing upon enemy planes. But what about its firepower? In the earliest days, Air Chief Marshal Dowding wanted more. He also wanted bulletproof glass, an initial suggestion that drew sniggers from politicians. But, as he later remarked acidly, if such glass was deemed good enough for Chicago gangsters, then it was certainly good enough for his pilots.
One of the more startling aspects of the Spitfire to today’s hermetically sealed, pressurised flying public is the fact that at 15,000 feet, the pilots could still roll back the canopy of the cockpit (and indeed, had to do so in order to bail out); Geoffrey Wellum mentioned opening the canopy on a couple of occasions when, either during dogfights or in the terrifying moments when he was lost in clouds, low on fuel and trying to find his way home, he desperately needed to free himself of his oxygen apparatus and breathe freely.
By the start of the war, fighter pilots were still wearing Sidcots, the flying suits that had been devised towards the end of the First World War. These were so named after their inventor, Sidney Cotton, a maverick and often random figure. He had noticed back in 1916 that he suffered less from the biting cold in the air if he was wearing his oiled overalls; the Sidcot suit went through many incarnations but was most familiar as a green cotton garment with air-proof silk, to be worn over the blue RAF uniform, with a range of optional extra inner fleece or fur linings and a detachable fleece or fur collar. There was a large zip, buttons and large patch pockets. Cotton’s original prototype featured large amounts of expensive fur. By the outbreak of war, this extravagance had been tempered a little. The suit was light, not bulky; nothing could be allowed to hinder the pilot’s range of movement. The leather flying boots were also lined with fleece or fur; at the altitudes that the new Spitfire was capable of, the cold would otherwise have been agonising for the fighter pilots.
The Spitfire was, of course, not the only fighting aircraft available to the RAF. As well as the ineffective Fairey Battle, a little earlier in development was the Hawker Hurricane which – as many have pointed out – came to be unfa
irly overlooked when the story of the Battle of Britain was retold and invoked. Like the Spitfire, the Hurricane was a response to the need to evolve beyond the old biplanes. Like the Spitfire, it could hit hitherto unimagined speeds of around 482 kilometres per hour (300 miles per hour). Like the Spitfire, this was a craft that pilots could not wait to master. It was delivered to the RAF late in 1937; Squadron Leader John Gillan tried the beast out in some style, flying from Edinburgh down to Northolt in West London, and recording a steady ground speed of 656 kilometres per hour (408 miles per hour).
Rates of aircraft production in the increasingly dark days of the 1930s provoked complaints that the men who worked in the factories were simply not up to the job. What is more, the emergence of the economy from depression – in the south and the Midlands, there was increasing affluence, and not just among the property-owning middle classes – meant that recruitment was more difficult; so many rival jobs and rival wages were competing for workers’ attention. For instance, the motor industry was beginning to move into a new gear of mass production; a great many young workers were needed for those assembly lines.
But there was no temptation to nationalise the aviation industry; instead the government and the Air Ministry somehow wanted to rationalise the expertise of all these established family firms. Equally, the firms wanted a little more coherence from the Air Ministry. In 1938, the Society of British Aircraft Constructors got in touch with the Ministry to ask that it should pretend that the country was in a state of war. The implication was that that way, everyone could do their jobs a little more effectively.