Spitfire

The Illustrated Biography

Jonathan Glancey

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780857895103
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

It is difficult to overestimate the excitement that accompanied the birth of the Spitfire. An aircraft imbued with balletic grace and extraordinary versatility, it was powered by a piston engine and a propeller, yet came tantalisingly close to breaking the sound barrier. First flown in 1936, the Spitfire soon came to symbolize Britain's defiance of Nazi Germany in the summer of 1940. Flown by pilots of many nations, it saw service as far afield as Australia and the Soviet Union.

Spitfire: The Biography is a celebration of a great British invention, of the men and women who flew it and supported its development, and of the industry that manufactured both the aircraft and the Rolls-Royce engines that powered it. It is also about a boy who wished he could have been a Second World War fighter pilot and who was later able to fly the aircraft that took his father into combat.

CONTENTS

List of illustrations
Introduction
I	Of Monoplanes and Men
II	The Thin Blue Line
III	Survival of the Fittest
IV	The Long Goodbye
V	First among Equals
VI	The Spitfire Spirit
Epilogue
Technical Specifications
Select bibliography
Index

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

A restored Spitfire Mk I. Copyright 2006, Herbie Knott/Rex Features.

The author’s mother and father. Author’s collection.

R. J. Mitchell. Getty Images (2680725).

A Supermarine S 6B seaplane. The Flight Collection (11567).

The Spitfire prototype, K5054. The Flight Collection (12902s).

Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding escorts King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. Imperial War Museum (CH1458).

Gun camera footage taken from a Spitfire Mk I. Imperial War Museum (CH1830).

Robert Stanford Tuck. Imperial War Museum (CH1681).

A Spitfire Mk IA of 19 Squadron. Imperial War Museum (CH1458).

Air Transport Auxiliary pilot Diana Barnato-Walker. By permission of Diana Barnato-Walker.

Joan Lisle.

A trainee pilot takes off in a Spitfire Mk II. Imperial War Museum (CH6452).

Flight Sergeant James Hyde. Imperial War Museum (CH11978).

Air Vice Marshal Sir Keith Park. Imperial War Museum (CM3513).

Spitfire Mk VIIIs of 136 Squadron. Imperial War Museum (CF682).

The black Spitfire Mk IX. Getty Images (52693336).

A Seafire Mk 47 of 800 Squadron.

A Spitfire PR XIX.

The first Griffon-engined Spitfire Mk XIVE. Imperial War Museum (EMOS1348).

Adolf Galland. Imperial War Museum (HU4128).

A line-up of Italian Macchi MC 202s.

A restored Japanese Mitsubishi A6M3 Zero. Brian Lockett.

A Russian Lavochkin La-7.

A poster for The First of the Few, released in the US as Spitfire. RKO Radio Pictures Inc/Photofest.

Advertisement for the ‘Dan Dare’ cartoon in The Eagle. Colin Frewin Associates.

An Airfix 1/48 Spitfire Mk VB. Author’s collection.

A PR Mk XI Spitfire. Imperial War Museum (EMOS1325).

A restored Spitfire Mk IX. Copyright 2006, Herbie Knott/Rex Features.

SPITFIRE

INTRODUCTION

‘IT’s the sort of bloody silly name they would give it.’ R. J. Mitchell, inventor of the Spitfire, the most famous, best-loved and most beautiful of all fighter aircraft, was not exactly impressed by the tricksy appellation some cove flying a desk in Whitehall is said to have come up with for his prototype Supermarine Type 300 monoplane. The aircraft answering to Air Ministry specification F.37/34 had, in fact, been named by Sir Robert McClean, chairman of Vickers, the company that had bought the Supermarine Aviation Works, after his young daughter Anna, a right little ‘spitfire’. As for Merlin, the name given to the magnificent 1,000-hp Rolls-Royce V12 aero-engine that powered the Spitfire, this had been a wonderfully apt choice by Rolls-Royce itself. The Merlin proved to be the stuff of mechanical wizardry and, as the loudly beating heart of the stunning little fighter aircraft that soared into British skies against Hitler’s Luftwaffe in 1940, it was a significant part of the spell, and more than a flash of the sorcery, that led to the Nazis’ Götterdämmerung in 1945.

Rolls-Royce had actually named what was to become its most famous aero-engine not after the Arthurian wizard but after the falcon the Americans know, rather prosaically, as the pigeon hawk, and the British, more poetically, as the merlin. Rolls-Royce had a policy of naming its engines after birds of prey – the Eagle, Kestrel, Peregrine, Griffon and Vulture were all installed with varying degrees of success in RAF aircraft. The Merlin, though, was a perfect match from the very start for Mitchell’s promising little fighter. The avian merlin is a raptor with thin, pointed wings that allow it to dive at sensational speed. The Spitfire’s famously thin wing enabled it too to dive at very great speeds, so much so that in 1943 one of Mitchell’s sensational machines was not so very far from breaking the sound barrier. Not that a piston-engined aircraft ever has achieved this; it took the custom-designed and rocket-powered Bell X-1, ‘Glamorous Glennis’, to do the job in October 1947 with Captain Charles ‘Chuck’ Yeager at the controls. During the Second World War, Yeager had flown the North American P-51D Mustang, a superb American fighter powered by a Rolls-Royce Merlin, built under licence by Packard in Detroit. It was also the stuff of aeroindustrial sorcery.

A restored Spitfire Mk I rolls above the Seven Sisters Cliffs, Friston, West Sussex, in 1988.

The fastest falcon of all, the peregrine, can reach a speed of up to around 200 mph in a headlong dive in pursuit of its prey. The Victorian Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins evoked the flight of one of these mercurial raptors in an exhilarating, tongue-tripping poem, ‘The Windhover’:

I caught this morning morning’s minion,

kingdom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing

In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,

As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding

Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

When I first read those words, dedicated by the poet to ‘Christ Our Lord’, I was a schoolboy at what I thought of as a Catholic Stalag Luft. I was fascinated by birds and in love with aircraft and the idea of flight, and I thought of Hopkins’s falcon as a Spitfire scything through the air, ‘off forth on swing as a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend’. It was as if Hopkins had actually seen a Spitfire, another kind of saviour, in flight – although if he had, he would surely have described the sound of the Merlin engine that accompanies the flight of this most dangerously exquisite mechanical bird of prey. The Merlin’s voice is all thunder and lightning, a deep, pulsing roar overlain with the throaty whistle of its supercharger.

‘Rumble thy bellyful! Spit, fire! spout, rain!’ Even in this line from Shakespeare’s King Lear (Act 3, scene 2) that I happened to alight upon at much the same time as I flew on mind’s wings with Hopkins’s falcon, I could hear the basso profundo thrum of a Merlin and the blazing sight and chattering sound of Browning .303 machine-guns, or the pom-pom thud of Hispano 20-mm cannon, raining revenge from the wings of a fighter that really did spit fire.

Of course, for any English schoolboy of my generation who could assemble 1/72 scale Airfix Spitfires – a squadron of them, in fact, lovingly painted and detailed, complete with oil leaks from their glossy black Merlins – and do so without spreading strands of Britfix 77 glue and telltale fingerprints across their Lilliputian windscreens, there was another poem, that those who loved aircraft, yet pretended not to care a fig for literature, knew by heart:

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

Of sun-split clouds – and done a hundred things

You have not dreamed of – wheeled and soared and swung

High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there

I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung

My eager craft through footless halls of air.

Up, up the long delirious, burning blue,

I’ve topped the windswept heights with easy grace

Where never lark, or even eagle flew –

And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod

The high untrespassed sanctity of space,

Put ...