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 authorâs mother and father. Authorâs 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 âDan Dareâ cartoon in The Eagle. Colin Frewin Associates. |
An Airfix 1/48 Spitfire Mk VB. Authorâs collection. |
A PR Mk XI Spitfire. Imperial War Museum (EMOS1325). |
A restored Spitfire Mk IX. Copyright 2006, Herbie Knott/Rex Features. |
SPITFIRE
INTRODUCTION
âITâs the sort of bloody silly name they would give it.â 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 âspitfireâ. 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 Hitlerâs Luftwaffe in 1940, it was a significant part of the spell, and more than a flash of the sorcery, that led to the Nazisâ GötterdĂ€mmerung 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 â 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 Mitchellâs promising little fighter. The avian merlin is a raptor with thin, pointed wings that allow it to dive at sensational speed. The Spitfireâs famously thin wing enabled it too to dive at very great speeds, so much so that in 1943 one of Mitchellâs 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, âGlamorous Glennisâ, to do the job in October 1947 with Captain Charles âChuckâ 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, âThe Windhoverâ:
I caught this morning morningâs minion,
kingdom of daylightâs 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 skateâs heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, â the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
When I first read those words, dedicated by the poet to âChrist Our Lordâ, 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 Hopkinsâs falcon as a Spitfire scything through the air, âoff forth on swing as a skateâs heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bendâ. It was as if Hopkins had actually seen a Spitfire, another kind of saviour, in flight â 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 Merlinâs voice is all thunder and lightning, a deep, pulsing roar overlain with the throaty whistle of its supercharger.
âRumble thy bellyful! Spit, fire! spout, rain!â Even in this line from Shakespeareâs King Lear (Act 3, scene 2) that I happened to alight upon at much the same time as I flew on mindâs wings with Hopkinsâs 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 â a squadron of them, in fact, lovingly painted and detailed, complete with oil leaks from their glossy black Merlins â 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 Iâve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds â and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of â wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hovâring there
Iâve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long delirious, burning blue,
Iâve topped the windswept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew â
And, while with silent, lifting mind Iâve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put ...