I’ve been sporadically re-reading Churchill’s memoirs. He talks a lot about air parity and The Battle of Britain but I thought it odd he only mentioned Spitfires in passing a few times given their importance.
Then I remembered reading Adapt, a book by Economist Tim Harford about how to be innovative. It discusses the bizarre history of the Spitfire. A brilliant engineer at a small company came up with the groundbreaking ideas and design for an impossibly fast plane (450mph, only 30 years after the Wright Bros.). He threatened to quit around 1930 after being saddled with an eccentric boss (after Vickers bought the company) who ran a bizarre public crusade against lesbians. There was no enthusiasm for the idea since it was presumed bombers (and not fighters) were all that was necessary and fast planes served no purpose. Churchill himself disliked the idea of a plane which could only fire forward - a great advantage, but different from turrets or designated gunners. A prototype was successful, but was funded privately by Lady Houston, a benefactor upset no public funding was proffered. This book claims the fast speed and tight turn of the Spitfire was a critical reason for beating Germany, and was far superior to the Hurricanes available.
Now, I don’t know a lot about planes. To what extent is this true? Is there a lot more to this story?
Largely because they didn’t seem as important at the time as they do now, and the impression of the time was probably correct.
The Spitfire was a fine aircraft, and the bones of it were obviously outstanding given that versions of it flew for the whole war, but it wasn’t some sort of superweapon. Most of Fighter Command was still flying Hurricanes throughout the Battle of Britain, which while inferior to Spitfire was certainly up to the task, as they got most of the kills. Spitfires were better than Hurricanes but were evenly matched by the Bf-109.
It is NOT true that Spitfire’s superiority was why the Battle of Britain was won. The Bf-109 was, overall, just as good a fighter; inferior in some ways but superior in others. The Battle of Britain was won because the Luftwaffe were doomed. As long as that battle was fought over Britain they were going to lose; they simply did not have the ability to project fighter power over England to the extent necessary. Their fighters were fighting at the end of their range, in a situation where to be shot down was to die or be a POW while the British pilot was often in a new plane the next day, against a foe that was literally constructing new fighters as fast as they could be shot down, using bombers simply not up to the task of subduing a well armed nation. Had the RAF been entirely equipped with Hurricanes they would have still won.
The RAF was trying to replace the Spitfire shortly after the Battle of Britain, too, and for good reason; it wasn’t good enough. It was swiftly and brutally outclassed by the Fw-190 in 1941. The RAF’s planned next fighter was the Typhoon, which was on paper superior to Spitfire in every way, but it had a bunch of technical problems; they were eventually worked out with later Typhoons and the next plane, the awesome Tempest, but that was years later and by that time the Luftwaffe was dying by then anyway. So they worked to upgrade Spitfire out of sheer necessity, and kept it up with improvements until past the end of the war. (A late war Spitfire Mk24 was a very different plane from a Battle of Britain Spitfire; it wasn’t even exactly the same shape.) Its legend grew as the war went on, and of course today it’s as recognizable a plane as one could think of, but at the time it was just a plane, one that wasn’t always the best one in the fight.
I gather it’s also part of the conventional wisdom that the RAF’s command and control system was more effective and responsive, supporting the geographical advantage.
yes, this was a huge part of the 1940 success. Together with an excellent system for repairing and returning damaged fighters to action and the means to recover downed pilots, the Luftwaffe were never remotely in a position to gain even a sniff of air superiority.
The Spitfire, as beatiful and capable as it was, was not a game-changer. Nor were the pilots, skillful and brave as they undoubtedly were. But of course we are humans and the plane and the pilots are glamourous, logistics and communication less so.
For further reading on the subject I recommend two excellent books “The most dangerous enemy” by Stephen Bungay and “the Battle of Britain” by James Holland. The former skewing more to the strategy and the latter more to the personal but both covering the points already made and more, Defintely worth reading.
I heard somewhere that during the Battle of Britain, the Hurricanes were dispatched to attack incoming Luftwaffe bombers, and the Spitfires were directed to engage with enemy fighters. So just comparing the number of kills by each type of plane isn’t a perfect comparison.
I missed mentioning that, but it’s also a big deal, as it enabled the RAF to bring force to bear on bomber formations in a more effective manner than had ever been the case before.
This was done when possible; of course, if the available flight of planes was either Hurricanes or Spitfires, you sent who you could.
The Hurricane was slower than the Spitfire or Bf-109, especially in a dive, and less durable than a Spitfire if it was hit with gunfire, but it could in most flight profiles actually out-turn them; it was a really, really nimble fighter. Speed, however, tends to trump that in fighter combat. Attacking bombers, though, it was just as heavily armed as a Spitfire, so was just as effective - and then during the Battle of Britain they began rolling out Hurricane variants that carried 20mm cannons, giving it FAR more firepower than Spitfire, which only carried .303 machine guns at that time. Bombers take a lot more pounding than fighters to knock them out of the sky.
As a side note, later in the war the Germans faced the same issue; Allied bombers, of course, could be REALLY hard to shoot down, flying away with absurd amounts of damage. German fighter models were equipped with more, increasingly larger weapons to the point that it began impacting their dogfighting abilities, and eventually they started trying a similar system where Bf-109s would try to engage fighters while Fw-190s loaded down with a lot of cannons would attack bombers. Of course they were so outnumbered it was never going to work anyway.
Including, very importantly, radar which at the time was pretty much brand new. Radar gave the RAF the ability to vector interceptors to incoming attack waves a few crucial minutes in advance of what would have been possible relying only on visual sightings on the coast.
It’s also important to realize that, for all that WWII nerds like to talk about weapon systems, it was almost entirely a war of attrition. It wasn’t about whether the Spitfire Mk I was theoretically superior in a 1-on-1 fight with a Bf109-E. It was about who could keep bringing men and materiel to the fight and sustain losses for longer. Now, there were some crucially important strategic and doctrinal differences in how the various combatants fought that impacted the rates of attrition, and obviously better equipment would make a difference in attrition on the margins, but aircraft design is practically a footnote in the list of factors that determined the outcome.
Different theater and not a fair comparison but I never really understood why the Spitfire got more props than the Mustang. The Mustang’s range seemed like a true innovation while still remaining a very capable fighter.
Plus, in 1944-1945 the USAAF had a particular tactic of basically using the bombers as bait, and then when the fighters engaged, they’d jump them with an larger number of fighters, as the US had more fighters, and could essentially produce fighters and train pilots faster than the Luftwaffe could shoot them down.
But yeah, the Spitfire was a good fighter, but nothing unique, groundbreaking or spectacular. It’s just the iconic British fighter of WWII, and looks good in the role. Much like the P-51 for the US, even though there were a bunch of fighters that carried as much or more or the load- the P-47 for example tends to get overlooked because it wasn’t so photogenic.
Well, obviously to Commonwealth observers, because the Mustang wasn’t their fighter for the most part. To an American, the Mustang get the props.
It is very unlikely bombing aircraft factories was going to work, anyway. It often didn’t work for the Allies, and they were using way more impressive bombers.
The British were not stupid, and had already started distributing aircraft part production around to small facilities, nicknamed “shadow factories.” Germany didn’t have the bomber weight to hit aircraft production hard enough to make a difference in a few months, and didn’t have the intelligence apparatus to know everything they would have had to bomb.
I don’t believe the 20mm equipped Hurricanes were yet available during the BOB*, but not until mid '41 or so in the Mediterranean theater and north Africa. Even so, the Hurricane was considered a better gun platform than the Spitfire, as its eight .303 machine guns were grouped tightly together in groups of four in each wing, which made convergence less of an issue than with the Spitfire, whose machine guns were spaced at wider intervals along its wing leading edge. It made for a better bomber batterer with better concentration of fire.
Until the kinks could be worked out with the Hispano-Suiza 20mm cannons, an interim modification was carried out in the early Mk II Hurricanes that added 4 more .303 machine guns for a total of 12. ( ! )
Experiments were tried during the BOB to use the Hispano 20mm cannon in the Spitfire but these early installs proved quite glitchy, often jamming after few rounds were fired. This was made worse due to the fact in these early installs, a pair of these cannon were all that were installed…no other machine guns. As the kinks were worked out with the arrival of the improved Spitfire Mk V, the armament was a pair of Hispano 20mm cannon and four .303 machine guns in the outer wing. Later improvements would be made armament-wise as the 'Spit progressed through its lineage.
They did roll out a Hurricane II model that had 20mm Oerlikon cannons fitted in pods during the Battle of Britain. While the added punch was welcome, the performance impact was highly undesirable.
I believe some early model Typhoons also tried the twelve-machine-gun configuration, though they pretty swiftly went to four Hispanos, the configuration also used on Tempest and late war Spitfires.
I’m not sure why they never got heavily into use of .50 calibre guns given how successful the Americans were with those. It was a great in between solution that allowed for a standard weapon/ammo across multiple aircraft.
Yeah, it’s odd how some aircraft caught on as the “this was our plane” model, and surely looks have soemthing to do with it. The Spitfire and Mustang are BEAUTIFUL airplanes; they’re just smooth looking machines in a way that a Tempest or a Thunderbolt aren’t. The Hellcat was an immensely important airplane to the Americans - in terms of sheer success it might nhave been the best fighter aircraft ever made - but it’s ugly as shit and looks a lot like several other homely airplanes.
I was just at the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum a week ago with my daughter, and they have a Spitfire XIV. Even among other cool looking planes - and they have a lot of cool planes, some far more modern - it’s just a striking thing. My kid knew nothing at all about warplanes and was drawn to it more so than the other planes.
The B-17 isn’t beautiful but it’s extremely distinct; it doesn’t look like anything else, whereas a casual observer could mistake a Liberator for a Halifax or a Lancaster.
The Spitfire was a much earlier design than the Mustang, 5 years earlier (which was a lifetime in such volatile circumstances). The Mustang was also not particularly outstanding in its original format and only when it received the Merlin a couple of years later did it really shine.
When it did so though, it was a brilliant plane. Range, speed and agility. It was a more capable platform than the Spitfire in general and a hugely important plane in the context of the later war (and as a long range bomber support plane it was outstanding)
It suffered in the public’s imagination a bit because it was a pretty workmanlike design, it didn’t have the dainty and elegant lines of the Spitfire but then few planes have. Those that know about such things though do rate the P51 very highly indeed.
The Liberator is beautiful in it’s own way, fit for its purpose as an engineer would look at it, but it looks more like a flying truck than a Fortress does.
So what did Churchill have to say, if anything, about the Mosquito? Given his affinity for commando operations and his own Boys’ Own Adventure heroics, they’d appeal to him more.
