Aircraft of the Battle of Britain

R.J. Mitchell’s Spitfire grew out of his Schneider Trophy racers and first flew on 5 March 1936. Its thin elliptical wing gave it the speed and agility to meet the best German fighters, and Spitfires were in production from before the war until after it: more than 22,000 Spitfires and Seafires were built.

The Spitfire was built in some two dozen marks, from the 1,030 hp Mk I to the 2,000 hp-plus Griffon-engined Mk 24.

MH434 was built at Castle Bromwich in 1943 and flew as ZD-B with No. 222 (Natal) Squadron from Hornchurch, where Flt Lt Henry Lardner-Burke shot down a Focke-Wulf Fw 190 in it that August.

Sydney Camm’s Hurricane was the RAF’s first monoplane fighter and its first to exceed 300 mph. It first flew in November 1935, and its steel-tube and fabric construction was familiar to the factories and could be repaired on the squadron.

Hurricane pilots were credited with about 60 per cent of the RAF’s victories in the Battle of Britain.

R4118 was built by Gloster in 1940 and flew 49 sorties as UP-W with No. 605 (County of Warwick) Squadron from Croydon during the Battle of Britain.

The Blenheim began as a private venture. In 1934 the newspaper owner Lord Rothermere asked Bristol for a fast executive aircraft, and the all-metal Type 142 that resulted, which he named ‘Britain First’, flew in April 1935 and proved faster than any fighter the RAF then had. Rothermere gave it to the nation, and the Air Ministry ordered a bomber version straight off the drawing board.

‘Britain First’, the private aircraft from which the Blenheim grew, flew at over 300 mph in 1935, some 70 mph faster than the Gloster Gauntlet the RAF was then bringing into service.

This aircraft is really Bolingbroke IV-T 10001, built by Fairchild at Longueuil, Quebec, and taken on RCAF charge in October 1942 as a gunnery and navigation trainer at the Bombing and Gunnery Schools in Manitoba and Saskatchewan.

The Gladiator was Henry Folland’s last refinement of the open-cockpit Gauntlet. Gloster built it as a private venture, the SS.37, to meet an Air Ministry specification for a four-gun fighter, giving it single-bay wings braced by one pair of interplane struts on each side, cantilever main undercarriage legs with internal springing, flaps on both wings and a Bristol Mercury radial in a long-chord cowling. The prototype first flew on 12 September 1934 and reached about 242 mph, and the Air Ministry ordered the type in 1935 as the Gladiator, with an enclosed sliding canopy, the first on an RAF fighter, and four machine guns, two in the fuselage sides and one under each lower wing.

The Gladiator was the RAF’s last biplane fighter and also its first fighter with an enclosed cockpit: the pilot sat under a sliding canopy between wings braced with wires.

L8032 was the last Gladiator Mk I built.

The Lysander was Westland’s answer to Air Ministry specification A.39/34 for an army co-operation aircraft, a machine to spot for the artillery, photograph enemy positions, drop supplies and carry messages for troops in the field. Arthur Davenport and Teddy Petter designed it after asking the pilots who would fly it what they wanted, and the answer was a good view and the ability to use small, rough fields. They gave it a high wing that tapered towards the root, so the pilot could see past it, automatic leading-edge slats and slotted flaps for very low landing speeds, and a fixed undercarriage on two spatted cantilever legs.

On a pick-up the Lysander often spent only a few minutes on the ground in occupied France: agents climbed down the fixed ladder as passengers for England climbed up, and the pilot took off again without stopping the engine.

V9552 was built by Westland as a Lysander IIIA and shipped to Canada in 1942, where it served the Royal Canadian Air Force as target tug 1582 until 1946.

In the mid-1930s the RAF taught its pilots on biplanes, while the fighters they would go on to fly were becoming monoplanes. F. G. Miles of Phillips & Powis at Woodley, near Reading, had already built the Hawk Trainer, a two-seat version of his light Hawk monoplane, and the Air Ministry wrote specification T.40/36 around a militarised version of it. The prototype M.14, flown by Miles on 20 March 1937, was a low-wing monoplane built of spruce and plywood, with tandem open cockpits, flaps, a fixed undercarriage and a 130 hp de Havilland Gipsy Major I. It gave pupils the feel of a monoplane, flaps and all, before they moved on to the Harvard, the Master and then the Hurricane and Spitfire.

The Magister was the RAF’s first monoplane trainer, but it was built almost entirely of wood: a spruce and plywood airframe in an age that was turning to metal.

P6382 was built by Phillips & Powis at Woodley in 1939 and served with the RAF as an elementary trainer.

Willy Messerschmitt’s design team at Bayerische Flugzeugwerke in Augsburg produced the Bf 109 to a 1934 Luftwaffe call for a modern fighter. The prototype first flew on 29 May 1935, powered by a borrowed Rolls-Royce Kestrel because the German engines were not yet ready. It was small, light and fast, with a cantilever low wing, an all-metal stressed skin and a retractable undercarriage that folded outwards.

The Bf 109’s cockpit hinges sideways rather than sliding back, and the narrow canopy leaves the pilot sitting low and cramped behind a heavy engine.

Werknummer 1190 is a Bf 109E-3 that came down in England in 1940.

The Bf 110 was Messerschmitt’s answer to a 1934 Luftwaffe requirement for a Zerstörer, or “destroyer”: a long-range, twin-engined, heavily armed fighter that could escort bombers deep into enemy territory and clear the way for them. It was a slim, all-metal monoplane with twin fins, a long glazed canopy over the pilot and a rear gunner, and cannon and machine guns grouped in the nose. The first prototype flew at Augsburg on 12 May 1936, and the Bf 110C, with Daimler-Benz DB 601 engines, entered service in numbers in time for the invasion of Poland in 1939.

On 10 May 1941 Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, flew a Bf 110 alone from Augsburg to Scotland on his bid to make peace, baled out over Renfrewshire and spent the rest of the war as a prisoner.

Werk Nummer 730301 is a Bf 110 G-4 night fighter that flew as D5+RL with 3./NJG 3, the third squadron of Nachtjagdgeschwader 3.

The He 111 was designed at Heinkel by the twin brothers Siegfried and Walter Günter as a fast, twin-engined monoplane that could be shown off as an airliner for Lufthansa while it was really built to be a bomber for the secret new Luftwaffe. It had a smooth, all-metal fuselage and an elliptical wing like that of the smaller He 70. Gerhard Nitschke flew the first prototype at Rostock-Marienehe on 24 February 1935.

In the 1969 film Battle of Britain, the Luftwaffe’s He 111s were played by Spanish CASA 2.111s powered by Rolls-Royce Merlins, the same engines as the Spitfires and Hurricanes they were pretending to fight.

Werknummer 701152 was built in 1944 as an He 111 H-20/R1 paratroop transport, with seats for 16 paratroops in two compartments; they are still in it.