Spitfire: A Very British Love Story

by John Nichol

One pilot on his first operational sortie had crashed-landed and later died in hospital. He had not bailed out because a local had allegedly stolen his parachute to sell the silk on the black market. On hearing the news, Wing Commander Gracie ordered a gibbet erected on the aerodrome to warn of what would happen to anyone who stole parachutes.

That night the Axis-run Rome Radio broadcast that thirty-seven Axis aircraft had been lost to forty-seven Spitfires. In fact, just three Spitfires were downed, with the loss of a single pilot.

Churchill recognised the peril, urging in a personal note to his foreign secretary that it was ‘vitally urgent’ to keep the island supplied. In June the Admiralty sent two convoys simultaneously from the east and west. Only two freighters out of a total of seventeen got through, delivering 25,000 tons of supplies.

The Mark IX also added 70mph to the Spitfire’s top speed and 10,000ft to its fighting altitude. ‘The performance of the Spitfire IX is outstandingly better than the Spitfire V,’ the official test report read. ‘Spitfire is considerably faster and its climb is exceptionally good.’5 The only structural alteration from the Mark V had been to elongate the body by nine inches to accommodate the Merlin 61. But what a difference those nine inches made. With its two-stage supercharger, in which air was doubly compressed before entering the carburettor, the Mark IX was given an astonishing 20 per cent increase in power.

Intelligence had suggested that if a French port was seized the German protocol was to assume it was the prelude to a full-scale invasion. The Luftwaffe would be ordered to mount a major operation to control the skies. RAF commanders saw an opportunity to give the ‘Hun’ a bloody nose.

Peter Scott, a renowned naturalist and artist who had joined the navy, commanded a gunboat that had picked up both a German Luftwaffe and Norwegian RAF pilot. As he approached England, Scott went below decks to check on the fliers. The German was sitting with the ship’s cat on his lap next to the Norwegian pilot ‘who only hours before would have quite happily killed him in the air’. The German’s armed guard was sitting on the other side of his prisoner, fast asleep with his head on the pilot’s shoulder. ‘It is sights like this that makes one wonder why people go to war with each other in the first place,’ Scott noted.

Then he heard the sound of gunfire again. Much closer this time. He turned round and saw his wingman, Joseph Byrd from Texas, plummeting towards the ground, trailing smoke. Jesus, where did that come from? He looked again. The ‘Corsairs’ were in fact a flight of French Dewoitine 520 fighters and they were looking for easy Spitfire kills. The Vichy French clearly did not look upon the Americans and British as allies.

‘When you’ve got eight .303s with converging fire, that thing just went sky high.’

It took another day for the Vichy French forces in Algeria and Morocco to realise that continued fighting against the US and British force of 100,000 troops was pointless. To Hitler’s great fury the French surrendered. His anger was such that he ordered his troops into Vichy France, taking over the whole country.

As he turned to fly back to base, Peart reflected on the fact he had for the first time taken another human’s life. ‘This was the reality of aerial warfare – shooting down enemy bombers which also sometimes meant killing the half-dozen men inside. Fighting another fighter it was just a machine and you didn’t think about the man inside – it was machine versus machine. But shooting down a bomber was when I realised I was killing people. There was no sense of guilt at all – I felt sorry for them but this was what warfare was about and it was our job.’

Then a calm descended as he recalled the words of a First World War friend of his father’s who had become a mentor to the young Peart. ‘When cornered, son, give them everything you’ve got. Sell your life dear. They’ll remember you after that.’

Arriving at Souk-el-Arba, Farish encountered the RAF ‘commandos’, a group of rugged mechanics who had kept the muddy, puddle-littered airstrip and planes running before the squadron’s mechanics arrived. ‘These men, in tattered bits of uniform, dirty, long-haired, unshaven, tools sticking out of their pockets, were either cooking food over fires among the planes or dashing out to service aircraft as they landed. ‘These were the RAF “Commando” servicing echelon. Two flights of them, about 200 men, keeping flying four squadrons of Spitfires, one of Beaufighters and some Hurricanes.

And among those whose aircraft he serviced was one of the most rakish men to hold rank in the RAF. * * * Harry ‘Chas’ Charnock was a character who would not have been out of place in a Flashman novel. Having missed out on the Great War, he joined the RAF after Harrow School in 1924, aged nineteen. Six years later he was booted out, ostensibly for a low-level flying incident over Tangmere. The fact he had pushed a senior officer into a pond had not helped. For nine years little was heard of him, until two days into the outbreak of war the shortage of pilots persuaded the RAF to forget the past and allow Charnock to return as a noncommissioned sergeant pilot.5 He claimed three Germans during the Battle of Britain and was shot down once. This Charnock used to his full advantage. Despite landing on friendly ground, he managed to persuade the RAF to pay out compensation for the loss of his entire kit bag, as well as pocketing the gold sovereigns kept by pilots to facilitate their return from hostile territory. Charnock was awarded the Distinguished Flying Medal. He’d also had a taste for action and wanted more. His request for transfer from Britain was granted and he joined 72 Squadron. ‘If ever you saw a dissolute looking fellow, here was one,’ wrote Farish. ‘Even in his worn flying clothing one felt Charnock would be better placed propping up a night club bar. He usually contrived to have a bottle of whisky in his hand when on the ground. He was over thirty, by far the oldest...

To cut down the number of Spitfires nose-diving into the mud, Farish ordered airmen to climb onto the tail during taxiing. In the course of one scramble, a pilot forgot about his tail-man as he opened the throttle at the bottom of the airstrip. ‘The poor bloke must have been too frightened to fall off as the Spitfire gathered speed and the next thing they were airborne,’ Farish wrote on 20 January 1943. ‘Imagine the pilot’s consternation when he, unable to trim the aircraft, looked in the mirror and saw an airman waving in the breeze around his rudder! He managed to stagger round the circuit on full power while the terrified man hung on like grim death. ‘On touching down, the airman was thrown clear and broke his leg. That was all . . .

Farish drove back to the aerodrome to be told that the newly arrived Spitfire IXs had already downed two Germans. Harry Strawn, who was at Thelepte when 72 Squadron flew in, was fulsome in his praise of the new fighters. ‘They are much faster than ours, have a better rate of climb and a higher ceiling. In fact they can outclimb the latest Me109 and Fw190s. They did OK too, for on their first mission they shot down two 109s and damaged two more. The Hun can’t tell them from our Mark Vs so he tries the same tactics on them that he uses on us which proves fatal, for the Nines just climb up behind them and let them have

While the fight was raging, Hugh Dundas had arrived on operations at Souk-el-Khemis, an airstrip bulldozed from the mud in northern Tunisia, as the acting Wing Commander of 324 Wing after its boss had been injured. Aged just twenty-two, he was the equivalent of an army lieutenant colonel in rank. Dundas had demonstrated excellent leadership qualities, having recovered from Bader’s loss and the dark days of the Rhubarbs a few months previously.

‘With a Merlin 61 engine and a four-bladed prop, we will be able to outclimb the Me109s and Fw190s,’ Strawn reported. Within a week the entire squadron was equipped with Mark IXs flown down from Algiers. Strawn was overjoyed after his first flight. ‘What a ship it is! It has a 1,600hp engine with a supercharger which will take you up to 40,000ft or more if you need it. It is faster and has more climb than our old Fives. The Germans are scared to death of them for they know we can outclimb them.’

Cut off in the capital Tunis, other ports and in the mountains with no supplies to continue the fight, the Germans capitulated en masse. By 13 May, 240,000 Afrika Korps and Italians had become prisoners. The Luftwaffe lost a third of its total strength in the campaign from November 1942 to May 1943, with some 2,400 aircraft destroyed. By comparison, the RAF and USAAF lost just 849.

Because the Junkers were only single aircraft rather than a fleet that could cause severe damage, and deemed to be on reconnaissance missions, no air-raid warning was given on their approach. The disruption was too costly to the war economy. Thus, during morning rush hour on 28 August 1942, the streets of Bristol were bustling with commuters. Three packed buses were caught in the middle of the Ju86’s 550lb detonation which landed in the city centre. The single bomb ripped open the buses’ thin metal skins, cruelly striking those packed inside. Hot shrapnel and flying glass tore indiscriminately through the early-morning commuters. Limbs were strewn across the bus decks, a scene of carnage that even hardened rescuers struggled to deal with. The bomb killed forty-five and injured fifty-six. It would not go unpunished.

Galitzine joined the new Special Service Flight, the name given to the hoped-for high-altitude interceptors based at RAF Northolt, west London. The prince enjoyed a diet of chocolate, eggs, bacon and fresh orange juice, food unobtainable during rationing but considered necessary for high-altitude flying.

He was not going to let it get away. It was time to test the Mark IXs capabilities to the full. The war’s highest aerial combat was about to begin. ‘I jettisoned my 30 gallon external slipper tank, which was now empty, and had little difficulty in following him in the climb and getting about 200ft above the bomber. At this stage I remember telling myself: Take it easy, conserve your strength, keep icy calm. ‘The grey-blue Junkers seemed enormous and it trailed a long, curling condensation trail. It reminded me of a film I had once seen of an aerial view of an ocean liner ploughing through a calm sea and leaving a wake.

At least 20,000 French were executed resisting the occupation and helping the Allies.

Victory in the Battle of Britain bought the RAF time in which to properly train its pilots. No longer were men thrown straight into the front line with just a dozen or so hours in a Spitfire under their belts. Instead, thousands were sent to America or Canada to train in clear blue skies free from marauding Messerschmitts. Then they were swiftly transported home past the hunting U-boats in the relative luxury of the Queen Elizabeth liner.

If we were flying the next morning and still had a hangover we would plug into our Spitfire’s oxygen supply and this usually did the trick.’

The Bomber Command losses were horrific. Nearly 56,000 were killed out of a force of 125,000. With more than 8,000 wounded and almost 10,000 taken prisoner, it meant a Bomber Command airman stood a one-in-two chance of getting through unscathed.

This new German aerial offensive was the result of a Goering diatribe against the Luftwaffe as Sicily slipped from Nazi control. A message sent to his pilots accused them of cowardice and threatened Eastern Front postings. I can only regard you with contempt. If an immediate improvement is not forthcoming, flying personnel, from the Kommodore downwards, must expect to be reduced to the ranks and transferred to the Eastern Front to serve on the ground.

Looting was punishable by death,

With troops still pinned down on the beaches, the British battleship HMS Warspite was ordered to use her massive fifteen-inch guns to bombard German positions. She was about to become the next victim of the Nazis’ latest secret weapon, the Fritz X, the world’s first guided anti-ship missile. Developed in great secrecy, the Germans had created a 3,000lb device that could penetrate five inches of armoured decking then burrow down to explode under the keel. It was mounted on Dornier 217 bombers and guided onto the target by a bombardier who used a transmitter to adjust its large fins in flight via the bomb’s receiver. A skilled aimer could guide the missile to within at least 50ft of his target 50 per cent of the time. Being launched from three miles out it also gave the Dornier crew a good chance to get away before a ship realised it was being attacked.

The new Spitfire Mark XIV, powered by the Griffon engine that gave it a top speed of 446mph, became an early ballistic-missile interceptor. The Mark XIV was a beast of an aircraft, loved by many pilots for its brutal power provided by the Griffon 65 engine which produced 2,050hp – almost double that of the original Merlin.

On one of his first missions, Blyth realised he had to develop astute tactics if he wanted to stay alive. He had just reached German airspace when he spotted an Me109 diving down on his tail. Coolly, he acted as if he hadn’t spotted the threat. ‘If you panicked and reacted too soon they might get a better line on you. The 109 disappeared behind me and I figured he was just getting ready to open fire when I pulled straight back on the stick – going straight up in the Spitfire which I could never have done in the American P38. I got up to 35,000ft and rolled over to see him still sitting below me trying to see where I’d gone – I could see him weaving around trying to figure out where the hell I was and what the hell had happened! ‘I watched him disappear then continued on the mission. That was the power of the Spitfire for you.’

‘The aftermath of the fighting in the Falaise Gap was horrendous. We had witnessed it from the air but down here was the reality. Mile upon mile of destruction, quite literally the death of an army. As far as you could see, burnt-out lorries and tanks and the bodies of soldiers and horses lying about everywhere. The weather was hot so you can imagine the terrible smell and this was going to get worse before time was found to bury all the dead.’

The adrenaline of combat had been coursing through Hugh Dundas since his days over Dunkirk, in the Battle of Britain, on Rhubarbs over France, in North Africa, Sicily and now Italy. He had had an incredible wartime career and it was starting to take its toll. He was now a Group Captain in charge of the Spitfire Mark IXs of 244 Wing in Italy – at the age of twenty-three, the youngest ever in the RAF to hold the rank equivalent to an army full colonel. Whether it was his youth or sense of responsibility, Dundas still insisted on leading from the front.

Despite the food and medical supplies that were arriving in vast quantities, inmates were still dying, with 400 being buried a day.

‘To be perfectly honest, I wanted the war to go on as long as possible. Wartime gave many women something they’d never had: independence, earning your own money, being your own person. Once you married, everything changed dramatically.

The Spitfire’s development through the war was astonishing. The power of the final mark, the Seafire 47, was such that it was equivalent to the original Spitfire I of 1938 taking off with thirty-two airline passengers on board complete with their baggage.11 The top speed had gone from 362mph to 452mph, the rate of climb to 20,000ft from 9.4 minutes to 4.8 minutes, the range from 575 miles to 1,475 miles.12 The RAF found a model that worked and stuck with it, every variant proving it could at least contend with, if not outdo German developments. Nearly 23,000 Spitfires, including the navy variant, the ‘Seafire’, were built between 1936 and 1946.13 It had been used in combat in every theatre of the war: the deserts of North Africa, the snows of Russia, the jungles of Burma, in temperate Europe and scorching Australia. It rarely disappointed and almost always impressed. More than thirty countries operated the Spitfire, from Taiwan to India, Ireland and Rhodesia. It was flown in combat by Britons, Belgians, New Zealanders, Americans, Argentinians and Norwegians, to name but a few. The Spitfire went on to fight in the 1948 Arab–Israeli war, with both the Israeli and Egyptian air forces using the fighter against each other. It was the final time the fighter was shot down in action.14 It was used operationally in the Korean War in 1950, Malaya in 1951 and remained in service with the RAF as a meteorological aircraft until 1957.

‘The Spitfire was a thing of beauty to behold, in the air or on the ground, with the graceful lines of its slim fuselage, its elliptical wing and tailplane. It looked like a fighter and it certainly proved to be just that in the fullest meaning of the term. It was an aircraft with a personality all of its own – docile at times, swift and deadly at others – a fighting machine par excellence. One must really have known the Spitfire in flight to fully understand and appreciate its thoroughbred flying characteristics. Once you’ve flown a Spitfire it spoils you for all other fighters. Every other aircraft seems imperfect in one way or another.’

‘I am often asked which is my favourite aircraft. It is a very difficult question to answer. Who couldn’t be impressed with the gut-wrenching climb performance of the Lightning, almost touching the lower reaches of space, or of howling along in a Hawker Sea Fury? So I answer the question this way: if God said that I could have just one more flight, my last flight before I die, in any aircraft I have ever flown, I would choose to get airborne in a Spitfire.’