A Summer Bright and Terrible (9 page)

England’s traditional strength had been its
navy, but now it was becoming increasingly evident that even the greatest
warships were vulnerable to aerial attack. Churchill grumbled ominously,
telling England that “war, which used to be cruel and magnificent, has now
become cruel and squalid. In fact it has been completely spoilt. I wish flying
had never been invented. The world has shrunk since the Wrights got into the
air; it was an evil hour for poor England.”

He was not alone. A. P. Rowe, a rather obscure
staff member of the Directorate of Scientific Research of the Air Ministry,
undertook a search through the ministry files for all scientific proposals to
improve air defence since the Great War. Among the many thousands of files, he
found only fifty-three, none of which had the slightest use. He failed to find
a single suggestion that would provide the slightest answer to Baldwin’s
pronouncement “The bomber will always get through.”

Rowe felt alone and lost. Although Churchill was
rumbling on, the politician was a political outcast whom no one paid attention
to, his speeches described as “an old man farting in the wind.” And although a
few members of Parliament echoed Churchill’s warnings in that chamber, no one
listened. So Rowe packed his clothes and went off on vacation after writing a
memo to his superior, H. E. Wimperis, Director of Scientific Research, telling
him that the directorate was spending its time on useless endeavours while the
world was falling down around them. He asked Wimperis to tell his superior, the
Secretary of State for Air, that “unless science can find some way to come to
the rescue, any war within the next ten years is bound to be lost.”

He received no reply.

Eight

Perhaps Trenchard was right that there was
no defence against the bomber, and perhaps Rowe was right that any war within
the next ten years was bound to be lost. With Hitler rearming Germany so
rapidly, war certainly looked imminent within less than ten years, and here was
London, Churchill’s “tremendous fat cow,” waiting helplessly to be bombed and
gassed and set on fire. The problems seemed insoluble. And yet . . .

What was it Rowe had said? “Unless science can
find some way to come to the rescue . . .” So doom was looming, but not yet
inevitable. Sound detection didn’t work and the death ray didn’t work, but what
else might we have? The trick was not to despair because of the three insoluble
problems, but to tackle them one by one. Looking around, Dowding’s attention
was drawn to the Schneider Trophy races and the genius of a rather nondescript
man named Reginald Mitchell.

In the 1920s, airplane races and their aviators
were the darlings of public entertainment, and the races sponsored by M.
Schneider were the premier event. The rules had been set by the French founder
back in the 1910s, when the future of aviation lay obviously with seaplanes,
which could land on, and take off from, lakes and harbours, obviating the
necessity of constructing costly airfields all over the world. For these races,
hundreds of thousands of spectators would show up, lining the shore and filling
the waters around the course with hundreds of yachts, sailboats, rowboats, and
barges. At the appointed time, they would hear a gunshot, and the first plane
would take off. From a distance, they would see at first only a plume of water
advancing faster and faster, and then it would suddenly cease and instead a
small gnat would emerge from it and would claw itself into the air, roaring
over their heads, turning and coming back around the course. Again and again
the gunshot would sound, and one after the other, the competitors would flash
around, bewildering the senses as they flew at very nearly two hundred miles an
hour!

Though the competition was originally set up in
France, the winners usually came from England, Italy, or the United States. By
1922, when the race was won by England with a flying boat designed by Mitchell
and built by Supermarine, Mitchell had begun to realize that the necessary hull
design of a flying boat was aerodynamically inferior and added too much weight
to the airplane. He decided to sidestep the original intentions of M. Schneider
by designing a sleek monoplane, basically a land-based airplane, but fitted
with floats to fulfil the letter if not the spirit of the competition.

He got to work immediately but wasn’t able to
get a machine ready for the following year’s race, which was won by a Curtis
flying boat from America. The organizers decided to run the races only every
other year, so that no competition was held in 1924. By the summer of 1925,
Mitchell’s revolutionary S.4 was in the air: a sleek monoplane, virtually a
flying engine mounted on a pair of floats. At 226 miles per hour, it
immediately broke the British speed record, but it crashed before the Schneider
event took place.

The airplane nevertheless impressed His Majesty’s
government so much that they saw the future and provided funds for seven more
such aircraft, three to be built by Mitchell and four assigned to a design team
at Gloster Aircraft. The next Schneider race was in 1927, and by then the
Supermarine design, Mitchell’s S.5, was clearly the better. It dominated the
race, taking both first and second places; later that year it broke the world
speed record by nearly a hundred miles an hour, with a run at 319 miles per
hour.

With enthusiasm high, work began immediately on
an improved design for the 1929 race. This time the airplane was constructed
entirely of metal (the previous winner had wooden wings) and it had a new
Rolls-Royce engine. Two of them were built, and once again they took both first
and second places. A week later, they set another world’s speed record, raising
it to 357 miles per hour.

Mitchell’s group at Supermarine was ecstatic,
but His Majesty’s government was less so. Evidently feeling that good enough
was sufficient, it withdrew all support for another seaplane. At the last
moment, Lady Houston came through with a hundred thousand pounds, and the S.6
was built. The race itself was an anticlimax: Mitchell’s designs were so
clearly superior to anything else, both the Italians and the Americans gave up,
and no one else even showed up for the 1931 competition. The S.6 cruised around
the course at 340 miles per hour, winning the trophy for the third time in a
row and, by the rules, retiring it permanently.

Everyone concerned with airplane development
now felt that England should sponsor another such race. Rut Dowding realized
that the emphasis on seaplanes was misplaced since the large floats they
carried would always render them inferior to land-based planes. He also
understood that the fantastic speeds achieved in the races meant that without
the floats, Mitchell’s basic design could produce a fighter plane much faster
than the Luftwaffe’s bombers. He argued that it was time to forget seaplanes
and trophy races and instead use the technical knowledge that had developed
during the years of competition to build faster fighter planes.

Reginald Mitchell felt the same, but the Air
Ministry did not. In the fall of 1931 they issued Specification F.7/30,
inviting firms to design a new fighter to replace the Bristol Bulldog, a
traditional two-gun biplane fighter similar to those used in the Great War.
Seeing his chance, Mitchell submitted a monoplane based on his Schneider winners,
but in this competition it lost. Eight firms competed, and the winner was
another biplane.

Vickers, the parent company of Supermarine, let
Mitchell continue his work. Two years later, his newest design was labelled the
Type 300 and Mitchell was diagnosed with cancer. He had an operation that, like
most cancer treatments those days, was ineffective. On a trip to the Continent
to recover from the operation, if not from the cancer, he visited Germany. The
usual story is that he saw a demonstration of Willy Messerschmitt’s new,
single-winged Bf 109 fighter and realized that it totally outclassed the
biplane the RAF had just ordered. The story isn’t true, as the 109 wasn’t built
till 1935, but he did see the exuberant, warlike spirit of the Nazis. He was
both impressed and terrified by it, and so he came home to ignore his rapidly
growing cancer, to refuse all further treatment, and to work without rest on
what would become the Spitfire.

By 1935, Dowding had managed to convince the
Air Ministry that the old biplanes were an anachronism. He persuaded the
ministry to issue a new specification calling for a single-winged airplane with
enclosed cockpit and speed enough to catch the modern monoplane bombers. A
primary objection the old guard had was that the biplanes’ wings were braced
together with wire, which gave them the strength to withstand the violent manoeuvring
of a dogfight, and obviously a single wing couldn’t be braced with a second
wing that doesn’t exist. But new construction techniques and materials were
able to provide a greatly strengthened wing, one that was more than acceptable.
As an added bonus, the new single wing was actually strong enough to handle the
recoil of machine guns, which could thus be placed on the wing, well outside
the propeller’s arc, and could therefore fire continuously. The provision was
made to give the new fighter four of these guns instead of the two that the
biplanes had been able to accommodate.

The head of the operational requirement’s
section of the Air Ministry, a Squadron Leader named Ralph Sorley, computed
that at the high speeds of both the new fighters and the bombers, a pilot would
be lucky to hold the target in his sights for one or two seconds. And with such
a short burst, even from four guns, the new all-metal bombers couldn’t be
brought down. He suggested eight guns, “causing great controversy” in the
ministry, some of whose members had been fighter pilots in the Great War only
twenty years previously. The standard equipment they had had, two guns firing
through the propeller, continually jammed, so the breech had to be accessible
to the pilot, who carried a hammer with which to bang on it. This usually
worked, but if it didn’t, the pilot had to take the gun apart, clear the jam,
and reassemble it—all in the middle of a dogfight!

The former pilots couldn’t realize how far the
technology had advanced in so few years. By 1935 the RAF had the Browning .303,
which was less prone to jam, while at the same time the new monoplane designs
had wings strong enough to hold eight such weapons. This arrangement is what
Sorley suggested, with Dowding’s backing. But Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, then
the Commander in Chief of Air Defence, agreed with the ongoing consensus of the
establishment that “eight guns was going a bit far . . . the opinion of most
people in Fighting Area is that the guns must still be placed in the cockpit.”
He also argued that the cockpit must not be enclosed, for when the pilots
banged on the jammed guns, they’d need plenty of room to swing their hammers.

The old guard also pointed out that the weight
of eight guns would be too much for a single-engine plane to handle, especially
with the bomb-load it was expected to carry, since all fighters were expected
to serve also as ground support for the infantry. Dowding argued that what was
needed was a pure fighter; it was time to stop insisting on double duty. It was
a tough fight, but Dowding won out. A new specification F.1O/35 was sent out
for an eight-gunned fighter, with the bombing requirement lifted.

The premier biplane fighter designer of the
1920s, a man named Sydney Camm, was working for the Hawker company. Convinced
of the basic rightness of Mitchell’s ideas, he came up with his own monoplane,
the Hurricane, which would prove to be inferior to the Spitfire but easier to
produce and maintain. Dowding recommended that the biplane winner of the 1935
competition be dropped and the Hurricane and Spitfire be built instead, and
eventually he got his way. As it turned out, it was in the nick of time.

So he had, or would soon have, fighters that
could reach up to the bombers’ altitude, catch them, and shoot them down. He
had one problem remaining: Even in the case of war, he clearly would never have
enough fighters to keep a continuous patrol in the air waiting for the bombers.
And even the new “Spits” and “Hurris” took more than twenty minutes to climb
from the ground to the bombers’ cruising altitude, whereas in half that time,
the Luftwaffe would cover the thirty miles from the coast—where they would
first be spotted—to London. So back to square one: “The bomber would always get
through.”

Nine

And back to the death ray, and to Winston
Churchill. By the time of Rowe’s memorandum and the demise of the sound
location system, Churchill had been out of the government for five years.
Always true to his principles rather than to party politics, he was scorned by
both the Liberal Party he had left ten years before and the Conservative Party
to which he now belonged. And he was no more popular among the people at large.

Twenty years ago, he had been the coming man;
now he was a has-been who had never quite been. His voice roaring out the dangers
of Nazi rearmament was a living example of the Zen riddle: If a tree falls in
the forest and nobody hears it, does it make a sound?

Nobody wanted to hear it. The horrors of the
past war were too near, the horrors of any future war too horrible, the horrors
of the present were bad enough. The heroes of the Great War had come home to
find the economy in ruins, and the sudden eruption of the worldwide depression
had made things all the worse. Unemployment in towns around England ranged from
an unacceptable 10 percent to an unbelievable 68 percent. So the people of
England did not want to hear about the plight of the German Jews or about the
statistics of aircraft production in the Ruhr.