There were delays of up to six years between the issue of a specification, acceptance of a design, manufacture and entry into service. The progress of the Hurricane and the Spitfire from drawing board to the skies was quicker, but far from smooth. By the end of the 1920s it was obvious the biplane era was over. The most powerful machine in the RAF’s hands, the Hawker Fury, could only manage 250 m.p.h. The 1929 Schneider Cup, a competition of speed and endurance between seaplanes, was won by the Southampton firm of Supermarine with an S6, a monoplane with a streamlined fuselage and metal wings, flying at an average of 328.63 m.p.h. In 1930 the Air Ministry issued specification F.7/30 for a new high-speed fighter, opening the competition to single wing designs. Monoplanes had been around from almost the beginning of aviation but were inferior in terms of manoeuvrability to biplanes, whose twin surfaces provided considerably more lift. Streamlining, metal airframes and new engines powerful enough to keep them airborne removed this restriction and delivered the future to the monoplane.
In August 1933 Sydney Camm, chief designer at Hawker Aircraft Limited, presented two designs to the Air Ministry for a biplane and a monoplane. Both were rejected as too orthodox – evidence of the presence of some radical and imaginative minds at important decision-making levels inside the air establishment. The board of Hawker decided to continue development anyway. When the Air Ministry issued a new specification the following year, Camm’s design was close to their requirements, and a prototype, K5083, was ordered. The RAF wanted a fighter capable of 300 m.p.h. which could fly as high as 33,000 feet. To meet these demands the aircraft needed to be streamlined with an enclosed cockpit and a retractable undercarriage. It also had to be capable of bearing a battery of machine guns. Ballistics experts calculated that at the new high speeds an intercepting fighter would have only two seconds to shoot down an incoming bomber. Eight machine guns, each firing 1,000 rounds a minute, were needed to provide the required weight of fire.
The novelty of the project and the high demands of the specification meant that fundamental problems of physics, engineering and design arose at every stage. The crucial question of power had been answered by the appearance of the Rolls-Royce PV twelve-piston engine, later known as the Merlin. It developed 1,030 horsepower, more than twice that of the best engine of the First World War. The thrust it delivered made speeds of 330 to 340 m.p.h. possible – more than enough to satisfy the RAF’s demands.
Camm’s original design had been called the Fury monoplane, a name that conceded the fact that even after 4,000 blueprints the aircraft was only half-way evolved from its biplane origins. The frame was of metal tubes and wooden formers and stringers. The skin was fabric, heavily painted with dope to reduce drag, and stressed-metal wings were only added fairly late in the development. The outlines of the old Fury were certainly discernible in its profile. But it was definitely something else. They called it a Hurricane. It was not a new name, having belonged to a short-lived aircraft of the 1920s. But it conveyed a note of confidence and aggression that was infinitely more reassuring than the placid Harts, Flycatchers and Grebes of the previous generation.
The Hurricane made its first flight on 6 November 1935 at Brooklands in Surrey. Hawker’s chief test pilot, George Bulman, a small, bald, ginger-moustached extrovert who had flown with the RFC in the war, was in the cockpit. The prototype had been developed in great secrecy. When the tarpaulins were stripped away and the hangar doors opened, there were murmurs of surprise. It was painted silver, which emphasized the sleekness of its low, humped lines and the sculptured way the rounded wings fitted beautifully flush to the fuselage below the neat, narrow cockpit. It was big, bigger than any existing fighter, and at more than 6,000 pounds very heavy. It seemed unlikely that a single engine could get it off the ground. Bulman, in overalls and flying helmet, approached the machine and vaulted into the cockpit watched by Camm and other Hawker executives, who stood at the edge of the damp field, smoking nervously. The Hurricane bumped away into the distance then turned into the wind. The rumble of the Rolls-Royce engine deepened into a roar. The machine moved forward, gathering speed, but slowly, so that some thought Bulman would not get airborne before he ran out of field. At the last moment the Hurricane left earth in an abrupt bounding movement and climbed steeply. The spectators watched the undercarriage retract and the muscular shape dwindle into the distance until it disappeared and the sound of the engine faded. Half an hour later the reassuring drone was heard again. Bulman performed a perfect three-point landing and taxied over to where Camm was waiting to report the flight had been ‘a piece of cake’.23
The Spitfire, the first prototype of which flew in March 1936, was a more modern design, all metal with a monocoque fuselage and thin, elliptical wings, the more sophisticated offspring of the Supermarine C6. It had the same Merlin engine as the Hurricane and carried the same guns, but at 5,180 pounds it weighed 1,000 pounds less and went 30 m.p.h. faster. The name was proposed by the chairman of Vickers, Sir Robert McLean, whose company had taken over Supermarine. R. G. Mitchell, whose designs carried the machine through its various evolutions to become the most beautiful and efficient fighter of its era, was not impressed. ‘Just the sort of bloody silly name they would choose,’ he is reported to have said on hearing the decision.24 But in the propaganda film of his life The First of the Few, which appeared in 1942, he is portrayed as devising the name himself: ‘A curious sort of bird…a bird that spits out death and destruction…a Spitfire bird.’
The orders came quickly, with the Air Ministry ordering 600 Hurricanes and 310 Spitfires in the summer of 1936. The accelerated pace reflected alarm that the next war might come sooner than expected. Preparations at every level speeded up as successive intelligence reports, and the Germans’ own boasts, suggested that Britain’s reluctant rearmament programme was insufficient either to deter or defend.
The sense of urgency, and the rapid twists and turns of circumstance, were evident in the brevity of the shelf-lives of the schemes that succeeded Scheme A, as both government and the Air Ministry tinkered with the plan to take account of a situation that always seemed to be changing for the worst. Only one scheme, Scheme F, approved by the cabinet in February 1936, was implemented as planned, coming to fruition in March 1939.
But the expansion was real. From 1935 forty-five new air stations were ordered to be built, most of which were finished by the time war came. Scheme C, which was approved in May 1935, envisaged 123 home squadrons as opposed to the 76 designated in Scheme A. That meant recruiting 1,500 pilots in the next two years. Altogether the RAF was to increase fivefold between 1934, when there were 31,000 officers and men, and the outbreak of war, when the service had an actual strength of 118,000 backed by about 45,000 reserves.
The Air Minister, Lord Swinton, inherited Trenchard’s system of short-service officers, who since the early 1920s had supplemented and outnumbered the cadre of permanent RAF officers. He intensified links with public schools, attracting 1,700 entrants. A further 800 pilots were found among RAF non-commissioned officers. Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa were all asked to contribute men. The number of auxiliary squadrons increased from eight to twenty in the run-up to the war. But more radical measures were needed to satisfy the new demand and, equally important, to provide a reserve.
A pool of pilots would be essential to replace the dead and wounded once the fighting started. The Director of Training at the Air Ministry, Air Commodore A. W. Tedder, a Trenchard protégé who had inherited some of his briskness of thinking, conceived the idea of a ‘Citizen Air Force’. It was to be democratic in character, and linked to a locality, but to the factories, offices and avenues and crescents of semi-detached homes in the new estates springing up around towns rather than to the shires to which the army’s territorial units attached themselves. The Air Ministry added that the new force should be ‘open…to the whole middle class in the widest sense of that term, namely the complete range of the output of the public and secondary schools’. Given its nature it was felt ‘inappropriate to grade the members on entry in as officers or airmen according to their social class’. Everyone therefore started out the same, as airmen under training, with commissions being awarded later