Breda Ba.201

By 1940 the dive bomber had become one of the defining weapons of the age. The German Ju 87 Stuka had terrorised Poland and France, and the Regia Aeronautica wanted the same capability — but on its own terms, from an Italian factory rather than as an import from its ally. Several Italian firms answered the call, and Breda’s response was the Ba.201.

The Società Italiana Ernesto Breda had a mixed record in military aircraft: the ground-attack Ba.65 had served, but the twin-engined Ba.88 Lince had been one of the war’s most notorious failures. The Ba.201 was the company’s bid to build Italy a native purpose-built dive bomber — and, in doing so, to free the Regia Aeronautica from its reliance on German-supplied Stukas.

In configuration the Ba.201 owed an obvious debt to the Stuka. It was a single-seat, all-metal monoplane with a pronounced inverted gull wing, and its split flaps doubled as dive brakes to hold the aircraft steady in a near-vertical plunge. In one respect, though, it was cleaner than the German machine: where the Ju 87 rode on fixed, spatted legs, the Ba.201 had a fully retractable undercarriage that folded away into the gull wing.

Where it differed was under the cowling. Instead of a radial, the Ba.201 used the German Daimler-Benz DB 601A — the same inverted-V12 of around 1,175 hp that powered Italy’s best fighters — chosen partly because its direct fuel injection kept running cleanly through the negative-g of a dive. It drove a three-blade constant-speed propeller and gave the slim, purposeful aircraft a top speed of about 460 km/h.

The first prototype, MM.451, made its maiden flight on 3 July 1941. Testing at Breda’s works went briskly — some 34 flights totalling around thirteen and a half hours — and on 26 September 1941 the aircraft was demonstrated before General Mario Bernasconi, head of the Regia Aeronautica’s assault aviation, before being handed to the experimental centre at Guidonia.

On the surface it was a promising start: a clean, conventional design that flew without major vice and could carry a single 500 kg bomb, swung out on a crutch to clear the propeller arc in the dive. A second prototype followed. But under closer scrutiny the Ba.201’s shortcomings began to tell, and the early enthusiasm did not last.

The central problem was performance. The Regia Aeronautica had asked for a dive bomber capable of 500 km/h; the Ba.201 managed only about 460, and no amount of refinement closed the gap. Worse, it was a single-seater with no rear gunner — its only guns were two 12.7 mm Breda-SAFAT in the wings — leaving it defenceless from behind, exactly the weakness that made unescorted dive bombers so vulnerable.

There were other complaints. Rearward visibility from the cockpit was poor, and the dive brakes were reportedly so effective that they risked slowing the aircraft too much, turning it into an easy target at the bottom of its dive. No single fault was fatal, but together they described an aircraft that was merely adequate at a moment when adequate was not enough.

The decisive factor lay outside the Ba.201 itself. The Regia Aeronautica had already solved its dive-bomber problem the quick way, by acquiring the German Ju 87 — the “Picchiatello”, as its Italian crews called it — which was flying combat missions over Malta and the Mediterranean while the Ba.201 was still under test. The Stuka was actually slower, but it came with a rear gunner, a heavier defensive fit, and, above all, it was already in service.

Against a proven, available aircraft, an Italian prototype that was faster on paper but weaker in defence and short of its speed target offered no compelling reason to disrupt production. The Ba.201 was not ordered. After the two prototypes, the programme was quietly cancelled, and Italy’s home-grown Stuka went no further.

The Breda Ba.201 was neither a bad aeroplane nor a memorable one. It was a competent, conventional dive bomber that did most of what was asked of it, undone less by its own faults than by timing and circumstance: it arrived after the Regia Aeronautica had already committed to the German Stuka, and it brought nothing decisive enough to change that decision.

It belongs to a category of Italian designs that never reached production because the industry was too stretched, the priorities too fixed, or the German alternative too readily available. Two prototypes were flown and evaluated; neither the performance nor the single-seat layout gave the Regia Aeronautica a reason to disrupt a dive-bomber force already equipped with the Ju 87, and the programme was cancelled.

• Jonathan W. Thompson, Italian Civil and Military Aircraft 1930–1945 (Aero Publishers).
• Chris Dunning, Courage Alone: The Italian Air Force 1940–1943 (Hikoki Publications).
• David Mondey, The Hamlyn Concise Guide to Axis Aircraft of World War II (Chancellor Press).