Fiat CR.32

The letters stood for Caccia Rosatelli — fighter, Rosatelli — and by 1933 Celestino Rosatelli had been building them at Fiat for a decade. The CR.1 of 1923, the CR.20 that followed it and the CR.30 of 1932 formed a single evolving line of unequal-span biplanes, each one a little cleaner and a little faster than the last. The CR.32, first flown on 28 April 1933, was essentially a smaller, lighter and more carefully refined CR.30, and the refinement made all the difference: what had been a good aircraft became an outstanding one.

Deliveries to the Regia Aeronautica began in 1934, and production ran through four series — CR.32, CR.32bis, CR.32ter and CR.32quater — until roughly 1,210 had been completed by Fiat at Turin and by its subsidiary CMASA at Marina di Pisa. That made it the most numerous Italian fighter of the interwar years and the standard mount of the Italian fighter arm for most of the 1930s, a decade in which Italian aviation traded heavily on prestige — record flights, mass formation displays, and an air force that looked, from the outside, thoroughly modern.

The CR.32 was a sesquiplane: a biplane whose lower wing was noticeably smaller than the upper, a layout Rosatelli used to cut drag while keeping the biplane’s lift and its quick roll response. Its interplane bracing was the designer’s signature — W-form Warren struts that carried the loads without the forest of flying wires typical of the type, saving drag and simplifying rigging. The structure was metal with fabric covering over most of the airframe, spanning ~9.50 m against a length of ~7.45 m, and it was famously strong: pilots threw it around with a confidence few contemporaries invited.

Power came from the Fiat A.30 R.A., a liquid-cooled V12 of about 600 hp — modest even by 1933 standards — but the airframe was clean enough to turn it into roughly 360 km/h at medium altitude, with a ceiling near 7,700 m and a range of about 780 km. Armament was where Italy was ahead: two synchronised 12.7 mm Breda-SAFAT machine guns firing through the propeller disc, heavy-calibre weapons at a time when the RAF and the Luftwaffe still armed their fighters with rifle-calibre guns. The CR.32bis added two 7.7 mm guns in the lower wing and racks for light bombs.

From August 1936 Italy shipped CR.32s to Spain in support of Franco’s Nationalists, flying them first with its own Aviazione Legionaria and progressively handing them to Spanish units. Roughly 380 were sent over the course of the war — the largest deployment the type ever saw, and the one that made its name. The Spanish christened it “Chirri”, and the nickname stuck so firmly that it followed the aircraft into its post-war Spanish career.

Its opponents were Soviet-supplied. The Polikarpov I-15 biplane — the Chato, snub-nose — was its closest match; the I-16 monoplane, called Mosca by the Republicans and Rata by the Nationalists, was the more dangerous, fast enough at around 460 km/h to leave the Fiat behind whenever its pilot chose to disengage. What the CR.32 had instead was a tighter turn, excellent control harmony at low speed and the steadiness of a good gun platform, and in the low-level swirling fights of Spain those qualities repeatedly told. It was outrun, and it kept winning anyway.

The war’s leading ace flew one. Joaquín García-Morato ended the conflict with about 40 victories, most scored on the CR.32, and led the celebrated Patrulla Azul — the “Blue Patrol” — a small hand-picked flight whose aircraft carried his personal marking and which built much of the Nationalist fighter arm’s reputation. He survived the war and died months after it ended, killed on 4 September 1939 in a flying accident, still at the controls of the aircraft on which he had made his name.

Italian pilots built reputations on it too. Ernesto Botto lost a leg in combat over Spain in 1937 and returned to front-line command in the Second World War as “Gamba di Ferro” — Iron Leg — while Adriano Mantelli emerged as one of the Aviazione Legionaria’s most successful fighter pilots. Individual claims from that war are contested on every side, inflated by the confusion of multi-aircraft dogfights and by the propaganda both sides ran on them; that the CR.32 dominated the close-in fight over Spain is not in dispute.

Spain was read in Rome as proof. If the nimble biplane could beat faster monoplanes, then manoeuvrability rather than speed decided air combat — and the Regia Aeronautica built its fighter doctrine on that conclusion. The result was the CR.42 Falco of 1939, a direct descendant of the CR.32, ordered in quantity and eventually built in some 1,780 examples: the last biplane fighter in the world to enter large-scale production, and one still leaving the factory when Spitfires and Bf 109s were the measure of a fighter.

Britain and Germany drew the opposite conclusion from the same war and invested in speed, monoplane wings, retractable undercarriages and heavier armament. Here fact ends and judgement begins: the CR.32’s Spanish record was genuine, but the kind of combat it had won was already passing. The Spanish sky had been a slow, low-altitude arena in which the turning fight still decided matters; the war that followed was fought at speeds and altitudes where it rarely did. In June 1940 Italy went to war with several hundred biplane fighters on strength.

When Italy entered the war on 10 June 1940, some 300 CR.32s remained on charge, and the fighter force in Libya consisted of 36 CR.32s alongside 51 of the newer CR.42s. The CR.32s were first into action: on 11 June, six of them intercepted Bristol Blenheims raiding the airfield at El Adem and claimed two shot down — British records give two Blenheims lost and two damaged, one of the rare occasions when a claim and the enemy’s own account nearly agree.

Most of the North African machines were CR.32quaters with underwing bomb racks, and they spent the brief Italian offensive of September 1940 strafing and bombing rather than fighting for air superiority. Operation Compass swept them away that December, and the survivors were withdrawn from the front line by mid-1941. In East Africa, cut off from resupply from the first week, the CR.32 had its better war — fighting Gladiators on rough terms and Hurricanes on impossible ones until spares and tyres ran out, a campaign that ended with the surrender at Gondar in November 1941. Between the two, CR.32s also flew over Albania and Greece through the winter of 1940–41, and by 1942 the survivors had been pushed into advanced training, liaison and night harassment.

Export orders had spread the type widely before the war. Hungary and Austria both bought it — the Austrian machines passing to the Luftwaffe after the Anschluss of 1938 — and small batches reportedly went to Nationalist China and to Venezuela. In Spain, Hispano-Aviación built it under licence as the HA-132-L Chirri, and Spanish CR.32s went on serving as fighters and then as advanced trainers into the 1950s, two decades after the prototype first flew and long after the type had vanished everywhere else.

The two halves of the verdict do not contradict each other. As a biplane fighter the CR.32 was among the best ever built: strong, docile, heavily armed for its generation, and produced in greater numbers than any other Italian fighter of the 1930s. What followed was not its fault but its consequence. An air force reads its last war for evidence, and the evidence the Regia Aeronautica took from Spain was that the aircraft it already had was the aircraft it still needed — a conclusion the CR.32 had earned, and which cost the pilots who inherited it dearly.

• Håkan Gustavsson & Ludovico Slongo, Fiat CR.32 Aces of the Spanish Civil War (Osprey, Aircraft of the Aces 94).
• Chris Dunning, Courage Alone: The Italian Air Force 1940–1943 (Hikoki Publications).
• Jonathan W. Thompson, Italian Civil and Military Aircraft 1930–1945 (Aero Publishers).