Gloster Gladiator

The Gloster SS.37 first flew in September 1934, and by the standards of biplane fighters it was a thoroughly modern machine: four guns instead of the traditional two, and an enclosed cockpit, the first on an RAF fighter. Deliveries began in July 1936 and the first squadrons were operational in early 1937.

It was also obsolete, and the Air Ministry knew it when it signed the order. The Hurricane had flown in November 1935 and the Spitfire in March 1936 — monoplanes carrying eight guns and a hundred miles an hour more. The Gladiator was bought because it was available now and the monoplanes were not, which is a perfectly sound reason and the one that governed most of what happened to it afterwards. It fought its war as a stopgap that kept being needed.

On 24 April 1940 the Gladiators of 263 Squadron flew off HMS Glorious and landed on the frozen surface of Lake Lesjaskogsvatnet in central Norway. There was no airfield; there was a lake, and the ice was the runway. The squadron had arrived without most of its ground crew, its spares or its fuel bowsers.

The Luftwaffe found them the next morning. He 111s attacked shortly after daybreak on 25 April, and went on attacking. By the end of 26 April the squadron had destroyed two Heinkels and had no aeroplanes left: every Gladiator was destroyed on the ice or damaged beyond the squadron’s ability to repair it. 263 was ordered home before the month was out, re-equipped, and went back to Norway in May. On 8 June 1940 its aircraft and most of its pilots went down in the North Sea with HMS Glorious, caught and sunk by Scharnhorst and Gneisenau.

The most famous thing the Gladiator ever did is the thing most often told wrongly. The story is that three of them — Faith, Hope and Charity — defended Malta alone against the Regia Aeronautica in the summer of 1940. The aircraft were real, the defence was real, and the arithmetic is not.

Six Sea Gladiators were assembled from crated spares at Kalafrana during April and May 1940, left behind by the Fleet Air Arm. Of those six, about three could be made serviceable and put in the air at any one time — which is where the number in the legend comes from, and it describes a maintenance state rather than a total. As for the names, they were not used by the pilots who flew the aircraft in June 1940: the earliest documented appearance in print is in the Times of Malta on 25 October 1941, sixteen months after the fighting it commemorates. Who coined them is still argued over — the University of Malta has published a paper setting out five competing explanations.

In Greece and the Western Desert the Gladiator found the one enemy it could meet on equal terms: the Italian Fiat CR.42, a biplane of the same generation and much the same performance. The dogfights over Albania in the winter of 1940–41 were the last time two biplane fighter forces fought each other as a matter of routine.

It was there that Marmaduke “Pat” Pattle of 80 Squadron built the score that makes him, by most reckonings, the highest-scoring pilot the British Commonwealth produced in the war. He is credited with 15 victories on the Gladiator — more than any other pilot on the type — and about 35 more on Hurricanes, for a total usually given as at least 50. The figure can never be settled: the RAF’s records in Greece were destroyed in the collapse of April 1941, and Pattle was killed over Athens on the 20th of that month.

Of the 747 Gladiators built, 216 were exported, and the customer list is a map of the small states of the late 1930s: Belgium, China, Egypt, Finland, Greece, Iraq, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Portugal, South Africa, Sweden and the Free French. Several of those countries used them against invasions that overran them within weeks.

The Swedish aircraft, designated J 8A, produced the type’s strangest campaign: a volunteer flight took Gladiators to Finland for the Winter War of 1939–40, flying against the Soviet air force from frozen lakes in temperatures that froze the guns. Norway’s own Gladiators fought over Oslo on the morning of the German invasion, 9 April 1940, and were gone by lunchtime.

The Fleet Air Arm took its own version. The Sea Gladiator added an arrester hook, catapult spools and a dinghy stowed between the undercarriage legs, and served aboard Courageous, Eagle and Glorious from 1939. It was the Royal Navy’s last biplane fighter and, briefly, its only modern one.

The type’s naval career is also the reason for Malta. The Sea Gladiators that made the island’s defence were not sent there as a fighter force: they were crated spares belonging to the Fleet Air Arm, sitting at Kalafrana because Glorious had left them behind. The most celebrated fighter defence in British popular memory was mounted with somebody else’s reserve stock.

Judged as a fighter of 1940 the Gladiator is indefensible: 414 km/h against a Bf 109E’s 570, four rifle-calibre guns against eight, and a second wing whose drag no amount of skill could talk away. Every squadron that had it wanted Hurricanes, and every squadron that got them stopped talking about the Gladiator.

What it had was agility and availability, and in the places where the war reached before the monoplanes did — a lake in Norway, a Maltese airfield, the mountains of Albania — availability was the quality that counted. The RAF’s last biplane fighter shot down its last enemy aircraft in 1941, five years after the Spitfire first flew.

• Alex Crawford, Gloster Gladiator (Mushroom Model Publications).
• Andrew Thomas, Gloster Gladiator Aces (Osprey, Aircraft of the Aces).
• Christopher Shores, Brian Cull & Nicola Malizia, Malta: The Hurricane Years 1940–41 (Grub Street).
• E. C. R. Baker, Ace of Aces: M. T. St J. Pattle — for the Greek campaign and the lost claim records.
• John Vasco & others, University of Malta OAR: “Five explanations as to who named Malta’s Gloster Gladiators Faith, Hope and Charity”.