Hawker Hurricane

The Hurricane was designed by Sydney Camm at Hawker as a monoplane successor to the company’s Fury biplane fighters. First flown on 6 November 1935 and entering RAF service in December 1937, it was the first British monoplane fighter, the first with a retractable undercarriage, and the first capable of exceeding 300 mph in level flight.

Powered by the new Rolls-Royce Merlin and armed with an unprecedented eight 0.303 in (7.7 mm) Browning machine guns, it gave Fighter Command a modern eight-gun interceptor in quantity years before the more advanced Spitfire was available in numbers. By September 1939 the RAF had far more Hurricanes than Spitfires in front-line service.

The Hurricane used a deliberately conservative hybrid structure: a Warren-truss framework of steel and duralumin tubing, with the rear fuselage and (early) the wings covered in doped fabric. This made it simpler and cheaper to build than the all-metal, stressed-skin Spitfire, and crucially fast and easy to repair in the field — battle damage to the fabric could often be patched overnight.

The same construction gave it a benign side-effect in combat: cannon shells frequently passed straight through the fabric-covered rear fuselage without detonating. Its thick wing made it a steady gun platform and a tighter turner than the Bf 109, though it cost speed: the Mk I managed about 520–547 km/h, clearly slower than both the Spitfire and the 109.

The Merlin gave strong performance up to medium altitudes: the Mk IIC with the 1,185 hp Merlin XX reached roughly 547 km/h (340 mph), a service ceiling near 11,000 m and a range around 965 km.

In the summer of 1940 the Hurricane equipped the majority of RAF Fighter Command’s squadrons — around 60% of the fighters engaged. Doctrine increasingly paired the two types: the faster, higher-flying Spitfires drew off the German fighter escort while the more numerous and steadier Hurricanes were vectored onto the bomber formations.

The result was decisive. Hurricanes are credited with destroying more enemy aircraft during the battle than all other British defences combined, and the type — not the more celebrated Spitfire — did the bulk of the fighting that turned back the Luftwaffe in the first great air battle of the war.

The Hurricane proved endlessly adaptable. Its armament grew from the original eight 0.303 in guns to twelve in the Mk IIB, and then to a hard-hitting four 20 mm Hispano cannon in the Mk IIC. The Mk IID slung two 40 mm anti-tank guns under the wings for ground attack, and “Hurribomber” versions took bombs and, later, rockets into the assault role as the pure fighter was retired from front-line interception.

It was built on a scale no earlier British fighter had reached — about 14,487 of all marks, including some 1,400 assembled by Canadian Car & Foundry in Ontario, whose chief engineer Elsie MacGill, the world’s first woman aircraft designer, became celebrated as the “Queen of the Hurricanes”. Navalised Sea Hurricanes flew from carrier decks and, most desperately, from catapult-armed merchant ships as expendable convoy defenders — the “Hurricat”, whose pilot had to ditch in the sea once his single sortie was flown.

Long after it had been outclassed as a front-line interceptor at home, the Hurricane went on fighting across the world. It held the line through the worst of the siege of Malta before the Spitfires arrived, and it was the RAF’s workhorse in the Western Desert, where the 40 mm “tank-buster” Mk IIDs of No. 6 Squadron earned the nickname “the Flying Can-Openers” for prising open German armour and transport.

In the Far East it met the Japanese over Singapore, Burma and India — outturned by the nimble Zero but rugged, well-armed and available, holding on where more delicate fighters could not be kept flying. Wherever the RAF fought, in almost every theatre of the war, the Hurricane was there.

One of the Hurricane’s least-told chapters was also one of its most remarkable: it was the first Western fighter to fight on the Eastern Front. In September 1941, within weeks of the German invasion, the Hurricanes of No. 151 Wing RAF flew off the carrier HMS Argus and operated from Vaenga, near Murmansk, covering the northern convoy route and teaching their tactics to Soviet pilots before handing the aircraft over to them.

What followed was a flood. Nearly 3,000 Hurricanes were shipped to the Soviet Union under Lend-Lease — more than any other British type — and they served the Red Air Force from the Arctic to the southern steppe through the grimmest years of the war. Obsolescent though it was by 1942, the Hurricane was one of the aircraft that helped the Soviet air force survive its catastrophe and claw its way back.

The Hurricane is the great unsung fighter of the war — outshone in glamour and top speed by the Spitfire, yet the aircraft that actually shouldered most of the burden in 1940 and went on to fight, in ever-changing forms, on every front to the end of the war.

Rugged, forgiving, easy to build and easy to repair, it was a triumph of pragmatic engineering: a machine designed to be produced in numbers, absorb punishment and keep flying. If the Spitfire won the headlines, the Hurricane won much of the fighting.

• Francis K. Mason, The Hawker Hurricane — the standard reference.
• Leo McKinstry, Hurricane: Victor of the Battle of Britain (John Murray, 2010).
• Peter Jacobs, Hawker Hurricane (The Crowood Press).
• Tony Holmes, Hurricane Aces 1939–40 (Osprey, Aircraft of the Aces).