Supermarine Spitfire

The Spitfire grew out of the racing seaplanes that had won Britain the Schneider Trophy outright in the early 1930s. Its designer, R. J. Mitchell of Supermarine, had built those sleek floatplanes — culminating in the Supermarine S.6B, which pushed the world air-speed record beyond 400 mph (640 km/h) in 1931 — and he distilled their lessons into a land fighter built around the new Rolls-Royce Merlin engine and, above all, around a thin, elegant elliptical wing that gave the least possible drag while still housing guns, fuel and a retractable undercarriage.

The prototype, the Type 300, first flew from Eastleigh on 5 March 1936, and its test pilot knew at once that something exceptional was in his hands. Mitchell — already gravely ill with the cancer that would kill him in 1937 at just 42 — did not live to see his fighter go to war, nor even to see it named; he reportedly thought “Spitfire” a “bloody silly” choice. But he had bequeathed the RAF a design of rare aerodynamic purity, and one whose airframe would prove astonishingly adaptable, its engine power more than doubling across the war while the unmistakable shape barely changed.

The Spitfire’s defining quality was its capacity to grow. The early Merlin-engined Mk.I and Mk.II gave way to the ubiquitous Mk.V of 1941, but that autumn the fighter met its first true crisis: the Focke-Wulf Fw 190 outclassed it so completely over the Channel that the RAF was, for a time, losing the daylight battle. The answer came with extraordinary speed — the Mk.IX, a Mk.V airframe hastily mated to the two-stage supercharged Merlin 61, restored parity almost overnight in 1942 and became the most-produced mark of all.

One deficiency was not a matter of growth but of plumbing, and it cost lives before it was fixed. The Merlin drew its fuel through a float carburettor: push the nose down hard and negative g threw the fuel to the top of the float chamber, starving the engine for about 1.5 seconds. The Bf 109 and later the Fw 190 used direct fuel injection and had no such interruption, so a German pilot could escape simply by shoving the stick forward — a manoeuvre a Spitfire could not follow without its engine coughing. The answer came from Beatrice Shilling at the Royal Aircraft Establishment: a brass restrictor, a thimble-shaped washer with a calibrated hole, fitted in the fuel line ahead of the carburettor. She toured the fighter stations fitting them herself in early 1941, front-line units first, and by March 1941 the device was throughout Fighter Command. Officially the R.A.E. restrictor, the pilots called it Miss Shilling’s orifice. It was a stopgap and was understood as one: the problem was only properly cured by the Bendix pressure carburettor in 1943.

Later marks abandoned the Merlin for the larger, more powerful Rolls-Royce Griffon, nearly doubling the horsepower of the original design. The Griffon-engined Mk.XIV pushed the top speed beyond 700 km/h and climbed hard enough to run down the V-1 flying bombs launched at London in 1944. Armament grew in step, from eight rifle-calibre machine guns to a hard-hitting mix of 20 mm cannon and .50-calibre guns — keeping a 1936 design competitive right up to the dawn of the jet age.

The Spitfire’s legend was forged in a single summer. Through the Battle of Britain, from July to October 1940, it fought alongside the Hurricane to break the Luftwaffe’s daylight offensive over southern England. Fighter Command’s controllers, guided by radar, sent the faster, higher-flying Spitfires against the Bf 109 escorts wherever they could, and put the Hurricanes into the bombers — the aircraft actually dropping high explosive on British cities and airfields.

The aircraft’s fame has since eaten the arithmetic, and the arithmetic is not close. By September 1940 the Hurricane equipped 33 squadrons against the Spitfire’s 18, and of the 1,107 enemy aircraft Fighter Command credited destroyed in the battle, roughly 656 went to the Hurricane against 529 to the Spitfire. Saying the Spitfire won the Battle of Britain is not a small exaggeration; it hands to one aircraft a victory the other one did more of the work in. What the Spitfire won that summer was the symbolism — downed German aircrew were said to insist, to the irritation of Hurricane pilots, that it had been a Spitfire that got them.

The Spitfire’s war ranged far beyond that summer and across the whole globe. It defended Malta through the worst of its siege, flown off American and British carriers to an island under daily bombardment; it fought over the Western Desert, Sicily, Italy and Normandy; and it served as far afield as Burma and the defence of Darwin in northern Australia against Japanese raids. Some 1,300 Spitfires were even shipped to the Soviet Union, flying in Red Air Force markings from 1943.

In north-west Europe it took on tasks the pure interceptor had never been designed for: escorting the daylight bombers, sweeping ahead of the invasion fleets, and — clipped-winged and bomb-armed — strafing and dive-bombing the roads and railways of occupied France. Few Allied aircraft were present on so many fronts, in so many guises, for so long a stretch of the war.

More than twenty principal marks were produced, and the airframe was tailored endlessly to its task. The wing itself came in three forms — the standard ellipse, the clipped tips that sharpened the roll of low-altitude LF variants, and the long, pointed span of the high-altitude HF interceptors built to catch pressurised German raiders in the stratosphere. Engines, radiators, armament and even the rear fuselage were reworked from mark to mark, yet the essential shape — and the delight of flying it — survived every change.

The navy got its own version. The Seafire, fitted with an arrester hook and folding wings, flew from Royal Navy carriers from 1942, serving at Salerno, in the Mediterranean and finally against Japan in the Pacific. Across every variant some 20,351 Spitfires and a further ~2,600 Seafires were built — more than any other British aircraft of the war.

Some of the Spitfire’s most consequential work was done without guns at all. Stripped, polished and painted in high-altitude blue or camera-pink, photo-reconnaissance Spitfires traded armament for fuel and cameras, cruising where nothing could touch them; the Griffon-engined PR.XIX of 1944 operated above 12,000 m and was almost uninterceptable.

It was a PR Spitfire sortie over Peenemünde on 23 June 1943 that brought back the images in which analysts first identified the V-2 rocket lying on its trailer — intelligence that triggered the bombing of the site that August. From the Ruhr dams to Normandy’s beaches, virtually every major operation in Europe began with a Spitfire’s cameras.

The Spitfire is one of very few fighters to have remained in front-line production from the first day of the war to the last, and it stayed in operational RAF service into the 1950s. Its adaptability is the measurable part of the legend: engine power rose from 1,030 hp on the Mk.I to 2,050 hp on the Griffon marks, armament went from eight rifle-calibre machine guns to 20 mm cannon, and the wing was built in three separate planforms — standard, clipped and extended — for three different jobs, all without the shape ever becoming unrecognisable.

The affection is real and does not need inflating: test pilot Jeffrey Quill, who flew every mark, and the squadron pilots who converted onto it wrote about its balance in terms they used for no other aeroplane. 20,351 Spitfires and some 2,600 Seafires were built, more than any other British aircraft of the war; it served on every front the RAF fought on, from Malta and Darwin to the Soviet Union, which received about 1,300; and it flew the reconnaissance sortie over Peenemünde on 23 June 1943 that first identified a V-2 on its trailer.

• Edward Morgan & Edward Shacklady, Spitfire: The History (Key Publishing, 2000) — the definitive production history.
• Alfred Price, The Spitfire Story (Arms & Armour Press, 1982).
• Jeffrey Quill, Spitfire: A Test Pilot’s Story (John Murray, 1983) — by the man who first flew and developed her.
• Leo McKinstry, Spitfire: Portrait of a Legend (John Murray, 2007).
• Imperial War Museums — Supermarine Spitfire collections, Duxford & Lambeth.
• Stanley Hooker, Not Much of an Engineer (Airlife) — for the Merlin’s development and the R.A.E. restrictor.