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.

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 more numerous Hurricane to break the Luftwaffe’s daylight offensive over southern England — the first time Germany had been stopped. Faster and higher-flying than the Hurricane, the Spitfire was the one RAF fighter that could meet the Messerschmitt Bf 109 on equal terms, and Fighter Command’s controllers, guided by radar, increasingly flung the Spitfires at the escorting fighters while the Hurricanes tore into the bombers.

Yet the aircraft’s fame outran the arithmetic. There were more Hurricanes in the battle, and they claimed more of the enemy; what the Spitfire won that summer was something less tangible and more lasting. It became, to a nation and its enemies alike, the very symbol of Britain’s defiance — the shape in the sky on which survival seemed to hang. Downed German aircrew were said to insist, to Hurricane pilots’ irritation, that it had been a Spitfire that got them. It is a status the aircraft has never lost, earned in those weeks above Kent and the Thames Estuary.

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 Supermarine Spitfire is the single most celebrated British aircraft of the Second World War, and one of the very few fighters to remain in front-line production from the first day of the conflict to the last. It equipped dozens of air forces, stayed in operational RAF service into the 1950s, and outlived almost every contemporary that had once outclassed it.

Beyond the statistics lies something harder to measure. Few machines have ever been so loved — by the public who watched it defend their skies, and by the pilots who found in it a fighter of rare balance and beauty, a thoroughbred that seemed to fly itself. R. J. Mitchell’s elliptical-winged design remains, three generations later, the enduring symbol of Britain’s war in the air.

• 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.