Hawker Typhoon

The Typhoon was designed to be the next great British fighter and very nearly killed the men who flew it instead. In 1937 Sydney Camm, the Hawker designer behind the Hurricane, began work on a heavy interceptor built around the new generation of 2,000 hp engines, to the Air Ministry’s F.18/37 specification. Two designs were drawn up around two different power units: the Rolls-Royce Vulture-engined Tornado and the Napier Sabre-engined Typhoon.

The Tornado died when the troubled Vulture was cancelled, leaving the Typhoon to carry the whole programme. Its prototype first flew on 24 February 1940, but the Battle of Britain intervened: Hawker’s lines were needed for Hurricanes, and development slowed to a crawl. When the Typhoon finally reached No. 56 Squadron in September 1941, it arrived as a big, heavy, and dangerously immature aircraft — nearly seven tonnes, with a thick wing and a temperamental engine that no amount of urgency could yet tame.

At the Typhoon’s heart was the Napier Sabre, one of the most complex aero-engines of the war: a 24-cylinder “H” block with sleeve valves, giving between ~2,180 and 2,260 hp — enormous power for 1941, and enormously unreliable. Early Sabres were almost impossible to start in cold weather, threw connecting rods, and failed so often that squadrons were sometimes grounded for want of a serviceable engine. The aircraft that was meant to master the skies could barely be kept in them.

Worse, the Typhoon failed at the very job it was built for. Its thick wing, so useful later, robbed it of performance in thin air, and above about 6,000 m it was outclassed as an interceptor. To add insult, carbon-monoxide fumes from the engine leaked into the cockpit, forcing pilots to breathe oxygen from the moment they started up. By early 1942 the Typhoon was so troubled that the Air Ministry seriously considered cancelling it outright.

Then Typhoons began to lose their tails. In a series of fatal accidents the rear fuselage failed in high-speed dives and the entire tail unit broke away, and it took months of investigation to trace the cause to elevator mass-balance flutter weakening the joint behind the cockpit. Reinforcing “fishplates” were riveted around the rear fuselage of every aircraft as a stopgap, but the type had already gained a grim reputation among its own pilots before the fix took hold.

The Typhoon had a second, man-made enemy: its own side. Head-on, its deep “chin” radiator and blunt nose gave it a silhouette that jumpy Allied gunners repeatedly mistook for the radial-engined Fw 190, and Typhoons were shot down by friendly flak and fighters. The RAF’s answer — bold black-and-white identification stripes painted under the wings — was a direct forerunner of the D-Day “invasion stripes” that every Allied aircraft would wear in 1944.

Salvation came from an unexpected quarter. Through 1942 the Luftwaffe was mounting fast, low “tip-and-run” raids with bomb-carrying Fw 190s that streaked in below British radar to strike coastal towns and slip away before the defenders could climb to meet them. Almost the only RAF fighter fast enough down on the deck to catch them was the Typhoon, which was blisteringly quick at low level — around 663 km/h (412 mph) — exactly where its high-altitude weakness did not matter.

Standing patrols of Typhoons began to run down the raiders over the Channel, and for the first time the aircraft had a job it could do better than anything else in the RAF. That success bought the programme its life, and it pointed to the future: if the Typhoon was a poor interceptor but a superb low-level machine, then its destiny lay not in the high blue but on the ground beneath it.

Rearmed, the Typhoon became a devastating strike aircraft. Its four 20 mm Hispano cannon could tear apart trains, trucks and barges; then came bombs — first two of 500 lb, later two of 1,000 lb — earning the fighter-bomber the nickname “Bombphoon.” From the autumn of 1943 it carried the weapon that made its legend: eight RP-3 “60 lb” three-inch rockets, four under each wing.

A full salvo of rockets was often described as delivering the broadside of a destroyer, and the sight of a Typhoon tipping into its dive with rockets slung beneath the wings became one of the iconic images of the Allied advance. The rockets were hard to aim accurately, but against a stationary target — a tank, a locomotive, a strongpoint — a hit was catastrophic, and the mere threat of them could empty a road of vehicles in seconds.

By D-Day the Typhoon was the backbone of the RAF’s 2nd Tactical Air Force, and in Normandy it perfected close air support. Under the “cab rank” system, squadrons circled over the battlefield waiting to be called down by ground controllers in Visual Control Posts riding with the forward troops, who directed them onto targets sometimes only a few hundred metres ahead of friendly lines. German commanders learned to dread daylight movement. During the destruction of the Falaise Pocket in August 1944, Typhoons fell on the trapped columns hour after hour — everything from Panther and Tiger tanks to horse-drawn wagons — choking the roads with burning wreckage.

The legend outran the arithmetic. Post-battle Operational Research surveys of the wreckage found that rocket accuracy against a tank-sized target was only around 4%, and that far fewer German tanks had actually been destroyed from the air than the pilots claimed — most armour at Falaise was abandoned or knocked out on the ground. What the Typhoons truly wrecked was the enemy’s transport, fuel and nerve: they made movement by day almost suicidal and forced the German army to crawl. It came at a price — flak was murderous at low level, and Typhoon squadrons suffered some of the heaviest loss rates in 2nd TAF.

Around 3,317 Typhoons were built, the great majority by the Gloster Aircraft Company while Hawker turned to its refined successor, the Tempest, which married the Sabre to a thin laminar-flow wing and became one of the best fighters of the war. The Typhoon itself was withdrawn with unusual haste once the fighting stopped, its reputation as a difficult and dangerous machine outliving its triumphs.

It survives almost only in memory: of the thousands built, just one complete example remains, MN235, preserved in the RAF Museum. Yet no Allied aircraft was more feared by the German soldier in the West. The Typhoon is the story of a failure turned into a war-winner — an interceptor that could not intercept, remade into the tank-buster that ruled the roads of Normandy.

• Chris Thomas & Christopher Shores, The Typhoon and Tempest Story (Arms & Armour, 1988).
• Chris Thomas, Typhoon Wings of 2nd TAF 1943–45 (Osprey).
• Christopher Shores & Chris Thomas, 2nd Tactical Air Force (Classic Publications).