An alternative Battle of Britain -- I

by Cliopatria

[Cross-posted at Airminded.]

This is the front cover of a book by J. M. Spaight on British airpower, called The Sky's the Limit. It was published in 1940, a not-insignificant year for the RAF. In fact, this 'New and up-to-date' edition was published in August, right in the middle of the Battle of Britain. (The first edition was published prior to the fall of France, judging from the number of references to the Armée de l'Air, now in the past tense.) It's a familar image -- the young fighter pilots sitting in their Spitfires on a glorious summer's day, standing by for the word from Ops to hurl themselves into the sky to repel the hordes of Nazi invaders. In fact, it's almost iconic. But hang on -- something's not quite right here. Take a closer look at the aeroplane in the background:

The Sky's the Limit

It's got a turret on it! That's no Spitfire. It's not even a Hurricane. It is, in fact, a Defiant (from 264 Squadron, judging from the markings). The Defiant was an oddity -- unlike most fighters, it had no fixed, forward-firing guns, but instead had four machine-guns in a power turret. The idea was that they would fly alongside or below a bomber and pour fire into it. A 1938 Air Staff memorandum explains:

The speed of modern bombers is so great that it is only worthwhile to attack them under conditions which allow no relative motion between the fighter and its target. The fixed-gun fighter with with guns firing ahead can only realise these conditions by attacking the bomber from dead astern. The duties of a fighter engaged in 'air superiority' fighting will be the destruction of opposing fighters ... For these purposes, it requires an armament that can be used defensively as well as offensively in order to enable it to penetrate into enemy territory and withdraw at will. The fixed-gun fighter cannot do this.¹

But because of the extra weight of the turret and the gunner, and because the shape of the turret impaired streamlining, it was slower and less maneuverable than its more conventional counterparts, which turned out to be a fatal flaw.

Defiants did take part in the Battle, but in very small numbers -- two squadrons only. They can hardly be considered emblematic of Fighter Command as a whole. So how did they come to grace the cover of The Sky's the Limit? The answer is to be found in Spaight's account of the last days of the air campaign in France. He describes the Defiant's combat debut:

On 29th May [1940] our fighters destroyed at least seventy-seven German aircraft and seriously damaged a number of others. Of the seventy-seven no less than thirty-eight were brought down by a squadron of twelve Defiants without loss to themselves. The success of this new two-seat fighter, equipped with a gun-turret, was the outstanding feature of a wonderful day ... sixteen of their thirty-eight victims were Me 110's, the others being an Me 109 and twenty-one bombers. It was almost a battue. No single squadron had ever had such a day's hunting, nor had the total bag for the day ever been surpassed.²

This is a well-known story. The Defiants had an initial advantage, because of their resemblance to Spitfires, so German pilots thought they were safe attacking from the rear, which of course was exactly the wrong thing to do. But once this was realised, Defiants were terribly vulnerable: 141 Squadron lost 7 aircraft and 12 men in the space of half an hour, after being bounced by Me 109s on 19 July. They had to be rescued by a squadron of Hurricanes. Spaight obviously hadn't heard of this, and was still lauding the Defiant as a powerful new air superiority fighter. He clearly expected it to play a important role in the Battle of Britain then raging over his head. Instead it was soon relegated to night fighter duties, where it did it fact do good work during the Blitz.

As a final example of Spaight's promotion of the Defiant, here's a glamour shot from his book:

'DEFIANTS ON THE WING. The Boulton-Paul Defiant Fighter is a two-seater monoplane with a Rolls-Royce Merlin engine and a multiple gun-turret amidships. It is the fastest plane of its class in service and the only land fighter in the world with a revolving turret. (Official photograph.)'³

So the Battle of Britain Spaight expected was different to the one that was actually unfolding as he wrote. And that's just for the British side of things -- his thoughts on the German aircraft were even more 'alternative'. I'll discuss them in the second part of the post.

Quoted in Stephen Bungay, The Most Dangerous Enemy: A History of the Battle of Britain (London: Aurum Press, 2001), 84.
J. M. Spaight, The Sky's the Limit (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1940), 122.
Ibid., facing 108.

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Brett Holman - 8/11/2006

Thanks, Andrew. I always find it interesting to see how intelligent, well-informed people can miss what seems obvious in hindsight -- it should be a warning to ourselves, when we are certain that we know what is going on and what is going to happen!

Brett Holman - 8/11/2006

I guess the issue with the guns was weight -- the more guns, gunners and ammo a bomber has, the fewer bombs it
can carry (or the less fuel). So again, if a turret is considered better than fixed guns, putting them on a fighter might make some sense. The other approach was to have bombers converted into gunships -- the USAAF tried this with B-17s: no bombs, but extra guns and ammo (the YB-40). They turned out to be too heavy and too slow, and couldn't keep pace with the formation they were escorting once it had dropped its bombs.

Brett Holman - 8/11/2006

Perhaps there was some of that -- not stemming from boyhood fantasies of course, but there was this idea that a power turret was definitely superior to fixed guns. It makes sense, superficially -- you can point turret guns where you like instead of having to point the aircraft at the target. But on a bomber, their field of fire is constrained (harder to put a turret below, for example). So a turret on a more nimble fighter was the best of both worlds, and could really do serious damage to the enemy, keeping the guns trained on it while it vainly ducked and weaved ... Seemed like a good idea at the time, anyway!

And yes, I agree -- one of the things I like about Sky Captain is the way it captured the visual tone of images and movies from ca. 1940. (Don't try telling that to Esther, though -- to her it's that "ACCURSED FILUM"!)

Andrew D. Todd - 8/7/2006

Here is a reading note of a book written on the very eve of Pearl Harbor, by one of the very great writers on strategic studies.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Bernard Brodie, Sea Power in the Machine Age, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1941

This is a history of the rise of the modern battleship, ironically written in the very hour of its demise. While written in the first days of the second world war, it treats the first world war as the climax of technological development, and the events of 1939 to spring, 1941 as merely more of the same.

The sailing ship was restricted by the wind. Most importantly, it could not sail directly upwind. The "high ground" of naval combat was the "weather gauge," upwind from the enemy. Equally to the point, the sailing ship was subject to the variability of the wind. Apart from calm weather, the wind might shift, and the hunter become the hunted. But at the same time a sailing ship could go for indefinite distances under wind power. Before the battle of Trafalgar in 1805, Nelson had chased Villaneuve to the West Indies and back. The French navy, while inferior in naval strength, had been able in 1798 to evade British surveillance and put an army in Ireland.

Steam power made naval power far more certain, but also far more local. The steamship could go in any direction in any weather, but it was also tied to its supply of coal, and to the complex repair facilities dictated by its machinery. Global power required a global network of bases, and an empire to go with them. Paradoxically, the steam navy was a navy which was most threatening while in port.

Steam power, and its concomitants, iron construction and large turret-mounted guns, had been billed as a naval revolution, capable of overthrowing the global dominance of the British navy. However, the industrial requirements of a steam navy merely resulted in the dominant industrial power-- Britain-- becoming the dominant naval power of the steam age.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, a new innovation appeared-- the submarine. Submarines offered the promise of using stealth to bypass the battleship. However, soon after the submarine appeared, so did submarine detection gear, as well as the use of airplanes to locate submarines. In may 1941, Brodie had heard rumors of ASDIC (sonar) and had it confused with radar, all of which were still secret, but he still had a basic idea of what the equipment did.

Brodie minimizes the effect of aircraft, treating the aircraft carrier as a battleship by other means. That is, the carrier's airplanes perform the same function as a battleship's guns, only at a greater range, and with a lower rate of fire.

Writing when he did, Brodie missed the one most striking characteristic of the aircraft carrier-- the near impossibility of designing it in a compartmentalized fashion. This fact, of course, contributed mightily to the decisive character of the battle of Midway in 1942.

Kurt Niehaus - 8/4/2006

Also interesting is the quantity of guns in the aircraft. I think the Spitfire had 8 and the Defiant 4. Most defensive positions on bombers had one and a few had two. (although the B17 had a total around 12)
This reminds me of the early B-17, before the ball turret. I've heard the belly gun was aimed through a periscope, making it almost impossible to shoot anything down. From what I've read, it seems that not a single claim was ever put in by an airman using it.

Oscar Chamberlain - 8/3/2006

My first thought concerning these pictures is how much the cinematographer for "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" owed not simply to the design of the planes but the hues of the illustrations of the times.

My second thought is about aerial gunnery and WWII. In the end it was the bombers that utilized side and rear guns to defend themselves.

When I was a kid I found something alluring about the sidegunners in a B 17. (Obviously I understood nothing about mortality} Probably it was the mano a mano sense that the movies gave of guys standing in a doorway fending off fighters. I wonder if there was a bit of that in Spaight's love of the Defiants?

Great pictures and stories. Thanks.