The unsung plane that REALLY won the Battle of Britain: The Hawker Hurricane gets its rightful place in history
 

By Leo Mckinstry for MailOnline
 July 10, 2010

 

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The scene is still one of the most evocative in this island's history: dashing young pilots in their fighter planes, defying the odds as they speed across blue summer skies towards the intruder above southern England.

A German aircraft goes into an uncontrollable spin, smoke pouring from its bullet-riddled engine as it plunges to earth.
 

At an RAF station on the ground, the mellifluous voice of Vera Lynn wafts from a nearby wireless. From the House of Commons chamber, Winston Churchill's whisky-soaked growl rouses a nation to resistance at its moment of darkest peril.

Seventy years on, the Battle of Britain continues to have such resonance because the campaign so magnificently fused an epic quality with a moral purpose.

It represented the classic fight between good and evil; between freedom and tyranny.
 

It was the ancient myth of St George slaying the Dragon made real. The Arthurian legend translated into the modern world, with the Knights of the Round Table cast as the selfless-RAF pilots and the sword of Excalibur as the fighter force.

Yet, for all this heroic glory, a sad injustice hangs over the battle.

For the summer of 1940 will always be associated with the Supermarine Spitfire, the single-engined RAF plane which became the most potent symbol of Britain's fight against German subjugation. The very name Spitfire is now synonymous with victory in the air.

But this is a travesty of what really happened in the crucial months of 1940.
 

For the RAF aircraft which actually won the Battle of Britain was an older, larger, slower but still deadly fighter, the Hawker Hurricane.

Without the Hurricane, the RAF would have probably lost the Battle of Britain, because there were simply not enough Spitfires emerging from the aircraft factories and into the squadrons.

In the national struggle for survival, the Hurricane dominated the front line.
 

When Churchill made his famous tribute to the men of the RAF in August 1940, telling Parliament that 'never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few', it was the Hurricane units that deserved the lion's share of the Prime Minister's accolade.

On the eve of the Battle of Britain in early July 1940, Fighter Command's operational force throughout the United Kingdom was made up of 29 squadrons of Hurricanes and 19 of Spitfires, proportions that were to remain the same throughout the coming months.
 

The overall distribution between the two fighters was largely reflected in German losses. According to the Air Ministry's own figures, for every two Luftwaffe planes brought down by the Spitfires, three were shot down by Hurricanes.

'It was the aircraft for the right season. It came at a time when it literally saved the country and it performed magnificently,' said Eric 'Winkle' Brown, the renowned test pilot.

Despite tributes such as this, the Hurricane never received the credit it deserved.
 

A graphic indicator of this indifference could be seen in the mass flypast over London in September 1945, held to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the Battle of Britain.
 

Astonishingly, not a single Hurricane was included in the RAF's formation.

Even during the war, the plane's record was ignored, its achievements belittled.
 

After the defeat of the Luftwaffe, the air industry magazine Flight commented in September 1940 that in comparison to the Spitfire, the Hurricane was 'equally remarkable in its own particular way', but had received 'far less than its due attention from a somewhat fickle public'.

This was partly a result of wartime propaganda, as the Government exploited the image of the Spitfire to boost morale.
 

Tellingly, the official campaign of 1940 to raise money for aircraft production was called 'the Spitfire Fund'.

When a group of citizens in North London tried to set up a 'Hurricane Fund', they encountered only widespread indifference and even ignorance about the plane.
 

Further lustre was added to the Spitfire's reputation by newsreels, articles and films such as The First Of The Few, the 1942 biopic in which Leslie Howard played the part of the plane's designer, Reginald Mitchell.

Nor can it be denied that the Spitfire, with its intrinsic elegance, had greater aesthetic appeal than the more solid Hurricane, which had much thicker wings.
 

Moreover, the Spitfire was a faster plane, enjoying a superiority of 30mph in level flight and 70mph in a dive.

It exuded sleek modernity, while the heavier Hurricane evoked the past, not least in the structure of its airframe which owed its origins to the Hawker biplanes of the late 1920s.
 

Throughout its life, in contrast to the all-metal Spitfire, the Hurricane's fuselage was built partly of wood and fabric.

So strong was the bias against the Hurricane that a form of Spitfire snobbery arose during the Battle of Britain, where victories by the Hawker planes were falsely attributed to the more glamorous Spitfire fighters.

Hurricane pilot Tom Neil of 249 Squadron recalled going to a cinema in Leeds to see a newsreel report of an encounter in which one of his sections had shot down a Junkers Ju88 bomber over the Yorkshire coast.
 

'The British Movietone News commentator credited the Spitfire with shooting down the German aircraft, producing whoops of disbelief and annoyance,' he said.

The Spitfire snobbery even extended to German airmen, some of whom seemed to regard the idea of being shot down by a Hurricane as an insult to their honour.

One Hurricane pilot, Eric Seabourne, ended up in a hospital in Portsmouth after he had been badly injured in a dogfight. In the bed next to him was a German pilot.

'He had been shot down by a Hurricane, which he thought much below his dignity. If it had been a Spitfire, it would have been OK - but not a Hurricane,' recalled Seabourne.

This complacent, dismissive judgment was one of the prime reasons that the Germans lost the Battle of Britain, for they badly underestimated the fighting qualities of the Hawker plane.

The Hurricane might not have been as fast or as beautiful as the Spitfire, but it had a host of other virtues.

It was highly manoeuvrable, with a turning circle even tighter than that of a Spitfire. Because of its traditional method of construction, it was easy for factories to produce in large quantities, a vital factor in early 1940 when the Spitfires were still in short supply.

Just as importantly, its airframe made it straightforward to repair. No fewer than 60 per cent of all Hurricanes that crashed on British soil ended up back in service with squadrons.

With a wide undercarriage, lack of vices and intrinsic strength, the Hurricane was the ideal fighter for raw recruits, a priceless asset during the Battle of Britain when the demand from the operational squadrons for new pilots was so high.

The plane's structure also made the plane astonishingly resilient in combat. The Hawker could absorb phenomenal amounts of punishment, with enemy bullets often passing right through the fuselage.

Ben Bowring, of 111, believed that the Hurricane 'would keep flying almost after it was destroyed'. On one occasion he was able to land after his wings had been all but wrecked in combat.

'That aircraft's a bloody miracle,' he said after jumping out.

In addition, the Hurricane's thick wings, each of which contained four Browning machine guns, also provided a unique stability when attacking the enemy.

The famous legless pilot Douglas Bader, who flew Hurricanes in the Battle of Britain, regarded the fighter as 'a marvellous gun platform.
 

The sloping nose gave you a splendid view forward and the plane remained rock steady when you fired', whereas on the Spitfire, 'the recoil effect was noticeable'.
 

And Sir Hugh Dowding, who masterminded the 1940 victory as head of Fighter Command, had no doubt about the importance of the Hurricane: 'It was a jolly good machine, a rugged type, stronger than the Spitfire.'

Remarkably, given this fine record, the Hurricane was a plane that the British Government neither ordered nor even wanted when Hawker's chief designer, Sydney Camm, first came up with the proposal for a new high-speed monoplane in March 1934.

In an era of slow biplanes, Camm's design represented a major technical-advance, but the Air Ministry was not interested because it had already commissioned a prototype of the Spitfire.

'It is regretted that, at the present time, the Department is unable to give active encouragement to the scheme proposed,' wrote the Ministry to Camm, a statement showing classic bureaucratic lack of prescience.

But Camm, who combined a ferocious-sense of determination with a volcanic temper, was not a man to give up easily, largely as a result of his tough upbringing.

The eldest of 12 children born to a working- class carpenter from Windsor, he had developed his passion for aeronautics while still a schoolboy.

At the outbreak of World War I, when he was just 21, he went to work for one of Britain's pioneering-aircraft manufacturers, Martin and Handasyde - where he soon showed a precocious talent for design - before going on to join Hawker.

During an amazingly fruitful career, he designed 52 types of aircraft and presided over the manufacture of 26,000 planes - including the Harrier jump jet, the world's first successful vertical take-off and landing fighter.
 

But the Hurricane-remained his most significant achievement.

Undaunted by the Air Ministry's rejection in early 1934, Camm pressed on with his monoplane project as a private venture, modifying the design to make it even more effective.

His persistence paid off, helped by development problems that were plaguing the rival Spitfire.
 

Once the Hurricane had made a successful first flight on November 6, 1935 - five months ahead of the Spitfire's first trip - the Air Ministry relented and placed an order for 600.

The first operational Hurricanes went into service with 111 Squadron in December 1937, just as the drumbeat of war was echoing across Europe.

Compared with lightly armed biplane fighters that barely reached 200mph, the new 300mph Hurricanes were a revelation for their air crews.

On the eve of conflict, the Hurricane invigorated the RAF.
 

As the Battle of Britain ace Group Captain Peter Townsend, later the love of Princess Margaret, wrote: 'We were at one with ourselves and our machines.

'It was the Hurricane, really, which gave us such immense confidence, with its mighty engine, the powerful battery of eight guns and its feel of swift, robust strength.'
 

And such optimism proved to be well-founded. The Hurricane was the only RAF fighter to see action in every major theatre, from the start of the war to its finish.

It fought heroically in the doomed Battle of France, over Dunkirk, in the Balkans, in the North African Desert, and even in the war against the Japanese over the Burmese jungle, during which campaign it was occasionally used to drop the lethal petro-chemical gel napalm on the enemy.

More than 2,000 Hurricanes fought with the Soviet air force, while some specially adapted Hurricanes, known as Hurricats, were catapulted from merchant ships to defend the Atlantic convoys from aerial attack.

Altogether, 14,533 Hurricanes were built, the last in August 1944.

But, as with the nation, the Battle of Britain represented the Hurricane's finest hour. Without this fighter, the RAF's defences would have been too overstretched to survive.

Contrary to German mythmaking, the Hurricane proved a mortal foe to the Luftwaffe, on some estimates shooting down more than 1,000 German planes.

Bleeding to death, the Nazi forces continued to misjudge both the power and numbers of Fighter Command.

After September 15, 1940, the day which was subsequently designated Battle of Britain Day because it represented the final defeat of the Luftwaffe, one German airman, Hans Zonderlind, wrote of how his confidence turned to dismay while conducting a raid.

'We saw the Hurricanes coming towards us and it seemed the whole RAF was here,' he said.

After the war, the German general Gerd von Runstedt confessed that the Battle of Britain had been the turning point in the conflict.
 

He said: 'That was the first time we realised we could be beaten and we were beaten and we didn't like it.'

*

Too readily sidelined or forgotten, the Hurricane is owed a huge debt for saving Britain, and indeed the world, in the triumphant months of 1940.

 

By Leo Mckinstry for MailOnline
 July 10, 2018

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• Hurricane: Victor Of The Battle Of Britain by Leo McKinstry is published by John Murray at £20. To order a copy for £17.99 (p&p free), call 0845 155 0720