Free With Wings Like Eagles by Michael Korda

sent painters down from Derby to sand down the prototype, apply numerous coats of blue-gray lacquer, and polish it until it shone like a mirror—or like one of their cars. By July it had demonstrated, in a service trial flight at RAF Martlesham Heath, that it could take off in 235 yards, climb to 25,000 feet in just under eleven minutes, and fly at 350 miles per hour; that it had a ceiling of 30,000 feet; and, most important of all, that it was “simple and easy to fly and has no vices.” Even before that test flight the Air Ministry had ordered 310 aircraft at a total price of £1.395 million (about £4,500 each), excluding guns, radios, instruments, and all other “service equipment,” the largest order ever given for an airplane in Britain to that date. 7 The first production Spitfires reached RAF squadrons in 1938, a year after Mitchell’s death from colon cancer at the age of forty-two, * so he never saw the vital role his aircraft would play in Britain’s survival in 1940, but it would not have surprised him.
    It had first flown in 1936, the year Hitler reoccupied the Rhineland; and it began to reach service squadrons in 1938, the year of Munich. In the air, at least, the governments of Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain were better prepared than they have been given credit for—or than the Germans believed at the time.
     
     
    Perhaps even stranger was the fact that unlike the Germans, the British spread their bets, and built two very different fighters instead of just one. At the same time as the Spitfire was being developed, one of Mitchell’s rivals as an aircraft designer, Sydney Camm of Hawker Aircraft, was designing the Hawker Hurricane. In 1933 Camm, a forceful and energetic man, had tried and failed to interest the Air Ministry in building a high-speed monoplane fighter to replace the aging Hawker Fury biplane he had designed. 8 Objections had been raised regarding the weight, cost, and practicality of the Hurricane, but Hawker decided to continue the project as a private venture, and by 1935 the Air Ministry was sufficiently alarmed by the rapid growth of the German aviation industry to place an order with Hawker for a prototype. The Hurricane was easier to build than the Spitfire—Camm used the existing Fury as the starting point for his fighter, with fabric for some of the surface (which also made it quicker and easier for ground crews skilled in the use of fabric, dope, and glue to repair, and reduced the cost), and it would eventually be powered by the same Rolls-Royce Merlin engine as the Spitfire. Camm developed a thick, sturdy wing, in which there was no difficulty finding room for four machine guns and an undercarriage that retracted inward, toward the fuselage, rather than outward, thus giving the Hurricane a notably wide, stable track, unlike the Spitfire, with its dangerously narrow track. (Another benefit of Camm’s robust wing design was that the Hurricane would later adapt easily to carrying four twenty-millimeter cannon and even two forty-millimeter cannon in its role as a “tankbuster” in the Western Desert of North Africa, and to carrying bombs under its wings as a Hurribomber. It could also be flown off carrier decks or fitted with skis for operating in Norway.) The Hurricane took its first flight in 1935, a year before the Spitfire, and it proved to be so easy to fly that when the Hawker test pilot, P. W. S. Bulman, who wore a snappy fedora hat for the flight, stepped out of the cockpit afterward, he turned to Camm and said, “It’s a piece of cake—I could even teach you to fly her in half an hour, Sydney.” 9
    By 1937, production Hurricanes were reaching RAF squadrons in quantity. Camm would always regret not having designed a thinner wing, but no pilot ever complained about that—the Hurricane could absorb enormous punishment and still get you home in one piece; and although it was slower than the Spitfire and had a lower ceiling, its thick wings and the grouping