A Summer Bright and Terrible by David E. Fisher Page A

Eight firms competed, and the winner was
another biplane.
    Vickers, the parent company of Supermarine, let
Mitchell continue his work. Two years later, his newest design was labelled the
Type 300 and Mitchell was diagnosed with cancer. He had an operation that, like
most cancer treatments those days, was ineffective. On a trip to the Continent
to recover from the operation, if not from the cancer, he visited Germany. The
usual story is that he saw a demonstration of Willy Messerschmitt’s new,
single-winged Bf 109 fighter and realized that it totally outclassed the
biplane the RAF had just ordered. The story isn’t true, as the 109 wasn’t built
till 1935, but he did see the exuberant, warlike spirit of the Nazis. He was
both impressed and terrified by it, and so he came home to ignore his rapidly
growing cancer, to refuse all further treatment, and to work without rest on
what would become the Spitfire.
    By 1935, Dowding had managed to convince the
Air Ministry that the old biplanes were an anachronism. He persuaded the
ministry to issue a new specification calling for a single-winged airplane with
enclosed cockpit and speed enough to catch the modern monoplane bombers. A
primary objection the old guard had was that the biplanes’ wings were braced
together with wire, which gave them the strength to withstand the violent manoeuvring
of a dogfight, and obviously a single wing couldn’t be braced with a second
wing that doesn’t exist. But new construction techniques and materials were
able to provide a greatly strengthened wing, one that was more than acceptable.
As an added bonus, the new single wing was actually strong enough to handle the
recoil of machine guns, which could thus be placed on the wing, well outside
the propeller’s arc, and could therefore fire continuously. The provision was
made to give the new fighter four of these guns instead of the two that the
biplanes had been able to accommodate.
    The head of the operational requirement’s
section of the Air Ministry, a Squadron Leader named Ralph Sorley, computed
that at the high speeds of both the new fighters and the bombers, a pilot would
be lucky to hold the target in his sights for one or two seconds. And with such
a short burst, even from four guns, the new all-metal bombers couldn’t be
brought down. He suggested eight guns, “causing great controversy” in the
ministry, some of whose members had been fighter pilots in the Great War only
twenty years previously. The standard equipment they had had, two guns firing
through the propeller, continually jammed, so the breech had to be accessible
to the pilot, who carried a hammer with which to bang on it. This usually
worked, but if it didn’t, the pilot had to take the gun apart, clear the jam,
and reassemble it—all in the middle of a dogfight!
    The former pilots couldn’t realize how far the
technology had advanced in so few years. By 1935 the RAF had the Browning .303,
which was less prone to jam, while at the same time the new monoplane designs
had wings strong enough to hold eight such weapons. This arrangement is what
Sorley suggested, with Dowding’s backing. But Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, then
the Commander in Chief of Air Defence, agreed with the ongoing consensus of the
establishment that “eight guns was going a bit far . . . the opinion of most
people in Fighting Area is that the guns must still be placed in the cockpit.”
He also argued that the cockpit must not be enclosed, for when the pilots
banged on the jammed guns, they’d need plenty of room to swing their hammers.
    The old guard also pointed out that the weight
of eight guns would be too much for a single-engine plane to handle, especially
with the bomb-load it was expected to carry, since all fighters were expected
to serve also as ground support for the infantry. Dowding argued that what was
needed was a pure fighter; it was time to stop insisting on double duty. It was
a tough fight, but Dowding won out. A new