The Fairey Battle: A Reassessment of its RAF Career Read online

  As it turned out, the Battle’s first foray into the tactical arena did not last long. The Czech problem was settled at Munich by giving Hitler the Czech Sudetenland, the Battle squadrons did not go to France, and the idea of using the Battle tactically soon faded—for the time being at least. However, the idea of trimming down the Battle was not shelved. Ludlow-Hewitt believed that the Sudetenland crisis, and the reality of actually using the Battle to bomb the Ruhr, had at least exposed how absurd the idea was. He still planned to use the Battle for strategic bombing, but only against much closer targets. Ludlow-Hewitt insisted 100 miles was the maximum that Battles could be expected to penetrate, which ruled out the Ruhr as a target if Belgium and the Netherlands were neutral.

  The idea of using the Battle tactically might have been shelved, but since it would be flying shorter range strategic missions, Ludlow-Hewitt believed the plane could still do without some of its equipment. There was less need for an autopilot and the plane did not need its auxiliary fuselage fuel tank—even with the higher fuel consumption flying at low level required, the Battle could still reach targets 135 miles away from bases in France. Ludlow-Hewitt had never liked the fuselage tank; it was a barrier between the pilot and the rest of his crew and, he insisted, an unnecessary fire hazard. In January 1939, he recommended its removal.31

  Three months later, a surprisingly detailed reply reached Ludlow-Hewitt from the Deputy Chief of Air Staff, Air Vice-Marshal Peirse. The Air Staff did not want to reduce any plane’s radius of action until the experience of war had proven it necessary, Peirse explained. Ludlow-Hewitt might be right about the 100-mile maximum penetration, but there might be circumstances where risks would have to be taken and Battles would have to fly further. As far as the safety aspect was concerned, Peirse had done his homework. The fuel in the fuselage tank would always be used first so it was only a fire hazard if the plane crashed soon after it had taken off. Peirse had looked at accidents involving Battles, and discovered that eight had crashed soon after take-off and none of them had caught fire. Removing the tank might still be justified if the extra weight reduced the performance of the plane, but he had been assured it did not. Finally, crews would be far more likely to push home their attacks if they were confident they had a substantial fuel reserve should they encounter any bad weather.32

  By the time the reply arrived, Ludlow-Hewitt understood why the Air Staff were so keen to ensure the Battle kept its full fuel capacity. As soon as memories of the 1938 crisis began to fade, and there was no immediate prospect of actually ordering Battle aircrews to bomb the Ruhr in broad daylight, the Air Ministry seemed to forget how absurd the scheme was. The Air Ministry Plans department was now being run by Group Captain Slessor, who was soon proposing attacks on electricity and coking plants in the Ruhr which involved low-flying Battles.33 Ludlow-Hewitt was horrified at the prospect of sending Blenheims, never mind Battles, on such missions. Navigation at these low levels would be extremely difficult and he doubted the hedge-hopping Battles would even be able to find their targets. He was certain they would ‘suffer losses out of all proportion to results they would achieve’.34 However, Slessor was adamant that Bomber Command was too reliant on the Battle to not use it. Now that there was a more solid alliance with the French, airfields in France would be available, which would at least eliminate the North Sea crossing. ‘Only the experience of war can say if losses will be too high’, Ludlow-Hewitt was told.35 To reach the Ruhr at low level, the Battle needed the fuselage tank, so it stayed for the time being.36 An irritated Ludlow-Hewitt made sure that Air Vice-Marshal Playfair, the commander of the Battle-equipped No. 1 Group, knew that he was free to remove the tanks as soon as he got to France.37 Plans to remove the autopilot were also put on hold: a decision in principle to remove it had apparently been taken, but for the time being the equipment stayed. The Air Staff were determined to make sure the Battle was ready to play a full part in their strategic bombing plans.

  Far from being phased out, more Battles were soon on order. The Air Staff finally made up their minds about whether to use the Stockport plant to build Battles or Spitfires. For Newall, it was a real dilemma: he had a choice between ordering bombers that he believed were obsolete, or producing too many fighters. The former was considered the lesser of two evils and, in December 1938, Fairey were told to build 200 more Battles. Newall did not even particularly want them, and hoped that the French might be persuaded to buy some.38 It was perhaps one of the more remarkable achievements of the Fairey Battle that, on this occasion at least, it was preferred to the Spitfire. Ironically, when Dowding was trying to form fighter squadrons in the autumn of 1939, some had to be equipped with Fairey Battles as makeshift alternatives for training because there were no available Hurricanes or Spitfires.

  There was now at least some effort to give the Battle a better chance of surviving fighter attack. The emphasis was on protecting the crew rather than the plane. The plan was to armour the pilot’s seat, lay a sheet along the fuselage floor to protect the bomb aimer, and protect the gunner with a plate in the rear fuselage and a shield attached to his gun. In total, the armour amounted to 85 lb. There would be no armour for the vulnerable radiator system the Merlin engine relied on. There were, however, plans to make the fuel tanks self-sealing. During the First World War, with no parachutes to fall back on, fire had always been the pilots’ greatest fear: if the fuel leaking from a punctured fuel tank caught fire, the crew were doomed. Towards the end of the war, tanks began to be coated with a material that reacted with leaking petrol to seal bullet holes. By 1918, these had become a standard requirement for future equipment, but the idea was forgotten in the years that followed. In peacetime, the need for these precautions was not so obvious. The Sudetenland crisis focused minds, and the Air Ministry hurriedly arranged to acquire self-sealing systems used by the French Air Force.

  The problem for the Air Staff was that armour and self-sealing tanks could only be installed at the expense of range or bomb load, neither of which they wanted to sacrifice. They therefore decided to wait and see if they really would be needed before weighing down the bombers unnecessarily. The sets of armour were manufactured, but they were not installed, nor was there any hurry about fitting the Battle with self-sealing tanks.39 There was no harm in thoroughly testing the French sealing systems before they were used on RAF fuel tanks. The longer a final decision was delayed, the better.

  Even with armour and self-sealing tanks, it seemed unlikely the Battle could survive the 150-mile penetration required to reach the Ruhr. Ludlow-Hewitt’s idea of using them tactically still seemed a far better option and a change in government policy made the idea even more sensible. In the spring of March 1939, the government accepted that Britain could not support France solely with air power; a substantial army would be required as well. Talks immediately started with the French about how the RAF should support Anglo-French ground forces. The French believed that the initial German offensive would be the critical battle, just as it had been in 1914 and, if the Anglo-French forces could survive the initial onslaught, the two countries would have time to mobilise their immense resources. The French had no doubts that air power would have a key role to play in halting the initial German attack.

  This meant using bombers to attack targets much closer to the front than the Air Staff envisaged or thought sensible; their preferred strategy was to cut off German arms supply at source by bombing industry. The RAF had contingency plans for attacking lines of communication closer to the front but it was very much a second-best option. If they were targeted, it should be as far in the rear as possible. There were perfectly sound reasons for this: it was more efficient to strike roads and railway lines at junctions where they converged, rather than where they led from these nodal points to the front. However, the Air Staff would often stretch the logic to the extreme, so that the bombers were striking the targets that they really wanted to attack. Bombing the Ruhr was often justified because it was the ultimate communications nodal point. T
he British Army and French wanted air support to be as close to the front as possible so that it could influence the course of the battle, which meant bombing targets in and around the battlefield. This was a type of target the Air Staff did not even have a contingency plan for. The Air Staff might stretch a point to include enemy columns approaching the battlefield but attacking any target that Army artillery could hit was seen as a misuse of air power.

  As the Army began to assume a more significant role in British strategy, the differing Air Ministry and War Office attitudes to tactical air support became a more controversial issue. To the Air Staff, it seemed pointless knocking out individual tanks when they could destroy the tank factory. The War Office would claim that even the destruction of a tank factory could not alter the course of a battle in progress. The War Office were not against strategic bombing in principle; they were quite happy for the Air Force to knock out tank factories, provided it did not deny the Army the support it might need at a critical stage of a land battle. The Air Ministry view was less flexible. They believed that it was always wrong to use bombers on the battlefield. There was an unbridgeable gulf between the two services. The Air Staff could not understand that, for the Army, the aeroplane was just another way of moving a weapon from one point to another. Like all weapon carriers, it had its advantages and disadvantages, but it was an option that was as essential to the Army as artillery or tanks. The Fairey Battle found itself right at the heart of this Army/Air Force controversy because the Air Staff still wanted to use it for strategic bombing, while others thought it could only be used for tactical air support.

  Strategic bombing is a very different proposition to attacking tactical targets, especially if the targets are on the battlefield. Bombers flying at a medium altitude might be able to hit a factory, but they cannot be expected to hit gun positions or vehicles. There were two ways of improving accuracy—planes either had to attack from a very low level, or they had to dive-bomb the target. Neither method was intrinsically tactical. The Air Staff saw both as ways of attacking strategic targets more accurately and the Fairey Battle was supposed to be capable of both. The original Battle specification required a dive-bombing capability and the Air Staff planned to use the plane in low-level strikes on the Ruhr.

  Dive-bombing is a very broad term. All bombers can bomb while diving to some extent and even shallow dives can improve accuracy. For maximum accuracy, a plane needs to dive vertically so that the target is stationary relative to the plane. Diving vertically, however, means a very rapid increase in speed, which can soon take the plane beyond the stress its structure can absorb. For steep dive-bombing, air brakes are needed to slow down the acceleration. The Junkers Ju 87 was one of the few dive-bombers that could actually manage a 90-degree vertical dive. Less steep dives could still produce some impressive results: in 1937, Hawker Hinds, diving at around 70 degrees, had managed an average error of just 41 yards. Even with 50-degree dives, average accuracy was around 70 yards. The consensus within the Air Ministry was that anything less than 45 degrees did not produce any worthwhile improvement. The Battle’s hydraulically lowered bomb racks enabled the plane to release bombs at an angle of 80 degrees, but the plane had no air brakes and was only stressed to dive at 60 degrees.40

  Even dive-bombing had to take place from relatively low altitudes to be successful. In trials in 1938, Battles dive-bombing from high altitude on average missed targets by 100 yards. Better results were achieved from much lower; the method of attack eventually adopted was to dive from 5,000 feet and drop bombs at around 2,000 feet. Similar tactics would eventually become standard for RAF fighter-bombers in the Second World War. There were considerable differences of opinion within the Air Ministry about how vulnerable dive-bombers would be. Some argued the plane would be almost immune to anti-aircraft fire because it would be changing altitude so rapidly. Others thought modern predictor sights would be more than capable of coping and it might be so risky, it would only be possible when there was no fighter opposition and only light anti-aircraft defences.41 Whatever the risks, dive-bombing was an important element of Battle pilot training.

  Even low-level dive-bombing was unlikely to be accurate enough to hit a target as small as a tank or a gun position. To hit very small targets, the only option was to fly very low and the Air Staff were very aware that this was very dangerous. Many considered low-level attack more suicidal than dive-bombing, so dangerous it might only be possible if there were no anti-aircraft defences. There was an element of inconsistency about the Air Staff attitude. They constantly used the vulnerability of low-flying aircraft as an argument for not using RAF planes over the battlefield. However, they were quite happy to plan low-level attacks on strategic targets, where the bombers would be likely to encounter organised anti-aircraft defences and face the added obstacle of barrage balloon cables. Arguably, strategic low-level missions were far more dangerous. Experience in the First World War had tended to suggest that the closer to the front line planes operated, the less the danger. Contact patrols and other low-level missions over the trenches suffered surprisingly few losses, mainly because troops in forward positions had too many other dangers to worry about to devote much effort to dealing with aircraft flying above them. The heavy losses sometimes suffered tended to be against targets in the rear of the tactical zone, where anti-aircraft defences were better organised.42 The same would prove to be true in the Second World War.43

  At low-level even the bombs carried posed a problem for the attacking plane. The Air Ministry did not believe 20 and 40-lb bombs could be dropped from lower than 450 feet without the explosions damaging the plane. The Battle was only designed to carry 250-lb bombs and these could not be dropped safely from altitudes lower than 1,000 feet. For bombing below this altitude, there had to be a delayed fuse to enable the planes to make their escape before the bombs exploded. This tended to negate the advantage of flying so low: even if dropped accurately, the bombs were likely to bounce clear of the target before detonating.44

  In the First World War, low-flying fighter-bombers had relied on small 20-lb bombs and machine gun fire. On and around the battlefield, strafing was considered at least as important as any bombs dropped. This would prove to be true in the Second World War as well, especially as cannon became available. The Air Staff had not forgotten this lesson, and inter-war specifications for army cooperation planes required extra fixed guns specifically for ground strafing. The Lysander had two; its successor was to have four. The Air Staff knew these were vital for low-level ground attack.

  Many of the advantages of flying low are also disadvantages. Pilots can use the surrounding terrain to provide some cover, which might enable an attack to be delivered before the enemy has time to react. However, any favourable terrain that conceals the approach of the plane also makes it more difficult for the pilot to see the target. Planes need to be manoeuvrable if the pilot is to negotiate his way round any obstacles. Smaller, more agile planes also make more difficult targets for the defending anti-aircraft guns. Armour helps provide more protection but inevitably reduces manoeuvrability; the correct balance of these has been a contentious issue throughout the history of low-level ground attack. The debate at the end of the First World War was whether the heavily armoured Salamander or the manoeuvrable un-armoured Camel, or indeed something in-between, was best. Significantly, there had been a debate; the problems posed by low-level air support were not new to the Air Ministry.45

  For low-level strategic bombing, the Battle, Blenheim, and even the Hampden were considered to be sufficiently manoeuvrable. Of the latest bombers, only the Wellington was considered too unwieldy. When it became clear the RAF would be called upon to support Allied forces on the ground, trials were organised to see which British bombers were best suited for the role. These trials showed that even the Blenheim, the lightest of the twin-engined bombers, lacked the manoeuvrability to pick out small targets, and only the Battle was manoeuvrable enough. Indeed, the trials suggested that the plane ought to do well
in the low-level attack role.46

  The Battle, however, was scarcely ideal. It was relatively large for a ground-attack plane, certainly much larger than it needed to be. Attacking targets that were a few miles behind the front line did not need a plane capable of carrying fuel for 1,000-mile round trips. It was not even the best plane available for ground attack—Fairey’s own much smaller P.4/34 light bomber was faster and more manoeuvrable, but this never went into production. The parallel Hawker P.4/34 Henley had gone into production and might also have made a better ground-attack plane; however, plans to use it as a bomber had already been abandoned and the plane was being built as a target tug for training schools. Both the Fairey and Hawker P.4/34 designs were arguably closer to what was required. They were certainly a closer approximation to the fast, agile single-seater fighter, which had proven so successful in the First World War and would do so again in the Second World War.

  Interestingly, there were also trials to see how suitable single-seater fighters might be. Many were convinced that modern monoplane fighters would be far too fast and not manoeuvrable enough to pick out small targets at low level, but the trials disproved this theory. Mechanised columns, troops debussing, refuelling points, and troops that were about to enter the battle were all considered suitable targets for ground strafing fighters. The Air Staff, however, insisted that fighters had to be used for their primary role of establishing air superiority. On the face of it, this seemed a reasonable policy, although of course there was nothing to stop the Air Ministry building more fighters specifically for ground attack. Fighters were cheaper and easier to build than bombers, even single-engined bombers like the Battle. In truth, the Air Staff did not believe fighters had much of a role to play in any capacity and wanted to build as few as possible. Only bombers were candidates for low-level ground attack and of the bombers in squadron service, the Battle was the best available. To be effective, though, it needed the ground strafing capability fighters possessed.47