Montagu Curzon

A dream to fly

Undeniably the Hawker Hurricane has suffered the fate of the less pretty sister.

Undeniably the Hawker Hurricane has suffered the fate of the less pretty sister. It is the Spitfire, at once beautiful and deadly, that is forever the star of 1940, firmly lodged in the British military pantheon, beside the longbow and HMS Victory, and the Hurricane is in the shadow. Yet it did more of the work, in greater numbers, and with more victories in the Battles of France and Britain. It too was loved and admired.

Leo McKinstry, after his definitive books on the Spitfire and the Lancaster, sets out to repair this reputational injustice. His subtitle, ‘Victor of the Battle of Britain’, states the claim clearly. Hurricanes made up 63 per cent of Fighter Command’s strength in the Battle and were responsible for 61 per cent of Luftwaffe losses: ‘Without it the thin blue line of defenders would have been too thin to hold.’

Hawker produced 14,533 Hurricanes up to July 1944. Its designer, the great Sidney Camm, regretted that it had been so rushed into production in the late 1930s (by the prescient Secretary for Air, Lord Swinton, no appeaser) that its development potential was limited — by fabric covering and simple construction. But it arrived in numbers just in time.

McKinstry uses the best witnesses — the pilots — to make his case, who were somewhat miffed by the glorification of the Spitfire. (Some German pilots even protested to their Hurricane victors that they had been shot down by Spitfires, as if this made them feel better). ‘She was a dream to fly, she really was’: this was the general opinion. For Peter Townsend, it was ‘our faithful charger and we felt supremely sure of it’. And they were partisan: ‘As a general purpose aircraft [it] would beat the pants off the Spit.’

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