Piloting a Spitfire in Combat

The Battle of Britain has always fascinated me. I met a Royal Air Force veteran, Kenneth F. Dewhurst, who flew with Squadron 234 based at Middle Wallop, in a London pub and wrote about the talk I had with him for The Cincinnati Enquirer. He was one of 451 RAF pilots who survived the 1940 ordeal. Of the 866 pilots participating, 415 lost their lives. (More on Dewhurst in a later filing.)

Michael Korda’s book, With Wings Like Eagles, prepares the reader for the details of the battle by providing mountains of useful information on all the factors and major participants including the aircraft, the Spitfire, the Hurricane and the German bf109. Here’s a sample:

“…in combat, a pilot had to yank on his control stick with all his strength if he wanted to survive, and stamp his heavy, thick-soled flying boots mercilessly on the rudder pedals with his full weight as if he were kicking somebody on the floor in a life-or-death barroom brawl. In any case, hands and feet were too cold and cramped for gentle movement. The temperature at 25,000 feet was thirty degrees below zero, and the cockpits of the fighters weren’t heated…

“Even so pilots sweated heavily as they manhandled their machines through violent maneuvers in the cold, bright sky five miles above the ground at 300 to 400 miles an hour, instruments and the horizon spinning crazily as they rolled, twisted, and dived; the sudden changes in g force making their limbs feel as light as a feather for one fraction of a second, and heavy as lead the next; the muscles of their neck aching fiercely from the need to keep looking behind for an enemy who might be transformed from a tiny, almost invisible dot in the sky—hardly more than a speck of dust on the transparent plastic of the cockpit canopy–at one moment to the blunt front profile of a BF 109 appearing suddenly and brutally at close range in the rear view mirror, gun flashes bright from its fuselage and wings and tracers arcing straight at you.”

The illustration displayed comes from Rolls-Royce. It is a photograph of a window at the Derby engine plant which memorializes the Battle of Britain pilots who “turned the work of our hands into the salvation of our Country.”