"The Man Who Saved Great Britain"

CCLXXXIV

Sir Reginald Joseph Mitchell (1895 – 1937)

“The Man Who Saved Great Britain” was a reluctant apprentice at Kerr, Stuart & Company, a locomotive works in Stoke-on-Trent, England. When, at the end of his first day, he was asked by his father how he liked working a man’s job, “R.J.” as he was always known, admitted he didn’t much like it. In true Edwardian fashion his father rebuked him with the words, “You’ll do it. And you’ll like it.” 

R.J. really didn’t like it, but he kept on at it. A fastidious boy, he disliked the grime, coal soot, the heat of the furnaces, and the rough language on the factory floor, but (fortunately for him and for the world) his apprenticeship allowed him to work a stint in each department of the company. When he reached the Drafting and Engineering Department, he found his métier. 

Looking over drawings and blueprints and looking at suggested designs for new locomotives he suddenly saw the beauty in the rough work he’d been doing up until then. The bosses were ecstatic. Few of the apprentices had the head for design, but R.J. excelled at it --- so much so that they paid for night school so he could learn engineering and mathematics. R.J. would later call this period "the most important five years of my life."

A 1930 Kerr, Stuart Class “E” locomotive

But R.J. still disliked the messiness of the locomotive works, so when he finished his apprenticeship and night school both he decided to try his hand at something that seemed more aesthetic. There was a job down in Southampton at a small one-time boatbuilder’s named Supermarine.

Supermarine, despite its name, was much too small to be competitive, so in 1913 its owners decided to switch from boats to aircraft. The onset of World War I the next year made aircraft design a much more lucrative area, and several Supermarine designs, including military flying boats, were submitted to the Royal Flying Corps (RFC), the precursor to the Royal Air Force (RAF).

The Supermarine Nighthawk of 1917. Designed to be a Zeppelin-killer, this quatrefoil aircraft proved to be too slow and not nimble enough by half for its intended purpose. Only this prototype was built

The day R.J. interviewed with Supermarine in 1919 he was hired. He never even went home to Stoke to get his things. They were shipped to him by his parents. He would stay with Supermarine for the rest of his life. 

A few months after being hired R.J. was promoted to Chief Designer. The year after that he was asked to join the Board of Directors as Technical Director. 

His hiring coincided with the company’s decision to compete for the Schneider Trophy, awarded specifically to flying boats.  It wasn’t an auspicious beginning. The Supermarine entry, a “Sea Lion” seaplane, sank during the event.

The ill-fated Sea Lion of 1919

As it transpired, none of Supermarine’s Schneider Cup entries won until 1927.

The Schneider Trophy

Supermarine limped along through the early Twenties, making just enough profit to operate in the black. The company was known for its flying boats which were very good, but sales were depressed because Supermarine just couldn’t seem to win first prize. The Schneider Trophy would have made Supermarine's reputation. The British military ordered seaplanes and flying boats from Supermarine from time to time, but never enough to lift the company out of the doldrums.

Then in 1925, R.J. designed a flying boat which Supermarine called the “Southampton.” It proved to be an enormously popular model. Nascent airlines in the British Empire bought them up in good numbers, a few private sales were made, and the RAF ordered about a dozen-and-a-half. It was the first truly successful Supermarine design, and it allowed the company to expand.

The Supermarine Southampton. 83 were built. One (in a museum) survives

With a crew of two or five (two pilots and three gunners in the military version) the Southampton was 49 feet 8½ inches long, had a wingspan of 75 feet even, weighed 9,697 pounds empty and 15,200 pounds loaded, and had two Napier Lion 500 horsepower engines. Its top speed was 95 miles per hour, and its service ceiling was 5,950 feet, an altitude it could reach in an astoundingly slow 29 minutes and 42 seconds. Offsetting its lack of power was the capacity to fly for nearly seven hours while carrying 12 passengers, impressive numbers in 1925.

The Supermarine S-5 of 1927 was built like a winged mechanical pencil suffering from elephantiasis of the pontoons, but this elegant yet ungainly creation (R.J.’s) ran away with the Schneider Cup. S-5s flown by different entrants came in first and second. The S-6 was even more seemingly out of proportion but it set a new world speed record of 407.5 miles per hour. R.J. was knighted (CBE) for his contributions to British aeronautics in 1931

The cash infusion brought about by the Southampton allowed Supermarine to keep racing. This may seem a frippery, but in the interwar years with countries disarming, flying races were often the only venues where new and radical designs could be tested out.  

R.J. continued to design flying boats. The Walrus, Scapa, and Stanraer were all military planes, and the Stanraer served as the RAF’s go-to search-and-rescue craft during World War II

In 1933 Hitler came to power in Germany and Great Britain began moving toward an apotheosis of appeasement in continental Europe, but Winston Churchill (of all people) convinced the cranky fuds at the Air Ministry to consider upgrading the RAF, which was still flying World War I –era biplanes. 

R.J. saw this as a challenge, and decided to produce a prototype fighter aircraft based on the cantilevered wing and monocoque fuselage pioneered by Boeing in America. He began working on an all-metal monoplane which he called the “224” but the company christened the “Spitfire.” R.J. hated the name. 

The Air Ministry waited with bated breath for R.J.’s new design. After all, the man had earned a knighthood designing airplanes.

The original Spitfire: The Type 224 had fixed landing gear and a revolutionary gull-wing design later copied in the Chance-Vought Corsair, but nobody liked it --- not the Air Ministry, not the pilot, not even R.J. Mitchell who designed it

Nothing about the 224 seemed quite right. For one thing, the RAF had asked for a metal biplane. The Air Ministry was wedded to the idea that cantilevered wings were prone to fall off, and insisted on struts. It wanted a rugged “bomber killer” made the old-fashioned way, not the new-fangled “Colonial” way. Conventional wisdom was that “the bombers always get through” and the new plane had to be able to knock them down. Since “fighters” weren’t truly “fighters” in the Air Ministry’s collective mind, maneuverability was of secondary concern. Essentially, the Air Ministry saw aerial combat as a head to head battle where the fighters functioned as a red line in the sky that the bombers couldn’t cross. 

When Supermarine presented the 224 to the Air Ministry, the government was underwhelmed. The new plane was nothing like what they had asked for. It also had trouble reaching its rated top speed. They rejected it out of hand, settling instead for the Gloster Gladiator, a biplane. 

The Gloster Gladiator did see combat action in World War II, especially in some out-of-the-way places like Norway in 1940 and Iraq in 1941. Glosters fought in the Battle of Britain in 1940, as well. The last Gloster combat patrol took place in 1943. Afterward, the plane was used for non-combat tasks. Despite being hopelessly obsolescent, there were a handful of Gloster aces by war’s end

R.J. was frustrated. He knew he had a wonderful plane in the 224. The basic idea was right. So he literally went back to the drawing board, and within a few months had produced the 300. 

The 300 was as much a racing plane as a warplane. Sleek curvilinear lines gave the plane a lower drag coefficient than the 224, and he faired the cockpit canopy into the fuselage. The 300 had fully retractable landing gear and a variable pitch propeller. To provide punch, he loaded each wing with four fifty caliber machine guns. He also asked Henry Royce to work with him on adapting the incredibly high-powered Merlin automobile engine for the plane. Remarkably, he gave the plane a semi-elliptical wing whose widened chord provided greater lift and smoothed the airflow over the wing surfaces. It also gave the plane an unmistakable profile.

One of the most beloved and beautiful aircraft ever built, the famous Spitfire, which went into production in 1938, went through 40 “Marks” (iterations) in its long and illustrious career

The prototype was paid for entirely by Supermarine, with Rolls-Royce throwing in the engine for cost. The British government, having not asked for the plane, paid nothing toward its development.

R.J. knew he was working against the clock. Intimately familiar with aeronautical design he knew that Hitler’s new Luftwaffe was turning out state-of-the-art aircraft with which the Gloster Gladiators simply wouldn’t be able to contend in the event of a war, and it was becoming more clear by the day that there would be a war. He knew Britain needed a high-powered, highly flexible, and heavily armed air weapon for both defense and offense. 

He also knew he was dying. The colorectal cancer that would claim him was first diagnosed in 1934. After a radical colorectomy, he seemed to be fine, but the cancer recurred with a vengeance in late 1935. He wanted the 300 adopted by the RAF before he died. 

The Air Ministry men who came to see the revised (really “reinvented”) Spitfire were underimpressed despite the improvements. One or two men complained that “the plane was really more of a racer.” Someone else demanded an open cockpit since the pilots needed to crane their necks around to see enemy planes on their six (the Spitfire had rear-view mirrors). Another complaint was that the Spitfire went so fast that it would bypass incoming German bombers. R.J. was astounded. Did the Air Ministry think that Hitler was sending over an air fleet of canvas-covered strut-and-wire Gothas from the last war? Apparently, some of them did.

Once again, it was Winston Churchill who obtained the Spitfire for the RAF. Watching film footage of the plane in flight he realized that what R.J. had delivered was a plane that was nothing less than revolutionary. He forced approval of the plane. 

R.J. gave a sigh of relief, and turned his attention to the Type 316 / 317 Heavy Bomber. It had the same elliptical wing as the Spitfire but obversed. In most respects it matched or exceeded the specifications of Boeing’s vaunted B-17 Flying Fortresses.

The Supermarine b.12/36 (type 316 / 317) Heavy Bomber. This was the last plane R.J. Mitchell designed and it promised to be on a par with the Spitfire 300. Unfortunately, the blueprints, plans, mock-ups, and prototype fuselages were all destroyed in a German bombing raid in 1939. With the pace of things in wartime nobody could be troubled to reconstruct R.J.’s work, and so the history of this aircraft is relegated to The-What-Might-Have-Beens

R.J. Mitchell died in 1937. He was a young man, only 42, and it’s possible his greatest aircraft designs died with him. But he had done his life’s work well. The Spitfire would prove to be just as crucial to Great Britain’s defense in the summer of 1940 as R.J. could have imagined. He was truly the first among equals of the “so few” to whom “so many” owed “so much.”