Dowding had the future in mind. He knew that the German Luftwaffe was expanding and that Adolf Hitler’s ambition would probably lead to an armed conflict between Britain and Germany. His farsightedness would pay off eight years later, in 1940, when he was chief of RAF Fighter Command.

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Because of his aircraft’s elliptical wings, Mitchell was able to fit four Browning .303 caliber machine guns into each wing without increasing drag or radically altering the design. With that armament, along with the RollsRoyce Merlin engine and the other features he had designed, Mitchell knew that his fighter would be a match for any aircraft the Luftwaffe might produce. Now all he had to do was convince the Air Ministry.

Mitchell’s fighter first took to the air on March 5, 1936. It had been given a name-the Spitfire-by Vickers and made official by the Air Ministry. (Mitchell himself did not like the name very much; he called it ‘a bloody silly name.’) This Spitfire was flown by J. ‘Mutt’ Summers, chief test pilot for Vickers and Supermarine, out of the Eastleigh airport in Hampshire. It was unarmed and fitted with a fixed-pitch wooden propeller. After landing from his test flight, Summers told his ground crew, ‘I don’t want anything touched.’ Although some alterations would be made, he realized from just one flight that the Spitfire was an outstanding fighter.

Following some persuasive arguments from Air Vice Marshal Dowding, the Air Ministry agreed with Summers’ assessment. With a maximum speed of 342 mph, the plane was classed as the fastest military aircraft in the world. Less than three months after Summers’ test flight, on June 3, 1936, a contract was placed with Supermarine for 300 Spitfires. Six hundred more were ordered the next year. By the time Britain went to war with Germany on September 3, 1939, the war that Air Vice Marshal Dowding had foreseen, 2,160 Spitfires were on order for the RAF.

But R.J. Mitchell never lived to see the success of his creation. In 1937, at the age of 42, he died of cancer.

Although the Spitfire was the product of one man’s imagination, the Hawker Hurricane did not owe its origins to any single individual. It was the result of an evolutionary process that began with the fabric-covered biplanes of World War I. Revolutionary for its time-it was the RAF’s first monoplane fighter and its first fighter to exceed 300 mph-the Hurricane was still a wood-and-fabric airplane. It was once referred to as ‘a halfway house between the old biplanes and the new Spitfires.’ Sidney Camm, Hawker Aircraft’s chief designer, was the leading force behind the Hurricane’s development. In the early 1930s, when the Air Ministry began looking to replace its biplanes with a more modem fighter, Camm already had a design for what he called his Fury monoplane, a modification of the graceful and highly maneuverable Fury biplane. The Fury was the direct descendant of Sopwith’s Pup, Triplane, Camel, Dolphin and Snipe-fighters of World War I. Hawker Aircraft Ltd. had begun its life as Sopwith Ltd.

Apart from the fact that the Hurricane was a monoplane, its major differences from the Fury were its power plant and armament. The Fury was powered by the Rolls-Royce Kestrel, which gave it a maximum speed of 184 mph. But the Kestrel was much too small for the Hurricane. When Camm heard about RollsRoyce’s PV-12 engine, the Merlin, he modified his new monoplane to accommodate it.

The original armament of the new Hawker monoplane consisted of two .303-caliber Vickers Mark V machine guns mounted in the fuselage, and two .303-caliber Browning machine guns in the wings. But when Dowding decided that eight guns would be needed to destroy an enemy bomber, Camm changed his design. Just as Mitchell had done with his Spitfire, Camm incorporated eight Browning machine guns in his new fighter, four in each wing. But while Mitchell spaced the guns across the wing’s leading edge, Camm grouped four guns together on each wing; this made for a tighter and more destructive concentration of fire.

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