Its exactly 70 years since the first Spitfire took to the air. But the plane that won the war almost didn’t make it. Its remarkable designer was fighting a tragic personal battle -and time was running out.

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RACE FOR

THE SKIES

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Daily Mail

Saturday, March 4-2006

by

 Tony Rennell

FOR THE many men in her life, it was love at first sight. ‘I was captivated by her sheer beauty,’ declared one of her eminent lovers, a government minister.

‘She was slimly built with a beautifully proportioned body and graceful curves just where they should be. She was every young man’s dream.

‘Mind you, she was what mother called a fast girl. I was advised to approach her gently. But once safely embraced in her arms, I found myself reaching heights of delight I had never before experienced.

IT WAS NOT A WOMEN that Captain Harold Balfour Under-Secretary of State in the pre-war Ministry of Air, was drooling over back in the thirties [The Gathering Storm years] after his first meeting with HER. It was the British fighter plane that would change the course of history -the

Spitfire

But for all his passion, even he could not have predicted what a battle-winner she would prove to be. Not that she would come to be the very icon of British guts and defiance. Nor that decades later -into the 21^st century in fact-the sight of her flying over London on special anniversaries would bring tears to the eyes of grown men and women.

The promise of a Spitfire in the skies can still lure thousands to an Air Show, just for a glimpse of those elegant lines, the purr of that Rolls-Royce engine and all the history and glamour, death and glory, packed into her 31ft fuselage and 37ft wing-span.

TOMORROW

Sunday the 5^th March 2006 is another historic anniversary.

It is 70 years [In March 2018-it will be 82 years ] to the day since the very first

Spitfire

Prototype climbed into the skies at

Eastleigh in Hampshire

-half its fuselage covered in a dirty yellowish-green wash, the rest rough and unpainted.

Captain ‘Mutt’ Summers, the Test Pilot, took her up to 3,000 ft and had her back on the ground in 8 minutes later. But in that short time in the air, the prototype won him over.

“the handling qualities of this machine are remarkably good “,

he wrote in the Test-Flight Log.

Destiny awaited. Two days later, on March 7-1936, the troops of a resurgent Germany under Chancellor Adolf Hitler marched over the border to reclaim the Rhineland it had been forced to give up after losing the World War I.

The first steps had been taken towards the conflict for which, in every sense, the SPITFIRE was made.

It is difficult to overstate her impact on events. The Spitfire’s revolutionary design with its extra edge of speed and manoeuvrability stopped the German Messerschmitts in 1940 that until then had had no match in the skies over Europe.

But what these brave men -and many among the generations who had followed -never realised was that the Spitfire so nearly didn’t make it to the drawing board. In a desperate race against time, its brilliant creator Reg. Mitchell was fighting cancer as he put the finishing touches to his design for the aircraft.

He lived to see his creation make it into the skies -but died in 1937, two years before the outbreak of the war and never having seen the leanest, meanest fighting machine of its age in combat.

He was just 42 years old.

Reg Mitchell, or ‘R J’ as he was known is a name generally lost on all but air aficionados these days. So who was he?

A new book by his son, Gordon Mitchell, gives a glimpse into the life of this little-known engineering genius.

He was a son of a headmaster in Stoke and from his earliest days delighted in making things. He even built his own lathe. He left school at 16, became an apprentice in a railway engineering works and soon graduated to the drawing office.

Here his outstanding inventiveness quickly became apparent. Wanting to spread his wings, as it were, he applied for a job at the Supermarine Aviation in Southampton, a firm setting out in the infant business of seaplanes and flying boats.

RJ had stumbled on his life’s work and the outlet for his considerable talent.

He shot up the hierarchy until, just 25; he was Chief Designer and Chief Engineer with the job of creating the fastest seaplanes in the world.

 Time and again Mitchell’s planes were entered for the Schneider Trophy, an International Flying Contest over water. His success rate was remarkable as he learned how to streamline an aircraft to get every last knot of speed out of her.

In between the wars, with the help of the expert team he built at Supermarine, he designed no fewer than 24 different aircraft. A shy man with a slight stammer, he never pushed himself forward for the headlines his Schneider successes were increasingly grabbing.

He gave that glory to the pilots whom he admired for their courage, the more so when two died in accidents in his experimental planes.

But if reserved in public, he was a martinet in the office, typically standing staring at his drawing board for hours puffing on his pipe as he worked out complex problems. It was a foolish employee who interrupted him deep in thought.

At home, son Gordon remembered flashes of temper, followed by long moody silences. ‘He had no time for anyone he considered a fool and could be rude if the individual concerned did not quickly get the message.

Then again, he had great charm, his son recalled, and a sense of fun. When not preoccupied with work, his blue eyes shone and his smile was warm.

Mitchell was a very British genius, quiet, retiring, never personally pushy. Nor would he ever be rich, for all his exceptional talent and success.

At Supermarine (later part of Vickers), his pay as Chief Designer began at £1,200 a year rising by £100 every December until it reached £2,500.a handsome enough sum for those days and equivalent to £76,000 today.

Even after being appointed a Director, he would remain essentially a well-paid employee, in an era when results were not rewarded with share options and ‘fat cat’ bonuses. The patents for his inventions stayed with the company.

He brought a large detached house with peaceful gardens and a live in maid in the suburbs, played tennis and golf

And took family holidays at Bournemouth.

He was never one for the high life, despite the fast and wealthy international aviation set he sometimes dealt with. He preferred the company of his fellow workers, for whom he had great admiration. His best night out was with the lads at the drawing -room party.

His one indulgence was a Rolls Royce car, but since Sir Henry Royce was a fellow engineer and collaborator, that was not surprising.

But by 1933 Mitchell was harbouring a grim secret: He had been diagnosed with bowel cancer. He had a major operation and was fitted with a colostomy bag. Inventive man that he was, he even designed a better bag to conceal his disability.

A lesser man would have stopped work, but Mitchell was driven. By the mid-thirties, the world of peaceful international flying competitions began to change to one of more deadly and warlike rivalries. As a result, the Air Ministry in London sought tenders for a fast ‘killer’ fighter plane.

Mitchell’s first attempt was a flop. It had an open cockpit and a fixed undercarriage and could reach only 230 mph, 20mph short of the Ministry’s specification and a long way off his 400mph seaplanes.

Despite the terrible pain and distress of his illness, he stayed at his design desk as he smoothed out the Spitfire’s problems ahead of her first Test Flight.

In the next design, he retained just the name-

Spitfire

-suggested by the company’s chairman Sir Robert Mclean. It was what he called his feisty daughter, Ann.

Everything else changed. The shape of the wings went straight to elliptical. Against all conventional thinking, he also made the wings thin rather than thick. A sliding cockpit canopy gave the pilot al-round vision while reducing drag.

A Rolls Royce Merlin engine completed the transformation, and it was the prototype -K5054 - that flew that day 70 years ago.

Twelve weeks later, the RAF had its first go in the new fighter; Flight Lieutenant Humphrey Edwardes-Jones took her up at Martlesham Heath, the test aerodrome in Suffolk. He almost crashed her.

A revolutionary aspect of the

 Spitfire

-were wheels that retracted into the wings when in flight to make her more aerodynamic. As he came in to land he almost forgot to drop the undercarriage, and only just recovered in time.

His verdict, telephoned to the Air Ministry was that the Spitfire was

‘delightful to handle’

-and would be easy for the pilots to learn to fly-as long as they remembered to put the wheels down! Eight days later, the Ministry ordered 310 at a cost of £1.25 million (£38m at today’s prices.)

It was Mitchell’s triumph - and with that over, he turned his attention for designing a better, faster bomber for the RAF.

But he ran out of time. In February 1937, in exasperation, he told a visitor:

‘I who have so much to do, have only until June.’

The next month he finally stopped work.

Characteristically, he worried that he was letting people down by not being able to finish the job he had started. Letters from colleagues high and low assured him

he had done far more than most.

He made one last effort to live, flying by private plane to a cutting edge cancer clinic in Vienna. The treatment did not work.

After five weeks the doctors sent him home to die. He sat in his garden, often with the local vicar, and in June, the month he predicted, he died.

‘I just felt numb,’ his son, then aged 16, recalled, ‘but I could comprehend that at least he was no longer in pain’

Meanwhile, the Spitfire, one of the greatest single-seater fighters of all time was on its way into mass production. The first of more than 20,000 rolled of the production lines in 1938.

It would be another two years before it’s

FINEST HOUR

With Hawker Hurricanes, the other British fighter plane, Spitfires soared over Southern England.

In the summer of 1940

as

CHURCHILL’S

Acclaimed

‘FEW’

-fought and won that crucial confrontation with the Luftwaffe.

 The Spitfires took on the enemy Messerschmitt fighters that protected the German bomber formations. The slower Hurricanes then moved in to down the defenceless bombers.

It was a joint victory, but in truth, it was the

SPITFIRE

-that made the crucial difference and for which

Reg Mitchell

 -remains a largely forgotten hero.

His son, now 85, feels certain his father’s death robbed Britain of yet more world-beating inventions. That bomber, the project he never finished was one example. He was designing it to fly at top speed of 360mph, 25 per cent faster than the Lancaster and the Wellington.

How much quicker might Bomber Command have got on top of the Luftwaffe, if its crews had been flying Reg Mitchell’s creation?

How much sooner might the war have been won?

 The greatest tragedy of Reg Mitchell’s death at such a sadly early age was that thousands of other lives that given the chance, he might also have saved.

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‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.’

Speech on the Battle of Britain-

August 1940

by

Winston Churchill.

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ADAPTED from:

R. J. Mitchell:

Schooldays to Spitfire

by

Gordon Mitchell

Published by Tempus at £12.99

To order a copy, telephone 01453 883300.

Tony Rennell is a military historian-His latest book is