The Hurricane Pocket Manual: All marks in service 1939–45

THE

HURRICANE

POCKET MANUAL

COMPILED AND INTRODUCED BY MARTIN ROBSON

Contents

Introduction

Significant Hurricane Variants

   I Design and trials

Specification F.5/34 Single Seater Fighter, 16 November 1934

Trial of the Hawker Monoplane, F.36/34, no. K-5083, Aeroplane and Armament Experimental Establishment, Martlesham Heath, April 1936

Specification 15/36, Hawker ‘Hurricane’ – development, production 20 July 1936

Tests on the Operational Characteristics of Hurricane Aircraft, Sqdn Ldr J. W. Gillan, 21 February 1938

II Pilot Notes

Pilot’s Notes: Hurricane I Aeroplane Merlin II or III Engine

III Tactical

Air Fighting Development Unit, Report No. 31, Tactical Trials with Hurricane Aircraft fitted to carry bombs, 7 August 1941

IV Operations

111 Squadron, Operations Record Book, September 1940

Fighter Command Combat Report, 12 Group, 9 September 1940

Sqdn Ldr Douglas Bader’s Flying Log, 7–19 September 1940

Report on the operations of No. 6 Sqdn RAF in the Eastern Desert, June 1942, Hurricane Mark IIDs operating as ‘tank-busters’

Index

Acknowledgements

Introduction

‘The Hurricane was our faithful charger and we felt supremely sure of it and ourselves’

Wing Commander Peter Townsend

‘It was the plane that won the Battle of Britain’

Flying Officer Ben Bowring, 111 Squadron

One question remained in my mind during the research and writing of this book. The Hawker Hurricane was loved by the majority of its pilots, and it comprised 63 per cent of Fighter Command during the Battle of Britain in the late summer of 1940 – so why was its contribution to that epic fight with the German Luftwaffe and to the overall British war effort overshadowed by the Supermarine Spitfire? In part the answer lay in the Spitfire’s alluringly radical, almost sensual, lines and its performance, especially its speed. Perhaps more important was the perception of the Spitfire in the minds of the general public (in part fostered by the British Government) and in the minds of the enemy. While German pilots were happy to admit to having been shot down by a Spitfire (the ‘wonder weapon excuse’), it was almost humiliating to be shot down by a Hurricane, yet this aircraft accounted for 61 per cent of Luftwaffe losses in 1940.

Such perception belittles one of the most successful and, for the late summer of 1940, most important aircraft designs ever to have made it off the drawing board. But it is typical for the history of an aircraft that is riddled with paradoxes. Equipped with a Rolls-Royce Merlin engine and mounting eight .303 Browning machine guns in her sturdy wings, the Hawker Hurricane traced its origins back to the biplanes of the First World War. It was very much a fusion of the old-fashioned and the new, modern age. By the time of the Battle of Britain, although the design had reached its technical limit, Fighter Command could muster 1,715 Hurricanes to combat the German threat. It was by no means a ‘gold-plated’ solution to the problem of intercepting enemy aircraft, but the Hurricane was good enough and far easier to produce than the Spitfire.

Obtaining precise production figures is notoriously difficult, but a good enough figure is a total of 14,533 Hurricanes produced between 1937 and 1944. Those Hurricanes saw service throughout the war, and the Hurricane story falls neatly into two distinct phases as recounted by former Hawker test pilot Philip G. Lucas. Phase one was the development of the airframe as an interceptor and its performance in that role during operations in France, Norway and the Battle of Britain. The second phase saw the Hurricane superseded as an interceptor but finding a new lease of life in the form of the Mark II, with a Merlin XX engine armed with cannon, rockets and bombs as flying artillery, providing Close Air Support to Allied troops on the ground in North Africa, the Mediterranean and the Far East until the end of the war.

If the Spitfire can be considered a pilot’s dream, an aircraft for flying, then the wartime service and testimony of its pilots confirm the Hurricane as a superb fighting airframe. To understand why, we must trace the development of the Hurricane back to its origins in the mind of her designer Sir Sydney Camm. Camm began his design career working on biplanes during the First World War and by 1925 had worked his way up to become chief designer at Hawker, a post he would hold for forty years, ending his tenure working on the revolutionary Hawker Harrier in 1965. In an era of boffins, Camm fitted the stereotype perfectly. Driven, irascible, idiosyncratic (bizarrely for an aircraft designer he had a marked aversion to using wind tunnels) and at times a nightmare to work for and with, he had the necessary sheer bloody-mindedness to know that he was correct and to take on an Air Ministry and politicians searching for a cohesive and logical airpower strategy. Air theory in the inter-war years focused on the inevitability of the fact that, in Stanley Baldwin’s words, ‘the bomber will always get through’ any air defence. Moreover, the political classes were late to wake up to the threat posed by the Fascist powers rearming and flexing their muscles during the 1930s.

It is in that context that the history of the Hurricane must be assessed. In 1930 the Air Ministry circulated Specification F.7/30 for a single-seater fighter capable of 250mph. Camm responded with a biplane design, the P.V.3, which was rejected. Undaunted, he went in a different direction, submitting a design for a single-seater monoplane development of the Hawker Fury biplane, but in the spring of 1934 that too was rejected. He revised the design again, this time including retractable wheels; they required a new and thicker wing root, which had the effect of providing the design with a strong undercarriage. Propulsion would come from a new engine designed by Rolls-Royce, the PV-12. Test details of this engine, later known more famously as the Merlin, were made available to Camm.

In September 1934 Camm submitted the revised design to the Air Ministry, who were impressed by the potential speed of nearly 300mph. This piqued their interest – especially as they were aware of the problems Supermarine were experiencing with their design to Specifications F.7/30 and F.37/34 (for details see The Spitfire Pocket Manual), which would eventually be christened the Spitfire. Hawker would benefit from a growing awareness within the Air Ministry and political elite that Britain was woefully short of fighters, and that the resulting expansion of the RAF would call for aircraft with which to equip squadrons. Camm’s design was concurrent with, but not a direct response to, the Air Ministry’s Specification F.5/34 which called for an eight-gun day fighter to replace the Hawker Fury. Camm was still designing an airframe to house four .303 Browning machine guns. A meeting on 10 January 1935 between the Air Ministry and Hawker consolidated the two different strands into Camm’s design – often referred to as Specification F.36/34 even though the written specification was not issued, as the design was already in circulation. The most important aspect, however, of all this was the ordering and construction of a prototype, K5083.

In July 1935 the Air Ministry issued a contract to Hawker to supply an eight-gun Hurricane. On 6 November 1935, K5083 took to the air with ‘George’ Bulman, Hawker’s Chief Test Pilot, at the controls. After the Hurricane’s first flight, Camm climbed on to the K5083 wing desperate to hear what Bulman thought of his creation. ‘It’s a piece of cake,’ Camm recalled Bulman exhorting; ‘I could teach even you to fly her in half an hour, Sydney.’ There were teething troubles: the Hurricane had a fixed-pitch propeller, which meant it was a little sluggish during take-off – though this was later resolved with the fitting of variable-pitch propellers and then the Rotol constant-speed propeller. There were teething troubles with the Merlin engine itself. Nevertheless, following trials at the AEE at Martlesham Heath, the Air Ministry were keen for the Hurricane to enter production and on 6 February 1936 placed a provisional order for 600. (At the same time, 300 Spitfires were ordered.) The Air Ministry required a number of changes to the original design for the production model and a particular specification, 15/36, was issued on 20 July 1936. A little over a year later, on 8 September 1937, the first production model, L1547, was available for the RAF. Given the urgent need for pilots to gain airtime with the new aircraft, the Hurricane entered operational service on 15 December 1937 when 111 Squadron became the first RAF unit to receive it.

6 March 1938: Hurricanes of 111 Squadron at RAF Northolt, Middlesex.

Despite the Spitfire’s enduring allure, in the last few years before the outbreak of the Second World War it was the Hurricane that was grabbing the headlines, thanks to one particular event which surpassed all expectations. As dusk fell on 10 February 1938, Squadron Leader John Gillan, the Commanding Officer of 111 Squadron, took off from Edinburgh at precisely 17.05. At 17.53 he arrived at RAF Northolt, having covered the 327 miles in just 48 minutes, at an astonishing speed of 408.7mph – shattering the landplane world speed record. Much of the resulting press coverage ignored the fact that Gillan benefited from a gale-force tail wind (though it earned him the moniker ‘Downwind Gillan’) and instead focused on the fact that the RAF now possessed the world’s fastest fighter then in service – not bad for a design that had its origins in a wooden biplane and still retained a stressed-fabric covering (though later aircraft would carry stressed-aluminium-covered wings).

On 1 September 1939 the RAF could muster 16 operational Hurricane squadrons with another one still working up, a total of 280 Hurricanes ready to face the German menace. They would be needed. On the outbreak of war, four Hurricane squadrons were sent to France. The French called for more, but the commander of Fighter Command, Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, was appalled at the prospect of frittering away his precious resources, which he thought should be carefully husbanded for the air defence of Britain. With the Germans inflicting carnage in Poland, the war in the west became known as the ‘Phoney War’. Nevertheless, on 30 October one of the Hurricanes of 1 Squadron, flown by Pilot Officer Peter Mould, shot down a reconnaissance Dornier Do 17P, thereby claiming the Hurricane’s first ‘kill’.

Further north, with the Russian invasion of Finland, 12 Hurricanes were bought by the Finnish government; they arrived too late to see action in this conflict but would be used by the Finns against the Russians in 1941. They were not the